Avoid Gorbachev political reforms is the main thing
Yep, follow the Chinese way of economic, but not political reforms. That would probably make it. And, of course the economic reforma should not be of the crazy type followed in Russia in the 1990s.
Avoid Gorbachev political reforms is the main thing
The underlying problem for a command economy is how you ensure that the centre gets accurate information. Soviet systems were remarkably poor in in-built cross-checks, relying instead (to a large extent) on sending saboteurs to the gulag.
eg even in post-Soviet times the requests for foreign currency, and the counterpart ruble payment went to different departments at the central bank, so that any checks were only carried out after the foreign currency had been paid out.
Maybe if Gromyko got the Premiershipninstead of Gorbachev. He knew that the USSR needed reform, though more gradual ones that the ones Gorbachev was proposing.
I wonder why they went to different bank departments?
I can see no flaws in this Khrushchevian deviousness.
So from your perspective, the system was running on inertia for close to 400 years?
And was there a noticeable decline in the quality of medical services at any point? If so, how did it manifest? I've read that from the 1960s on, there was a real shortage of doctors.
*Divert water from northern European Russia to the Ukraine and southern Russia - one of the major bottlenecks for agriculture in the European Black Earth region is that water is so variable, so while such a water diversion is bad for the wetlands of the European Sub-Arctic, for the Soviet economy (and Soviet trade balance)
*Get over the feelings of technological inferiority - the Soviet Union wasted enormous amounts of resources copying the West (generally using technology they'd stolen) or stealing technology with the intent to copy it (the KGB had the largest and most successful industrial espionage racket in history going - most of the fruits from that languished in file cabinets because not enough engineers and scientists in the relevant fields had the requisite clearances to go through what the KGB had stolen to figure out what was worth implementing) in every case I am aware of (except perhaps the atom bomb program) the Soviets would have been better to simply fund R&D projects that started only with the knowledge that a thing was possible, instead, when obtaining foreign technology (which the Soviets must do, since the rest of the world has more brainpower than any single country or empire) buy what the foreigners are willing to sell
Except that this was a joke which would not make sense in a real life: what's the sense in having "opposition" like that?
The projects to this effect had been proposed but their impracticality became too obvious even to the Soviet leadership.
To start with, 1990 - 1700 = 290, not 400
Then, I did not say that it was all the same all the time, just that approach to the reforming was quite often the same.
There was shortage of everything and as far as quality is involved, ask your dentist to do root canal without anesthesia. Perhaps you'll get a general idea.
On this specific subject I can tell you that as far as the Soviet electronics and computers were involved by the end of the 1980's it was impossible even to copy the advanced models and the "original" mini-computers (at least those invented in the Northern Donetsk) were a complete disaster. BTW, the process of stealing did not necessarily had the KGB involved: you were buying the original computers and then copying them and their software. The problem was that you'd need to have a supporting elements base (oops), that there would be a need to figure out how to copy software of the microprocessors, etc.
Most of the snipped are fantasies which sound good but rather unrelated to the realities of the SU.
If we're all making memes in this thread:
Ah, I do apologize then! That was certainly not my intention.Please don't. Especially since I feel this particular entry over-exalts my book-learning and under-values the contributions of the other participants in this thread.
fasquardon
One of the papers I have in my massive pile of Sovietology is a history of these water diversion projects - the Siberia-Central Asia project was still at the pipe dream stage, but the Northern Europe-Southern Europe water diversion project looked like it had come very close to happening in the early 80s and if the Soviet Union had continued for a few more years, could very well have happened.
That is an interesting point. I've never tried to compare different periods of Russian reform with each-other. I'll have to look into this.
My understanding is that during at least the early parts of Brezhnev's tenure things were tight but at least available in sufficient quantity to assure reasonable standards compared to Western Europe at the time (not that Western Europe was great by modern standards). Then there was a decline in outcomes (especially in terms of shortening male life expectancies and rising infant mortality rates) during the 70s and that over the early 80s things were starting to get a little better, then during the late 80s things got really bad.
Soviet computers in the 70s and 80s are a great example of the technological inferiority complex driving uneconomic decisions. Dumping their old computer technology (until the late 60s, the Soviets were actually leaders in the design side, though software and scale of production lagged far behind the US) to steal IBM's designs looked like a very sensible decision, because even if they were copying less advanced IBM mainframes, they could steal all that software from the US! But copying the software, as you say, turned out to be harder than expected and the USSR just ended up with copies of really old US technology much too late for the effort to be worthwhile. The Soviets ended up in a position where by the end of the 80s they were more than a decade behind the US even on the design side.
Ecological results of the Soviet experimenting already had been disastrous. Some of the best agricultural lands ended up under water as a result of creation the huge hydro power plants. Ditto for a significant climate change as a result of creation of the similar artificial "sea" for Bratskaya hydro power plant. Isolating Kara Bugaz Gol from the Caspian Sea produced results opposite to the expected and Sea of Aral pretty much disappeared. One may only guess what the further experiments in this area would produce.
More or less, yes. Nikita did a lot to destroy the agriculture both on the governmental (stressing extensive usage of the chemicals, putting resources into expanding the agricultural lands instead of trying to improve productivity, insanity of the corn program, etc.; basically, you name it and he did it) and individual level (cutting the personal plots). Breznev's regime picked up from this point and continued along the same lines even if with less of the "innovations" except for the seemingly good ideas like providing collective farms with the cash advances (true to the rule of the thumb, this killed incentive to work).
Let's don't go into that area: I was part of it and can tell that pretty much everything was done wrong as far as the independent development was involved. You can start with the wrong incentives for the designers and go all the way to the inadequate level of electronic industry or even production of the peripheral devices, discs, etc.
Don't know why are you getting fixated on the mainframes: in 1980's most of the industry had been (supposedly) using the mini-computers.
If you don't mind me saying so, the problem with your "proposals" is not that they are illogical or foolish but a genuine unwillingness to grasp a fact that on certain stage of a general deterioration of a society the problem is not just incompetence on the top but an overall stagnation on all levels. Few sincere enthusiasts were not capable of changing things even on a local level because such a thing would be immediately producing a negative reaction from everybody else and cheating was OK.