AHC/WI: Economically prosperous USSR

marathag

Banned
Most of the people there weren't even Polish, the Polish government took it from Russia during the Russian Civil War in a naked landgrab. Why should they leave?
And before that Civil War, the Russians were doing all they could to suppress the Poles under their control, unlike AH control in nearby Galicia, where at that time after the 1860s, they were allowing local Polish administration.
Congress Poland, OTOH, was subject to intense Russification after revolts in 1830 and 1863

Despite the bans on education in Polish and emigration to Germany and USA, here were the demographics for 1897
Polish 71.8%
Polish Jews 13.5%
German 4.3%
Ukrainian 3.6%
Lithuanian 3.2%
Russian 2.8%
 
Most of the people there weren't even Polish, the Polish government took it from Russia during the Russian Civil War in a naked landgrab. Why should they leave?
That's an interesting take on international law. If another country has territory with ethnic groups that also live in your country you have a right to take that territory away from them? There was another 20th Century national leader who espoused those theories, his name was Adolf Hitler. In the 21st Century Putin also thinks that way. "Well Crimea was always part of Russia, even though we signed treaties to the contrary, so we can take it by force." Under this theory few national borders could be secure, since only a uni-ethnic State could claim legitimate borders. Russia, and the Soviet Union are an empire made up of conquered ethnic groups, many of whom wish to be independent, so what legitimacy do it's borders have?

In the case of Poland, Russia, along with Austria, and Prussia had destroyed the Polish Nation, and divided it's territory. The Poles had reestablished their State, with internationally recognized borders, which included land that had been part of the earlier Polish State. In 1939 the Soviets & Nazis partitioned Poland between them, in a gangster pact. The Soviets then ethnically cleansed their part of Poland, and systematically murdered the Polish intelligencer under their control. After WWII they imposed a Communist Regime on Poland. Since Russia never had any respect for Polish Rights how could Poland have ever trusted Russia, to be an ally? Between Russia, and Germany Poland was choosing what poison to drink.
 
You then fail the title of thread 'Make USSR economically prosperous.'

In my case it's not 'defending' - more the pointing out that in the case of collectivisation it worked in the stated goal of getting the levels of agricultural product to export to finance the first two Five-Year Plans, which as my stats show pushed Soviet industry to levels simply unattainable by any other means.* Whether it could have been done without so high a cost and whether the result was even worth it are different debates.

This is why I put by POD at 1945; so this thread did not get derailed yet again by Stalin, Hitler et al.

* If anyone has any other ideas for that, I'm curious. For I can't really see another way out.
The United States actually produces most of it's food on huge commercial farms. No one was killed to take their land, and the Government didn't create them, a free market economy did. Russia had a history of voluntary collective farming. Mass murder wasn't necessary, and exporting food, for foreign exchange, while starving your own people in the process is criminal. Only a regime with no regard for the lives, or wellbeing of their own people would act in such a depraved way.
 
That's an interesting take on international law. If another country has territory with ethnic groups that also live in your country you have a right to take that territory away from them? There was another 20th Century national leader who espoused those theories, his name was Adolf Hitler. In the 21st Century Putin also thinks that way. "Well Crimea was always part of Russia, even though we signed treaties to the contrary, so we can take it by force." Under this theory few national borders could be secure, since only a uni-ethnic State could claim legitimate borders. Russia, and the Soviet Union are an empire made up of conquered ethnic groups, many of whom wish to be independent, so what legitimacy do it's borders have?
You're ignoring the fact that this was also the justification Poland used to invade Russia in the first place. They were given land in the Treaty of Versailles, then decided to invade far beyond that in a war of conquest because there was a Polish minority there. The USSR simply took back land that had been occupied for less than 20 years. Plus, if they didn't do that, the Nazis would have started from a position far enough forwards that they could have won the war and implemented Generalplan Ost - in which case, there wouldn't be any Poles left to complain about.
 
