Could U.S.S.R./Russia Feed Itself?

I thought only Americans did not feed their animals grass.

depends on which part of the states we're talking about. Stockyards across the country feed grain to livestock, but in the western states, there is widespread grazing of livestock on public lands (most of which aren't suitable for any other kind of agriculture).
 
Which in practice means government ownership of the means of production.
Thats only one interpretation of it. It could also just mean a redistribution of land from large agricultural owners to the peasants who actually farm it. Do keep in mind that Stalin did not collectivize out of an ideological desire, but so that he could keep the profits of the farms for the state so he could go ahead in his road of forced industrialization.
 
Thats only one interpretation of it. It could also just mean a redistribution of land from large agricultural owners to the peasants who actually farm it. Do keep in mind that Stalin did not collectivize out of an ideological desire, but so that he could keep the profits of the farms for the state so he could go ahead in his road of forced industrialization.

Not just Stalin but Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Min, and Pol Pot. In which Communist country did the workers actually have any meaningful control? All the orders came down from the Communist Party hierarchy.
 
Not just Stalin but Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Min, and Pol Pot. In which Communist country did the workers actually have any meaningful control? All the orders came down from the Communist Party hierarchy.

All "Communist" nations IOTL (strictly speaking that should be "nation states governed entirely by Communist parties", but you get the shorthand, I'm sure) emerged from a single revolutionary event duplicating its structures elsewhere, either by influence or force. They were all not only all devoted to Marxist Communism, but to a very specific school of Marxist-Leninist Communism. And frankly, Leninist Communism is deeply flawed.
 
All "Communist" nations IOTL (strictly speaking that should be "nation states governed entirely by Communist parties", but you get the shorthand, I'm sure) emerged from a single revolutionary event duplicating its structures elsewhere, either by influence or force. They were all not only all devoted to Marxist Communism, but to a very specific school of Marxist-Leninist Communism. And frankly, Leninist Communism is deeply flawed.

Marxism is deeply flawed. It works against human nature. All animals (including humans) are, in human terms, greedy and lazy. These are survival tactics in the wild. Eat as much as you can when you can to fatten up just in case there is a famine. Don't exert yourself much when you don't have to so you have the fat reserves when you need it. These tendencies have been transfered to humans. Expecting people to work hard just out of the goodness of their hearts doesn't work. If everyone gets paid the same why work hard? Are you a born sucker? He also drastically underestimates the economic necessity of middlemen. To have an efficient economy you don't only need efficient production but efficient distribution. Producing 10,000,000 pairs of shoes does you little good if they are are ruined because they are improperly stored or you lose many in transporting them or the store selling them loses track of them. Since Marx sees all of that as "parasitic" they get the short end of the stick and you can wind up with 10,000,000 pairs of shoes that are transported to the wrong place and improperly stored God knows where in the storage areas where you sell them.
 
Even Trotsky saw this.

http://sfr-21.org/trotsky.html
Trotsky bases his argument in these chapters on a view of human nature in which people are considered to be innately lazy: "As a general rule, man strives to avoid labor. Love for work is not at all an inborn characteristic: it is created by economic pressure and social education. One may even say that man is a fairly lazy animal. It is on this quality, in reality, that is founded to a considerable extent all human progress; because if man did not strive to expend his energy economically, did not seek to receive the largest possible quantity of products in return for a small quantity of energy, there would have been no technical development or social culture. It would appear, then, from this point of view that human laziness is a progressive force."
 
Yes, in theory it could feed itself, while Soviet problems with agriculture IOTL owed greatly to flaws in terms of adapting Russian methods to feeding a growing population and the Bolsheviks being overmighty, overnaive city-slickers who didn't know a damn thing about farming.
 
If the world was only that simple. Basically, how much of that export was done by domestic farmers and not foreign-capital farms (meaning it had to be exported)? What kind of grains were exported? Could it be that because of over-exportating, people actually had less to eat than during the Soviet Era (in terms of per capita, not actual distribution). While I do not disagree with that there was inefficiency, simplistic reasons can lead to the wrong conclusions, even when looking at the same situation.

