AHC: Have the Soviet Union survive to the present

The '90s aren't mentioned at all in the book, but yes, they did occur. The book doesn't claim to be an account of characters who actually existed, it's written as an extremely realistic form of historical fiction to show the structure of the Soviet economy and its major problems.
Well, if it was supposed to be extremely realistic, it would show the disastrous collapse of living standards and what led to them. You can't understand modern Russia without understand what happened in the 90s and why it happened. Any book that skirts this issue is at best simplistic and shallow, at worst dishonest.
 
Well, if it was supposed to be extremely realistic, it would show the disastrous collapse of living standards and what led to them. You can't understand modern Russia without understand what happened in the 90s and why it happened. Any book that skirts this issue is at best simplistic and shallow, at worst dishonest.
I don't think the author is advocating for that type of economy or aiming to show how what every era of communist life. The author used the 1950s and '60s, when the Soviet economy was supposedly at its peak and looked like it would overtake the US, to show how the system was supposed to work in an industrial economy that had recovered somewhat from WW2. The Soviet system was a horrendous failure, I'm not apologizing for it either.

The decline in living standards during the '90s was influenced by several factors, its partly a case of correlation being conflated with causation. Stagnation in the '70s had turned into a decline by the 1980s for economies like Poland and Romania. In a counterfactual where the command economy remained in place and pre-1989 trends continued, the same decline could have been the same or worse than OTL.

The post-communist performance of an economy was generally based on how aggressively the country reformed and how long communist rule had been in place. Poland went through a short, sharp recession during its economic reforms and came out ahead of more gradual reformers like Romania, Albania, and Ukraine. The USSR was at a disadvantage relative to the Warsaw Pact states because 70 years of communism left Russian society without recent living memory of what a functioning market economy and non-communist political system was supposed to look like.

Preconditions to a successful capitalist country like the rule of law weren't in place to make the transition go well in Russia. State assets went into the hands of the bureaucrats with access to them, and normal people who were given vouchers for state assets didn't know what to do with them, there are stories of people using them as wallpaper.
 
I don't think the author is advocating for that type of economy or aiming to show how what every era of communist life. The author used the 1950s and '60s, when the Soviet economy was supposedly at its peak and looked like it would overtake the US, to show how the system was supposed to work in an industrial economy that had recovered somewhat from WW2. The Soviet system was a horrendous failure, I'm not apologizing for it either.

The decline in living standards during the '90s was influenced by several factors, its partly a case of correlation being conflated with causation. Stagnation in the '70s had turned into a decline by the 1980s for economies like Poland and Romania. In a counterfactual where the command economy remained in place and pre-1989 trends continued, the same decline could have been the same or worse than OTL.
If you're going to be the denying the role of the disastrous reforms on what was basically a Great Depression in Russia, then we're wasting our time.

The post-communist performance of an economy was generally based on how aggressively the country reformed and how long communist rule had been in place. Poland went through a short, sharp recession during its economic reforms and came out ahead of more gradual reformers like Romania, Albania, and Ukraine. The USSR was at a disadvantage relative to the Warsaw Pact states because 70 years of communism left Russian society without recent living memory of what a functioning market economy and non-communist political system was supposed to look like.

Preconditions to a successful capitalist country like the rule of law weren't in place to make the transition go well in Russia. State assets went into the hands of the bureaucrats with access to them, and normal people who were given vouchers for state assets didn't know what to do with them, there are stories of people using them as wallpaper.
So basically you're refuting your previous claims about the collapse of the economy and acknowledging that the reforms were to blame?
 
If you're going to be the denying the role of the disastrous reforms on what was basically a Great Depression in Russia, then we're wasting our time.


So basically you're refuting your previous claims about the collapse of the economy and acknowledging that the reforms were to blame?
No, I'm not denying the disaster that was Russia's economy in the '90s, or that the reforms played a role. I'm saying multiple factors contributed to Russia's economic problems, a factor having some role=/= being the the only factor involved.
 
I don't think the author is advocating for that type of economy or aiming to show how what every era of communist life. The author used the 1950s and '60s, when the Soviet economy was supposedly at its peak and looked like it would overtake the US, to show how the system was supposed to work in an industrial economy that had recovered somewhat from WW2. The Soviet system was a horrendous failure, I'm not apologizing for it either.

The decline in living standards during the '90s was influenced by several factors, its partly a case of correlation being conflated with causation. Stagnation in the '70s had turned into a decline by the 1980s for economies like Poland and Romania. In a counterfactual where the command economy remained in place and pre-1989 trends continued, the same decline could have been the same or worse than OTL.

The post-communist performance of an economy was generally based on how aggressively the country reformed and how long communist rule had been in place. Poland went through a short, sharp recession during its economic reforms and came out ahead of more gradual reformers like Romania, Albania, and Ukraine. The USSR was at a disadvantage relative to the Warsaw Pact states because 70 years of communism left Russian society without recent living memory of what a functioning market economy and non-communist political system was supposed to look like.

Preconditions to a successful capitalist country like the rule of law weren't in place to make the transition go well in Russia. State assets went into the hands of the bureaucrats with access to them, and normal people who were given vouchers for state assets didn't know what to do with them, there are stories of people using them as wallpaper.
In the existing circunstances of russia were different from the ones in Poland that isnt Russians fault when we aplied the same tools the same way an it fails. The transition to a newer system was needed but if the conditions to privatise like in Poland werent there them it should have been done in a different way. We cant keep pretending its the third world countries fault when the same copy paste neoliberal policies keep falling and we keep repeating the same policies with no comprimice with past experience or local reality.
 
If you're going to be the denying the role of the disastrous reforms on what was basically a Great Depression in Russia, then we're wasting our time.


So basically you're refuting your previous claims about the collapse of the economy and acknowledging that the reforms were to blame?

This is a great example of how not to debate.
 
Denying the collapse of living standards in Russia (and to different extents, throughout the former Eastern Block) is a good indication that the book is nothing more than pure fiction.

Agreed. In fact, this is the big issue with Western intellectuals covering the collapse of the USSR. They did not experience the horrific nightmare that was the 1990s, and they downplay how bad it was. It was a total collapse and it's affects continue to linger today.
 
No, I'm not denying the disaster that was Russia's economy in the '90s, or that the reforms played a role. I'm saying multiple factors contributed to Russia's economic problems, a factor having some role=/= being the the only factor involved.
The problem is neglecting the role of the most important factor. The reforms (and they way they were carried out) happened because of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The enormous disruption cause by the collapse of an unified country obviously can't happen if the Soviet Union doesn't collapse. The end of the Communist system also caused the end of nearly all social protections, also greatly contributing to the collapse of living standards. So I can't take seriously the idea that what happened in the 90s would have happened anyway, even without the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This is a great example of how not to debate.
I don't think that making statements which fly in the face of well established history and without presenting any evidence is a good way to debate either.
 
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