ok
@amadeus finally got time for writing this out - still a bit tipsy (was my birthday) but i hope i'm making sense -
- alright so just a few points here -
I think the problem of the ruble and the general low quality of Soviet export goods did more to harm them than any sanctions leveled against them. These were not problems imposed by an external force, but I would say almost inherent in how their economy was centrally-planned.
I think there would be a more convincing case of this if the USSR was not so richly endowed with land, labor, and natural resources. What did they lack that prevented their own development? I don’t believe that Russia starting at a lower level of industrialization can explain why it was such a failure:
for me it boils down to - i don't think you appreciate how a crap situation russia has been historically. yes, it was long a formidable military power, had swathes of land and impressive accomplishments, but a lot of that had to do with its particularly shrewd military doctrine that built upon its strengths that were reasonably unique in europe. very little of it matched europe in prosperity and development. rest was butt. due to its size, it was basically impossible to invade. it was decentralized enough that securing the capital wouldn't usually break it. like, maybe it's my mindspace, but i don't recollect a relevant number of
offensive wars they did in europe that were of much success, and those that were ended up securing them very little. most of their succesful endeavours were
eastwards, as we literally see on a map today. they were offensively relevant in some european
coalitions, such as napoleon and the partition of poland, russia managed to capture land in the great northern war, stuff like that. russia was no joke, of course. history around ww2 highlights the basic issue of the thing; germany was never going to win, but the idea that hitler was a poor military commander is overstated there - he
was, but when he thought there wasn't much point in taking moscow, and that rather taking the oil fields was more important, the german generals have blamed him for germany's failure, which is just not really the case of the reality back then. because there
wasn't much point in taking moscow. as we saw with napoleon. russia has never been france. it would not capitulate out of losing their capital, because russia would just move its institutional organs east and keep fighting. russia was too large, decentralized and organized in a way that it could basically just do that. now, germany
couldn't take the oil fields, they lacked oil to begin with, as we saw. but taking the capital was pointless.
that was russia. suicidal to fight, but unless you were like finland you wouldn't actually
lose land as a western nation.
the only real point where that fact changed imo was ww2, which was after the sovjets. point is, though, yea, the fact that they had to develop from unindustrialized farmland is actually a huge factor as to whether a nation can compete with a sphere of nations that have made it to mass producing televisions, and who innately don't want you to succeed. most of sovjet russia had to go through what the rest of europe did in the 1800s. then it's hard to compete, even before blocs form.
other countries in the Eastern bloc, namely Czechoslovakia and Hungary, were fairly advanced before WWII and Soviet occupation, ahead of a few Western European countries that would surpass them in the late cold war.
I would say again though it is hard to imagine this counterfactual because if they did have a capitalist economy organized along the lines of US/W. Europe, the ideological battle lines wouldn’t be there to impose any sanction against them in the first place.
i'm not well acquainted enough with czechoslovakia and hungary to well enough to properly engage with this, i have to say.
my impression, which may be fallacious, was that they were highly urbanized and such, but the dice of history following the ridiculousness that was austria-hungary would doom them either way. then getting taken over by the sovjets is just not gonna bode well, because again, growing pains. and i'm not even sure they're good examples for anything. they survived for what a few decades before being thrown around like tumbleweeds.
but again, i'd really like you to delineate more concretely what exactly happened in those countries, and specifically the degree it matters. a lot of geopolitical development can be attributed to ideology over other things. despite our conception of africa, there's a plethora of capitalist nations that are absolute failures. is that because of capitalism? is it because they're not capitalist enough? the nordics only really grew to proper prominence (since the great northern war) from, what, 1960? is that because of capitalism? did they fail until then because of capitalism? did they fail because they weren't capitalist enough? like, at this point, the answer is easy, right? we did it right, because now the nordics compete over being the best places to live in the world, nevermind the absurd poverty we had until the marshall plan pumped some good old capital into us, giving returns some decades later.
... something that tsarist russia would never have been able to. and there's a hint here as to the capabilities of post-tsarist russia developing what they conquered, something stalinists weren't interesting in, to boot.
And this is why you will keep being exploited by the oligarchs here. You are "happy that the alternative didn't succeed". Because the USSR was the example of the alternative. What you are living under is the logical late evolutionary stage of liberalism. The alternative, for a complex society, remains communism or fascism. And liberalism does evolve to fascism - the oligarchs have already effectively suppressed democracy in this EU we live in. You may vote to change the faces of governments but when last were changes of economic policy voted for and delivered? And economics constrains everything else in society, as surely you know. It is the most political of things.
And don't give me the "social democracy" thing as alternative. Social democracy evolved here to liberalism and oligarchy. Allowing magnates to exist ends in corruption of the political process and the bureaucracy.
