marathag
Banned
Well, British Leyland and Soviet upgraded FIAT 126 were similar for build quality, but hadn't heard that about Ford UK.
However, there is inexpensive, and then there is cheap.
Would the soviet union survived if they had adopted a export oriented model
- Thread starter pandanope3
- Start date
However, there is inexpensive, and then there is cheap.
Sorta kinda. The USSR was in the middle of an expansion, reorganisation and was adding new weapon systems. The purges & surprise certainly didn't help, but they were not the sole reason of the defeat.
The scope was much more limited than people first thought. I'm lazy so I'll quote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge:
Anti-Vietnamese pogroms in what was by then the eastern part of Re-unified Germany?
What that reported internationally? I don't remember reading about it.
There was a time when the Lada. Niva was quite popular for people who wanted to do serious off road driving at a low cost.
Attachments
The Soviet Union’s economy two biggest problems were quality control and allocation. Outside of the military industries, formal QC did not exist. Since workers, or to be more accurate various work groups, were being judged on a per product, they found it better to do stuff like produce ten million defective products than 9,999,999 excellent products.
The other, somewhat related, problem was one of allocation. You could have a perfectly good factory that could be producing lots of useful things if only you had one extra eensy-weensy part, but unless the higher-ups had allocated you that part, you were out of luck. If that part happened to break, getting a new one would depend on how much clout you (and your superiors) pulled versus how much clout other people who wanted parts (and their superiors) held.
To use one example, a pig farmer in Siberia needed wood in order to build sties for his pigs so they wouldn’t freeze – if they froze, he would fail to meet his production target and his career would be ruined. The government, which mostly dealt with pig farming in more temperate areas, hadn’t accounted for this and so hadn’t allocated him any wood, and he didn’t have enough clout with officials to request some. A factory nearby had extra wood they weren’t using and were going to burn because it was too much trouble to figure out how to get it back to the government for reallocation. The farmer bought the wood from the factory in an under-the-table deal. He was caught, which usually wouldn’t have been a problem because everybody did this sort of thing and it was kind of the “smoking marijuana while white” of Soviet offenses. But at that particular moment the Party higher-ups in the area wanted to make an example of someone in order to look like they were on top of their game to their higher-ups. The pig farmer was sentenced to years of hard labor.
In another instance, a tire factory had been assigned a tire-making machine that could make 100,000 tires a year, but the government had gotten confused and assigned them a production quota of 150,000 tires a year. The factory leaders were stuck, because if they tried to correct the government they would look like they were challenging their superiors and get in trouble, but if they failed to meet the impossible quota, they would all get demoted and their careers would come to an end. The often alleged solution - lying about the number of tires produced - wasn’t actually achievable. because those tires would then have to go somewhere and if nonexistent tires don’t show up at the car factory like they are supposed to, then the whole lie gets blown wide open and the factory workers and managers now face all the same consequences as failing, but with the added bonus that they get charged for fraud against the State.
But hope shines eternal: the tire factory learns that the tire-making-machine-making enterprise had recently invented a new model that really could make 150,000 tires a year. In the spirit of Chen Sheng, they decided that since the penalty for missing their quota was something terrible and the penalty for sabotage was also something terrible, they might as well take their chances with a lie they might actually be able to pull off and destroy their own machinery in the hopes the government sent them the new improved machine as a replacement. To their delight, the government believed their story about an “accident” and allotted them a new tire-making machine. However, the tire-making-machine-making company had decided to cancel production of their new model. You see, the new model, although more powerful, weighed less than the old machine, and the government was measuring their production by kilogram of machine. So it was easier for them to just continue making the old less powerful machine. The tire factory was allocated another machine that could only make 100,000 tires a year and thus they were right back where they started.
Throughout the life of the Soviet Union, various reform ideas were drafted on how they might deal with the allocation problem. Some even made it as high as the senior leadership. None were ever fully implemented and those which were partially implemented frequently faced a political backlash that resulted in them then getting yoinked after only a half-decease, at the most. It might be interesting to argue how things might have turned out had someone willing and able enough to rise to the top of the USSR was able to force through, say, Leonid Kantorovich’s proposal to use linear programming as an allocation method, but inevitably I get the feeling speculative those “what if’s” are fundamentally speculative.
