Communist countries doesn't forbid emmigration

I'd say if anything that's why a revolution happened there-you have semi feudal barbarism and backwardness in the countryside along with a rotten regime with a quickly developing urban core that was packed densely with working class citizens and peasants who for part of the year worked in the factories.

Also where do you think of a lot of the Bolsheviki intelligentsia got there education from?

Trotsky and some of the other communists actually acknowledged Russia's situation in the early 20th century and made a point as to how it led the revolution to be.

Regimes tend to be under the most threat when they are reforming, partly because it is often too late as governments tend to have to be dragged kicking and screaming towards reform, partly because big changes unsettles people. Both were present in both the overthrow of the Tsarist Regime and the Communist Regime.
 
this is why market forces dont mix too well with socialism, would need the coin for wages to come from the state or would need the company to act as a capitalist siphoning off surplus value. what im trying to say is that thier needs to be some way to standardise wages and purchasing power. perhaps a universal income would instead ease this issue?

I think the best solution for this unemployment problem would have been to give the power of hiring new workers to a neutral institution. The wages of the members of this council would have been fixed and only determined by the income of the enterprise, not by the profit, so that their share doesn't decrease with each additional worker. Then again, I'm just a person with a lot of fantasy -- maybe the Yugoslavian planner had other ideas.
 
this is why market forces dont mix too well with socialism, would need the coin for wages to come from the state or would need the company to act as a capitalist siphoning off surplus value. what im trying to say is that thier needs to be some way to standardise wages and purchasing power. perhaps a universal income would instead ease this issue?
I myself am pretty open to a mixed economy, like what the UK had in the years immediately after World War II. Where major sectors of the economy are basically treated and managed as utilities.
 
The big difference is that the guy you are talking about is very likely to remain in the US after his time is up. Not as likely for a Soviet doctor. You pay for his schooling and shortly after it pays off he goes to Germany or the US to make more money.
It's definitely a problem.

But then, a lot of different countries manage. Plus, the money sent home from abroad flows into the economy. It has the same function as exports sold.
 
It's definitely a problem.

But then, a lot of different countries manage. Plus, the money sent home from abroad flows into the economy. It has the same function as exports sold.

it is likely to be considerably higher though. Russia is a part of Europe so for both cultural and economic reasons its easier for them. Trains going from Moscow to Warsaw are more common than ferries or planes going from Cairo to Rome , I am pretty sure. As far as money sent from abroad not all will do that and it will be a fraction of what they make for those who do.
 
I think East Bloc emigration was a sore point mostly to East Germany only (that's why it had one of the most harsh travel restrictions.) The reason for this, is that Germany was the only country that was divided between the West and the East. If an East German escaped to the West, at least he/she would find himself/herself among fellow Germans, on the other part of his/her homeland.

In the case of Hungary, it is true that people could visit the West every 3 years, and Yugoslavia every 2 years as a tourist from the 70s onwards. They could visit either the West or Yugoslavia once a year, if they were invited by a relative. There were some defections, but at the end of the day, there was only one Hungary "East Hungary." Their whole homeland with its culture, mentality, traditions, food, and music was located behind the Iron Curtain. Escaping to Austria, spending months in a refugee camp, then being shipped off to some far-off country like the USA or Canada, was not as simple emotionally and psychologically, as it was for an East German to settle in West Germany.

In the Kádár-period, living standards in Hungary improved greatly since 1956, so there was even less of an incentive to escape.

I have older relatives and family friends who visited the West once or twice in the Communist period, but they came home after it, and they weren't party members or privileged. They simply didn't want to leave everything behind.

Even in Communist Bulgaria, which had a standard of living much lower than Hungary, warning signs near the border to Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Greece were mainly written in German, to deter East German tourists who would want to defect. Most Bulgarians didn't want to leave their homeland behind.
 
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So, I get this problem on the part of East Germany (and the same would be the case with the Koreas), but what about the other countries? And, in fact, the precedent was estabilished in Russia in 1917. Were that many skilled workers in pre-revolutionary Russia for the Communists to worry about them leaving the country? And would they be accepted as immigrants in other countries with relative easy?


Heard about Sikorsky? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Sikorsky
 
And when the economy went downhill for decades.
I welcome the challenge!

We're talking about when the UK nationalized steel, railroads, telecom, etc, under a Labour government in the late '40s. Now, I think Britain did pay more per capita for NATO defense than did a lot of other European countries.

All the same, I do wonder, if healthcare is treated as a utility like I advocate, like in a single-payer system, can we still keep a couple of good engines of innovation going?
 
I welcome the challenge!

We're talking about when the UK nationalized steel, railroads, telecom, etc, under a Labour government in the late '40s. Now, I think Britain did pay more per capita for NATO defense than did a lot of other European countries.

All the same, I do wonder, if healthcare is treated as a utility like I advocate, like in a single-payer system, can we still keep a couple of good engines of innovation going?

From that time until the 1980s GB was clearly on the way down. It ceased declining since then.
 
