Stalin had been preparing for a war with forewarning, not a surprise attack. He had placed his half mobilized army undersupplied and unprepared next to the border, so the Germans could take them down in surprise. If he had placed his army closer to his logistical centres and far away enough from the border they had the time to properly prepare themselves for combat before the Germans reach them, the war would have gone quite differently...
Would the soviet union survived if they had adopted a export oriented model
- Thread starter pandanope3
- Start date
I would point out that a country that is one of the richer ones on the planet as little to complain about raw material extraction. How the hell do you think it paid for things to make it a wealthy country? Handled correctly, like the US and Australia did and it can help fuel your economy. Done poorly and you wind up like Egypt or Russia. There is nothing wrong with raw materials extraction, without it you don't have an economy.
The problem with Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in the 1960s is that a bloc of the nomenklatura were aligned with the proletariat as a revolutionary class, with an awareness of the actualisable power and outrage of a chunk of the proletariat. All the good workers weren't dead, bought off as new nomenklatura, or dead by Germans.
The Soviet Union's centrist nomenklatura lack this prod (scourge?) towards their better natures. There's no effective social force requiring buying off, or talk of a rapid immediate movement to substantive workers control. With no effective scourge there's no social force of a Nagyist or Revolutionary nomenklatura. Czechoslovakia sounds nice, but are we really being pressed to go there?
The stampede is an excellent metaphor for what happened. I'm nicking it for when I need to explain this sad affair in future.
It does, but the potential for their enumeration makes for great potential discussions of forced mass development via a march through plastics factory hell for a variety of potential economies.
yours,
Sam R.
That's probably fair to say.
Of course, since the Germans had been probing the Soviet lines off and on since the two forces met in Poland, seeing what they could get away with, Stalin was worried that if the main forces pulled back to the railheads, the Germans would just march into the gap whenever a Soviet patrol wasn't in the area and take all of those gains that Molotov's negotiation and a costly fight with Poland (the Red Army did NOT do well when it invaded Poland in 1939) for free. There was definitely sunk cost fallacy thinking there. But in 1941, most of Hitler's playbook had been to seek where his neighbours would let him push the boundaries, then push almost to the point of intolerable provocation, then stop, let things cool down and use the extra resources to build up for pushing the next boundary.
This was making the same mistake as the Poles themselves had in 1939, and the Soviets should have took what happened to Poland as more indicative than what happened to the Rhineland or Austria or the Sudetenland or the rest of Czechoslovakia... But we can say this very comfortably with hindsight. The Soviets had less information, less reliable information and the stress of months and years of varying levels of alert, waiting for the other shoe to drop was degrading people's ability to think straight.
Nor is there anything wrong with saying "the externalities of these extractive industries are a bit poopy huh?"
Just because Australians have a wealthy and relatively successful economy does not abrogate their right to ask "what can we do better?" or "do we want to reduce this stuff by a bit so we can put the labour and capital into this other thing instead?"
And maybe it is OK for someone to want their country to produce more stuff locally rather than strip mine the land so they can buy stuff from other people?
I remind you that the vast majority of people alive today are wealthy compared to the historical average of the human race. That improvement wasn't the result of external forces, or invisible hands. It was because your ancestors and mine looked at what was going on and asked "what can we do better?" and "what does better mean to us."
True!
Hmmm. I don't agree. So far as I can tell, genuine wishes to make the system work in the Soviet Union and its satellites were about equal. And about equally distributed among the different groups in those societies.
Now, the systems were slightly different, and that might explain similar groups producing different results.
Also, I am wary about talking about the nomenklatura as if they were a monolithic group in any of these places. Any large group of people will have diversity. And while the incentives of a system might make a group defined by certain traits act in concert to defend their common interests, I think the stories of real people and real human systems are more complex than simplified models of "this group wants this, that group wants that, and both act accordingly."
Why thankyou.
fasquardon
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And if you don't have enough people to make the stuff yourself or you don't have the money to buy the machinery to make it into something or other people make it cheaper and better than you? Autarky isn't a good solution, If it is a good solution then you shouldn't protest the US cutting off trade with anyone including the USSR, or indeed everyone. We would be doing them a favor by not trading with them.