The United States actually produces most of it's food on huge commercial farms. No one was killed to take their land, and the Government didn't create them, a free market economy did. Russia had a history of voluntary collective farming. Mass murder wasn't necessary, and exporting food, for foreign exchange, while starving your own people in the process is criminal. Only a regime with no regard for the lives, or wellbeing of their own people would act in such a depraved way.
This was in fact one of the ideological fault-lines between the old SRs and Marxists before/during WW1.

That in late Czarist Russia, the vast majority of the agricultural surplus [which was exported and fed the cities] came from a relatively small amount of well-capitalised, modern large 'landlord estates' which were as efficient as the ones seen in Western Europe or the USA. The SRs called for these estates to be broken up and the land 'returned' to the peasants.

Bolsheviks/Mensheviks [both as Marxists] opposed this, instead advocating the estates be nationalised and turned into collective farms instead. They saw the problem; to simply 'give back the land' to the peasants would be a large step backwards because it would be going from 'capitalist' agriculture [under Stolypin's model] back to the 'feudal' agriculture of inefficient strip cultivation under the Mir which died out in Western Europe by about 1500.

The problem was, by the time the October revolution happened, the peasants had taken the 'revolution into their own hands' and broke up the estates - ending up with the exact problem the Marxists had feared; huge amounts of under-capitalised, semi-subsistance strip cultivation by individual peasants which produced little surplus for export. This seriously buggered up the Bolshevik's original plan/idea; to use the old landlord estates [now collectives] to provide the export surpluses to help make more collectives and to fund industrial development.

I've already explained the 'Catch 22' situation which the USSR found itself facing by the end of the '20s. Your only suggestion appears to be 'capitalism' which well, comes back to what looks from my end to be your own 'historical determinism' which is 'only capitalism works long-term'.
 
The United States actually produces most of it's food on huge commercial farms. No one was killed to take their land, and the Government didn't create them, a free market economy did. Russia had a history of voluntary collective farming. Mass murder wasn't necessary, and exporting food, for foreign exchange, while starving your own people in the process is criminal. Only a regime with no regard for the lives, or wellbeing of their own people would act in such a depraved way.
Those huge commercial farms exist because of accumulation by dispossession. Millions of people had to be financially ruined and be forced to sell their land, either becoming migrant farmworkers or moving to cities to look for work. The government had a role in this social violence, enforcing the dispossesion of indebted farmers who were just as often ruined by government farm policy as helped. The difference between the collectivization and what occurred in the United States is one of degrees of violence, not of kind.

That is, of course, merely talking about the violence against the farmers themselves, and ignoring the giant elephant in the room of just how so many people managed to get cheap or free land in the Americas. Genocide and ethnic cleansing built the farming class in America. People were in fact killed to take their land, they just generally weren't white.
 
Those huge commercial farms exist because of accumulation by dispossession. Millions of people had to be financially ruined and be forced to sell their land, either becoming migrant farmworkers or moving to cities to look for work. The government had a role in this social violence, enforcing the dispossesion of indebted farmers who were just as often ruined by government farm policy as helped. The difference between the collectivization and what occurred in the United States is one of degrees of violence, not of kind.

That is, of course, merely talking about the violence against the farmers themselves, and ignoring the giant elephant in the room of just how so many people managed to get cheap or free land in the Americas. Genocide and ethnic cleansing built the farming class in America. People were in fact killed to take their land, they just generally weren't white.
Wow, you honestly just tried to claim the normal tug and pull of modern farming economics to the horrendous shit the ussr did to its own AND then compared it to the Indian genocide that happened a century before these large commercial farms even came into existence (after 1945 by the way). I want to say I'm surprised but then people also claim what Stalin did to the ussr economy was good for Russia so I'm really not.
 
This was in fact one of the ideological fault-lines between the old SRs and Marxists before/during WW1.

That in late Czarist Russia, the vast majority of the agricultural surplus [which was exported and fed the cities] came from a relatively small amount of well-capitalised, modern large 'landlord estates' which were as efficient as the ones seen in Western Europe or the USA. The SRs called for these estates to be broken up and the land 'returned' to the peasants.

