Is the former USSR really better off, now that communism is dead there?
I know there is that conventional wisdom, in the US esp., that democracy-capitalism is always better than communism-totalitarianism. But has that really been the case?
You see, although I typically support democracy and capitalism, I really do have an open mind. And I am open to the suggestion that communism can sometimes be a better alternative to other possibilities. (I know in the former USSR everyone was guaranteed a job. That is not as much a certainty with capitalism.)
Not at all going my measures most people would care about. The average life-span rapidly declined and death-rates spiked in Russia at the end of the Soviet era and this continued through much of the 1990s due to the Soviet health care system cratering, spread of alcoholism, and AIDS. Another factor was the economy being liberalized and privatized far too quickly which also contributed to other problems such as massive wealth inequality. Now due to this terrible experience it seems most Russian people have lost any enthusiasm they may have had for Western liberal democracy and instead prefer the authoritarian nationalism of Putin (or even its more extreme variants found in the Russian Communist and Liberal Democratic Parties or the Neo-Nazi groups).
Ryzhkov really should have won the first post-Soviet elections in 1991 instead of the drunk Yeltsin.
The former Soviet satellites states who joined the EU and NATO have made a transformation into free market democracies and it seems to work for them.
Russia now has an Oil and Gas economy and is ruled by a man who would be a Czar and bunch of Oligarchs presiding over a peasantry.
One step forward, one step back. That country, with all its natural wealth and huge size, should be as prosperous as the US. It has always suffered from authoritarian leadership.
Being poor and unimportant under any system is not a good place to be. Is it better to be on the breadline in the US or Russia? What a choice!
Not really. Even without communism, the Russian economy would have been cratered by World War II and like the other economies of Europe, would never quite have caught up with the US’ not-bombed-to-shit head start.
Relative to Russia, I think it’s not unreasonable to say that Germany, France and the UK are “as prosperous as the US”. A few other European countries as well.
They’re more prosperous than Russia, of course, but not on the same level as the US. Our GDP per capita is 20% greater than even Germany’s with its vaunted economy. There are European states which are wealthier than us, of course, but none with more than 10 million people.
I think the former Soviet Union would have benefited from going through a sort of reverse Marxism. There should have been a period of socialism to ease them through the transition between capitalism and communism.
But Putin has done nothing to reestablish the economic structures or even the cultural trappings of Communism, apparently perceiving no political benefit to looking back to those days.
You can count them if you want. I didn’t count them because they are more likely than larger states to be statistical outliers. It’s not a coincidence that the wealthiest countries in the world are really, really small. If you go back to my original point, I am merely saying that the Russian economy would not be where the US’ is today because of WWII.
It took the Western European nations about twenty years to rebuild their economies after WW2 (with considerable help from the US) I don’t doubt that many of the European states within the Soviet Union would have rebuilt much faster if they had an economic system that worked. Even the East Germans could not make Communism work. It held everything back and led to economic stagnation. Though Russia through the Soviet Union wielded enormous political power. It was poor, but nonetheless powerful after WW2. All of that stemmed from the Bolshivek revolution of 1917 and the rise of Stalin who presided over a series of disasters. His successors did little to change the system until Gorbachev and he was not strong enough to see it through, leading to the chaotic disintegration of the 1990s.
The rise of Putin has seen Russia get richer through Oil and Gas. For this he has to thank the US and its adventures in Gulf that have kept prices at historic highs. I would be impressed if the money was spent on a diversified economy. But that is rare for countries with Oil and Gas. It is too easy for an elite to take it all.
To answer the question, Russia is better off. It is no longer stagnating. Whether it will realise its potential, that is another thing.
IIRC, the USSR turned down US assistance under the Marshall Plan. I don’t particularly think that accepting it would’ve turned the USSR into Western Europe, but it couldn’t have hurt. (Other than leaving them beholden to the capitalist imperialist Western pig-dogs, of course.)
That is partially because Putin is allied to the oligarchic interests who became wealthy during the 1990s. And secondly to some extent Putin has brought back Communist trappings such as a more anti-Western foreign policy and the anti-homosexual laws.