Why is the only possible choice besides "mine as much stuff as China is willing to buy" necessarily Autarky? This is a false binary that has nothing to do with what either Sam and I have said so far.
And why do you think I would protest the US cutting off trade with anyone?
I get the feeling like you are having an argument with someone who isn't here, rather than looking at what Sam R. has said or what I am saying?
fasquardon
IIRC you were one of those who said (paraphrasing) how the poor USSR couldn't compete because the US restricted its trade.
And? Just because the US did something that wasn't good for the USSR doesn't mean that action was bad.
That I talk about the Soviets as human beings who had complex and occasionally even well-intentioned motives rather than as evil communist robots should not be read as approval. Any more than my talking about Americans of any period in the same terms should be read as disapproval.
I think there is much to learn for people today from the mistakes made in the Soviet Union, but to learn from them, first we need to learn to relate to them. To understand what really happened and why. To see the Cold War from their perspective. To understand their strange and dysfunctional system for what it really was, not some as platonic ideal of communism or of evil.
fasquardon
I don't think anyone here denied the Soviets were human beings and were instead mere evil Communist robots. That I think the government sucked does not mean I don't think that the average Soviet citizen tried his best to just get along in life.
I guess I'm talking about the lack of a concrete down the pub alliance between some nomenklatura and revolutionary communist and social democratic workers as in Hungary, or between some nomenklatura and a (significantly sized) revolutionary proletariat in Czechoslovakia.
I don 't doubt there were reading circles of Nomenklatura looking for a new '68, or full communism. I doubt that there was a revolutionary body of the working class to spur them and keep them honest. From dead people I've heard of revolutionary circles in Russia in the 1940-1960 period (I'm not narrowing it down, they're not dead enough, and it was a witnessing given crying by an old man to a very young man who had some vaguely related topical interest.) I look with wide open eyes for a tendency for good in late nomenklatura societies. In China where the revolutionary proletariat hasn't been disciplined by foreign fascism, the revolution is much more alive to my humble interpretation.
We will have to agreeably disagree unless there's documentary records coming forward.
yours,
Sam R.
Many of us who live in Australia, and have an interest in social political economy, which happens to *mostly* be the left, point to the fucking god awful waste of extraction:
Noel Butlin's seminal work on the structure of 19th century extraction being centred on London.
The wide political economic and labour historical agreement that our secondary industries were import substitution basket cases which needed liquidating, or were toy industries. "The Australian film industry is always nascent," "Australia ''makes'' cars." etc. But this goes further back with soap, or stoves.
Our our economy 1970-2001 (20 year rule) being based around residential and commercial construction internally, without accompanying infrastructure.
Australia hasn't fucked it like the Soviet Union or Egypt, but it hasn't done decently well like the US or China. We are Chile or Brazil waiting to happen, and up to 2001 saved by our ruling classes' seminal intermingling with the ruling classes of our betters, shared transnational imagined community membership, and a willingness to do our own fucking coups thank you very much you don't have to ask twice mate. I could use stronger language for all three of these, but if the basic relationship isn't sordid enough, calling a racist inbred anti-democratic ruling class a shovel won't help.
yours,
Sam R.
[the intelligent Australian right, very few that they are, are so equally skeptic that their portfolios are internationally diverse.]
Australia has 90% of the PCI of Germany, and roughly 80% of the US, this is not poor and does not even approach poor. Its PCI is nearly triple that of Chile or China, and over triple that of Brazil. You are comparing Australia with countries that are actually poor. That is by Western standards , they are middle income by World standards.
Countries by PCI
. Do you think Australia can truly compete broadly in manufacturing with the US, Germany , Japan or China? It doesn't have the population to actually do that. Germany has triple the population of Australia and it goes up from there. Population by country Those countries have the population to have a large number of people across the board in manufacturing allowing them to have mass production in multiple industries and derive the cost reduction that goes along with that, Australia doesn't. Considering Australia is mostly desert I think it is doing quite well.