The other, somewhat related, problem was one of allocation. You could have a perfectly good factory that could be producing lots of useful things if only you had one extra eensy-weensy part, but unless the higher-ups had allocated you that part, you were out of luck. If that part happened to break, getting a new one would depend on how much clout you (and your superiors) pulled versus how much clout other people who wanted parts (and their superiors) held.
To use one example, a pig farmer in Siberia needed wood in order to build sties for his pigs so they wouldn’t freeze – if they froze, he would fail to meet his production target and his career would be ruined. The government, which mostly dealt with pig farming in more temperate areas, hadn’t accounted for this and so hadn’t allocated him any wood, and he didn’t have enough clout with officials to request some. A factory nearby had extra wood they weren’t using and were going to burn because it was too much trouble to figure out how to get it back to the government for reallocation. The farmer bought the wood from the factory in an under-the-table deal. He was caught, which usually wouldn’t have been a problem because everybody did this sort of thing and it was kind of the “smoking marijuana while white” of Soviet offenses. But at that particular moment the Party higher-ups in the area wanted to make an example of someone in order to look like they were on top of their game to their higher-ups. The pig farmer was sentenced to years of hard labor.
In another instance, a tire factory had been assigned a tire-making machine that could make 100,000 tires a year, but the government had gotten confused and assigned them a production quota of 150,000 tires a year. The factory leaders were stuck, because if they tried to correct the government they would look like they were challenging their superiors and get in trouble, but if they failed to meet the impossible quota, they would all get demoted and their careers would come to an end. The often alleged solution - lying about the number of tires produced - wasn’t actually achievable. because those tires would then have to go somewhere and if nonexistent tires don’t show up at the car factory like they are supposed to, then the whole lie gets blown wide open and the factory workers and managers now face all the same consequences as failing, but with the added bonus that they get charged for fraud against the State.
But hope shines eternal: the tire factory learns that the tire-making-machine-making enterprise had recently invented a new model that really could make 150,000 tires a year. In the spirit of Chen Sheng, they decided that since the penalty for missing their quota was something terrible and the penalty for sabotage was also something terrible, they might as well take their chances with a lie they might actually be able to pull off and destroy their own machinery in the hopes the government sent them the new improved machine as a replacement. To their delight, the government believed their story about an “accident” and allotted them a new tire-making machine. However, the tire-making-machine-making company had decided to cancel production of their new model. You see, the new model, although more powerful, weighed less than the old machine, and the government was measuring their production by kilogram of machine. So it was easier for them to just continue making the old less powerful machine. The tire factory was allocated another machine that could only make 100,000 tires a year and thus they were right back where they started.
Throughout the life of the Soviet Union, various reform ideas were drafted on how they might deal with the allocation problem. Some even made it as high as the senior leadership. None were ever fully implemented and those which were partially implemented frequently faced a political backlash that resulted in them then getting yoinked after only a half-decease, at the most. It might be interesting to argue how things might have turned out had someone willing and able enough to rise to the top of the USSR was able to force through, say, Leonid Kantorovich’s proposal to use linear programming as an allocation method, but inevitably I get the feeling speculative those “what if’s” are fundamentally speculative.
Last edited:
marathag
Banned
But the higher the rank, the higher the chance you would meet with Beria's minions. And a good percentage ended up very dead
Soviets started having major problems with mineral deposits depleting in the 1970's, they were still able to increase production of steel (overtaking the USA around this time) but it was very inefficient since they had to start using new deposits in Siberia which required huge transportation and infrastructure costs. To avoid this, you'd have to have a larger Soviet-aligned sphere with more easily accessible resource deposits, and the latest POD for that is avoiding the Sino-Soviet split IMO.
