How to boost Soviet electronics output?

I had thought Kruschev was pretty well disliked by everyone. His reforms to the oblast and compulsory 1/3rd turn-over of officials at internal elections had angered the Party, the Virgin Lands campaign and his support for Lysenko had left Soviet Agriculture a complete mess and he had annoyed the KGB to the point the head backed the coup against him. He had two of the main pillars of the state against him and no Soviet leader can survive that. And that was before the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I'm also unsure it would help, I didn't think he was that impressed with anything outside Agriculture/Chemistry. There is an anecdote on the wiki that the big thing he took away from his visit to IBM was not demands for more Soviet computers, but the idea for self-service staff cafes. This does not seem promising for a Soviet electronics revolution.

Hm. I would say Khrushchev really pissed off certain groups and was overall less popular than Brezhnev would be overall in his term as leader. But that's not to say he was without the tools to disarm the plot against him. Critically, Brezhnev & co were able to get up to steam because Khrushchev underestimated them (he'd had warnings that something was afoot, and as soon as the plotters moved he quickly realized their ambitions, but did not take sufficient precautions when he raced back from holiday on the Black Sea to Moscow), so if Khrushchev had cancelled his holiday or returned for Moscow ready for a real fight, I think he'd have had excellent odds against the plotters. Remember that Khrushchev had already squashed a similar plot back in 1957. Indeed, comparing the details between the two plots I find it amazing the difference of Khrushchev in 1957 and Khrushchev in 1964 - I do wonder if he simply was too old and tired for another such fight?

And Khrushchev wasn't only impressed with agriculture and chemistry. He was obsessed with the new in general (on balance I think it was one of his virtues, but by gum could he get over-enthused as well). As far as the anecdote about the IBM visit... Well... Self-service cafes would have been a much cheaper idea to implement and would have much wider applicability in the Soviet Union at that time. Maybe we are silly for thinking that Khrushchev should have been impressed by the high technology, as opposed to the innovative ways of organizing lunch? Similarly, with agriculture and chemical industry, it's quite practical for a Soviet leader after Stalin to get so keen about those economic sectors. The chemical industries of Germany and the United States were a major reason why both states were rich, powerful and leaders in the industrial world. And of course, since the Soviet Union was heavily agricultural (even by Gorbachev's time it was 20% of the economy), meaning that even small improvements to agricultural productivity would have a big effect since they would effect such a wide part of the economy. So Khrushchev's focus on these areas isn't some failing, it's him actually being a good leader. It's the next level down the decision tree where he goes hog wild for corn where Khrushchev fell short.

Indeed, it's the practicality of trying to develop agriculture and chemical industry that makes me doubt that a shift from agriculture to electronics manufacturing or the like would be at all a plausible PoD.

how do you make good little consumers in a communist country?

Eastern Europe proved it was pretty easy to get consumers under a communist system. The problem is getting consumer demand that stimulates product improvement.

Yup. And so were American ones...who got most of their money from Government contracts.

Heh, good point.

fasquardon
 
Not sure about Soviet Russia, but in the waning years of communist East Germany we saw the beginning of what later happened with electronics in China.

East German combines like Robotron were cheaply making electronics not just for home use but also for export and sale in the west. This mostly involved peripherals like printers and similar as the actual computers made in East German factories were not good enough for the west.

If the situation had been allowed to continue long enough cheaper labor in the east may have resulted in more and more electronics being manufactured there and eventually produce CPUs and systems on par with the west.

As far as I can tell there were a lot on interesting designs and prototypes created behind the iron curtain, but a lack of resources and inefficiency in manufacturing meant that they never were able to really produce mass numbers of the things they could envision.

The trick may have been to ensure that enough political pressure was put on the people in charge of the computer projects to prevent the normal corruption graft, inefficiency and other sources of bad output. The soviets were able to keep some industries going pretty well as prestige objects. It would just be the problem of making sure that computer were one of them.

Maybe if something like Chile's futuristic project Cybersyn could have been implemented 'successfully' somewhere in the soviet block and thus created a demand for computers that would keep the factories going until they got good enough and produced in large enough numbers to make them common items in planning everywhere and eventually in the home too.
 
You can make good products, with interesting and innovative designs.
Awesome. That’s about 12% of the work. The rest is having a distribution network, quality control, customer service and repair, feedback procedures, marketing,and sales. Lots of awesome products fail because they or their parent companies lacked in these area.
How exactly are you to manage to have all that, in a society, when all the local apparchick cares about is this months production figures and customer service is You, have a complaint? Be thankful we don’t send you to Siberia.
 