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Hmm. Now that is interesting. So in Hungary and Czechoslovakia were socializing more across class boundaries? And which parts of the nomenklatura were socializing widely?
Fair point. Well meaning individuals are not the same as well meaning individuals who can count on a broad consensus of the population to get things done and diverse social contacts to keep their well-intended ideas grounded.
Fair. And to an extent, the Soviet government really can be characterized as an evil Communist robot - or at least an AI if you buy into Charlie Stross' concept of "slow AI" (which is that bureaucracies can be understood as algorithms that run on bored bureaucrats shuffling paper around, similar to how a computer program is an algorithm that is run on silicon semiconducter that shuffles electrons around - which I think has some merit).
Even so, the Communist AI that ran on the Soviet bureaucracy was running on people who would leave their workplaces and walk those streets same as the hairdressers and factory workers. And while the bureaucracies of East and West had different rules in significant areas, I think they were more similar than they were different. Especially in being made up of people.
And even at the top of the Soviet and American systems, while neither Brezhnev or Nixon was the ordinary man on the street, both nonetheless were humans.
fasquardon
The idea that Stalin and his obsessive focus on heavy industry and military buildup at the expense of everything else saved the USSR is something that you hear sometimes, especially in the former USSR. It's false, and it's also really problematic IMO because it can be taken as justifying the idea that you need a Strong Authoritarian Leader and not Weak Decadent Softies to defend your country against a Foreign Threat and Pull It Into the Glorious Future. That's a very, VERY common talking point among dictators of all stripes that has been used to justify slews of awful things.
For the record, Russian industry actually grew fastest during the Czars when the economy was at its most liberal—production of most of the main industrial products went up by anywhere from 2-5x depending on the good from 1887-1900, with slower but still very significant increases after that. In about thirty years from 1881-1913, they were able to go from an agrarian backwater to having about the industrial production of France. The Soviet Union never even came close to accomplishing anything of comparable magnitude when you adjust for things like the quality of their products, statistical fraud, the ability of workers to actually use/crew what was produced, etc. Communism was never necessary to industrialize Russia, and it did nothing but impede that process.
More specifically, with regards to the Soviet Union, multiple studies have been done that show Stalin's economy significantly underperformed where the USSR would have likely ended up if the trends from the NEP era had continued. They are not kind to Stalin. The most conservative ones indicate that the NEP continuing would have most likely delivered the same gains as Stalin's program without all the deaths and the collapse of agriculture. His purges of skilled workers, famines, collectivization, and mismanagement did nothing but hurt the process of industrialization. Total Factor Productivity in his economy was well below where it was under the czar. Key conclusion of the one that I linked:
The other thing key to understanding Stalin's legacy in WWII was just the sheer idiocy of the geopolitical decisions he made leading up to it. The military purges, the dismantlement of the Stalin Line before the Molotov Line was constructed, and refusing to acknowledge any of the obvious warnings that Hitler was about to attack are low-hanging fruit, but there were so many, many others. The trade agreement with Germany, and critically the decision to continue deliveries of raw materials for a year AFTER the Fall of France, was a biggie. The Reich's war machine would have broken down long before June 1941 without that.
Attacking Finland, then failing to finish the job was literally the worst thing he could possibly have done—it ensured that the Finns were royally pissed off/willing to ally with Germany while also leaving them with the ability to put half a million men into the field against the USSR. Not going to war with them would have ensured Murmansk and the Kola Peninsula was safe unless Hitler wanted to fight the Finns, too (since the Reich would have had to cross their territory to get to that part of the Soviet Union). A neutral/friendly Finland would also have prevented any siege of Leningrad and freed up millions of troops to fight the German Army which actually came quite close to collapsing (they had 8 divisions classified as fully operational left nine months after Barbarossa started).
Putting in the full might of the Red Army and conquering them after starting the Winter War would have had all of those benefits besides the shield of neutrality for the northern USSR, and it would have allowed the Soviet Navy's subs to torment German iron supplies in the Baltic, allowed them potentially to counterattack Germany's iron supplies in northern Sweden, etc.
