Worker coops own economies after eastern bloc falls

[Nell_Lucifer]

Where are you getting these statistics? Even in prosperous post-Soviet countries like Poland the majority of Soviet-era industry was either abandoned, scraped, or heavily modernized.

Personal experience with a few people who worked in the Romanian heavy industry during and the post-communism era, and a it seems that reoccurring theme plaguing those factories was bad management/organization. For example, my hometown was a very heavily industrialized zone, employing up to 40000 industry workers in the 80s, we even had a hydraulic industrial robot arm factory. Though as for the other information, mostly from various Russian articles and one or two books.

Most of these types of machines were imported from the West and most of them went to specialized arms factories, but not everywhere. I don't remember which western station produced this material, or it was about the ZIL plant. It is clearly visible from the 1990s how the flood of used but well-maintained cars killed the automotive industry of those countries.

To an extend as by the mid 80s the civilian industry started to enjoy the use of new technology for their sectors. For example, the Automatica București's RIP 6,3 started being utilized in the construction of buses by the mid 80s by the Autobuzul București, later Rocar, though as you mentioned, the flood of Western products, cheap cars, lead to the decline and eventual bankruptcy of the company. With the majority of companies post-communism suffering from the collapse of their trading partners, their suppliers, the uncertainty of the 90s and the bad management of the government.

Spoiler: images

There were many more industrial robots and CNC machines produced throughout the Eastern Block, but barring a few examples, information about them is scarce on the internet or in the English speaking world. The imported Western machines were the very high end precision stuff, which, the Soviets always were behind by 2 to 5 years, however, in the grand scheme of things, that doesn't matter as even today, in well developed countries, the heavy industry is still employing very old stuff where it can because, well it works just as well and you have experts working on them. (Both can apply on automated and manually operated systems, depending on the scale of production)

 

[Sasza]

Only to produce these CNC machines you still needed imported chips, but to make a CNC design you needed CAM and CAD machines that were either imported or produced from imported parts.

So it's a vicious cycle and you still need capital. Another problem is that after 1968 Romania stood aside from the rest.

 

[Band in China]

Personal experience with a few people who worked in the Romanian heavy industry during and the post-communism era, and a it seems that reoccurring theme plaguing those factories was bad management/organization. For example, my hometown was a very heavily industrialized zone, employing up to 40000 industry workers in the 80s, we even had a hydraulic industrial robot arm factory. Though as for the other information, mostly from various Russian articles and one or two books.

Fascinating, do you remember their names or have the links? This contradicts the majority of scholarship I've seen and I'd very much like to learn more.

To an extend as by the mid 80s the civilian industry started to enjoy the use of new technology for their sectors. For example, the Automatica București's RIP 6,3 started being utilized in the construction of buses by the mid 80s by the Autobuzul București, later Rocar, though as you mentioned, the flood of Western products, cheap cars, lead to the decline and eventual bankruptcy of the company. With the majority of companies post-communism suffering from the collapse of their trading partners, their suppliers, the uncertainty of the 90s and the bad management of the government.

One does wonder how well they would've done had they exported finishes goods in any volume, but IRCC the only things anyone brought from the Soviets were resources, foodstuffs, and weapons.

Spoiler: images

There were many more industrial robots and CNC machines produced throughout the Eastern Block, but barring a few examples, information about them is scarce on the internet or in the English speaking world. The imported Western machines were the very high end precision stuff, which, the Soviets always were behind by 2 to 5 years, however, in the grand scheme of things, that doesn't matter as even today, in well developed countries, the heavy industry is still employing very old stuff where it can because, well it works just as well and you have experts working on them. (Both can apply on automated and manually operated systems, depending on the scale of production)

Sounds interesting, where can I read upon some numbers?

 

[Nell_Lucifer]

Only to produce these CNC machines you still needed imported chips, but to make a CNC design you needed CAM and CAD machines that were either imported or produced from imported parts.

So it's a vicious cycle and you still need capital. Another problem is that after 1968 Romania stood aside from the rest.

Uh, not really? Romania was producing the Z80 microprocessor and a variety of other microelectronics at Microelectronica Bucureşti, and for most industrial applications, the Z80 is enough, as even today it is used in microcontrollers. And the imported electronics came from East Germany.

There's some things I am probably missing in regards to imported western stuff, but for the most part, everything needed could be obtained inside the country. The Soviets also had some improved and overall better versions of their copies, however, they were behind by 2 to 5 years in electronics and more so in quality but again, in the grand scheme of things regarding industry, it doesn't matter if the microprocessor is from 1982 or 1990.