If they were actually prepared for Operation Barbarossa, they would have ended WWII in 1943-1944 with several times fewer casualties, control over a lot more of Europe, and far less damage to their economy. The invasion of Japan would also happen at least a year before the USA would have nukes, meaning they would be able to seize (at a minimum) all of their mainland holdings, and possibly parts of the Home Islands too. The increased prestige associated with communism from this also might make communist parties take power in France and/or Italy (OTL, the PCF actually got a plurality, although not a majority, of seats in several elections in the 50's and late 40's, and the PCI almost won the 1948 elections outright) and regardless of if that happened or not they would be in a much better position to influence the new nations emerging from decolonization and avoid the Sino-Soviet split.
However, the USSR definitely could have survived even if it could not have became a major exporter. It had nearly constant economic growth for all of its existence besides WWII, internationally observed elections in 1991 had close to 80% of the population vote in favor of keeping the USSR around (albeit in a reformed state), the Communist Party of the Russian Federation won the 1995 and 1999 legislative elections and almost won the 1996 presidential election, and today a solid majority of the Russian population says they view the dissolution of the USSR as a bad thing. This isn't to say that there weren't several major issues with the USSR, but far worse states like North Korea still managed to survive without reforming.
If they were actually prepared for Operation Barbarossa, they would have ended WWII in 1943-1944 with several times fewer casualties, control over a lot more of Europe, and far less damage to their economy. The invasion of Japan would also happen at least a year before the USA would have nukes, meaning they would be able to seize (at a minimum) all of their mainland holdings, and possibly parts of the Home Islands too. The increased prestige associated with communism from this also might make communist parties take power in France and/or Italy (OTL, the PCF actually got a plurality, although not a majority, of seats in several elections in the 50's and late 40's, and the PCI almost won the 1948 elections outright) and regardless of if that happened or not they would be in a much better position to influence the new nations emerging from decolonization and avoid the Sino-Soviet split.
However, the USSR definitely could have survived even if it could not have became a major exporter. It had nearly constant economic growth for all of its existence besides WWII, internationally observed elections in 1991 had close to 80% of the population vote in favor of keeping the USSR around (albeit in a reformed state), the Communist Party of the Russian Federation won the 1995 and 1999 legislative elections and almost won the 1996 presidential election, and today a solid majority of the Russian population says they view the dissolution of the USSR as a bad thing. This isn't to say that there weren't several major issues with the USSR, but far worse states like North Korea still managed to survive without reforming.
If anything Lada in the UK demonstrates why the plan would never work. For starters "Popular" is relative, in the 20 years Ladas were imported into the UK they sold 350,000 cars in total, Ford alone sold more than that in a single year. In their very best year Lada sold 30,000 cars, total car sales that year were 2.2 million. They were certainly cheap, something like the cost of a basic Mini or a 2CV at least to start with, but they were no incredibly so and by the mid 80s they were being undercut by Japanese imports and indeed Fiat.
As to why the plan wouldn't work, well standard fresh-from-the-factory Soviet Ladas were illegal to sell in the UK so needed work before going on sale. They had a large 'Rectification Factory' in Yorkshire that fitted UK legal parts and fixed all the bits the Soviet factory hadn't bothered to do. Of course after they had done all that and set the very cheap price Lada were making a loss on each sale, to the extent that the Soviet system recognised losses. No-one particularly cared as it was bringing in hard currency, so an economic loss on each sale was fine because the buyers were paying in Sterling, which could be used to import the many things the Soviets needed.
But this was not a sustainable way to run an economy and was not something that could be scaled up. To increase sales they would have to make the Ladas even cheaper which would just mean an even larger losses, something that even the Soviets realised was a bad idea.
The Soviet industrial inefficiency was hidden in the 70s by the oil crisis benefitting their energy sector and allowing for the industrial sector to avoid reform in its allocation and provisioning fields.
Add to that the social crises, in alcoholism, industrial accidents, and labor discipline issues that would make British Leyland circa 1977 look like a Mitsubishi plant in in comparison, and it was something of a delayed mess by the late 80s.
Gorbachev's plan was to become something of a petrostate, to use the benefits of energy exports and cheap access for the industrial sector, to make socialism effective in raising human capital to the point where the country could support an economic system with social market forces in the legal sphere. This failed because the compounding issues were not able to be overcome, and it came at the same time as a massive political and social crisis that destroyed the USSR.