As is, Stalin managed to choose literally the worst option of all.
Dismembering Romania ensured that a rabidly anti-Communist regime took over that was willing to not just go to war with the Soviets, but to put their everything into it. There are others you can name, but those are the main ones.
The USSR was worse off in every way imaginable for having had Stalin. Zero question about it.
As for the OP's original question, it seems impossible that the USSR could have done this, because as a middle income country they would not have had comparative advantage in the sort of labor-intensive, low-skilled industries that Communist countries like Vietnam and China were able to excel in.
This is in addition to all the other problems with the idea, from corruption and lack of quality control to the ideological contradictions of the USSR retooling to sell trinkets to the western world to the politics of it all and the likely unwillingness of non-Communist countries to trade with/finance an armed, aggressive country whose propaganda spends a great deal of time talking about how they are greedy, evil, and will sell the Communists the rope with which they will hang them.
The other factor that makes this unworkable is just the USSR's geography. One of the significant issues is the lack of good ports. This problem in Russian/Soviet history is commonly summed up as a lack of warm water ports, but that's not really accurate, it's not having accessible deep water ports. The ice problem can be handled easily enough with icebreakers, but that one isn't going away. The approaches to St. Petersburg and the Turkish Straits, which must be transversed to get to Sevastopol, are just over 30 feet deep in places. That prevents container ships of significant size from docking there, which makes shipping out of Russia much more expensive. The deepwater ports that do exist, most notably Murmansk and Vladivostok, are a million miles from anything. That means anything shipped through there would have to travel across a huge distance over rail, again massively adding to the cost. The Baltic SSR's are better than what's available in Russia, but still not optimal.
As far as non-maritime transport, the Iron Curtain, lack of quality roads, and also the differing rail gauges make even just land shipment to Western Europe very complicated.
This is why so much stuff gets made in China, and to a lesser extent Vietnam. Their great advantage is in the sheer number of workers they have in giant megacities right on the coast where huge ships can dock. This makes shipping costs minimal, and it allows for the creation of enormous conglomerates like Foxconn, which has 1.3 million employees in mainland China. You could never create something like that in part of the Soviet Union or its successor states simply because there aren't enough workers and their geographic position doesn't allow them to outcompete other states in this area.
This is in addition to all the other problems with the idea, from corruption and lack of quality control to the ideological contradictions of the USSR retooling to sell trinkets to the western world to the politics of it all and the likely unwillingness of non-Communist countries to trade with/finance an armed, aggressive country whose propaganda spends a great deal of time talking about how they are greedy, evil, and will sell the Communists the rope with which they will hang them.
The other factor that makes this unworkable is just the USSR's geography. One of the significant issues is the lack of good ports. This problem in Russian/Soviet history is commonly summed up as a lack of warm water ports, but that's not really accurate, it's not having accessible deep water ports. The ice problem can be handled easily enough with icebreakers, but that one isn't going away. The approaches to St. Petersburg and the Turkish Straits, which must be transversed to get to Sevastopol, are just over 30 feet deep in places. That prevents container ships of significant size from docking there, which makes shipping out of Russia much more expensive. The deepwater ports that do exist, most notably Murmansk and Vladivostok, are a million miles from anything. That means anything shipped through there would have to travel across a huge distance over rail, again massively adding to the cost. The Baltic SSR's are better than what's available in Russia, but still not optimal.
As far as non-maritime transport, the Iron Curtain, lack of quality roads, and also the differing rail gauges make even just land shipment to Western Europe very complicated.
This is why so much stuff gets made in China, and to a lesser extent Vietnam. Their great advantage is in the sheer number of workers they have in giant megacities right on the coast where huge ships can dock. This makes shipping costs minimal, and it allows for the creation of enormous conglomerates like Foxconn, which has 1.3 million employees in mainland China. You could never create something like that in part of the Soviet Union or its successor states simply because there aren't enough workers and their geographic position doesn't allow them to outcompete other states in this area.