Bolsheviks/Mensheviks [both as Marxists] opposed this, instead advocating the estates be nationalised and turned into collective farms instead. They saw the problem; to simply 'give back the land' to the peasants would be a large step backwards because it would be going from 'capitalist' agriculture [under Stolypin's model] back to the 'feudal' agriculture of inefficient strip cultivation under the Mir which died out in Western Europe by about 1500.

The problem was, by the time the October revolution happened, the peasants had taken the 'revolution into their own hands' and broke up the estates - ending up with the exact problem the Marxists had feared; huge amounts of under-capitalised, semi-subsistance strip cultivation by individual peasants which produced little surplus for export. This seriously buggered up the Bolshevik's original plan/idea; to use the old landlord estates [now collectives] to provide the export surpluses to help make more collectives and to fund industrial development.

I've already explained the 'Catch 22' situation which the USSR found itself facing by the end of the '20s. Your only suggestion appears to be 'capitalism' which well, comes back to what looks from my end to be your own 'historical determinism' which is 'only capitalism works long-term'.
Well you can call it determinism if you like, but reality is free market economics work. If you want production to rise allow market incentives to do their thing, and if it's physically possible then it will. Human nature will do the rest. State regulations of markets are needed to deal with issues that markets have no incentives to fix, such as environmental policy, redistributive tax policy, and issues markets are blind to, like avoiding monopolies, and over concentration of wealth. The State can subsidize what it wants more of, and tax what it wants less of, but it can't control markets, or create wealth out of thin air.

The Soviets built industries, to produce products nobody wanted to buy, or could use, and paid wages people couldn't spend. At the last November 7th parade the best banner ever seen in Red Square read "75 Years of going Nowhere"
 
The USSR achieved remarkable levels of GDP per Capita growth, in particular before 1960, that exceeded comparable development in the west. Even with the horrors of Stalinism, the Civil War, and then the Second World War, living standards did increase quite considerably during this period. But even within the period of 1960-85, (although not 85-91), there was a continuous increase in prosperity as measured by both GNP and Household Consumption levels.

The really interesting thing about Soviet development is that they were able to increase living standards dramatically at a time of rapid industrialisation. That was something neither the US or the British were able to do during their own periods of rapid industrialisation, which instead saw a collapse in living standards before a later rapid improvement.
 
The USSR was prosperous. You had quite remarkable standards of living (at least for a nation which was for the most of the time an agricultural backyard) in the 80's and most Russians still regret the collapse of the USSR and it's social security system. The USSR didn't collapse out of economic stagnation - nations can do pretty well even when they stagnate - but because it's political foundation wasn't what it was supposed to be and when Gorbachev tried to change that it all came down. The Soviet Union wasn't doomed at least until 1990, when they let all of Eastern Europe just go without getting any reward. That was a a big blunder on Gorbachev's part and directly led to the fact that he was getting eclipsed by national leaders more and more.
 
The USSR was prosperous. You had quite remarkable standards of living (at least for a nation which was for the most of the time an agricultural backyard) in the 80's and most Russians still regret the collapse of the USSR and it's social security system. The USSR didn't collapse out of economic stagnation - nations can do pretty well even when they stagnate - but because it's political foundation wasn't what it was supposed to be and when Gorbachev tried to change that it all came down. The Soviet Union wasn't doomed at least until 1990, when they let all of Eastern Europe just go without getting any reward. That was a a big blunder on Gorbachev's part and directly led to the fact that he was getting eclipsed by national leaders more and more.
Prosperous for what? The party members that got special apartments or Stalin's military projection? The majority of Russians went hungry and impoverished up to 1941 "for a better tomorrow" before being sacrificed to the idiocy and paranoia of general Stalin. Then the USSR spent 30 years recovering from Stalin's mess, 15 years into which they finally focused on shoddy consumer goods before Brezhnev and hardliner pals decided to reverse course ridding high on a petrol commodity boom.

