There is a reason why high speed rail needs massive subsidies pretty much everywhere in the world except Japan. Trains aren't efficient at moving people. Freight, yes. Passengers, no.
AHC/WI: Economically prosperous USSR
- Thread starter Otto Kretschmer
- Start date
There is a reason why passenger rail (and note how I say passenger rail, not high speed, so you can stop with that strawman already) dominates long-distance intra-country travel everywhere in developed countries besides the United States... and even once dominated it within the United States. Even today, in the United States however, rail is cheaper for the individual willing to take the extra time: a flight from Chicago to Saint Louis costs $165, one-way. An Amtrak ride costs $62, round trip.
Not to mention the fact that getting through an Amtrak passenger station and on board your train is a far more pleasant experience than getting through an airport terminal ever since, oh, 2001 or so.... Having gone without a DL for about a year and 4 months a while back (let's not talk about the reasons
), I came to appreciate Amtrak quite a bit...But yeah, there are problems of scale when you're talking about 8 million square miles... High-speed rail between Chelyabinsk and Vladivostok? Not practical. High-speed rail radiating out from Moscow and Leningrad to most of European Russia? Yeah, could have and probably should have been done...
What's with this fixation with transportation? It's one of the least of the USSR's problems. In fact, some of the 'showpiece projects' were transportation and mainly a waste of precious resources; boondoggles like the Baikal-Amur railway, the Volga-Don Canal etc.
What's more, it did not need high speed rail or even domestic air travel [at least, not more than it already had]. The USSR for most of it's life needed a) more goods lorries, b) more branch lines for industrial/agricultural goods, c) more commuter trams/buses for urban areas and d) more tractors, bulldozers and snowploughs. Part of the shortage of all the above was simply because so much of the industrial capacity to construct them went into military production instead.
What's more, it did not need high speed rail or even domestic air travel [at least, not more than it already had]. The USSR for most of it's life needed a) more goods lorries, b) more branch lines for industrial/agricultural goods, c) more commuter trams/buses for urban areas and d) more tractors, bulldozers and snowploughs. Part of the shortage of all the above was simply because so much of the industrial capacity to construct them went into military production instead.
AlexG
Banned
Unfortunately the USSR got the short end of the whole "Autocratic Communists taking advantage of the USA's total ineptitude, lack of any foresight, deciding to annihilate its own working class and destroy its manufacturing capabilities, all while empowering its ideological and geopolitical foes based on some utopian notion that history ended" stick.
If the USSR had decided not to be belligerent towards the West while it was still...not manned by incompetents and fools, then there's a chance that after the greatest generation raises the worst generation that they'll be lured away at the chance to fritter away their nations wealth for cheap electronics made in the USSR instead of in China.
If the USSR had decided not to be belligerent towards the West while it was still...not manned by incompetents and fools, then there's a chance that after the greatest generation raises the worst generation that they'll be lured away at the chance to fritter away their nations wealth for cheap electronics made in the USSR instead of in China.
Ok, the only time the Soviet Union had a functional economy was from around 1925-28 when they had NEP, or New Economic Program, which was capitalism. Stalin said revolutions can never stand still, they move forward, or fall back. He then started the forced mass collectivization. The whole system was rotten, and could never work, because their theory of human nature was based on delusions.
There’s different kind of economic liberalizations, a major problem in OTL was the “sale” (more like theft) of state properties and liberalization when everything was in collapse. If we instead had seen liberalization which focused on private markets, light manufacturing and private farms, while the non-competitive heavy industry was slowly sold over the years and the large resource extraction companies and natural monopolies was kept under public control. Some labor reforms would also be good, in general labor protection is good, but USSR ended up going to far with the ban on firing people no matter how incompetent, lazy or unnecessary they were, remove that single rule and you see a large improvement in labor productivity.
Yes, but the problem was that there was no one left in charge who understood basic economy on instinctive level, so they were easy victims for snake salesmen and other conmen disguising themselves as economists. If Gorbachev had focused on a bottom up reform of the economy with slowly stopping the price control on different basic goods, allowing private enterprise and reformed the agricultural sector, he would have been inba much better position for the later bigger reforms.