People who discount the USSR as an alternative model usually get one thing wrong. They claim it failed economically. That is false. The USSR succeeded economically. It failed politically. It collapsed because it was sabotaged by Gorbachev and his aides, and lacked countervailing powers capable and willing to kick those saboteurs from power immediately. Gorbachev started screwing up the soviet economy in 1985 with his "reforms". By 1997 it was ony half-functional, with missing raw materials and outputs because of coordination failures due to those "reforms". He deliberately dismantled systems that had worked well since the 1950s and had delivered a huge increase in living standards within the USSR. The country went backwards economically. Then, using those failures of his own "reforms" as an excuse, he forced upon the industry of the country "market mechanisms" for part of the production materials, without any preparation whatsoever (and ignoring the yugoslavian and hungarian experiences). This wrecked the soviet economy and placed control of increasing portions of it in the hands of looters. Then currency controls were relaxed and the looting brought foreigners to support it and teach how to introduce an oligarchy. The rest is history, albeit few people here seem to know even that part. And those who know the collapse and the rise of the oligarchs fail to research what brought it about step by step.
The USSR was economically successful. Proof of it was immediately visible even as a result of its collapse: dismantling the USSR put that vast region of the world backwards. Russia only started recovering after more than 10 years of misery and has not recovered to the level of the path of development that the USSR was in. The other republics fared worse. And that includes the briefly sovereign baltics, now provinces of the EU that lost nearly half their population due to economic collapse. The success or failure of a society can be seen from its demographics - it cuts through any propaganda like GDP* numbers because demographics cannot be massaged.
The failure of the USSR was political. Its political system put too much power in the hands of few people, and when an idiot came along he single-handedly collapsed the country while the few who could stop him stood by confused. Communism should not rely on the virtue of a few to guide politics, it needs decentralization of power between institutions so than no one gang can corrupt the whole thing. Ironically it was a reaction against perceived "blockages" within the system due to the alleged "stagnation of the 1970s (as if "the west" was any different in the 70s...) that accidentally placed too much power in Gorbachev's incapable hands.
* GDP counts as economic product me selling you something and buying it back from you at twice the price...
eh ok for all this, so
- i think sovjet russia's economic accomplishments are generally understated in the popular imaginary, so this is actually somewhere i agree with you in general; i say this maybe seemingly in spite of the observations i made for amadeus above; the point is i believe people understate what the sovjets achieved
economically from the economic base that was the 1900 tsarist hellscape. i'm not sure why you're arguing for their economic accomplishments here, maybe you think they were more succesful than i do. you also believe
- but, for what i
highlighted of your post, thinking of the sovjets as "the" alternative, or "the" example of "the" alternative, isn't the way i think, and i think you're wrong to think of it that way. (i don't mean this denigratingly, btw, i just disagree.) i
do look for something else, and i'm reasonably sympathetic to communism in the abstract, but i'm definitely not arguing for it, at least if it was an immediate, radical revolution.
revolutions tends to make stalins. whatever nature those revolutions are, it's what happens. i believe it's
not inherently the fault of communism, however abstract it may be to anyone's conception. we see the brutality of revolution, communist or not, both historical and worldwide, even for systems the west supposedly likes; this is specifically why i brought up the french revolution. i believe the sovjets were
an alternative, i believe they were a bad alternative, similarly to how i believe revolutionary france was
an alternative, and i believe revolutionary france was a bad alternative. revolutionary france has just been conceptually usurped as something the west thinks good, something whose ailments the west simply tolerate, in
retrospect. movements like this usually take a long time, and its toll on life can only be arbitrated as "worth it" after something better has made it "worth it". so yea, like: i don't think the sovjets are "the" alternative, similarly to how i don't think of revolutionary france as "the" liberalism.
- on whether you then want radical revolution; i think it depends on how willing you are to roll the dice. after a bunch of revolutions that make things worse, we may end up with something better; it's what happened from conservatism to liberalism in the west. whatever the ills of liberalism, i prefer it over having an emperor. so whether someone wants revolution really depends on the individual, whether you think the numerous gambles are worth it. my perspective is more that Grand Revolution is inevitably going to happen if something fails; until then, i prefer mediation and slow (but absolutely steady) progress, at least in situations like denmark (your social democracy). i'm not an accelerationist. i'm less "cautious" in cases like the us.
- you then distinguish between the economic accomplishments and the political (ie humanitarian) disaster that was the sovjet regime, and again, i do the same. but that still means that i don't think it's reasonable to think of the sovjets as "the" alternative, because the sovjets encapsulate their political situation as well.
they just do. they were a political entity. they did what they did. and i don't want that. i don't think the human cost is worth the growth. stalin wasn't the first guy that ruined the situation. i think, however, you appeal to the greater perspective that i'm trying to appeal to. my perspective is that if someone thinks liberalism is a good idea, early representations of it could be argued to be a good idea, but they were factually full of suffering. and that if communism is to be a thing, i cannot reasonably expect the sovjets to be a representative of anything that may come to pass. i similarly do not think that revolutionary france was "the" liberalism.
edit: missed part of your post, just want to say that i agree the suppression of alternative thought in western countries is a thing - france is just a single incident of this. it's everywhere. and poignantly, same happened in europe after the french revolution. "you really want another robespierre?", and then a century passes, as reforms seep through europe.