In short: Put more thought into what you're saying, especially when things are not that simple and there are many biased beliefs floating around.

Plus you need to add in the fact that people bluntly speaking the U.S.S.R consisted of more than just Russia and it’s citizens ate far more during the late-Soviet period cpmpred to previous decades. Also the Central Asian and some of the other SSR’s were net-importers of foodstuff because of climate/lack of arable land to grow crops combined with a rapidly growing population in those areas.


Also the overall number of people employed on the collective farms plummeted over time due to a variety of factors including WW2 & state sponsored urbanization, combined with the natural trend towards growing urban population as a country develops economically.


Not just Stalin but Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Min, and Pol Pot. In which Communist country did the workers actually have any meaningful control? All the orders came down from the Communist Party hierarchy.

Yugoslavia, the PRC too if you want to come down to it, Cuba has also made some reforms in agriculture and other Communist nations tinkered around during the Cold War.


Marxism is deeply flawed. It works against human nature. All animals (including humans) are, in human terms, greedy and lazy. These are survival tactics in the wild. Eat as much as you can when you can to fatten up just in case there is a famine. Don't exert yourself much when you don't have to so you have the fat reserves when you need it. These tendencies have been transfered to humans. Expecting people to work hard just out of the goodness of their hearts doesn't work. If everyone gets paid the same why work hard? Are you a born sucker? He also drastically underestimates the economic necessity of middlemen. To have an efficient economy you don't only need efficient production but efficient distribution. Producing 10,000,000 pairs of shoes does you little good if they are are ruined because they are improperly stored or you lose many in transporting them or the store selling them loses track of them. Since Marx sees all of that as "parasitic" they get the short end of the stick and you can wind up with 10,000,000 pairs of shoes that are transported to the wrong place and improperly stored God knows where in the storage areas where you sell them.

That stupid old bulls**t line again.:rolleyes:

Marxism was created & implemented by humans therefore it is not ‘’against human nature’’ any more than other ideologies or religions. Also just saying '' durr Marxism dosnt work because durr people are greedy & lazy durr'', kind of ignores the other aspects of human nature such as selflessness, altruism, solidarity/putting the needs of the group before the self. All of which are also inborn evolutionary traits, without which humans wouldnt have gotten to (never mind past) the most primative hunter-gatherer stage of social development.
 
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Marxism is deeply flawed. It works against human nature. All animals (including humans) are, in human terms, greedy and lazy. These are survival tactics in the wild. Eat as much as you can when you can to fatten up just in case there is a famine. Don't exert yourself much when you don't have to so you have the fat reserves when you need it. These tendencies have been transfered to humans. Expecting people to work hard just out of the goodness of their hearts doesn't work. If everyone gets paid the same why work hard? Are you a born sucker? He also drastically underestimates the economic necessity of middlemen. To have an efficient economy you don't only need efficient production but efficient distribution. Producing 10,000,000 pairs of shoes does you little good if they are are ruined because they are improperly stored or you lose many in transporting them or the store selling them loses track of them. Since Marx sees all of that as "parasitic" they get the short end of the stick and you can wind up with 10,000,000 pairs of shoes that are transported to the wrong place and improperly stored God knows where in the storage areas where you sell them.

Marx got a lot of things wrong - his ideas about the parasitic nature of trade is based much more on the experience of economies still largely self-sufficient in most major articles. But the idea that everybody ought to, essentially, be paid the same wage from the surplus produced by everybody is not really a terribly Marxist one. He had a vision of a human society in which humanity transcends its false consciousness to become, kind of, perfect, and that he called Communism. It's a kind of materialist Hegelian paradise, which makes no sense, but doesn't have to since it's a religion, really. He also had an idea for a form of society in which ownership of the means of production and political power were invested in the people doing productive work. That was what he called Socialism. He changed his mnind about what it should look like several times. The idea of state ownership, central planning and controlled wages is Leninist. Communism in the Marxist sense no more "works" than the Kingdom of god does. Socialism in the Marxist sense works, if you allow for the democratic forms of organisation Marx himself was in two minds about. Socialism in the Leninist sense does not work.

