Many indicators of a nation's health and livelihood have either barely recovered or not even recovered to pre-1991 levels. The collapse of the Soviet Union was catastrophic for its people.
Yes, and by a lot. It is important to remember that 1985 onwards, the period of the "look at the empty shelves in USSR", was a result of economic chaos that happened upon introduction of market reforms. Not to say that market reforms are evil, but rather that the way they were executed was a collosal frickup thay destabilized the supply chain and eventually killed the state. Before that USSR was basically a somewhat better Brazil - a big developing country with corruption, but one that was definetly improving, and a complete shitshow. Now Russia is more like Venezuela.
Also important to realize that Russia and the other constituent Soviet republics were backwater shitholes in 1918. Comparing the USSR to the United States really isn't a fair comparison.
Especially after it was nearly wiped out TWICE and rebuilt its society from scratch. A foreign soldier has never set foot in the US for the past 200 years (since the war of 1812).
that’s because of a complete systemic collapse and reform. any time a powerful state collapses they experience heavy post demoralization and recession. Russia also happens by chance to be a even more corrupt form of USSR thanks to the oligarchic unchecked power. The sanctions and shitty government may make Russians bring the communist party to power since it would be logical to start focusing on a domestic nationalized economy.
>The sanctions and shitty government may make Russians bring the communist party to power since it would be logical to start focusing on a domestic nationalized economy.
It'd be an interesting historical twist if that happened, like Putin being a Bonapartist figure during an interregnum but what actually happens in the future is the communists coming back into power so it becomes a second socialist republic.
>the future is the communists coming back into power so it becomes a second socialist republic.
Would be kino, if only for the massive butthurt it would cause
2 years ago
Anonymous
Not saying that's gonna happen of course, and I'm not even Russian, so what do I know? But you can see how it might happen "logically" if you follow an analogy in the French Revolution ending in a restoration (so Russia is in its version of the French Second Empire) which then failed and established the French Third Republic.
There's also a debate about how "for real" the communists in Russia are. Some say they're a controlled oppo party and just another bunch of crooks. Some say they're playing the long game. I don't know what they are. Hell if I know. But I've also heard one person say that the reason Putin tries to co-opt the aesthetics in some ways, or tolerates them as an oppo party (even if they're at least in part "controlled") is because they have enough purchase with enough people in Russia that they're a force that he has to at least deal with, even if not strong enough to take power right now. But who knows! History can always move in weird directions.
>"look at the empty shelves in USSR", was a result of economic chaos that happened upon introduction of market reforms.
bull fricking shit. empty shelves and bread lines in the USSR were the norm because of price controls, which always and invariably lead to deficits. the market reforms were only contemplated because the economy was already imploding to begin with.
Both are factors. Price controls were unironically the absolute most moronic thing any Communist government can implement. They shoehorned Capitalist reformism into a new economic structure where it inevitably leads to lots of hoarding.
The USSR has looked VERY different throughout it's inception and demise.
The problems with the USSR is that their bureaucracy sank them. They changed the entire economic system to something completely new, and they did this multiple times in a decade even.
It was honestly a mess. There was too much manpower involved in just managing the fricking thing, and the discrepancies among professions and how they paid you was maddening. The USSR of 1950 was a completely different animal than the one in 1965, and it kept changing time and time again until the fell.
The US, for all it's problems, kept the same economic system with small reforms added. The USSR operated under a free market in some towns, like a Stalin terrorized country in another region, and then it could be a mix, depending on what factory you worked at.
And this mess is just in regards to workers pay. I can only imagine the fricking disasters that permeated every nook and cranny of the USSR.
Another problem was how much production was focused on the military which was practically wasted from a purely economic standpoint. You can produce a lot of tanks but the labor and materials could've been better spent on other things to improve the productivity of the economy overall rather than the products sitting in tank yards awaiting World War III. The tragic irony perhaps is that the centrally planned economy was critical to the USSR's victory in World War II but became its undoing in the decades afterwards and the bureaucracy -- including elements of the bureaucracy embedded in the Soviet military-industrial complex -- froze attempts at making reforms, and no small amount of paranoia among the senior leadership that had their formative experiences in the bloodiest war in human history didn't help either.
