this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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I wish we could look at what the ussr did right and how it worked around its restrictions without rose tinted glasses. Some central planning of efficient railways and large industrial machinery might not be a bad idea. Lezz a fair doesn't always produce great results. Walkable neighborhoods and commie blocks aren't such a bad idea but fascist dictators are.
Just thought you'd enjoy learning that it's laissez faire. It's French, so obviously it's hard to spell.
Hell if I'm about to let some boojwazi tell me how to spell.
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It's laissez-faire. It took a few reads until I got it.
Say what you will about the USSR, but it took a bunch of peasant farmers under exploitative monarchy and literally rocketed them into a global superpower in, what, 2 generations? While weathering the immediate tangible effects of two world wars, and staying competitive against the capitalistic world power that remained virtually untouched in both wars and casually claimed industrial supremacy by virtue of that fact.
How great can capitalism be if the capitalists had a multi-century head start, better natural resources, advantageous geography, a bigger population, and it was still close?
Russia was a superpower to begin with. The communists took over the Russian empire and it nearly lost them ww2 (in the beginning). What are you talking about?
Edit: clarity about losing the war.
It was WWI, not WWII. And the war was lost under the monarchy.
And Russia wasn't a superpower back then, it was barely a Great Power.
The leadership of the USSR was a genocidal imperialistic regime, but it did in fact get Russia specifically from snowsleds to space shuttles.
In the meantime it caused irreparable harm to most of Eastern Europe.
They did lose WW1 because of the revolution, that's true, or rather stepped out of it, but that's not what I was talking about. I meant the beginning of the WW2 and the Russian invasion which was a huge disaster overall. They managed to come out of it on top, but the cost was ridiculous. (Edited my original comment for clarification).
I'm calling them a superpower even if they were not on par with UK, France and Prussia, they were a bigger power than the Austro-Hungarian empire or the Ottoman empire at the time.
I'm not praising tzarist Rusia. It was a shit place, a reminesscence of feudalism after the industrial revolution. I'm simply trying to argue the fact that it was communism which allowed them the progress. They started from pretty high up to begin with. In fact, the two major examples, China and Rusia, while in some sort of identity crisis when they switched to communism, were historical powerhouses to begin with.
Other, no power houses who went communist didn't fare so well. Cuba, North Korea, countries in the Balkans ...
I don't think you can really compare pre and post industrial superpowers, especially measured specifically against the ridiculously advantageous position of the mid century USA (perhaps I should have said nuclear superpower, or space-faring). And pretty much everyone in the hemisphere "nearly" lost WW2
I reread my comment and it was ambiguous. I meant nearly lost the war in the beginning due to lack of leadership which they basically executed early in the revolution.
You're right, nearly all of Europe lost in that war. The only two winners were USA and USSR
A puzzling juxtaposition, that.
What would you call the siedge of Moscow if not nearly losing?
History is rife with "nearly"s. The USSR had to content with y'know, actually being in the middle of both world wars and suffering the material consequences. And then went on to go toe-to-toe with the golden child of capitalism (safely nestled on its distant continent, far from the material consequences of war, with all the post-war industrial economic advantages that wrought).
The US had a freakish advantage, no one should have gotten even close. And the USSR got smacked down bad through both wars. And yet, they were stiff competition. It's like gloating that your thoroughbred greyhound barely beat out a half-blind, 3-legged street dog in a race. The fact that it was close should be your sign.
That's a very narrow view of what happened after the second world war. URSS occupied half of the European continent. It basically was the last empire in Europe with all the resources and human capital at its disposal to do anything it wanted. Not to mention war reparations.
And it lost. The ideology wasn't working. It took 40 years for that empire to collapse, but collapse it did because it was built on the wrong principles.
I'm sure famine, sanctions, and concentrated international sabotage had nothing to do with it.
There was no famine in URSS post world war 2. What are you talking about?
Last I checked, 1946-1947 comes after 1945, double-check my math though.
And let's circle back around to the far more important concentrated international sabotage if you please.
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1990 because of the famine in 47?
International sabotage? Do you have evidence of sanctions against USSR and their allies which weren't matched back by USSR & their allies?
Someone else already linked 'Killing Hope' by William Blum. I recommend perusing it.
That doesn't answer the question. At most, it just shows that KGB were more incompetent or not endowed with literary talent.
What?
