Could the USSR work well enought on its orthodox form to be a pleasant place in modern day?
- Thread starter Gukpard
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This post by @fasquardon sums it up quite well. The USSR would definetly remain a pretty good place to live in compared to the world average.
Living standarts would be a lot higher than in it's OTL successor states. The transition from socialism to capitalism was absolutely brutal. Russia took untill 2003 to recover to 1990 GDP per Capita levels. Ukraine took untill 2005, Belarus took untill 2004, Armenia took untill 2001, Georgia took untill 2005, Azerbaijan took untill 2005, Kazakhstan took untill 2002, Turkmenistan took untill 2002, Uzbekhistan took untill 2006, Tajikistan took untill 2007, and Kyrgiztan took untill 2007. Sadly I couldn't find data on Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (their world bank records only date back to the mid 1990s). The same is true for Moldova, however the accesible data implies a truly massive decline in terms of GDP/PC. Moldova didn't recover to it's (post-collapse) 1997 GDP/PC levels untill 2004
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This is an excellent perspective on the USSR: the USSR on paper had most of what an advanced industrial society was supposed to have, it always just had certain flaws in it which made them far less palatable in practice. It reminds one of problems shot throughout the Soviet industrial base: that the Soviets lacked a response and feedback system. In a capitalist country, if a product is made that is bad, then it is not bought by the consumer (unless if some sort of effective media or marketing campaign is done), and if it is democratic, then some sort of real pressure exists to modify things at the base to fix local problems. Since the Soviet Union had neither, it meant that you had no effective feedback mechanism to effectively reform, fix, improve things and to even the edges out on the plan - other than the black market. Fixing it is much harder in the Soviet system than the "simple" tasks of manufacturing more cars, refrigerators, television sets, because ensuring quality and effective operations are infinitely more difficult to account for in a plnned economy.Planned centralized economy is very ill suited to satisfy customer needs beyond very basic even in competent hands. Which means among other things that there is no reason to work well as there is no nice things to get beyond purely moral satisfactionAny desirable perks are available either as a privelege or through something underhanded. Which in turn makes whatever available to a common person would be of even lower quality.
USSR was not generally a bad place to live for most of its citizens (though for not insignificant number it sucked hard admittedly). Like pointed in one of above posts, there are a lot of worse places in the world. I daresay that even in contemporary US you could relatively easy find people who had worse. The problem which I can attest from personal experience was that unless you were from a very privileged strata, you had to deal with uncountable small difficulties in almost every aspect of life.
Like you had running water and plumbing in the house, but it may be poorly constructed and constatly leak and to call a plumber was an epic quest in itself and to make him work you'd need a bottle of vodka and you'd also need to ensure that he would not drink it before or during the work. And he still could cheat you.
You could buy a car - not an easy task, but it was not available only to privilged (privileged got cars provided to them by the state), not Zhiguli/Lada (nee Fiat 124) anyway, that's more about "Volga" - but it would require constant service and you'd need to be either skillfull repairman yourself or know one (and have a lot of vodka).
You could make a really nice dinner, but you'd need to run around the whole city and spend several hours in queues to get needed ingredients.
There was really good net of public transportation, but it often run out of schedule, was too crouded and vehicles themselves uncomfortable.
Almost anything you need was possible to get... with constant effort.
Any of such problems was not a big deal in itself, but they were everywhere and sapped the life out of you. Life in USSR was like wearing servicable but uncomfortable shoes (like solder boots). Better then going barefoot (esp. in snow) but not exactly pleasant. That's why (among other reasons) most Soviet people could not care less when USSR ended. Admittedly, many naively thought that that fact by itself magically would make them live like US middle class. But many would take their chances I think even knowing what lies ahead.
USSR could survive in orthodox form, but unless the rest of the world turned significantly worse then OTL, it certainly would not be a nice place. Probably not even good enough.
I don't really know how you would go about fixing this either, since merely throwing more resources at the problem gets diminishing results in the context of the inefficiences of the Soviet economy.
It is perfectly possible to plan for quality - if Japanese corporations can do it, there's no real reason why Soviet enterprises can't do it.
It just requires a different sort of planning than backing peasants into factories as fast as possible.
Of course, two major parts of what the Soviet planning system was lacking was effective decentralization to reduce information overload and the sort of ability to try-and-fail at small scales (and thus learn from mistakes and happy accidents) that American-style capitalism excels at (or at least excelled at during the Cold War).
It isn't a story I've heard before, but it could be true.
fasquardon
Even that is temporary. No matter how brilliant the marketing campaign is no one is going to buy it if it doesn't work.