I think the Kosygin reform's, which got rolled back under Brezhnev, might've made a difference at least in terms of labor discipline and productivity, but they were no Deng Xiaoping reforms.
The agribusiness model that allowed the US to become an agricultural superpower might have been an option with some very early PODs. After all, consolidation of farmland didn't have to be a disaster, as it wasn't in the US.
Add to that the social crises, in alcoholism, industrial accidents, and labor discipline issues that would make British Leyland circa 1977 look like a Mitsubishi plant in in comparison, and it was something of a delayed mess by the late 80s.
Gorbachev's plan was to become something of a petrostate, to use the benefits of energy exports and cheap access for the industrial sector, to make socialism effective in raising human capital to the point where the country could support an economic system with social market forces in the legal sphere. This failed because the compounding issues were not able to be overcome, and it came at the same time as a massive political and social crisis that destroyed the USSR.
I think the Kosygin reform's, which got rolled back under Brezhnev, might've made a difference at least in terms of labor discipline and productivity, but they were no Deng Xiaoping reforms.
The agribusiness model that allowed the US to become an agricultural superpower might have been an option with some very early PODs. After all, consolidation of farmland didn't have to be a disaster, as it wasn't in the US.
People talk about allocation problems. People talk about quality problems. People talk about critical path problems. These were real.
They were real mesoeconomic problems.
But surprisingly between 1929 and 1991 the number of deaths due to low total output was minimal. The number of deaths due to failed allocation or absence of infrastructure was criminal but did not cause system failure. The number of generalising strikes was lower than France it Italy and comlparable to the US or UK. Horrific or not: the Soviet Union did not fail economically during its regular recessions or in the 1985-1991 recession.
The Soviet Union achieved better than western growth in quantitative phases. And lesser than western in qualitative. It never managed its second technology transition, but the US outsourced their most recent one as did the UK by financialisation.
The Soviet Union failed politically. Chiefly in the requirement of young nomenklatura to forgo horrid excessive personal consumption. They chose privatisation.
An NEP or export Soviet Union may fail:
A> as urban workers physically liquidate party members over poor agricultural markets
B> militarily from failure to build sufficient “tractor” factories out of the “heavy industry” and “truck” macroeconomic allocations
C> politically as nomenklatura ask “why bother with the fan dance, this is naked exploitation.”
D> politically as the proletariat ask “why bother with the fan dance, this is naked exploitation.”
With less of the economy under direct conscious nomenklatura control the Soviet Union will be less well placed to buy off or repress pissed off classes.
They were real mesoeconomic problems.
But surprisingly between 1929 and 1991 the number of deaths due to low total output was minimal. The number of deaths due to failed allocation or absence of infrastructure was criminal but did not cause system failure. The number of generalising strikes was lower than France it Italy and comlparable to the US or UK. Horrific or not: the Soviet Union did not fail economically during its regular recessions or in the 1985-1991 recession.
The Soviet Union achieved better than western growth in quantitative phases. And lesser than western in qualitative. It never managed its second technology transition, but the US outsourced their most recent one as did the UK by financialisation.
The Soviet Union failed politically. Chiefly in the requirement of young nomenklatura to forgo horrid excessive personal consumption. They chose privatisation.
An NEP or export Soviet Union may fail:
A> as urban workers physically liquidate party members over poor agricultural markets
B> militarily from failure to build sufficient “tractor” factories out of the “heavy industry” and “truck” macroeconomic allocations
C> politically as nomenklatura ask “why bother with the fan dance, this is naked exploitation.”
D> politically as the proletariat ask “why bother with the fan dance, this is naked exploitation.”
With less of the economy under direct conscious nomenklatura control the Soviet Union will be less well placed to buy off or repress pissed off classes.
Yes, even unemployment. Or as I have read here.
I doubt such people can pull of a successful export economy.
Export what to who?
Everytime this comes up, it's treated like a magical panacea. The PRC's export based economic growth owes directly to the US allying with the PRC against the Soviets. It was that political rapproachment that enabled bilateral trade agreements, and in turn this was a political process to cement this cooperation by mutual interdependence.