Prosperous nations attracted immigrants with quality of life, it didn't need guns and barbed wire to keep people from escaping nor did it need to hold slaves in Eastern Europe as "bargaining chips"-in fact that sounds exactly like the French forcing the ex-slaves of Haiti to pay for their own freedom at gun point, don't expect the Poles to pay up.I t didn't "let it go" in 1990, the Soviets were tired of paying for the army to oppress Eastern Europe and stopped, how they screwed up the transition was a different story.
 
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Prosperous for what? The party members that got special apartments or Stalin's military projection? The majority of Russians went hungry and impoverished up to 1941 "for a better tomorrow" before being sacrificed to the idiocy and paranoia of general Stalin. Then the USSR spent 30 years recovering from Stalin's mess, 15 years into which they finally focused on shoddy consumer goods before Brezhnev and hardliner pals decided to reverse course ridding high on a petrol commodity boom.

Prosperous nations attracted immigrants with quality of life, it didn't need guns and barbed wire to keep people from escaping nor did it need to hold slaves in Eastern Europe as "bargaining chips". It didn't "let it go" in 1990, the Soviets were tired of paying for the army to oppress Eastern Europe and stopped, how they screwed up the transition was a different story.
Just google the Soviet GDP growth instead of going on an unrelated rant. The Soviet Union grew very strong and faster than the west (which to be fair is also due to the fact that it started way lower). Even when it stagnated it grew, just very slow.

Every country uses bargaining chips. The US doesn't do foreign policy just for shits and giggles.
 
Wow, you honestly just tried to claim the normal tug and pull of modern farming economics to the horrendous shit the ussr did to its own AND then compared it to the Indian genocide that happened a century before these large commercial farms even came into existence (after 1945 by the way)....
I think the general point Aelita was making is that the 'uber-successful' American capitalist farming system is built on the bones of exploitation - of people, of the environment, the state and so on. This is a statement which is a) true and b) normal. Exploitation is vital to create the surpluses - from the landlord squeezing rent out of their tenant farmers in the 18th Century to the modern titans of business upping the hours of unpaid overtime from their cubicle-drones so to increase the profit-margins of The Company. This is something which 20th Century socialists admitted; that it was only because their grandparents were exploited [and so went without so much] that capitalism was able to accumulate so much capital [plant and so on] that socialism had become viable as an alternative.

This was in fact one of the main bones of contention in the Bolshevik/Menshevik split between '03 and '14; the latter argued that Russia was too backward for socialism - it needed to go through the 'capitalist' phase of development [and the expoitation for capital] as outlined above. Therefore, Marxists needed to support the capitalists in their fight against the reactionaries like the aristocracy, clergy and landlords. This is what was seen in the 1905 Revolution; where the Socialists and Liberals joined hands against the Czar. [And the fact the latter promptly surrendered after a few concessions were offered hardened the Bolshevik's view against the 'bourgeois liberals' and their ability to create a 'capitalist revolution'.]

That in the case of American agriculture a century or so ago, it was so much more successful because it had all the advantages of a country which had so high 'accumulations' of capital. It had a modern, dense railroad system with oodles of rolling stock, engines and stations. A myriad of capacious businesses stood at the ready to assist in the farm development; from the tractor producer to the humble concern making barbed wire - and behind both of the previous stood the other businesses needed; the steelworks, the coal mines, the electrical plants and so on. The already existing infrastructure meant that our new farm could simply skip the 'subsistence' stage and go straight for commercial production - the Plains grain-farm didn't have to worry about producing meat, for that came in refrigerated rail-cars or in tins, via Chicago's packing yards.

The intangable accumulations count, too. The well-oiled banking systems allowing investment loans, the strong educational base encouraging modern farming techniques [in fact, many American 'State Colleges' were founded as agronomy schools]. Even the simple fact that almost all American farmers were literate helped; this, along with a flourishing printing industry meant that new, better innovations in production etc could be circulated quickly.

