And while they were building space ships they had constant shortages and folks relied on the black market to get the goods and services they wanted or needed, trading what they could get, because the central planners over produced one thing for what they couldn’t, because they under produced others. Their economy was a cluster fuck. But yeah, they built fairly good space craft.
Because they were more like a Western European social democracy…essentially, they were socialists without the big chip and authoritarian urges the the communists had (of course, they were only the PROVISIONAL government, so no idea how they would have actually ruled in the long term). They were actually quite popular, except for the fact that they wanted to keep the war going (or, more, they didn’t want to settle for the terms the Germans were requiring). Sadly for the Russians they wouldn’t give on this point, and that gave the Bolsheviks and Lenin a foot in the door and allowed them into power.
One of Nicholas’ faults was that he would do what the last guy he talked to wanted.
Bob wants to build a railway for better communication in the Empire, Sam wants to build schools in the Muslim areas lest the religious guys take over, Fred wants to build shoe factory, he’s the last guy the Czar spoke with, so all the money goes to shoe factories.
One more thing to point out, I know this is “what if” history and so all bets are off, but if the Bolsheviks had not seized power in 1917 the result would not have been a return to Tzarism. The Tzar had already been deposed in the February revolution. Who would have been ruling Russia in 1941 in that situation is anyone’s guess (successful democracy, dysfunctional democracy, dictatorship, or oligarchy) but it would not have been a tzar.
U-huh, and while they were building space rockets the USA had massive ghettos and black people couldn’t even share a bus with white folk. If the purpose of an economy is to provide for everyone then clearly nobody has found the answer yet. We all have our little problems.
How do Soviet Russian housing, health coverage and unemployment stats compare to the USA over a similar period ?
You know what changed? Black people in the US did get to share those buses. Know what didn’t? The Soviet’s wonderful command economy never did manage to get goods and services to the majority of Russians…which is why the USSR is gone now, but the USA is still here. Seriously, we all have our little problems, but the problems that the Soviets had were beyond ‘little’.
Oh, and they had their own problems with ghettos and minorities, less you think that everything was a paradise in the good old USSR except the economy, which sucked donkey dong.
Feel free to provide them if you feel you have some point to make. However, there were a hell of a lot more Russians trying to get out of the Soviet Union than there were Americans (or Western Europeans) trying to get in, so that probably says something right there.
This article is about the Winter War against Finland rather than the war against Germany but it shows how the political system in the soviet union hampered the military campaign:
It’s no good getting all patriotically grumpy about it, I just want a clear picture without the flag waving.
Saying that the Soviet Union didn’t get goods and services to the majority of Russians is a meaningless generalisation that would mean at least 51% of Russians starved to death.
Put the flag down, and offer some stats. I’m quite open to the SU not being as good, but not as bad as it looks through jingoistic goggles.
[QUOTE=MrQwertyasd]
It’s no good getting all patriotically grumpy about it, I just want a clear picture without the flag waving.
[/QUOTE]
Dude, you were the one trying to avoid addressing a point by attempting to point out some flaw in another country (there is a logical fallacy based on that I just can’t think of the name of…). Did you think no one would notice?
Only if one were building strawmen…or talking about the Soviet Union of Lenin or Stalin’s time BEFORE the war. You made a statement about the command economy, I pointed out that it sucked. It always sucked. It NEVER was able to get goods and services to the people in the quantity and type needed because command economies suck at doing these things.
Back your bullshit up with some facts instead of trying to build strawmen about where I stand.
Well, it’s not my fault if I have to guess at what “But a command economy will always step on its own feet after a few years.” means.
Nor do I know which recession I am meant to be considering. The 1970s one, the 1980s one, the 1990s one or the current one.
Or the 1930s one that caused all the trouble we’re talking about ? You know, the non-command economy that gets everyone a piece of toilet roll but causes world wars.
It got tanks to the Eastern front, that’s all that matters here, not whether a housewife in 1975 had to buy toilet paper in bulk.
…so let’s ask what the effects of the 1930s depression were on the Soviet Union and take a guess at how the Tzars would have coped ?
I think the answer is that being isolated from the world economy meant it wasn’t greatly affected, whereas goods and services around the rest of the world took a wee knock.
Was this important in the USSRs capacity to fight off the nazis and their US sponsored war machine ?
1- capitalist economies shoot workers. They also torture them if they get too uppity.
2 - capitalist/mixed economies shoot people to gain resources. A lot of people.
Are the communists ahead in the shooting workers league ? Maybe, so far, but non-command economies are supposed to be the final system (end of history blah blah) so we have a whole future of shooting people ahead of us. We have yet to bottom out of the current depression, so the shooting of impoverished people aggrieved at either losing, or never having, goods and services hasn’t really got going yet.
Yes, WWII. When the Western Democracies adopted command economies and delivered 50,000 tanks to their fronts, then reverted to market economies after the peace, and gave their veterans free educations, built the interstate highways, houses, addressed civil rights, etc.
True, the USSR’s system protected it from the rampant unemployment and hunger of the Great Depression, but just for yuks they had the Holodomor anyway.
The USSR avoided the Great Depression by adopting full employment geared toward rapid industrialization. Unlike the US, where 25% of the workforce languished, often without aid.
However, the Soviets financed this by selling grain on the international market (mostly to Germany). And two million Ukranians starved
One more “what if” too consider here. Without the Bolshevik revolution I could see the Russians very much ending up ideologically on the side of the Axis. Hypothetically, much like the Wiemar republic in the Germany, they would have been led by a weak democratic government trying to pick up the pieces from an autocracy that led them into a catastrophic world war, and then survive a world economy in depression. If the Russian Republic survived a bolshevik revolution in 1917 who’s to say they wouldn’t end up with their own Hitler/Mussolini in the 1930s.
And that would have seriously altered the outcome of the war in Europe.
Russia had a treaty with France, that either would go to war for the other. Would the provisional government have abrogated that treaty? Nicholas and Wilhelm were great buddies (Wilhelm tricked him into a treaty to side with Germany rather than France-Wilhelm and Nicholas were to be “Admirals of the Pacific and Atlantic Seas”, I do not recall who was to be whom, and Nicholas Ministers refused to agree to it) that may have made the Provisional government refuse any alliance with Germany.
CCitizen and his ancestors are safe, my money is gone.
My goodness, you thought you were winning your argument as you typed that!
Ignoring all evidence that the Russian economy, blessed with vast natural resources and a huge labor force, would have enlarged beyond what Lenin and Stalin accomplishes, with free market expansion and with its best and brightest not in gulags or among the White Russian refugees.
