I knew that which is why I had it happen over 5 years. You have enough time for the property laws to be straightened out and fewer number of shares sold early should increase their prices somewhat, at least for the successful companies. You want the unsuccessful ones to die anyway so they don't matter as much.
AHC/WI: Economically prosperous USSR
- Thread starter Otto Kretschmer
- Start date
That doesn't make much sense at all. Countries' economies aren't like HP bars. And if you would reduce it to HP bars, a more accurate analogy would be communism taking one big bite of each economy with the transition to communism, not slowly nibbling at their economies over several decades. Most of the damage to the economy is done by the transition to communism itself. You can see this with the Great Leap Forward and Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture.
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Actually in a sense it is. Every year that Communism exists is a year is a year the economy goes more out of whack and a year it fails to progress technologically as it would have otherwise. Developing and using new technology is not what Communist countries are good at. Using new technology disrupts the 5 year plan and so planners are loath to OK them. The new tech will probably use different materials, will cause manpower changes, cause different machinery to be built etc. This causes its carefully crafted plan to be changed which takes a lot of work.
Easier to deny the use of the new tech and keep using the old plan. After the current plan is done you might consider it more than otherwise. It isn't impossible to make the change mind you, but it is much more difficult. If GE thinks it's a good idea to buy new machinery it just does it, it doesn't need to go through 10 layers of government bureaucracy to do so.
marathag
Banned
Eastern Europe under A-H control was ahead of Russia before the Revolution, and wasn't wrecked by civil war, and then by 5 year plans after that, that system got exported to those countries, after the War, and post reparations where everything not nailed down, got shipped east.
| Austria GDP per capita 1950 $3731 Hungary $2480 Austria 1975 $5295 Hungary 1975 $1036 Yeah, that HP bar would be flashing red. |
Is there any way reforms could successfully be made under Gorbachev or had the boat sailed by that point? What could he have done differently to prevent the collapse of the USSR and the economic disaster in the 90s?
Again, the worst of the damage is usually done in the transition to communism. Once things settle down, a communist economy tends to stagnate.
Yes, there was no technological progress at all in the Soviet Union... the first country in space, some of the best military equipment in the world, the first nuclear power plant to deliver electricity to the civilian grid, interlaced video, the first kidney transplant, and many other things that I have not mentioned apparently don't count.
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It depends on what you mean by "successful". Better than OTL? Likely possible but it could have gone considerably worse which is little acknowledged. It was going to be painful no matter what. Change tends to be painful in the short run, great change is often very painful. That said 10 years earlier would have been easier and 10 years before that easier yet. But even done 20 years earlier I doubt it would have been easy.
Economy had recovered to pre-Russian Civil War levels by the mid 1920's, real GDP per capita continued to increase without any real depressions (besides WWII, which had been recovered from by 1950) up until the liberalization in the late 80's which caused the economy to completely collapse. Even the Era of Stagnation under Brezhnev merely slowed down the rate at which the economy grew to "only" a few percent a year (the same rate most developed countries grow at).
Communist countries are really good at large state projects where they can divert a lot of funds and manpower to certain things such as military, an electric grid, nuclear project, space stuff etc. They are not good at however consumer goods because they have no way of gauging stuff such as how many different types of toothbrushes, or cereal we need etc.
Compare it to the US, Germany, Japan or France. It pales in comparison. A lot of firsts in space done in the USSR was because it didn't care about safety and had less ambitious plans. Sputnik 1 did nothing but beep, Explorer 1 had an entire scientific package. If Sputnik 1 blew up on the pad killing 100 people, no biggie. They didn't announce it before it was launched and they would simply not announce the failure and the death of 100 people meant nothing to the CPSU. Explorer 1 was announced ahead of time so if it blew up on launch it would be a major PR problem. Not giving a damn about casualties naturally sped up the process as you don't have to engineer and build as many fail-safes.
The Soviet government had consumer goods as a very low priority, far behind things like military equipment and heavy industry. They did not allocate many resources to this area, which obviously caused quality and quantity to suffer. But if they did take consumer goods more seriously, why would they not improve? They were able to supply needs for the military just fine, and there is not any fundamental reasons why they could not have applied the quality control and distribution methods for that to civilian production as well.
Yeah just better off than IOTL. Preferably avoiding the worst of the post soviet years when everything shit the bed.
And it could’ve been worse? Really? Jeez I thought IOTL Russia’s economy was bad enough in the 90s but damn.