The USSR [or even late Czarist Russia] did not have any of these advantages. Yes, it had railways, industrial plant etc but simply way too little capacity to add to the 'accumulations'. The farms in the NEP era were terribly undercapitalised; for example, it's estimated that over half of ploughing was done with wooden implements, two thirds of gain-harvesting was done by scythe and perhaps sixty percent of threashing was by flail. Even worse, it's estimated that over half of peasant holdings were in fact too small/inefficient to even provide the holders with sufficient food [let alone anything for sale]. Even the so-called 'Kulaks' were very thin on the ground and often merely represented the lucky few who could eat three square meals year-round, hire a man for the harvest and perhaps own some 'capital equipment', to improve productivity like a horse-plough or a decent barn/silo.

And people are expecting such a place to develop quickly towards American-levels of production without any 'exploitation'? This sounds suspiciously similar to a 'I did it, therefore so can you' speech delivered by Donald Trump [let's say the c2010 'businessman edition'] to a bunch of homeless people in a shelter - glossing over the fact the latter don't have $400m 'seed money' from Daddy, or the Ivy League education, the contact book and so on.
...I want to say I'm surprised but then people also claim what Stalin did to the ussr economy was good for Russia so I'm really not.
In my case, it's more of 'grimly accepting it was the only real option' in 1929. Allowing NEP to trundle on, waiting for the peasantry to gradually become as good as American farmers will take about as long as waiting for all those homeless people to become property moguls. The Party did not feel they had a century to patiently wait, and nor could get massive aid from 'the capitalists' to speed it up. The only option left was increased exploitation of the peasantry. A few 'hard years' of tight belts and long work hours, but as the scrimping pays off and accumulations rise, both worker and peasant will see the improvements - the former will enjoy better/more foodstuffs, while the latter better/more manufactured goods. [This was basically, the 'Left Oppositions' plan].

However, do not mistake the last paragraph as support of the methods Stalin et al took to achieve this. The mass deportations, the 'liquidation of the kulaks as a class', the constant 'sabotage' show-trials and lastly, the famine were at least unnecessary at most massively counter-productive on all fronts.
Well you can call it determinism if you like, but reality is free market economics work. If you want production to rise allow market incentives to do their thing, and if it's physically possible then it will. Human nature will do the rest. State regulations of markets are needed to deal with issues that markets have no incentives to fix, such as environmental policy, redistributive tax policy, and issues markets are blind to, like avoiding monopolies, and over concentration of wealth. The State can subsidize what it wants more of, and tax what it wants less of, but it can't control markets, or create wealth out of thin air...
Free market economics work, yes; but don't portray it as 'exploitation free' [or perfect, for that matter]. Even the most doctrinaire Bolshevik didn't deny that free-market capitalism would improve agricultural output - what they criticised was that it would take far too long, it would create a new capitalist class and most likely, would end up with a pre-1914 scenario where the bulk of 'capital' in the USSR being foreign-owned/controlled.

As you're playing hindsight, I shall too for a moment. Isn't it interesting that all the countries which successfully 'modernised' themselves to the point they can be truly be called 'advanced' after WW2 [Taiwan, South Korea, China etc] none of them operated true 'free market economies' - that instead, they ran classic examples of export-driven, 'population exploitation' models so they could build up sufficient capital etc so they could improve living standards? [In fact, most explicitly ignored the likes of the IMF, World Bank etc in their 'advice'.] That many of the nations which merely tried to 'let free market economics' make that final leap into 'modernity' ended up instead getting in the 'middle-income trap', like with most of Latin America and modern Russia.

In fact, it can be said that the Bolsheviks showed both 'how to' and 'how not to' rapidly industrialise/modernise a state. They were the first to really try such a thing.
 
I think the general point Aelita was making is that the 'uber-successful' American capitalist farming system is built on the bones of exploitation - of people, of the environment, the state and so on. This is a statement which is a) true and b) normal. Exploitation is vital to create the surpluses - from the landlord squeezing rent out of their tenant farmers in the 18th Century to the modern titans of business upping the hours of unpaid overtime from their cubicle-drones so to increase the profit-margins of The Company. This is something which 20th Century socialists admitted; that it was only because their grandparents were exploited [and so went without so much] that capitalism was able to accumulate so much capital [plant and so on] that socialism had become viable as an alternative.

