Stalinist crash-industrialization in other countries ("Pulling a Stalin")

CaliGuy

Banned
That growth isn't that different from the rate under the Russian Empire right before the war.
Actually, it doubled every 20 years or so in the Russian Empire; here, we're talking about a doubling in 10 years.

However, it's worth noting that Stalin's rule might have very well been a period of catching up after the damage, destruction, and devastation of WWI and the Russian Civil War--thus helping to explain the high industrial growth rate during this time.

So Soviet industrial output more than doubled under Stalin from 1928-1938.
Yep; however, some of it might have been catching up since WWI and the Russian Civil War did a lot of damage to Russia.
 
Got any citations for this?

I admit my Google-fu is missing something today. Robert Kaiser's Russia: The People and the Power mentions the widespread lying common in the Soviet Union regarding production in the 1970's because of the bonuses for "Above plan production" and the difficulty in verifying that it was actually produced. IIRC The Russians by Hedrick Smith said pretty much the same thing. Unfortunately I can't find my copies. Robert Kaiser was a reporter for the Washington Post at the time and Hedrick Smith was a reporter for the New York Times hardly right wing rags.

This was an era where you didn't get shot for bringing in reports the boss didn't want to hear. Stalin was a paranoid loon who very well might have you shot if you say anything he doesn't like. Why on Earth would you believe anything told to you by a totalitarian government run by a paranoid dictator who had people killed by the millions?
 
It's fertile plains with monsoon season versus rugged mountainous location with winter cold that reaches deep Siberian level. Ever heard of Chosin and its deadening cold that slaps anything the Germans faced in the Soviet Union?

Eh, I wouldn't call just about anywhere in Korea "plains," whole place is full of hills and mountains, just South Korea has a lot of nice valleys while North Korea is rocky as fuck. Doesn't help that when cheap Russian oil was cut off people started cutting down a lot more firewood which caused horrible erosion and mudslides.
 

Deleted member 97083

I admit my Google-fu is missing something today. Robert Kaiser's Russia: The People and the Power mentions the widespread lying common in the Soviet Union regarding production in the 1970's because of the bonuses for "Above plan production" and the difficulty in verifying that it was actually produced. IIRC The Russians by Hedrick Smith said pretty much the same thing.
Neither of which have the Stalinist period as their primary focus, and both of which were written during the height of the Cold War when documents that became available after 1989-1991, had yet to become available.

This was an era where you didn't get shot for bringing in reports the boss didn't want to hear. Stalin was a paranoid loon who very well might have you shot if you say anything he doesn't like. Why on Earth would you believe anything told to you by a totalitarian government run by a paranoid dictator who had people killed by the millions?
Because historians have been debating the industrial and population growth of the Soviet Union for decades, yet even with revised figures, still witness a large growth in that period. If Stalin truly had led to such insignificant growth, then "Stalinist Industrialization" would be one of those "Big Historical Myths" like the "Clean Wehrmacht" Myth.
 
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Neither of which have the Stalinist period as their primary focus, and both of which were written during the height of the Cold War when documents that became available after 1989-1991, had yet to become available.

The "Height of the Cold War" was the 1950s not the 1970s which is the "Détente Period" but you are correct, they concentrate on the then current period. A period when the data was more likely to be more accurate. For all his faults Brezhnev wouldn't have you taken out and shot if you told him something he didn't want to hear, Stalin would.

Because historians have been debating the industrial and population growth of the Soviet Union for decades, yet even with revised figures, still witness a large growth in that period. If Stalin truly had led to such insignificant growth, then "Stalinist Industrialization" would be one of those "Big Historical Myths" like "Clean Wehrmacht".

I wouldn't say insignificant but closer to Late Imperial Russia growth which was actually quite impressive.
 

Deleted member 97083

The "Height of the Cold War" was the 1950s not the 1970s which is the "Détente Period" but you are correct, they concentrate on the then current period.
True.

A period when the data was more likely to be more accurate. For all his faults Brezhnev wouldn't have you taken out and shot if you told him something he didn't want to hear, Stalin would.
But could American historians access Soviet archives in Moscow during Brezhnev? I doubt that.

After the 1989-1993 period, a lot of old data about the WW2 period became available to Western academics for the first time.
 
Hedrick Smith's The Russians is from 1976 so you're right on that. Though Kaiser's Russia: the People and the Power is from 1958.

.

1976 as well
https://smile.amazon.com/Russia-Peo...=8-1&keywords=russia+the+people+and+the+power

But could American historians access Soviet archives in Moscow during Brezhnev? I doubt that.

After the 1989-1993 period, a lot of old data about the WW2 period became available to Western academics for the first time.

How much could they be trusted? After all the data is based on lies. People lower down lied to the people above them to avoid being shot or sent to the gulag. If they lied under Brezhnev they would almost certainly do so under Stalin. The whole thing is questionable when people are lying. It is hard to say how much growth there really was during that period since all the data is questionable. My guess, and I admit it is a guess, is that it is probably lower. After all Russia was never an industrial powerhouse. It exports very little manufactured goods to advanced countries even with most of the Cold War restrictions lifted.
 