I can't say if Romania used any CAD or CAM software, but I assume they did as most old industry guys know CATIA and that works on 1980s computers. At least I know the Soviets had CAD software by the late 70s and even published their own at the start of the 90s.

Fascinating, do you remember their names or have the links? This contradicts the majority of scholarship I've seen and I'd very much like to learn more.


One does wonder how well they would've done had they exported finishes goods in any volume, but IRCC the only things anyone brought from the Soviets were resources, foodstuffs, and weapons.


Sounds interesting, where can I read upon some numbers?

I don't remember the names let alone links of said articles, they were in Russian and I accidentally stumbled there.

The Soviets did export finished goods, industrial machinery, clothes, household appliances and so on. (Both the West and the Socialist world sought Soviet products, and East German products for that matter)

Probably in more recent (2010+) books written by Russians or Eastern Europeans, or, hmm, try to dwelve into the 1960s-70s electronics industry by starting with the BESM-4 computer? My memory is shoddy after the 60s as that was an early interest in the Kiev, Moscow and Leningrad computer institutes. You can probably find some articles on the internet on Soviet computers and microelectronics.

 

[Band in China]

The Soviets did export finished goods, industrial machinery, clothes, household appliances and so on. (Both the West and the Socialist world sought Soviet products, and East German products for that matter)

I don't doubt some made it to the world market, but given how hungry the USSR and Warsaw Pact was for western currency it didn't seem to make a significant dent.

Probably in more recent (2010+) books written by Russians or Eastern Europeans, or, hmm, try to dwelve into the 1960s-70s electronics industry by starting with the BESM-4 computer? My memory is shoddy after the 60s as that was an early interest in the Kiev, Moscow and Leningrad computer institutes. You can probably find some articles on the internet on Soviet computers and microelectronics.

I have, they tend to follow the lines of "The massive civilian Western electronics industry eventually gave the West huge leads vs the military-industrial complex of the USSR. The Soviets were for reasons of prestige constantly importing western equipment and trying to copy the latest tech, never consolidated a line of 1-2 gen older computers, and kept chasing the newest thing at tremendous expense and the loss of economies of scale."

And "State set prices among other issues had a long-term effect in depress quality and encouraging underinvestment, unlike a market economy that can simply refuse to produce goods at a loss the state set the mandates as both the supplier and purchasers."

 

[Nell_Lucifer]

I have, they tend to follow the lines of "The massive civilian Western electronics industry eventually gave the West huge leads vs the military-industrial complex of the USSR. The Soviets were for reasons of prestige constantly importing western equipment and trying to copy the latest tech, never consolidated a line of 1-2 gen older computers, and kept chasing the newest thing at tremendous expense and the loss of economies of scale."

And "State set prices among other issues had a long-term effect in depress quality and encouraging underinvestment, unlike a market economy that can simply refuse to produce goods at a loss the state set the mandates as both the supplier and purchasers."

Yeah, that's pretty much correct, but, lacking in details. It was the failure on settling on an universal computer code language and architecture for governmental organizations. The US did this in 1963 to 68 with ASCII.
The Soviets instead of playing to the strength of their national-owned industry and command economy, where collaboration and consolidation was more than possible, saw a lot of infighting, lack of communication, competition and major computer allocation to the scientists and mathematicians than to factories, similarly with the capitalist world (Different computers every 2 years with proprietary programming languages) but with none of its strengths. If that makes sense...

For example, every single institute which was making computers had a different vision on how they were supposed to work, built and by whom to be utilized. BESM, Minsk, Mir, Setun, Nairi and so on utilized different programming languages like ALGOL 60, FORTRAN, KOI-7, KOI-8 and lacked any type of modularity between each other. Staros (Alfred Sarant) was probably the only one who touched upon modularity and small desktop-sized computers but he was building his computers for the military. A problem was also the lack of production capacity I believe, in the sense that they did not have enough large scale factories and well-throughout production process except for Zelenograd.

Copying the IBM 360 was probably a good idea, but as you said, they never consolidated on a single general purpose computer and continued to copy every damn type produced in the West. After, they should have invested into higher end electronics or improving the existing modules of the 360 and jump to an ASCII (KOI-8), ALGOL 68 or FORTRAN compatible indigenous microcomputer.

(Sorry for the late reply)