Of course it could have been worse, wasn't there a sounding rocket that got mistaken as an incoming ICBM that caused Yeltsin to almost launch Russia's nukes?
Easily, the economy could have went into full hyperinflation, there could have been huge riots destroying a lot of property, there could have been famines on the order of the Great Leap Forward, there could have been a full fledged civil war. None of this happened.
Well, the post I made just yesterday still applies here:
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The Soviet Union’s economy two biggest problems were quality control and allocation. Outside of the military industries, formal QC did not exist. Since workers, or to be more accurate various work groups, were being judged on a per product, they found it better to do stuff like produce ten million defective products than 9,999,999 excellent products.
The other, somewhat related, problem was one of allocation. You could have a perfectly good factory that could be producing lots of useful things if only you had one extra eensy-weensy part, but unless the higher-ups had allocated you that part, you were out of luck. If that part happened to break, getting a new one would depend on how much clout you (and your superiors) pulled versus how much clout other people who wanted parts (and their superiors) held.
To use one example, a pig farmer in Siberia needed wood in order to build sties for his pigs so they wouldn’t freeze – if they froze, he would fail to meet his production target and his career would be ruined. The government, which mostly dealt with pig farming in more temperate areas, hadn’t accounted for this and so hadn’t allocated him any wood, and he didn’t have enough clout with officials to request some. A factory nearby had extra wood they weren’t using and were going to burn because it was too much trouble to figure out how to get it back to the government for reallocation. The farmer bought the wood from the factory in an under-the-table deal. He was caught, which usually wouldn’t have been a problem because everybody did this sort of thing and it was kind of the “smoking marijuana while white” of Soviet offenses. But at that particular moment the Party higher-ups in the area wanted to make an example of someone in order to look like they were on top of their game to their higher-ups. The pig farmer was sentenced to years of hard labor.
In another instance, a tire factory had been assigned a tire-making machine that could make 100,000 tires a year, but the government had gotten confused and assigned them a production quota of 150,000 tires a year. The factory leaders were stuck, because if they tried to correct the government they would look like they were challenging their superiors and get in trouble, but if they failed to meet the impossible quota, they would all get demoted and their careers would come to an end. The alleged solution those who only think they know anything about the Soviet economy say they would have resorted too - that is lying about the number of tires produced - wasn’t actually achievable because those tires would then have to go somewhere and if nonexistent tires don’t show up at the car factory like they are supposed to, then the whole lie gets blown wide open and the factory workers and managers now face all the same consequences as failing, but with the added bonus that they get charged for fraud against the State.
But hope shines eternal: the tire factory learns that the tire-making-machine-making enterprise had recently invented a new model that really could make 150,000 tires a year. In the spirit of Chen Sheng, they decided that since the penalty for missing their quota was something terrible and the penalty for sabotage was also something terrible, they might as well take their chances with a lie they might actually be able to pull off and destroyed their own machinery in the hopes the government sent them the new improved machine as a replacement. To their delight, the government believed their story about an “accident” and allotted them a new tire-making machine. However, the tire-making-machine-making company had decided to cancel production of their new model. You see, the new model, although more powerful, weighed less than the old machine, and the government was measuring their production by kilogram of machine. So it was easier for them to just continue making the old less powerful machine. The tire factory was allocated another machine that could only make 100,000 tires a year and thus they were right back where they started.
Throughout the life of the Soviet Union, various reform ideas were drafted on how they might deal with the allocation problem. Some even made it as high as the senior leadership. None were ever fully implemented and those which were partially implemented frequently faced a political backlash that resulted in them then getting yoinked after only a half-decease, at the most. It might be interesting to argue how things might have turned out had someone willing and able enough to rise to the top of the USSR was able to force through, say, Leonid Kantorovich’s proposal to use linear programming as an allocation method, but inevitably I get the feeling those “what if’s” are fundamentally speculative.
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The Soviet Union’s economy two biggest problems were quality control and allocation. Outside of the military industries, formal QC did not exist. Since workers, or to be more accurate various work groups, were being judged on a per product, they found it better to do stuff like produce ten million defective products than 9,999,999 excellent products.
The other, somewhat related, problem was one of allocation. You could have a perfectly good factory that could be producing lots of useful things if only you had one extra eensy-weensy part, but unless the higher-ups had allocated you that part, you were out of luck. If that part happened to break, getting a new one would depend on how much clout you (and your superiors) pulled versus how much clout other people who wanted parts (and their superiors) held.