Well, the main problem in the eastern block was the GDR. An east German citizen could, before the wall was built, pack his bags and cross the border. On the other side, he would receive a shelter and automatically be granted west German citizenship.

Actually: He already had citizenship. The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) never recognized the 'Democratic Republic of Germany' ('East Germany'). As such all Germans living there were already considered citizens of West Germany - i.e. Germany as defined by the Federal Republic of Germany.

Admittedly, those coming over then eventually had to get their ID, passport etc. etc.. But only because they had no opportunity to do so yet, not because they lacked citizenship.
 
Then they never, ever would have been able to sustain the Cold War. This would have been especially true during the Stalinist reign of terror. Masses of people would have left to the West, to the point where it might have been Western countries putting up obstacles to immigration, but those who could would get out. East Germany might have lost most of it's population, as the FRG was accepting anyone who managed to cross over. The same is true for North Korea, assuming history goes much the same way, assuming the Cold War doesn't end before it falls behind South Korea (the North started out as having the better standard of living), and the majority of Soviet Jews would have ended up in Israel. The emigration would create a net effect of more emigration, as word got back of the better living standards and political freedoms the West had to offer.

While except for East Germany and North Korea, I don't think any of the Communist states would have experienced a demographically devastating drop in population, mainly because other Communist states weren't built from divided nations with a here is going to be a massive brain drain to the West, as educated and qualified people able to get visas leave in droves. This is further going to depress the quality of life, as things like healthcare, education, and infrastructure all suffer due to a lack of doctors, professors, and engineers, but this will also critically impair the Soviets' ability to keep up with the West in producing new military technologies, and they'll fall farther and farther behind. The Soviets might try to offer all kinds of incentives to stay, until they've essentially create a bourgeoisie and defeated the whole purpose of Communism, but if the West is smart, it'll offer it's own incentives to drain the Soviet Union of more brain power. The Soviets could stem the flow through certain incentives and strings attached to free education, but barring drastic action (IE "if you get a state-funded education you must stay for 20 years"), they couldn't stop it short of closing the borders.

The failure of Communism will be painfully obvious for all to see, as people emigrate in droves to the capitalist West, with no discernible flow the other way. The Eastern bloc will fall further and further behind unless they take harsh measures to stem the tide.

Brezhnev was talking to his Minister for Internal Affairs.
"Comrade Nikolai," he said, "How many Jews do you think there are in our glorious union?"
"A little over 2 million, Comrade General Secretary."
"And how many of them do you think would leave if we let them?"
"Perhaps 3 million, Comrade General Secretary."

I think it was originally "perhaps 20 million, Comrade General Secretary".

Anyway, in another joke, Leonid Brezhnev is talking with Golda Meir, and keeps asking her out on a date, but she refuses. Finally, she says "I'll go out with you when you agree to let everyone who wants to leave the Soviet Union out. Brezhnev smiles: "Ah, I knew you wanted to be alone with me.
 
East Germany might have lost most of it's population, as the FRG was accepting anyone who managed to cross over.
As per what I wrote above: It was not so much about 'accepting them' as in 'permit them to enter'. East Germans were already considered citizens of the Federal Republic. They needed no permit or visa or anything to move to West Germany.

Well: At least not from the West German authorities they did not.
 
Actually: He already had citizenship. The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) never recognized the 'Democratic Republic of Germany' ('East Germany'). As such all Germans living there were already considered citizens of West Germany - i.e. Germany as defined by the Federal Republic of Germany.

Admittedly, those coming over then eventually had to get their ID, passport etc. etc.. But only because they had no opportunity to do so yet, not because they lacked citizenship.

Well yes, from a legal point of view, the FRG considered all east Germans as German citizens and never recognized the citizenship of the GDR -- a cause for endless quarrels between the two states.

I wonder if the FRG counted the 17 million citizens of rhe GDR as west German citizens in official statistics?
 
In order for this to be even remotely possible, you'd have to indefinitely keep the New Economic Policy (NEP). Indeed, if the Soviet economy was actually in good shape, then less people would want to emigrate.

The way that the Soviet economy was actually set up for most of its existence, though, would ensure that extremely massive numbers of people would want to emigrate.
During NEP, it was the case that the USSR permitted emigration pretty leniently (Isaac Asimov's family left Belarus at that time) while stringently policing immigration, and of course when NEP was terminated, emigrate controls clamped down and immigration became easier--for anyone who still wanted in!
 
From that time until the 1980s GB was clearly on the way down. It ceased declining since then.
Great Britain's GDP was still increasing most years, just like is normal for pretty much any modern, 'advanced' economy. Other countries were catching up. I even did a thread on this subject.

Did the UK have only 3% growth in the post-war years (1951-1970)?
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...rowth-in-the-post-war-years-1951-1970.419594/

where I do wonder why it wasn't higher.

I'm particularly interested in the UK's "Winter of Discontent" Dec. '78-Feb. '79.
 
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