Remember that Khrushchev had already squashed a similar plot back in 1957. Indeed, comparing the details between the two plots I find it amazing the difference of Khrushchev in 1957 and Khrushchev in 1964 - I do wonder if he simply was too old and tired for another such fight?
In '57 he still had the Party on-side and I think that made a difference, you need one of the KGB or the Party organisation on your side to keep an eye on plotters. (Ideally you wouldn't have any plotters, but that is quite an unlikely situation to be in ;) ). In '64 by the time he actually knew, it was too late. His control of the military was lacking after the Missile Crisis so he could not pull the same trick he did last time and even then given how wide ranging the opposition was he probably couldn't be sure that anyone he brought along would actually support him. I think his lack of fight was because he knew had been beaten and didn't want to drag things out.

I never said he was wrong to focus on agriculture/chemistry, as you say for the situation the Soviet Union was in those priorities make perfect sense. The point was that because of those priorities he was the wrong person to lead an electronics revolution, unless you can link electronics to improving those areas.

One possible POD, Anatoly Kitov wrote to Khrushchev in '59 proposing an "Economic Automated Management System" for the Soviet economy. His bosses intercepted it and buried it (and him). Khrushchev did approve something very similar in '62, so he might go for the '59 version, particularly as Kitov was selling the idea of nightly adjustments to the plan to minimise waste and spoilage from unavailable people and plant. Given the large amount of harvested crops that were lost for those reasons that might be enough to sell it.

The main objection was the military having to share computer resources with civilians, so it's not impossible that the compromise decision is to massively increase Soviet computing resources so they don't have to share. Now the EAMS idea isn't going to work for many reasons (not least the unreliability of the input data; Garbage In=Garbage Out), but it will need massive amounts of computers and electronics that will stimulate production of those items. Plus the butterflies may involve Khrushchev not re-organising the party into agriculture and industry streams at the local level (why bother if it's all going to be run by the central computer?), which will keep the Party Organisation on side and may help him survive the '64 coup.
 
East German combines like Robotron were cheaply making electronics not just for home use but also for export and sale in the West. This mostly involved peripherals like printers and similar as the actual computers made in East German factories were not good enough for the West.
The problem you're going to have with that is as soon as you start talking about more advanced manufacture you run into the technology transfer laws. There was specific legislation limiting what was allowed to be exported to the Soviet block due to possible double use that could boost Soviet military capabilities.
 
It depends. I am pessimistic these days. Like any reform package, there are good features and bad features. Probably the best of Kosygin's reform ambitions was to shift Soviet manufacturing by measuring quantity of output to measuring the value added by the enterprise.

The problem is how do you measure added value when there is no meaningful pricing. The price is what Gosplan says it is not what it is really worth.
 
Soviets capture Konrad Zuse or a working Z4/Z5 and Pibruns.

They figure out exactly what they have and how it benefits the military - Soviet computer industry incorporates Plankalkul or similar language and development accelerates.

Transistors are an earlier focus and eventually very cheap to make and easily available.

Home studies and individual expression of talent via homemade computers, perhaps from state-standardized parts/modules, are encouraged with the best technical results rewarded.
 
The problem is how do you measure added value when there is no meaningful pricing. The price is what Gosplan says it is not what it is really worth.

Easy! You copy American prices!

There was a joke among the planners that after the victory of Socialism they'd need to keep one capitalist country around to copy the prices off of.

(And yes, you are quite correct that value-added measures are going to have issues in the Soviet economy, but I do think they'd be a vast improvement over the Stalinist focus on gross tonnage produced with no mind paid to input cost or output quality.)

In '57 he still had the Party on-side and I think that made a difference, you need one of the KGB or the Party organisation on your side to keep an eye on plotters.

Hm. See, I would have said the party organization was actually more favourable to him in '64 but that he didn't have the opportunities or spend the effort he'd have needed to leverage it, which would be different if he'd taken the plot rumours seriously when he first heard of them. Brezhnev & co were able to do a lot of behind the scenes politicking in preparation for their move which could have been easily undermined by early counter-moves by Khrushchev - at least in my view. I will see if I can find some more detailed sources, because this conversation is getting me curious. It may be that the overviews of events that I've read thus far just favour Khrushchev a bit.

fasquardon
 
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