I asked for examples of international sanctions which USSR & their allies couldn't match. That book is about CIA and US crappy foreign policy. If you say that CIA actions where themselves sanctions against USSR, then surely KGB should have solved the issue.
The book is very clearly focused on US intervention directly against the USSR and other socialist regimes. Did you even glance through the table of contents?
Are you suggesting that we ignore this significant, direct interference from an abnormally advantaged superpower as a contributing factor to the USSR's downfall? That's simply illiterate.
No, I've already dismissed the narrative that poor little USSR had a disadvantage against the big bad US when I pointed out that they abusively occupied half of Europe at the end of WW2 and had influence over a lot more of it. If you're bringing up secret services and you're saying that the US one was better at its job, then you're simply pointing out that the USSR one was incompetent.
In one corner, an uninterrupted economy bolstered on the global scale by not being a smoldering pile of ashes. In the other, the ruins of post-war Europe, juggling reconstruction and revolution.
Your analysis is either deliberately disingenuous, or feeble-mindedly impotent. I'm not interested in either. Read a book.
Oh spare me of that song played on the world's smallest violin. That's the stupidest take an the whole situation that I've ever seen. "Read a book"... yeah, the poor little witch being burned alive by Hansel and Gretel... Is that how you view that story too?
I don't debate children.
But the poor witch was so hungry... What could she do?
Exploit the global poor and extrajudicially unseat duly elected leaders around the world to subvert the democratic will of foreign citizens and maintain capitalist hegemony? Who did your daddy tell you the hungry witch was?
You're telling me it was the USSR. Poor thing, alone in the woods with nothing to eat... Those kids were so unfair to her
That was you, but your reading comprehension is not surprising. Maybe try some sources besides right wing propaganda. Good luck in life, you'll need it.
You too. Have fun making excuses for poor witches
I hope you figure out you're not doing anything different.
You're obviously taking pleasure in debating an idea. Obviously so do I. However, you need more training. You have to add more support to your arguments and contradict the opposing arguments with facts that hold up. You have to concede points and counterpoint when possible. And most importantly, you have to bring datapoints to your claims.
At the moment you're only putting out ideas with very little data. When I asked for examples of sanctions and international pressure, I was expecting something like this which is concrete. The "Killing Hope" is a really bad data point because it doesn't support your claim directly and it is "fictional" 3rd party data from a biased source.
With the examples of actual sanctions, I would have pointed that USSR and their allies which included China and strong economic ties with India had its own access to resources and economic development and could impose sanctions of their own. In fact, I can point out that USSR controlled by itself a land area comparable to the entire NATO alliance today and that between them and China, they occupy considerably more landmass and have considerably more population.
In fact, those sanctions were not going to make any dent in the actual USSR economy. That wasn't the goal (since it was impossible to achieve). They were meant to weaken the relationship with the communist buffer states such as Romania, Poland, Hungary and they did to a certain extent.
But, of course, USSR was doing the same thing in what has been the US back yard: South America. Countries like Argentina, Uruguay, Brasil were being aided by the USSR with loans, technology and technical leadership in order to remove them from the US influence sphere. And USSR was more successful than USA at doing this. In fact, Romania, Poland, Hungary only became US allies after the collapse of the USSR while the south american countries were closer to USSR since the 70s.
The discussion from here either goes backwards in history to how Russia had a late start or goes into economic details for a while, but ultimately it always ends in the same place: one model collapsed, one didn't.
I grew up in eastern europe. I'm intimately acquainted with the philosophy, propaganda and history of the area. More than just 3rd party information. I'm also familiar with the Russian culture and arts. This was the only foreign culture allowed to be imported into my country for obvious reasons.
I've had similar discussions through my life and I'm frankly disappointed in this one. But keep practicing, you'll get better at it. A hint: learn from the facts presented by others even if you don't agree with the interpretation. It helps in the long run
I would love the opportunity.
As it stands, all I've been presented are sanctimonious personal opinions about what does and does not constitute a global superpower, or a material economic advantage, or legitimate interference.
I've witnessed a concerted effort to deviate a statement about technological economic development to your own irrelevant and well-rehearsed goalposts, as well as the curious paradoxical assertion that the USSR was simultaneously fundamentally incompetent and masterfully capable of matching the first true industrial superpower in the height of its global influence.
You're not debating an idea, you're trying to steer the conversation toward a comfortable script, and frankly I'm not interested.