No one has to accept Soviet exports on reasonable terms. Outside of some compelling reason, anything more sophisticated than bulk commodities are going to be fenced in by tarrifs, and why would they lower them and make the necessary customs and credit arrangements to faciliate trade. Why would you consent to your major world political rival trying to flood your markets, or the markets of your allies, with lower cost/quality manufactured goods?
Who are the Soviets going to be triangulating against to make that possible? The Martians?
Everytime this comes up, it's treated like a magical panacea. The PRC's export based economic growth owes directly to the US allying with the PRC against the Soviets. It was that political rapproachment that enabled bilateral trade agreements, and in turn this was a political process to cement this cooperation by mutual interdependence.
No one has to accept Soviet exports on reasonable terms. Outside of some compelling reason, anything more sophisticated than bulk commodities are going to be fenced in by tarrifs, and why would they lower them and make the necessary customs and credit arrangements to faciliate trade. Why would you consent to your major world political rival trying to flood your markets, or the markets of your allies, with lower cost/quality manufactured goods?
Who are the Soviets going to be triangulating against to make that possible? The Martians?
I wonder what would have happened if the us/prc reprocment had not happened, especially considering these days the prc's legitimacy is built on that economic merical. Honestly for the us economy its gust as likely to move the industry to indea as keep in the US.
Yup the 1980s-2000s were a fucking Neo-Nazi festival https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rostock-Lichtenhagen_riots , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoyerswerda_riots , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Mölln_arson_attack ,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Underground_murders , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Nazi_marches_in_Dresden , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-sports-group_Hoffmann , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Solingen_arson_attack , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Enver_Şimşek, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Cologne_bombing
Btw it happened in other former Warsaw Pact States too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Hădăreni_riots, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mława_riot,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_clashes_of_Târgu_Mureș,
Australia started the century richer, didn't lose WW1, didn't oppose the allied might of the entire rest of the industrial world for over 40 years, didn't try to completely re-invent the industrial economy, didn't give one man so much power he could become a paranoid dictator and didn't have an army of Germans murdering and raping their way through the most developed part of the country.
And to point out that Australia has suffered consequences for its heavy raw material extraction focus is hardly the same as calling the country poor.
Potentially quite well. Allen in Farm to Factory modeled a "continuing NEP" scenario that by the start of Barbarossa had delivered almost as much economic gains as the "Stalinist" reference model and the actual statistics recorded by the real OTL Soviet Union. Of course, a continuing NEP would have resulted in an economy less focused on heavy industry, but if one buys the idea that the severity of the Stalinist purges was a counter-reaction to the reaction of people and military officers to the Holodomor (which to my knowledge has not been conclusively demonstrated, but does seem credible), it would also have wasted less human and military potential during the 30s.
However, Allen's work is quite old now, and his computer models are very simplistic, also, many of his assumptions are open to question. (Most significantly, Allen believes that the Scissors Crisis would go away on its own, which I am of the view is credible since a continuing NEP would not be static, but which Sam R. for example does not agree with since the NEP as it existed was a real basket case and it could easily have continued being a basket case. That the NEP was better than the War Communism that preceded it should not give any student of Soviet history the impression that it was good. It was just less bad.)
So there are big caveats to that "potentially quite well" - it is also possible to imagine a plausible "continued NEP" timeline where the Soviet Union folds like a wet paper bag the way Hitler expected.
Why would a continued NEP mean they'd be rid of Stalin?
Stalin was effectively in charge even before Lenin died. Note that he only ended the NEP when he had purged the inner Party of any conceivable rivals AND when the NEP itself seemed to have reached an existential crisis. Which is to say, it is very hard to avoid Stalin running the show once Lenin's health entered critical decline and it is also possible to imagine Stalin keeping the NEP going longer, since he'd already been the fellow running things for almost its entire run.
Possibly? Kamenev and Zinoviev (by far the most plausible alternatives to Stalin who aren't called Lenin) probably wouldn't cut a deal, simply because I would expect them to be too weak to cut a deal.
