Industrialize in 15 years, call Stalin.

Also, we shouldn't forget that the Soviet planners in the 30s to plan the industrialization could simply read a history book of the industrial revolution. But when they had to think into the future, because they were more or less on the technological level of the west, it became much harder, and that partially explains why there were always behind capitalist countries.
 
Well look at Soviet growth rates from 1928 to 1941, and then the rapid recovery post-WWII, I wouldn't have thought too differently in 1961.
 
What do you think of the Soviet economy compared to the Yougoslavian one? Would the Soviet system have been more succesful if they had taken over some Yougoslavian idea like market socialism and worker's control?

The Yugoslav model was, in my opinion, far worse.

The worst part of it was the way Yugoslavia used industry building to try to manage the national aspirations of the constituent republics. It meant they built alot of factories in places that made no economic sense, because factories are good, right? Well, a factory in the middle of Kosovo with no adequate road or rail links, no local raw materials to draw on and no trained local workforce to employ is a dead loss to everyone, and the Yugoslavs build thousands of white elephant factories.

And because of the way they did it, it was easy for people in one republic to get the sense that their lives were bad because of the ****s in the republic next door. The system was tailor made to create a civil war.

As to worker's control... Boy that was a mess.

Some enterprises could handle it.

From what I've read, in most it was a disaster, where workers gave themselves excessive pay rises and didn't invest in new machinery or training, meaning the businesses were run into the dirt. Add to that, most workers lacked the skills or interest in actually participating in their workforce democracies. Voter apathy was high, and even though attending meetings was mandatory, truancy appears to have been high. As such "worker's control" meant in practice "control by the party and the fat-headed", because most people who participated either had political ambitions and were using the enterprise council as a rung on their career ladder, or were people who had overly high opinions of themselves and liked lording it up as a big man in workplace politics.

IMO Yugoslav Communism was one of the few systems worse than Stalinist Communism.

I'll be interested to read how the situation in Hungary compared (I'm reading a book on that now).

For the Germans they lost about 10 million dead out of some 80 million pre-war population, the Soviets 27 million out of at least 190 million.

1) You failed at math. 10 million dead out of 80 million makes for 12.5% losses. 27 million dead out of 190 million makes for 14.2% losses.
2) According to wikipedia, Nazi Germany suffered significantly less war dead out of a larger population. 8.26 to 8.86 million dead out of an 83.5 million pre-war population. At most 10.6% losses, compared to the 13.7% losses the Soviets suffered.

So you over-estimated the German numbers by 1.9% and over-estimated the Soviet losses by 0.5%.

Worth noting is that while the German numbers on wikipedia count civilian deaths caused by the Nazi regime to Germany, the Soviet numbers do not count the deaths caused by the Soviet regime to the Soviet Union. Further, the Soviet casualties do not count the deaths of post-war famine, the post-war re-settlements and the post-war guerilla war in Ukraine and the Baltic states. All of these death tolls would have been far less had Germany not invaded.

So added to the numbers for war dead, the Soviet Union lost: judicial executions 46,350; deaths in Gulag labor camps 718,804; deaths in labor colonies and prisons 422,629.

In the re-settlement areas during the way, 309,100 deaths were recorded (however, it's hard to say how much of these were natural deaths).

The post war famine claimed 1-1.5 million lives.

So counting Soviet post-war famine and victims of Soviet state violence (but not deaths due to guerilla war or forced re-settlement), the Soviets lost 29.9-30.39 million people.

So 15.65% losses compared to the area in the 1946 border.

And since I haven't counted the losses that don't have easily accessible numbers, that is sure to be an under-estimate.

Any way you cut it, Soviet losses were far worse than any other major power during WW2. It was proportionally even worse than the losses that China suffered from WW2 AND all of Mao's crimes ADDED TOGETHER.

And could you please work at becoming less Germanocentric in your history? As long as I've been reading your posts, you've had a habit of inflating anything good about Germany and downplaying anything bad about Germany or good about anyone who was an enemy of Germany at a given time period.

China is outcompeting the Russians and started form an even lower bottom and was even more wrecked by Japan over a longer period than the USSR was. Japan wasn't remotely a peer of Russia, Russia was more advanced than Japan even with the WW1-WW2 damage.