Unlikely, ironic USSR wasn’t impoverish enough to corner that kind of market, USSR was and its successor state are are pretty much caught in the middle income trap. USSR should have focused on domestic consumer goods and then much like in OTL gotten their foreign capital mainly through oil and gas export and other export of raw materials.
AlexG
Banned
True. However, the middle income trap isn’t an inevitability for the USSR. And basically the only real way for sustainable and rapid economic growth is at expense of morons in the West.
This has been a tried and true market strategy since the disparate Indian states absorbed the gold supply of Rome in exchange for spices and other goods.
People keep talking about “oh but they needed to do X, Y or Z” when the reality is that a command economy is like a Welshman without a sheep: totally unnatural.
Almost none of the changes proposed here will happen: in a system where there is no incentive to get better....there is no getting better. You’ll always have the rare combination of idealistic types who are sharply intelligent that will occasionally show up and better society but they are few and far between.
Outside of what I just mentioned, there is nothing proposed here that will make the USSR into a prosperous economy. Everything else runs into a resource traps or is bandaid on a broken system. Even a total disarmament and using all that wasted wealth on improving the country will only delay the collapse of the System.
Hate to admit it, but Stalin was right there [in very general terms] - NEP was the slow road to nowhere in particular.
And it did work - in the respect it took a agricultural semi-colonial economy and built it into an industrial one [whether it could have been done much cheaper is a different question]. What it failed at was the 'next phase' where intensive not extensive growth was vital.
Actually, there were. Much of the problems mainly came from the politicians and apparatchiks. For example, Gosplan economists were not allowed to know the the 'real' budget, the size of the miliary sector and so on [which meant they were unable to know how much resources they had to play with]. Economics as a discipline was long crippled by the fact it 'intruded' too closely onto Marxist ideology, and the realms of statistics... well, they were usually treated as state secrets. Lastly, we need to remember that Gosplan was creating policies for the entire country, almost devoid of computer processor power and limited information.
One of the few things Stalin did well for the economic health of the USSR in his final years was the wholesale 'reset' of prices and wages in [I think] 1947. Most [though not all] the subsidies for products were stripped out which allowed the 'official' and 'market' prices to rapidly converge, while tighter wage-ceilings were enforced. Much of the problems of the later USSR was the fact that the politicians were simply too generous with pay rises but rarely if ever rose prices or provided enough extra products to soak up the excess demand they were creating.
Which was the fundamental flaw for a centralised command economy - there was little incentive to introduce new things. It ran basically on the 'rachet principle'; aka more of the same, utilising current designs and so on. This was in fact a flaw that everyone knew about, but the political 'cost' of sorting it out was simply too high.
Now, disregarding actual 'capitalist' solutions as non-starters, the only path I can see working from say 1955 onwards is a technocratic, decentralised system - where Gosplan [with better figures] takes a much more 'broad brush' approach to the Plan, with much of the decision-making power devolved down to individual companies, plants and farms. The metrics of 'success' are shifted from mere output to actual profit ratios, and the prices being charged are much more in keeping with actual consumer demand.
The resource trap of the 1970s is a harder one to avoid...
Yes you right in all the things your talking about, but if you do those things it wouldn't be the Soviet Union anymore. If they did the things your suggesting then the Russian Federation would be so much better off, and the Russian People would be much happier. The liberalization would inevitable led to the fall of the regime, because no one believed in it anymore. No one was willing to die for the system, and very few were willing to kill for it. Lenin had said after the Civil War that terror must be maintained. Without the threat of force the system couldn't survive.
a) Lenin was talking at a point where the new Bolshevik regime was still diplomatically isolated and appeared very unstable/weak and b) all systems ultimately rely on force - capitalism, for example relies on the use of the law and then police etc to 'protect' private property.
'Liberalization inevitably leads to CPSU downfall' statements only hold as true if you a) define 'liberalisation' as 'become more like American capitalism' and b) only allow yourself a view of the USSR in the 1980s. Allowing the changes to happen before the 'crisis point' can prove your statement false [qv: China] as well as allowing the Soviet system to organically grow as it continued in it's 'path towards Communism'.
Most outside agencies rated the general level of 'public acceptance' of the CPSU's rule decently high until perhaps c1980.