Japanese corporations have to make a profit. The workers there know this so they have some incentive in making sure that they make quality products. If the corporation goes under they are out of a job.
I think you have a severe misunderstanding of how labor and economic planning have worked in post-WW2 Japan. Lifetime employment was the norm for much of the 20th century and Japan had a very heavy-handed industrial ministry known as MITI. Japan's economy was not an intro to econ model of free enterprise.
Unless they strongly subsidized companies it wouldn't matter. Bankrupt companies can't employ people.
Ultimately "pleasant" is a relative term. I do believe a communist Russia could be pleasanter for most Russians than Comrade Putin's dictatorship.
Doubt it , it wasn't better under Brezhnev or Khrushchev not talking Lenin or Stalin. If anything it was worse particularly under Brezhnev.
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I am seriously skeptical of the idea that the standards of living in the ex-USSR countries would in any way be better off than today if it was still around. The OTL Soviet economy was stagnant for a decade before entering free fall in its last few years due to the global commodities slump that lasted through the 1990s and also screwed over Russia’s economy in those years. They were on their last legs in 1991; their GDP shrank by a sixth that year alone and their budget deficit was a quarter of GDP. And that was before oil prices got REALLY low (less than half their 1991 prices) in the mid to late 1990s. Things almost certainly would have been far worse if the Soviet Union had still been around then because of their “need” to spend 15-20% of GDP on their military, empire, and foreign adventures, their expensive subsidies to other Communist countries and movements, and their massive domestic subsidies to inefficient economic entities. I mean the Soviets by 1991 couldn’t even feed their population without huge imports, and they were running out of foreign exchange because their import revenue was tanking. Do the math on what that means.
As bad as Putin is, human rights and standards of living in Russia today are vastly better than they ever were in the USSR.
marathag
Banned
Without the spending to support themselves(and their worldwide clients) in the Cold War, the USSR could have had a consumer based economy to keep the people happier.
The US could afford to do both Guns and Butter, with the top Western economies buying US Bonds to support that kind of deficit spending.
So get sane, more trusting leadership in the USSR in 1944, Germany and Austria are set to be neutral non-aligned nations, and they actually have mostly fair elections.
No Iron Curtain, so sending arms around the globe to further revolutions
The Soviets can concentrate on making the citizens lives better, after the destruction of the War
The US could afford to do both Guns and Butter, with the top Western economies buying US Bonds to support that kind of deficit spending.
So get sane, more trusting leadership in the USSR in 1944, Germany and Austria are set to be neutral non-aligned nations, and they actually have mostly fair elections.
No Iron Curtain, so sending arms around the globe to further revolutions
The Soviets can concentrate on making the citizens lives better, after the destruction of the War
They did. MITI had extraordinary latitude towards provision of credit to specific companies and specific sectors (with basically a near monopoly on commercial lending into the early 1970s). They picked winners and losers.
I'm not saying all of this to say that the USSR was Japan or that the USSR's method of planning was similar to Japan's but simply to say that your argument that planning is antithetical to quality is out and out wrong. Japan's industrial policy post-WW2 was the logical evolution of the WW2 US economy which was most certainly a planned economy by almost any definition. Japanese quality management grew out of the WW2 era US playbook and it was in the US with a decidedly "free-er" economy that quality actually backslid (to the point where the US had to basically re-import originally American methods to get back to quality in industry).
Real GDP per capita fell by over 60% after the USSR was dissolved, and only returned to the level it was at in the late 80s a few years ago. There were somewhere between 3 and 7 million excess deaths caused by the collapse of the USSR - orders of magnitude worse than anything that happened under Soviet rule after Stalin's death. By literally every objective measure besides the number of brands of toilet paper, living standards got far worse. There's a reason a fairly large majority of Russians think the dissolution of the USSR was a bad thing.
This would probably be the most important thing for keeping the USSR around with a POD after 1960 or so. There was no need for that level of military spending - it's not like NATO would invade them even if the Soviets had a far smaller military, unless they scrapped their ICBMs too. Spending all that money on manufacturing cars instead of tanks would make their citizens much happier and improve their economy in other ways. Soviet consumer goods would likely still be of inferior quality to American or Japanese goods, but a big reason for their terrible quality OTL was because they were an extremely low priority for the people planning it - they were certainly capable of manufacturing decent military equipment when it was seen as important, and there's no reason to assume consumer goods would not increase in quality and quantity if more resources were devoted to their production and quality control was taken more seriously.
In Moscow that is undoubtedly correct. I am not sure it applies equally in the hinterlands.