Marx's idea about the transition from Capitalism to Socialism work. They're just awful.
 

whitecrow

Banned
So the fact that they were exporting food pre-WWI and starting soon after Communism fell and importing food during its Communist era doesn't show problems of agricultural efficiency under Communism? :rolleyes:
If the world was only that simple. Basically, how much of that export was done by domestic farmers and not foreign-capital farms (meaning it had to be exported)? What kind of grains were exported? Could it be that because of over-exportating, people actually had less to eat than during the Soviet Era (in terms of per capita, not actual distribution). While I do not disagree with that there was inefficiency, simplistic reasons can lead to the wrong conclusions, even when looking at the same situation.

In short: Put more thought into what you're saying, especially when things are not that simple and there are many biased beliefs floating around.
Have to agree with Sumeragi here. I have heard that Ukrainian tycoons prefer to export grain because they can get a better price for it abroad than on domestic markets. That doesn’t do wonders for the cost of bread in Ukraine.
 
You mean the withholding of grain?


Yes, partly because of oil money, and also not having to feed Central Asia.


Yes, but let me ask: What did it import?

The Stalinist famines were almost predominantly a failure of distribution of what existed. The famines were natural in origin, and made into catastrophic famines such as Russia hadn't seen since the Civil War because of the incompetence of the Soviet government. I've had arguments with people over the artificial famine theory before, places that were marching lock-step in with collectivization starved just the same as the ones that didn't, it is almost certainly an issue of incompetence rather than deliberate action.

As for the import issue I agree with you, honestly you just sort of need to preface it with a query on a similar note: why does the United States, a major exporter and producer of automobiles, import cars from other countries?

Answer that and you can answer the USSR grain problem.
 
The Stalinist famines were almost predominantly a failure of distribution of what existed. The famines were natural in origin, and made into catastrophic famines such as Russia hadn't seen since the Civil War because of the incompetence of the Soviet government. I've had arguments with people over the artificial famine theory before, places that were marching lock-step in with collectivization starved just the same as the ones that didn't, it is almost certainly an issue of incompetence rather than deliberate action.

As for the import issue I agree with you, honestly you just sort of need to preface it with a query on a similar note: why does the United States, a major exporter and producer of automobiles, import cars from other countries?

Answer that and you can answer the USSR grain problem.


The USSR was never a major grain exporter except when the country starved. I also no longer consider the US a major car exporter and it hasn't been for decades. We import far more cars than we export so we are a car importer not exporter.
 
The USSR was never a major grain exporter except when the country starved. I also no longer consider the US a major car exporter and it hasn't been for decades. We import far more cars than we export so we are a car importer not exporter.

Have you checked out GM lately? They sell more cars in China than they sell in the United States. Also keep in mind that "made in USA" is starting to become a very confusing label, if you buy a Toyota there is a very, very good chance that it was manufactured within the Continental United States

The USSR was almost always a major grain exporter, it just imported to make up for the exports. Feeding the people as a matter of "Say Sergei do we have enough food for Novgorod this year?" was never a problem, feeding people as a matter of "Say Sergei do you know how much food Novgorod needs this year?" was always a problem.
 
Have you checked out GM lately? They sell more cars in China than they sell in the United States. Also keep in mind that "made in USA" is starting to become a very confusing label, if you buy a Toyota there is a very, very good chance that it was manufactured within the Continental United States

The USSR was almost always a major grain exporter, it just imported to make up for the exports. Feeding the people as a matter of "Say Sergei do we have enough food for Novgorod this year?" was never a problem, feeding people as a matter of "Say Sergei do you know how much food Novgorod needs this year?" was always a problem.

We still import 3 cars for every one we export. That makes us a major car importer not exporter. The USSR always (except when it allowed people to starve under Stalin) imported far more grain than it exported. That makes it a major grain importer not exporter.
 
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