You do realize the consumer sector had many, many more products than the military even in the USSR? The military sector needed mainly weapons, spare parts, transport and food. The consumer sector needs all of the above except spare parts and weapons plus things like washing machines, dryers, books , can openers, record players, TVs and on and on. The former is much easier because there is far less to keep track of.
AHC/WI: Economically prosperous USSR
- Thread starter Otto Kretschmer
- Start date
Which is a game which makes it far, far simpler than real life. If I use any of the Hearts of Iron games I can easily win as Germany. Not so easily in real life.
I’ve heard of that, was in 94 right? But that’s not the economy doing worse that a nuclear conflict. Not what I meant.
True. Although the last two sound a bit fart fetched. I can’t imagine a Russian Great Leap Forward kind of thing happening in the 90’s. And civil war seems like it would require one hell of a POD to happen. Like the coup going way worse than IOTL.
Also the primary consumer of the output of military industries is another government institution (that is, the military) which makes it vastly easier for the government to plan and organize. Less so when the primary consumer is the general populace, constituting some 150-200 million individual citizens.
Yes, and? I wasn't actually using the quest to advance an argument on realism, merely presenting it as a thing that those who are genuinely interested in the subject might find fun to read.
It wouldn't be a new "Great Leap Forward" but the result of rioting getting out of hand and spreading to the countryside resulting in farms being burned down or the infrastructure so smashed that food can't get into the cities. A civil war was unlikely but possible. There was considerable uncertainty at the time that could have lead to civil war under the right conditions. The attempted coup being one. It could have led to a war between "Yelstin forces" and "Stalinist Forces".
There still would have been issues, but it would have been much less bad. For example, look at the Soviet automotive industry, which was famously not very good. However, the Soviets were able to produce large numbers of good armored vehicles for their military. If they had QC for their civilian automotive industry that was more similar to that of their military vehicle industry, and devoted more resources towards the production of civilian vehicles, the problems with both quality and quantity would have been massively reduced. Plus, civilian items generally do not have to put up with as much abuse and many items (including everything you mentioned with the possible exception of TVs and record players) were much simpler to construct than many of the military products they successfully produced on a massive scale.
Well, the Soviets did have quality control on the books for their civilian industries, based on a similar German system, but enforcement mechanisms were nonexistent so they were just ignored. It's concievable that a system similar to the military where a representative schooled in what the quality standards are checks the products and either approves or rejects them (and rejected items don't get counted towards quota) might work... or it might bloat into something too large and unwieldy. It's hard too say.
Officially they were allowed to reject products but there was enormous internal pressure not to. After all, he has to live in the same area with the people whose work he either accepts or rejects. They are going to be really unhappy with him if they miss their quota and thus any bonuses because of him. With the military they can invoke patriotism. You can say you need to make sure the tanks are working to "fend off counter-revolutionary pressure from the West" , you can't use that when making a toaster.
Well, it didn’t work that way with the military reps but then the military rep wasn’t actually a part of the local community. They were assigned there from outside as part of their commission and would eventually either be promoted or reassigned away. Now that’s obviously not something you can do with a civilian rep whose ostensibly not under military discipline and control, so yeah... that would be a massive stumbling block to prevent the position from becoming something of a joke. There’s probably some way to step around it, like subjecting the rep himself to unannounced review or something, but then you’re having to devote even more personnel and resources (not to mention political capital) to something for which the feedback mechanism remains quite ephemeral on.
Frankly, I suspect you’d have to solve the Soviets allocation problem that I discussed last page before even the potential of resolving the QC problem could present itself. And that presents it’s own challenges.
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It’s been 30 years since the Soviet Union ended and Russia is still a petroleum economy. It’s not that they don’t have paths forward but that Russian government and businesses can’t execute them. I don’t know if there’s a realistic chance they could change their fate.
Hypothetically, I would first focus on agriculture. Food shortages was what caused the most discontent. Russia is the 13th largest food exporter today. That’s pathetic. There’s no reason they can’t be the second largest exporter after the US.
Second high speed rail to improve linkage in the vast distances of the Soviet Union and WP. This alone may have prevented a few republics from breaking away in 1991. Japan built theirs in the 60s. US and Germany built national highway networks. The Soviets didn’t even try to build equivalents though they had more need than anyone.
Third integrated circuits and pharmaceuticals. Both extremely profitable and the former is dual use. This is much harder as innovation in these areas are highly profit driven. You need hundreds thousands of educated people to work their butts off and they want better incentives than an apartment and a Lada.
Hypothetically, I would first focus on agriculture. Food shortages was what caused the most discontent. Russia is the 13th largest food exporter today. That’s pathetic. There’s no reason they can’t be the second largest exporter after the US.
Second high speed rail to improve linkage in the vast distances of the Soviet Union and WP. This alone may have prevented a few republics from breaking away in 1991. Japan built theirs in the 60s. US and Germany built national highway networks. The Soviets didn’t even try to build equivalents though they had more need than anyone.
Third integrated circuits and pharmaceuticals. Both extremely profitable and the former is dual use. This is much harder as innovation in these areas are highly profit driven. You need hundreds thousands of educated people to work their butts off and they want better incentives than an apartment and a Lada.
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marathag
Banned
Like with the US, vast distance leads to airlines for fast and inexpensive passenger travel.
Like the USA, their railroads are set for freight, and are as good as the US for efficiency.
No one really want to take a train from Moscow to Berlin, when flying is an option
I also doubt that the major problem people had with being part of the Warsaw Pact was that there wasn't high speed rail between Moscow and Warsaw or Budapest. The main problem was they didn't want to be satrapies of the Soviet Empire.
The communists are in North Korea and North China, Once scenario is Manchuria and North Korea are reigned in and become East Germany like creations that the Soviets trade for $ and Finlandization of China and Korea just like east Germany.