But the most likely alternative to Stalin is a longer lived Lenin, and I can easily imagining him working with Hitler, simply because I don't see Britain and France being any more willing to form an anti-Nazi alliance with Lenin than they were with Stalin.
Of course, with a PoD that can avoid Stalin coming to power, how likely is it that Hitler would gain power in Germany or for the Battle of France to go as well as OTL if he did?
Stalin knew full well that Hitler was going to attack and had been preparing feverishly since the Munich conference (and chose to re-do a whole bunch of their preparations when the Winter War turned into a humiliation). But they weren't able to prepare fast enough and we caught with their pants still around their ankles in 1941.
Germany of course had a critical head start, since they had started preparing for WW2 the day that Hitler became Chancellor, 5 and a half years before Munich.
Barbarossa was only a surprise in that the Soviets weren't expecting it on that particular day or month (they'd been having false alarms since 1939). It was not a surprise in a general sense because unlike some countries, the Soviets had people in the leadership who'd actually read Mein Kampf and they could see the build up of German armies on their border.
I don't think that's fair. I think the majority genuinely wanted to make the USSR like Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia were in the 1960s. Not only was the more liberal party line attractive to these people as young men, the beginning of the debt fueled consumption boom in Eastern Europe meant that the economic policies of the satellite states looked like they were more successful than they actually were.
Now, when it turned out that turning the Soviet Union into Communist Yugoslavia was as bad idea there as it turned out to be for Yugoslavia itself, yes, much of the young nomenklatura (and for that matter the old nomenklatura) decided to loot the system if they had the power to do so. But I think the entire process is better characterized as something akin to a crowd stampeding than any significant group "choosing" privatization.
Of course, either way this was still a political failure. So I agree with the overall point.
E> as trade partners erect tariff barriers against the superior Soviet products that the Soviets have sacrificed enormously to gain an edge in, and the Soviet Union is known as the country that destroyed itself in the quest to create the greatest cars/watches/lampshades ever, and weren't they very silly?
And I am pretty sure I could go all the way to Z if I really spent some time thinking hard about how the Soviets could muck up being an industrial export-driven economy.
That wasn't really Gorbachev's plan. Or even Brezhnev's plan (the Siberian oil fields were mostly opened in the 1970s under Brezhnev). The plan was to use the oil and gas to modernize the Soviet economy from being coal powered to being oil powered (as the US and Europe had done from the 1940s to the 1970s) - since oil and gas are more energy dense fuels, this would increase efficiency. Exporting oil was just supposed to be a stopgap measure to pay for the imports of modern American oil extraction equipment (such as the large diameter pipes for the pipelines to the Western Soviet Union) so that the Soviets could get modernize faster (the alternative was to build their own factories to make large diameter pipes and so on, which would have slowed the whole transition down at a time when oil production in the Caucasus was starting to decline).
But things did not go to plan.
Gorbachev's actual plan was to become Dubček's Czechoslovakia or Tito's Yugoslavia. We might say that he succeeded in making the USSR into the new Titoist Yugoslavia at least.
Spot on.
Much of the growth in trade in the Western bloc was made possible by the hard work of all of the Allies of WW2 (including the Soviets, who dropped out half way through building up the economic institutions that had been meant for everyone), the US subordination of Western Europe during the Marshall Plan and the opening of the US market to Japan made possible by the Korean War. None of that HAD to happen and China being added to that system was no natural process or accident but the result of considered choices and hard work by Americans and Chinese alike.
I think it is possible for the USSR to find some ways to build an export sector (most significantly, if it improves relations with Western Europe and keeps them improved, or if it invests heavily in its poorer political fellow travelers like China in order to create new industrial economies that are open to trade, and then manage to maintain good relations with them). But it would be a difficult path and one that was always vulnerable to being shut off the moment the Soviets do something really dumb in their foreign policy.
Or the moment the US does something really smart in their foreign policy.
Or the moment that the sea lanes are shut off due to war.
And this is even assuming that the Soviets make good investments and produce a significant amount of products that other people want to import!