No. Even with all the murder wrought by Japan (over a much longer period than the German murder-fest in Europe), the Japanese killed less Chinese both in absolute terms and in percentage terms.

And China hasn't out-competed the Soviets yet. China is only now reaching the level of per-capita development that the Soviets had reached in the 80s. (Of course, the Chinese appear to be in a good position to breeze past the Soviet benchmark. As long as they can avoid meltdown of their political system they are pretty well set.)

Japan wasn't remotely a peer of Russia, Russia was more advanced than Japan even with the WW1-WW2 damage.

You think China has out-done the Soviets but don't think the Japanese out did the Soviets?

How the sam heck do you figure that?

If you're saying the peers of the USSR are Latin America, you're already saying that the USSR/Russia was well behind the West and never even remotely on par.

That's exactly what I've been saying right from the start.

The Soviets were a 3rd world country with nuclear weapons pretending to be a superpower.

No, it's just that those technologies aren't better than what exist in other countries; the rockets are a dick waving effort that most countries don't bother with and the US really wasn't interested in sinking enough money into to compete with Soviets/Russians beyond the 1990s, while the Mig-29 and Su-27 aren't really any better than the western standard, worse in many ways, while their civil aviation is behind the 8-ball.

Rocket technology is absolutely vital for having any real military independence in the modern world. A Soviet Union without rockets would have been a Soviet Union that was forced to accept American hegemony. Probably the right choice for their economy, but the Communist Party could have kissed their monopoly on power goodbye, and US companies would have to be allowed access to the Soviet economy. The Americans were determined to destroy Communism, even when they entertained ideas of killing it gently in the immediate post WW2 period.

As for aircraft technology, no other European state was able to compete with the US in the aircraft industry. They had to pool their efforts (either with each-other or the US) to remain competitive.

And if the Soviets were comparable to Brazil in terms of Nobel Prizes, not Germany, you're conceding the point that they are were never at a point to compete with the West.

Read what I said again. I said Brazil was the fair comparison.

The actual science nobel prizes of the FSU as of 13th October 2016 (which is an unfair comparison because funding for education and science fell sharply after the fall of the Soviet Union, meaning the FSU has produced virtually no new nobel-worthy science in the last 27 years) was 21. That is 0.734 science nobels per 10 million population - exactly comparable to South Africa, a bit more than Argentina and far, far ahead of the 0.048/10 million of Brazil. That's actually a really stunning performance by such an underdeveloped country. (As is Argentina's.)

Germany by comparison has 11.030 nobel science prizes/10 million. And Japan (the one Soviet peer that outperformed them) has 1.738 nobel science prizes/10 million - still out performing the Soviets, but also choking on German dust.

So yes, the Soviets were not playing on the same level as the US (which has a bit less science nobel laureates than Germany per head). But the Soviets were doing very well for a country that started with 29.6% literacy in 1897. Brazil by contrast had a literacy rate of 35% in 1900. The US had 89% literacy in 1900. (See here for stats. And here for stats on Russia.)

perhaps had WW1 not happened and the Czardom reformed Russia would be a near 1st world nation today

Perhaps. But again, it's worth remembering that the Tsars ruled a 3rd world country that was only a great power due to sheer size. Turning 3rd world countries into 1st world countries is hard. Between 1900 and now, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea managed it. 3 out of the hundreds that tried. As such, the odds are that the Tsars would have failed even worse than the Soviets (though perhaps Tsarism could have outperformed Soviet Communism by 2050, had either system lasted that long).

Since both systems have already fallen, we can't say.

There was massive problems getting food distributed to the civilian population post-war because of the wrecking of infrastructure and war economy had collapsed as a result of the destruction

And yet, there was no mass starvation in Germany. The Soviets lost 1-1.5 million to the 1946-1947 famine.

or had bad economy because of WWII has to start explaining why it enjoyed relative high growth rates which then stagnated in the 1970s-80s. The damage from the war should be repaired over time and should have less of an effect on Brezhnev era economy than the post-war era and yet the Soviet economy was more dynamic in the 50s.