Deleted member 97083

How much could they be trusted? After all the data is based on lies. People lower down lied to the people above them to avoid being shot or sent to the gulag. If they lied under Brezhnev they would almost certainly do so under Stalin. The whole thing is questionable when people are lying. It is hard to say how much growth there really was during that period since all the data is questionable.
But historians know that and took that into account, and have been analyzing Soviet data for faults for decades. It's not like historians blindly trust data from the Stalinist period. They debated and made arguments from 1945-1991, and again from 1991-2017 and the historical consensus now, like for every other historical topic, is the result of years of argument, review, and analysis.
 
Eh, I wouldn't call just about anywhere in Korea "plains," whole place is full of hills and mountains, just South Korea has a lot of nice valleys while North Korea is rocky as fuck.

Actually, the Honam plain of Jeolla was so productive, colonial imports completely depressed the Japanese rice market to the point there were Rice Riots that brought down a government. Without Korean resources, Japan wouldn't have been able to sustain the Sino-Japanese War due to famine.
 
Actually, the Honam plain of Jeolla was so productive, colonial imports completely depressed the Japanese rice market to the point there were Rice Riots that brought down a government. Without Korean resources, Japan wouldn't have been able to sustain the Sino-Japanese War due to famine.

Productive, yes, flat no. Mountains all over the freaking place, even though they're pretty small.
 
Productive, yes, flat no. Mountains all over the freaking place, even though they're pretty small.


SKZng01l.jpg


This isn't flat enough for you? Not getting your weird standard.
 
So Soviet industrial output more than doubled under Stalin from 1928-1938.

Even in the same chart, you can spot similar 10 year spurts for almost any country on the list, say, France between 1953-1963. Communism delayed the rebuilding of Russian industrial capabilities and when finally they could be recovered and improved - voila! Still, I don't remember Holodomor in 1950's France or in USA between 1913-1928... Propaganda on Stalin's achievements in industrialization are a part to whitewash his regime, like trying to focus on Hitler's great achievements on reducing smoking...
 
It's fertile plains with monsoon season versus rugged mountainous location with winter cold that reaches deep Siberian level. Ever heard of Chosin and its deadening cold that slaps anything the Germans faced in the Soviet Union?

My Dad remarked about Korea. It had the climate of Minnesota, but with mountain ranges, and they were filled with Communists trying their best to kill him.
 
A big part of the reason why "pulling a Stalin" worked was that it accelerated the migration of labour from the (overpopulated) Soviet rural areas to the cities where that labour could be more efficiently employed. The resources gained from plundering impoverished peasants pales in comparison to the resources gained by making an under-worked farmer a factory worker.

If you are looking for countries that might benefit from "pulling a Stalin", one wants to look for countries that have overpopulated countrysides and who have suffered from a relatively slow migration from the country to the cities. Certainly India comes to mind. Though I remain unconvinced that "pulling a Stalin" would provide long term benefits. The required violence, even if somehow managed in such a way that it avoided any actual deaths (and I don't see how that is possible) is going to leave people wounded mentally, which will lead to children who are traumatized by the trauma of their parents and a state corrupted with the power of brutality.

Even in the same chart, you can spot similar 10 year spurts for almost any country on the list, say, France between 1953-1963. Communism delayed the rebuilding of Russian industrial capabilities and when finally they could be recovered and improved - voila! Still, I don't remember Holodomor in 1950's France or in USA between 1913-1928... Propaganda on Stalin's achievements in industrialization are a part to whitewash his regime, like trying to focus on Hitler's great achievements on reducing smoking...

Your first point is a good one. However, saying that 1950s France and the USA between 1913-1928 didn't experience a mass famine is... Not a fair comparison. France before 1950 and the USA before 1913 hadn't experienced mass famine in living memory, they were both far wealthier and far more developed than the Soviet Union was (and had more forgiving climates to boot). The Russian Empire had regular mass famines during the 1800s and early 1900s. That this did not immediately change when the Bolsheviks took power shouldn't surprise anyone.

The more relevant comparison is how the Soviet regime responded to its mass famines as compared with how the Tsarist regime responded to its famines (the Tsarist regime was no oil painting, but I'd fancy my chances better in the famine of 1891 than the famine of 1932).

As for talking about Stalin's industrial achievements, I think they are as useful for whitewashing Stalin's crimes as the achievements of Nazi medical science are for whitewashing Hitler's crimes (even today, most of our scientific knowledge on things like how the human body responds to hypothermia comes from Nazi experiments - experiments which, I think, do the opposite of whitewashing Hitler or his regime). Stalin certainly did oversee a massive increase in the industrial capacity of the USSR - and the brutality used to meet those goals are one of the single largest contributing factors to the collapse of the Soviet system (and the related collapse of Soviet industry) almost 38 years after Stalin died.

fasquardon
 
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