And THAT assumes that the Soviets can overhaul their awful trade bureaucracy to be something vaguely akin to functional. Most of the Soviet difficulties with trade came not from foreign-imposed obstacles, but from the clunky bureaucratic mess they made of their trade. A small American or French company might want to sell their high-tech goods to the Soviets, but they didn't have the scale to employ their own trade bureaucracies and large corporations (like FIAT or IBM) which did have the scale to actually have their own bureaucracy that could interface with the Soviet bureaucracy still would take YEARS to negotiate the ins and outs of how to trade thing A from system 1 into system 2 and work out how system 2 could pay in a form that was useful in system 1.
It was a mess. It was even difficult to trade between the USSR and its own allies. This is why the Soviets could trade with Romania and for both the USSR AND Romania to get cheated by the deal!
Though to be fair, the Soviets did get much better as time went on. So it isn't unimaginable that the Soviets would figure out how to trade effectively, but it is no magic solution.
I've been guilty myself in past years of being over-optimistic about what the Soviets could do if they engaged more with world trade.
For example, I've said before that the Soviets were wrong to invest heavily into mines for coal and iron in Kazakhstan and Siberia when they should have imported coal and iron ore from abroad to feed modern smelters built around Leningrad or Odessa. Well... In that scenario they'd most likely be importing Moroccan iron ore and Appalachian coal, through the Danish straits or the Turkish straits which has obvious downsides when you pause to really think about it.
Spending vast amounts of treasure to move the entire steel industry to the Kuznetsk basin might not be such a bad idea if the alternative is being dependent on the Union's greatest rival for a vital raw material!
Faster industrial development of Thailand and Indonesia? More industry moving to Mexico? South Africa re-invents itself as the cheap manufacturing hub of the world?
The US has plenty of alternatives to China in its quest to de-industrialize itself.
However, I do think that without US-Chinese cooperation the USSR is far more likely to survive and the USSR and China make up by the 80s at the latest or maybe even during the 70s if the Soviets avoid Afghanistan or include China as an equal party in whatever they do in Afghanistan (the former is more likely, and possible if the Soviets aren't already scared by the increased threat a US-aligned China poses).
The CIA doesn't get listening posts in Xinjiang either, which makes the loss of Iran extremely damaging to US intelligence efforts to keep track of what's happening in most of Soviet territory. As it was in OTL, the loss of the CIA's listening posts in Iran were more than outweighed by the CIA being allowed to build listening posts in the much better Xinjiang.
China itself wouldn't develop so quickly economically, but it is possible that this would mean that China instead had to liberalize more politically, meaning that in the 21st Century the US could be facing a Sino-Soviet alliance that agreed on economic and political matters to a surprisingly large degree since both would be limited in how much they could grow their private sectors (since even if they want to grow these sectors, both will be starved of capital and markets) and see broad political participation as key to maintaining social stability while they tried to keep up with the West. Could be a nicer world in many ways.
Alternatively, everything could just go to the hot place in a handbasket.
I can see I have some cheerful reading tonight!
fasquardon
Last edited:
marathag
Banned
Self inflicted to a degree, tearing up the Stalin Line, and then not in any real rush to build the Molotov Line, and the continued purge of the VVS. Without Soviet Oil and Soviet Foodstuffs, Greater Germany would not have been able to sweep the the Low Countries and France as was done, along with the orders that forbade any intelligence flights over ex Polish territory, and to disregard what his spies were telling on an imminent attack.
Uncle Joe was the one who dropped his pants, and all but yelled to the Mustache 'come do me, good and hard'
To an extent, but when you look at what the Soviets knew at the time, their mistakes are understandable.
Stalin weaved when he should have ducked and walked right into the German right hook. But I don't think that it was unreasonable at all for the Soviets to say "the British are supine scum who will do everything in their power to fatten Hitler up and push him into war with us, the Americans aren't going to do anything, and the Germans will make war with us, but they'll take enough time to prepare that we are probably safe before the summer of 1942" - the way things had gone from the signing of the Versailles treaty to the spring of 1941 made that pretty credible.
Sometimes people are wrong and it isn't because they are stupid or evil (even when that person IS in the broad sense stupid and evil, though I think Stalin was only evil), they just make the wrong call.
fasquardon