To use one example, a pig farmer in Siberia needed wood in order to build sties for his pigs so they wouldn’t freeze – if they froze, he would fail to meet his production target and his career would be ruined. The government, which mostly dealt with pig farming in more temperate areas, hadn’t accounted for this and so hadn’t allocated him any wood, and he didn’t have enough clout with officials to request some. A factory nearby had extra wood they weren’t using and were going to burn because it was too much trouble to figure out how to get it back to the government for reallocation. The farmer bought the wood from the factory in an under-the-table deal. He was caught, which usually wouldn’t have been a problem because everybody did this sort of thing and it was kind of the “smoking marijuana while white” of Soviet offenses. But at that particular moment the Party higher-ups in the area wanted to make an example of someone in order to look like they were on top of their game to their higher-ups. The pig farmer was sentenced to years of hard labor.
In another instance, a tire factory had been assigned a tire-making machine that could make 100,000 tires a year, but the government had gotten confused and assigned them a production quota of 150,000 tires a year. The factory leaders were stuck, because if they tried to correct the government they would look like they were challenging their superiors and get in trouble, but if they failed to meet the impossible quota, they would all get demoted and their careers would come to an end. The alleged solution those who only think they know anything about the Soviet economy say they would have resorted too - that is lying about the number of tires produced - wasn’t actually achievable because those tires would then have to go somewhere and if nonexistent tires don’t show up at the car factory like they are supposed to, then the whole lie gets blown wide open and the factory workers and managers now face all the same consequences as failing, but with the added bonus that they get charged for fraud against the State.
But hope shines eternal: the tire factory learns that the tire-making-machine-making enterprise had recently invented a new model that really could make 150,000 tires a year. In the spirit of Chen Sheng, they decided that since the penalty for missing their quota was something terrible and the penalty for sabotage was also something terrible, they might as well take their chances with a lie they might actually be able to pull off and destroyed their own machinery in the hopes the government sent them the new improved machine as a replacement. To their delight, the government believed their story about an “accident” and allotted them a new tire-making machine. However, the tire-making-machine-making company had decided to cancel production of their new model. You see, the new model, although more powerful, weighed less than the old machine, and the government was measuring their production by kilogram of machine. So it was easier for them to just continue making the old less powerful machine. The tire factory was allocated another machine that could only make 100,000 tires a year and thus they were right back where they started.
Throughout the life of the Soviet Union, various reform ideas were drafted on how they might deal with the allocation problem. Some even made it as high as the senior leadership. None were ever fully implemented and those which were partially implemented frequently faced a political backlash that resulted in them then getting yoinked after only a half-decease, at the most. It might be interesting to argue how things might have turned out had someone willing and able enough to rise to the top of the USSR was able to force through, say, Leonid Kantorovich’s proposal to use linear programming as an allocation method, but inevitably I get the feeling those “what if’s” are fundamentally speculative.
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TheSwedishHistorian
Banned
In my opinion one of the buggesst problems was the low productivity per labour. One of the most mismanaged events and things were how Kulaks were targeted and gotten rid off. They got rid of the most competent administrators and haphazardly divided land and propert. During the first five-year plan, Stalin's all-out campaign to take ownership and organisation from the peasantry meant that "peasants with a couple of cows or five or six acres [~2 ha] more than their neighbors" were labeled kulaks. Under dekulakization, government officials seized farms and killed some resisters, deported others to labor camps, and drove many to migrate to the cities following the loss of their property to the collective.
Many chose to slaughter their livestock rather than give them up to collective farms. In the first two months of 1930, peasants killed millions of cattle, horses, pigs, sheep and goats, with the meat and hides being consumed and bartered. For instance, the Soviet Party Congress reported in 1934 that 26.6 million head of cattle and 63.4 million sheep had been lost
Many chose to slaughter their livestock rather than give them up to collective farms. In the first two months of 1930, peasants killed millions of cattle, horses, pigs, sheep and goats, with the meat and hides being consumed and bartered. For instance, the Soviet Party Congress reported in 1934 that 26.6 million head of cattle and 63.4 million sheep had been lost
What a total non-answer.
Anyway, for those interested here's a quest where the players are put in charge of the Soviet economy from 1928 on. We're up to the early/mid-50s by now and things are pretty different. Admittedly, we also got a fair bit lucky...