This was in fact one of the main bones of contention in the Bolshevik/Menshevik split between '03 and '14; the latter argued that Russia was too backward for socialism - it needed to go through the 'capitalist' phase of development [and the expoitation for capital] as outlined above. Therefore, Marxists needed to support the capitalists in their fight against the reactionaries like the aristocracy, clergy and landlords. This is what was seen in the 1905 Revolution; where the Socialists and Liberals joined hands against the Czar. [And the fact the latter promptly surrendered after a few concessions were offered hardened the Bolshevik's view against the 'bourgeois liberals' and their ability to create a 'capitalist revolution'.]

That in the case of American agriculture a century or so ago, it was so much more successful because it had all the advantages of a country which had so high 'accumulations' of capital. It had a modern, dense railroad system with oodles of rolling stock, engines and stations. A myriad of capacious businesses stood at the ready to assist in the farm development; from the tractor producer to the humble concern making barbed wire - and behind both of the previous stood the other businesses needed; the steelworks, the coal mines, the electrical plants and so on. The already existing infrastructure meant that our new farm could simply skip the 'subsistence' stage and go straight for commercial production - the Plains grain-farm didn't have to worry about producing meat, for that came in refrigerated rail-cars or in tins, via Chicago's packing yards.

The intangable accumulations count, too. The well-oiled banking systems allowing investment loans, the strong educational base encouraging modern farming techniques [in fact, many American 'State Colleges' were founded as agronomy schools]. Even the simple fact that almost all American farmers were literate helped; this, along with a flourishing printing industry meant that new, better innovations in production etc could be circulated quickly.

The USSR [or even late Czarist Russia] did not have any of these advantages. Yes, it had railways, industrial plant etc but simply way too little capacity to add to the 'accumulations'. The farms in the NEP era were terribly undercapitalised; for example, it's estimated that over half of ploughing was done with wooden implements, two thirds of gain-harvesting was done by scythe and perhaps sixty percent of threashing was by flail. Even worse, it's estimated that over half of peasant holdings were in fact too small/inefficient to even provide the holders with sufficient food [let alone anything for sale]. Even the so-called 'Kulaks' were very thin on the ground and often merely represented the lucky few who could eat three square meals year-round, hire a man for the harvest and perhaps own some 'capital equipment', to improve productivity like a horse-plough or a decent barn/silo.

And people are expecting such a place to develop quickly towards American-levels of production without any 'exploitation'? This sounds suspiciously similar to a 'I did it, therefore so can you' speech delivered by Donald Trump [let's say the c2010 'businessman edition'] to a bunch of homeless people in a shelter - glossing over the fact the latter don't have $400m 'seed money' from Daddy, or the Ivy League education, the contact book and so on.

In my case, it's more of 'grimly accepting it was the only real option' in 1929. Allowing NEP to trundle on, waiting for the peasantry to gradually become as good as American farmers will take about as long as waiting for all those homeless people to become property moguls. The Party did not feel they had a century to patiently wait, and nor could get massive aid from 'the capitalists' to speed it up. The only option left was increased exploitation of the peasantry. A few 'hard years' of tight belts and long work hours, but as the scrimping pays off and accumulations rise, both worker and peasant will see the improvements - the former will enjoy better/more foodstuffs, while the latter better/more manufactured goods. [This was basically, the 'Left Oppositions' plan].

However, do not mistake the last paragraph as support of the methods Stalin et al took to achieve this. The mass deportations, the 'liquidation of the kulaks as a class', the constant 'sabotage' show-trials and lastly, the famine were at least unnecessary at most massively counter-productive on all fronts.