'Liberalization inevitably leads to CPSU downfall' statements only hold as true if you a) define 'liberalisation' as 'become more like American capitalism' and b) only allow yourself a view of the USSR in the 1980s. Allowing the changes to happen before the 'crisis point' can prove your statement false [qv: China] as well as allowing the Soviet system to organically grow as it continued in it's 'path towards Communism'.
Most outside agencies rated the general level of 'public acceptance' of the CPSU's rule decently high until perhaps c1980.
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That period had one of the lowest rates of growth in the history of the entire Soviet Union, and most of that was simply the tail end of recovery from the Russian Civil War in 1925-1926. Growth really picked up again in the 1930's after the NEP was ended, and continued at a rapid pace (excluding WWII) up until the 70's, when the depletion of mineral reserves + idiots like Brezhnev caused the rate of growth to decrease somewhat. Even then, it continued to grow (albeit at a slower pace) until the worst of the "reforms" started in 1989. Please look at actual economic data before making any more posts.
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Yeah i don't get this. The USSR's economy was in comparison to the US, not efficient, corrupt, and lacklustre. In comparison to the global average, the USSR remained higher than the global average, even most western countries on economic efficiency, and production, and even when the recession of the 80s hit, remained on global average at least.
I would say avoiding the late 60s and early 70s resource trap would be best for the USSR.
It was at that point that they actually started to fall behind. For that i would retention of Kruschev is a minimum.
I would say avoiding the late 60s and early 70s resource trap would be best for the USSR.
It was at that point that they actually started to fall behind. For that i would retention of Kruschev is a minimum.
The desire to own private property, and gain the fruits of your own labor are natural human instincts. Communism is a aberration in human history. Being compelled to work for others, without benefitting from it is called slavery. In the Soviet Union you needed government permission to live in a location, take a job, or travel from one region to another, so you were unable to market your labor, you had to take what they wanted you to have, and be happy with it. Being weak, and isolated is no reason to terrorize your population into loyalty. The mindset of such governments are terroristic to begin with, since they don't accept the concept of individual rights against State interests during the best of times.
Taking care of your family, and seeing they have the best opportunities in life are also universal. In Communist countries the way to attain the things people want in life is joining the privileged ranks of the all powerful Party, which bestows all good things, and can just as quickly take them away. China no longer has State ownership of all means of production, because they understand how grossly inefficient that is, and now declare "It is glorious to be rich." But the State did not wither away, it instead determines who can be rich. In China all public officials, and the armed forces swear an oath not to the Nation, or the People, or the Constitution, but to the Communist Party. The death grip on power continues, without the high sounding rhetoric about "The dictatorship of the Preliterate." It least it's more honest.
So just what was this "Crisis Point" that was coming, that they had to be prepared for? We know when it happened, but it could've happened sooner, or later, once everyone realized it was all BS, and the fear was gone. The crisis was actually precipitated by a failed Communist coup, so they struck the final blow themselves.
If what you say was true, why do a supermajority of Russians say they think the fall of the USSR was a bad thing? (A second survey which reached the same conclusion, if this is not enough for you, there are hundreds more that reach the same conclusion out there). Why did the CPRF win the 1995 and 1999 legislative elections and nearly win the 1996 presidential elections while Yeltsin, who destroyed this system you say was so bad, leave office with a 2% approval rating? Why was the transition to the supposedly more efficient economic system so destructive it took decades for GDP per capita to recover to the level it was at before the USSR was destroyed? The Soviet Union was ran by massively incompetent and/or actively genocidal leaders for most of its existence, had the most destructive war in human history fought largely on its territory, and for its entire existence almost every other state pushed relentlessly for its destruction, and yet despite that it had far more rapid economic growth than the capitalist states that came before or after it.
Because the former members of the Police State looted the country, and turned Russia into a Kleptocracy. The Russian People were screwed by the same people who screwed them in the Soviet Period.
of the 9 oligarchs that stripped russia of money in the 1990s, Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Fridman, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Potanin, Alexander Smolensky, Pyotr Aven, Vladimir Vinogradov and Vitaly Malkin, literally, none worked in the USSR's government. This is an accusation floated around a lot that's holds little water.