Poland has too much of an independent to stay anybody's client for long without serious obvious repressions being applied, they are also an ex Allied state without even the slightest collaboration, the USA and Britain would be tolerant of Soviet designs and meddling other places and still pay the $.
As another poster mentioned, I think the most realistic option is one where the USSR* does not get into the Cold War. It's why I put my 'death of Stalin' in 1945; with his removal, there will be some 2-3 years where the domestic Soviet political squabbles make foreign 'adventures' [such as Berlin Blockade] very unlikely. At the same time, almost none of the larger players desire adventures either. This means that by the time the power-structure has found a 'new normal' [I suspect very similar to RL; First Secretary Khrushchev at the head of a troika with say, Voroshilov as Premier] the 'East-West' tension may have not gotten so severe.
That in this scenario, the world only gets into a 'Cold War Lite'; a time of friction and competition but not annihilation. Orthodox Marxism-Leninism holds a belief called 'historical determinism' - that in this case that worldwide Communism is the future of mankind. That while the capitalist states can stall this progression, they cannot stop it; it's inevitable. That's the gist of Khrushchev's 'we will bury you!' line; that the East will bury the West in the same manner the automobile replaced the horse and buggy. The man himself when touting 'peaceful coexistance' merely meant 'we won't use T-34s to bring others socialism' - there's no need to [in their minds] for capitalism will fall apart sooner or later, torn apart by it's own proletariat and inbuilt contradictions. But back to the possible future...
Without the runaway military competition with the Western Powers, the USSR is able to devote more resouces to plowshares than swords. Without the final years of 'High Stalinism', warping the internal intellectual life with paranoia and waves of terror, the more technically-savvy economists, engineers and managers are able to come up with better Five-Year Plans which don't rely on simple 'more of everything' and brute force. And with 'the Organs' with clipped wings and Beria's ashes blowing in the wind, the Soviet Union can make use of all those tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of highly qualified and intelligent minds to do more productive work for The People than hewing logs in Siberia. Lastly, without Stalin's ego demanding complete idological uniformity even on other nations; there is some 'leeway' for other Socialist nations to experiment a little, allowing the USSR to later on [if so desired] to adopt some of the more successful projects.
* That's the point. Not Russian Federation, not Russian Empire.
That in this scenario, the world only gets into a 'Cold War Lite'; a time of friction and competition but not annihilation. Orthodox Marxism-Leninism holds a belief called 'historical determinism' - that in this case that worldwide Communism is the future of mankind. That while the capitalist states can stall this progression, they cannot stop it; it's inevitable. That's the gist of Khrushchev's 'we will bury you!' line; that the East will bury the West in the same manner the automobile replaced the horse and buggy. The man himself when touting 'peaceful coexistance' merely meant 'we won't use T-34s to bring others socialism' - there's no need to [in their minds] for capitalism will fall apart sooner or later, torn apart by it's own proletariat and inbuilt contradictions. But back to the possible future...
Without the runaway military competition with the Western Powers, the USSR is able to devote more resouces to plowshares than swords. Without the final years of 'High Stalinism', warping the internal intellectual life with paranoia and waves of terror, the more technically-savvy economists, engineers and managers are able to come up with better Five-Year Plans which don't rely on simple 'more of everything' and brute force. And with 'the Organs' with clipped wings and Beria's ashes blowing in the wind, the Soviet Union can make use of all those tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of highly qualified and intelligent minds to do more productive work for The People than hewing logs in Siberia. Lastly, without Stalin's ego demanding complete idological uniformity even on other nations; there is some 'leeway' for other Socialist nations to experiment a little, allowing the USSR to later on [if so desired] to adopt some of the more successful projects.
* That's the point. Not Russian Federation, not Russian Empire.
The lack of affordable rapid transportation led to depopulation of far flung regions. Air travel alone is not enough to meet the demands of working class people. The Soviet Union was too big, high speed rail would shrink travel time and consolidate the country.
High speed rail makes air travel look dirt cheap. Also the main problem wasn't that people had to take a long time to go from Vladivostok to Kiev, very few people wanted or needed to go that far in the first place. High speed rail would just cause the USSR to go broke that much quicker.
Dedicated passenger rails, high speed or not, would take a load off the freight rails that the Soviet economy overwhelmingly relied upon while providing a far more affordable avenue to those Soviet citizens who had both the interest and the means to travel long distances within the USSR than air traffic provides. So it's a good idea on that account, but as it doesn't alter the fundamentals of how the Soviet economy was managed, it amounts too little more then a detail tweak. Something that might make things a bit more efficient, yes, but not something that would be the countries salvation from stagnation, much less make it prosperous in the manner the OP is looking for.
Transporting people long distances isn't that economically important. Even today most people don't go more than 200-250 KM very often not talking farther. Freight regularly travels long distances and is important. Far less affordable than air you mean. HSR is very expensive and generally not worth the cost. HSR generally needs massive subsidies .
That neatly misses the real point. If passenger and freight trains have to share the same railways, that creates additional rail congestion, increasing wear and maintenance costs, and decreasing the amount of freight that can be hauled down a given amount of track in a given amount of time. Dedicated passenger rail lines remove passenger trains from from freight rail, allowing more freight to be run more cost efficiently.
Far more. More people can be transported on a train more efficiently on passenger rail, HSR or otherwise, then via air traffic, as it costs less in fuel and other resources then with an airplane. Speed is lost out on, of course, but passenger trains tend to make up for that with comfort. The only reason the US doesn't have a passenger rail system on the level of most other developed countries is because American infrastructure has been geared around the cult of the automobile since the 1950s.
The main place air travel does win out on is for flying across oceans or other terrain where running a rail line is difficult, if not nigh-impossible.
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