Free market economics work, yes; but don't portray it as 'exploitation free' [or perfect, for that matter]. Even the most doctrinaire Bolshevik didn't deny that free-market capitalism would improve agricultural output - what they criticised was that it would take far too long, it would create a new capitalist class and most likely, would end up with a pre-1914 scenario where the bulk of 'capital' in the USSR being foreign-owned/controlled.

As you're playing hindsight, I shall too for a moment. Isn't it interesting that all the countries which successfully 'modernised' themselves to the point they can be truly be called 'advanced' after WW2 [Taiwan, South Korea, China etc] none of them operated true 'free market economies' - that instead, they ran classic examples of export-driven, 'population exploitation' models so they could build up sufficient capital etc so they could improve living standards? [In fact, most explicitly ignored the likes of the IMF, World Bank etc in their 'advice'.] That many of the nations which merely tried to 'let free market economics' make that final leap into 'modernity' ended up instead getting in the 'middle-income trap', like with most of Latin America and modern Russia.

In fact, it can be said that the Bolsheviks showed both 'how to' and 'how not to' rapidly industrialise/modernise a state. They were the first to really try such a thing.

Well question is who benefits from those free market policy and low taxes. If you have tariffs and preferences for local owned and operated eneprises say lower taxes then you are ok.

Also you can achieve high growth with helicopter speeds or with comrade we diced that you will valunter in our Siberian campaign.

As for Advice of IMF, ComCon and likes.
Botswana and Singapur have show that politely kick in them out works.
One is conservative in Sense of not taking loans and making big changes other was driven by statistics and economic/ political expidence.

As if there is no universal recipi for stuff.
 
Wow, you honestly just tried to claim the normal tug and pull of modern farming economics to the horrendous shit the ussr did to its own AND then compared it to the Indian genocide that happened a century before these large commercial farms even came into existence (after 1945 by the way). I want to say I'm surprised but then people also claim what Stalin did to the ussr economy was good for Russia so I'm really not.
While the USSR was implementing collectivization, millions of African Americans lived in a system of state sponsored debt peonage as sharecroppers on large estates. Attempts by tenant farmers to organize together to get out of the debt peonage trap were met with both crackdowns by the local police as well as extralegal terrorist violence. At the same time, millions of small farmers, who did own their own land, lost everything to foreclosure in the Great Depression.

Barely a hundred years before, most of that land had still been in the hands of numerous indigenous peoples. The settlement of white farmers, whether as yeoman smallholders or plantation slavers, came with conquest and genocide. At both ends, in the case of the plantation agriculture in the South. Hell, the internal frontier wasn't declared closed until the 1890s, forty years prior. It wasn't some ancient history, the people in the 1930s were closer in proximity to the Native American genocide or to the (legal) end of slavery than were are to the 1930s.

No matter how you compare them, these separate histories show more similarity than difference. In both cases, the ax fell hardest on minorities. Both were in service of a great ideological vision of achieving status as an economic world power.

Honestly, what more's interesting is that you think that pointing out the historic fact that primitive accumulation has always been a murderous process amounts to justification. Every great power sits on a throne of bayonets. The central question of this thread was how to make an economically prosperous USSR. But once you cut away the pop historical myths, you realize that the USSR was doing all the same settler-colonial imperialism that its predecessor the Russian Empire was doing, it was just doing it more intensively and more efficiently.
 
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Well question is who benefits from those free market policy and low taxes. If you have tariffs and preferences for local owned and operated eneprises say lower taxes then you are ok.

Also you can achieve high growth with helicopter speeds or with comrade we diced that you will valunter in our Siberian campaign.

As for Advice of IMF, ComCon and likes.
Botswana and Singapur have show that politely kick in them out works.
One is conservative in Sense of not taking loans and making big changes other was driven by statistics and economic/ political expidence.

As if there is no universal recipi for stuff.
No, there is not any universal 'recipe', but one thing is clear; 'laissez faire development' generally ends up with little actual development. The majority of Russia's Czarist industrial backbone was forced into being by government decree - Count Witte accepting that it wouldn't do itself and it needed to be done in the 1890s, for example.

