Can people please stop with the “command economy” bullshit?
the Soviet Union had a wage labour commodity economy with banks, lines of credit, rates of profit and Soviet corporations had local management making decisions to maximise profit.
At the investment bank level the plan coordinated which sectors would receive investment and had broad plans for output.
Alongside this the party acted as an audit system to prevent undesired or excessive corruption. And to pay graft to the feted pet industries where quality was mandatory (post 1945 military production for example.)
Dealing with the Soviet Union through a lens of “command economy” is a great way to demonstrate ignorance regarding Soviet economic history.
OTOH it is certainly possible that both points of view are right. There was a "command economy" of sorts (in part because of the technocrats and engineers from the Czarist era who were allowed to be let loose until Stalin's purges, after which the central planners realized that things were getting out of control so fast that the economy fell apart) which existed alongside a "wage labor commodity economy" (because something was needed to help finance the system, even with propaganda BS that it was all for the
naród which one could easily see through). You see elements of both in action when talking (in Chat) about modern Belarus, for example, except AFAIK there is nothing like Gosplan and the five-year plans. In Marxist terminology, the type of economy the Soviet Union had tended to be controversially known as the
Asiatic mode of production, and which in Russian historiography some, like Andrei Grinëv, call "politarism" (from the Greek πολιτεία). According to Grinëv and his circle, politarism is a stage all societies go through at some point which requires the heavy dominance of the state in all affairs (hence the name), especially in ownership of the economic structures and hence the functioning of society. Eventually, societies will discard this politarist stage and move onto other forms of organization, but Russia had a peculiar form of politarism which persisted under the Tsars and into the Soviet Union which was intertwined with the functioning of the state itself. (
This paper by Grinëv himself provides some overview of the politarist thesis as it applies to Russia, as is
another paper of his regarding whether the Soviet Union really was socialist as its supporters claimed, while
this non-Grinëv paper provides a critical investigation in the politarist concept and how it relates to post-Soviet Russian historiography as a whole.)
Since part of Grinëv's thesis is that Russia has never really moved out of its politarist stage - only changed the guise it presents itself as, hence the observation among non-Russians that all the Soviet Union had been was essentially neo-Tsarism in Marxist clothing - and that every time it has a choice to move out of it, Russia basically clung onto it more, in a White Russia the theory holds that some form of a state-centered economy would remain. I would agree that whoever takes charge would be horrific and would lead Russia down a path which would be a combination of KMT-era China and Zaïre under Mobutu, but key to the survival of any régime is whether it has control over the state itself, by which case it would also manage the economy and repress its population, and hence warlordism would mean a loss of control over the key levers of making the Russian state function. A White Russia that gains total control over the government, even without the Czar, would be more of the same as if the Czar had not abdicated; it would take a miracle on the level of the
Mexican Revolution to get Russia into a pattern more familiar to Europeans and Latin Americans (which Marxists would still call "bourgeois democracy") and avoid historical patterns to get the more optimistic scenarios of those who want a democratic White Russia (and in this case have the Mensheviks and the SRs take charge). Otherwise, on top of what everyone else has said, a White Russia would be more of a reversion to type, and as incompetent as they were the Okhrana would be as important to the functioning of a White Russia as the Cheka/OGPU/NKVD/MGB/KGB was IOTL to the Soviet Union.