Wars increase the growth rates of the economy after the fighting ends. Because it is harder to educate people in things completely new to them than it is to rebuild infrastructure after it's been destroyed by war.

So as the Soviet Union recovered, one would expect that growth rates would slow, converging with those of non-war damaged economies.

(And this is a good reason why high growth rates aren't necessarily a sign of economic health. Wrecking the economy one year so you can get high "growth" from repairing it on subsequent years is not healthy, however you do the wrecking.)

fasquardon
 

Deleted member 97083

It is very odd for me to see the Soviets accused of "lack of technological know-how." These are the people who put the first satellites and first manned spacecraft into orbit after all. To a great extent, apparent Soviet prowess in space technology was a matter of smoke and mirrors--but they could do it at all, when the USA chose not to and no other powers in the world could do it.

Space is not just a fluke either.

1) The Soviets were well along in developing turbojets at the same time as Whittle and Ohain were doing it in Britain and Germany.
2) In science in general, in physics especially, Soviet scientists were often the pioneers of new fields. Then they'd lose their lead and pioneer some other field, rinse and repeat endlessly.
3) In engineering Soviet technology often accomplished things that Westerners never quite matched--ekranoplans for instance. We could say, "well we didn't choose to match it, it was an irrational use of resources and a dead end." Maybe so. The point is, they could do it, pointless or not.

The downfall of Soviet technology is never then that they lack world class genius investigators, inventors or visionaries who can pioneer completely new fields and do a very competent prototype. Their problem was always one of implementing the visionary, cutting edge new stuff on a mass scale reliably. This is why the Russians would write and publish groundbreaking, visionary work on totally new lines of investigation, then the Westerners would come in and take over the field--because they could operate with reliable purchased equipment and big budgets; Soviet institutions generally had to make all their sophisticated equipment themselves from scratch, because there were no reliable Soviet manufacturers to contract out routine work to.

They didn't suffer from lack of know-how. I daresay their know-how put Westerners to shame, because they did everything by hand. They suffered from lack of being freed from specialized but routine know-how. Very poor quality control, very poor logistics.

That they lacked business know-how is plain enough!
I don't disagree, but do you have sources about this phenomenon?
 
As to worker's control... Boy that was a mess.

Some enterprises could handle it.

Thank you very much for your answer! Well I thought that workers who control their factories would try to run them smoothly and to improve them. So democracy as a mean to increase efficiency and motivation at work. Instead of paying the workers higher wages or trying to desperatly produce consumer goods for them, give them some economic rights: unlike consumer goods, that costs nothing and you can still hope that they'll not mismanage their own factories.

But maybe it doesn't work that way. Since I'm interested in the subject, it would be interesting to know which sources do you read on Yugoslavia. Because until know, I considered this system to be better (and not worse) than the Soviet Union.
 
Thank you very much for your answer! Well I thought that workers who control their factories would try to run them smoothly and to improve them. So democracy as a mean to increase efficiency and motivation at work. Instead of paying the workers higher wages or trying to desperatly produce consumer goods for them, give them some economic rights: unlike consumer goods, that costs nothing and you can still hope that they'll not mismanage their own factories.

Workers in highly skilled industries that were close to their markets (so workers who were intelligent, knew their work and knew their customers) performed well under worker self-management.

Again, having the right information was key to good performance.

Though to be fair, Yugoslav enterprises were also operating in an environment where there was no working price mechanism - likely worker self-management would have performed better if some of the enterprises that only just failed had real prices to deal with.

But maybe it doesn't work that way. Since I'm interested in the subject, it would be interesting to know which sources do you read on Yugoslavia. Because until know, I considered this system to be better (and not worse) than the Soviet Union.

I think it was one of the papers in my mountain of economics reference material. I looked this morning but couldn't find it. I'll keep hunting.

While I was seeing if I could find something via google-fu I did find this however. It really brings home the scale of the Yugoslav trade deficit, and I'm actually surprised that the Yugoslav economy under-performed that of Hungary and Bulgaria. Not that this made Hungary immune to having its own debt explosion in the 80s.

fasquardon
 
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