However, he had to accept a 'cost' of this; large foreign indebtedness [Russian national debt 1913 of ~$15 billion, some 30% of GDP, held 80% by France and 14% by UK] and heavy foreign ownership of capital [100% oil fields, 90% mines, 50% chemicals, 40% metallurgy]. Between them, this would have been a long, continious drain of capital out of Russia to the various European bondholders etc.

One of the main reasons they ended up 'intervening' in the USSR between 1918 and 1921. Masssive tizzy over the loss of income and capital.
 
The consolidation of farms in the West is primarily a result of farmers retiring and their kids not taking over. Yes it’s also economic necessary, but it’s also a result in the rise in labor prices, rising living standards and people being able to make more money elsewhere.

The communal farming in pre-Soviet was a massive poverty trap, it was inefficient and the attempt of Imperial Russia to decollectivize the farms resulted in a increase in living standard, a rise in productivity. and freed up a lot of rural labor to use as urban labor.
 
The consolidation of farms in the West is primarily a result of farmers retiring and their kids not taking over. Yes it’s also economic necessary, but it’s also a result in the rise in labor prices, rising living standards and people being able to make more money elsewhere...
Partly true, at least now [not so much in say, the 1920s]. But one of the main reason this is so because the kids know you can't make a good living out of a 'family farm' anymore - the amount of capital required to make a decent 'go of it' requires ever larger farms to make it pay for itself.* In fact, in many sectors the prices being paid for produce is actually lower than the long-term 'break-even point'. The economies of scale have gotten so large that it's basically beyond the reach of the family unit.

This is normal. This is capitalism. The agribusinesses swallow up the family farms, in the similar manner that the family farms ate up the strip-farming and common of the earlier peasantry.

* Which ironically suggests that the Soviet idea of massive 'agriculture factories' serviced by a rural proletariat living in central 'agri-towns' is actually closer than ever.
...The communal farming in pre-Soviet was a massive poverty trap, it was inefficient and the attempt of Imperial Russia to decollectivize the farms resulted in a increase in living standard, a rise in productivity. and freed up a lot of rural labor to use as urban labor.
Yes. But it was from a very low base. And simply letting the NEP roll on, hoping that 'private farming' will by magic improve yields etc without any capital investment [for there is a massive shortage of capital] is at best naive and at worst plain stupid.
 
Partly true, at least now [not so much in say, the 1920s]. But one of the main reason this is so because the kids know you can't make a good living out of a 'family farm' anymore - the amount of capital required to make a decent 'go of it' requires ever larger farms to make it pay for itself.* In fact, in many sectors the prices being paid for produce is actually lower than the long-term 'break-even point'. The economies of scale have gotten so large that it's basically beyond the reach of the family unit.

This is normal. This is capitalism. The agribusinesses swallow up the family farms, in the similar manner that the family farms ate up the strip-farming and common of the earlier peasantry.

Except it’s too large extent a result a rise in living standards, if I was willing to have the same living standard as my grandfather had in the 50ties and 60ties, I could easily run the same farm he had. But I isn’t willing to have annual income of 7-8000$, while working 60 hour a week, when I can make 60.000$ on a 34 hour week. But if the alternative was 50 hour week, where I made 5.000$ it suddenly looked like a better deal.

* Which ironically suggests that the Soviet idea of massive 'agriculture factories' serviced by a rural proletariat living in central 'agri-towns' is actually closer than ever.

Yes. But it was from a very low base. And simply letting the NEP roll on, hoping that 'private farming' will by magic improve yields etc without any capital investment [for there is a massive shortage of capital] is at best naive and at worst plain stupid.

Not really just continue the shift to individual farms and let the farmers produce what they wanted and keep the money, would have increased the output significant. There was no need for mechanization before the 50ties. The only crops large industrialized farms make sense before 1960 are one focusing on productizing cereal, potatoes or beets. So USSR schooldays have decollectizied the communal farms and made the large noble estate into agricultural factories.
 
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