The U.S. leaders knew this and came out of the war with a significantly larger economy than the USSR (more than twice as large? at least?) and could make the Cold War into an economic competition, while for the USSR to match the U.S. in military power (which it could do, and exceed in certain dimensions) would require a proportionally much higher percentage of their national economy on the military.
>was basically a somewhat better Brazil
Now that's a damning statement. Look at how Brazil and the Russian empire compared at, say, 1900 and that was the former riding the peak of the coffee and rubber boomm followed by underpeprforming the entire following century almost as bad as neighboring Argentina did. Russia did that much worrse than both.
Germans truly got their value out of agent Lenin.
The USSR was in a death spiral, its large centralized industry just couldn't adapt to modern economic conditions. It was designed for a different time, where consumer goods weren't that important and all that mattered was heavy industry. That time was gone and the USSR could never adapt to the modern economy without working markets. The USSR would have either opened up like China or end up like a huge shithole even worse than it was. It would probably have collapsed around 2000 though.
Many older Russians are nostalgic for it. There was a melodrama "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears" from 1980 that's about working girls who move to the city and I've heard it's a fairly realistic movie about ordinary life -- won best foreign film at the Academy Awards -- and is subtly critical of aspects of the society but the story is about people who are hustling in order to try and "make it" and not really "the system" per se. It doesn't depict Soviet life as a utopia.
People don't really seem to lack the basics. People weren't starving. And while this is a movie, it tracks with what the older generation said about those times. What's interesting to me is how even in 1980 it looked like the late 40s/50s in the U.S. in terms of how people dressed (rather conservatively and old-fashioned). So I imagine as this Soviet middle class was developing there was demand for more variety.
Also in terms of the subtle criticism of the system, the main character is studying in a university and she's also working in a factory and living in a worker's dormitory and complains to her friend "I'm studying all this stuff about physics but they have me working in a factory, and is this the rest of my life?"
There's a funny scene where a T.V. reporter shows up at the factory and is going to do a segment on model socialist workers at the factory who can solve every problem or whatever, she's like "pose with this wrench!" and gives her some canned / scripted responses to the questions, but she goes off script and says she kinda just landed at the job and the pay stinks and she's overqualified for this job.
Now there are no not enough high tech jobs but straight up almost none. And a lot of the factories shut down too. So if this happened today she would be working in a supermarket for fraction of the pay, and forget about the dorm, she would be paying like half of her income for rent.
>"look at the empty shelves in USSR", was a result of economic chaos that happened upon introduction of market reforms.
bull fricking shit. empty shelves and bread lines in the USSR were the norm because of price controls, which always and invariably lead to deficits. the market reforms were only contemplated because the economy was already imploding to begin with.
they were the norm and yet happened only in the 80s?
2 years ago
Anonymous
>75% of russians
yeah, and one could assume that 75% of them were also born after 1991; since the article does not specify the demographic age. i wonder why.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>According to Pipiya, nostalgia for the Soviet Union is more common among older generations, but it exists among younger people as well.
okay
>People don't really seem to lack the basics.
If by basics you mean potatoes, sure. Anything else was pretty much always in deficit. >People weren't starving
Depends on the time period and region. Most of the European USSR was in food surplus throughout the post-war period, but only because this region produces insane food surpluses regardless of management. >muh movie
Literally ever single piece of media in the USSR was checked by the state security apparatus. They won't show fricking food shortages.
Besides, the movie is set in Moscow - alongside Pidorburg the region where surpluses from throughout the empire got redirected. Here in the Baltics pretty much all our meat and dairy production got redirected to Moscow and Leningrad, with only scraps being left for local consumption - despite us consistently producing significant surpluses. And that's not even talking about investment and industrial output.
Of course not, they wouldn't have given up on gommunism if it wasn't for an imminent threat of a literal starvation crisis near the end of the 20th century. Gorby has saved Russians from mass deaths from starvation (I'm not talking about apparatchiks and their cousins - weeping crocodile tears after their reduced - not lost mind you - they still have pensions four times the average) privileges.
less command economic policies but that does not really matter anymore so I find it strange how no analysts are hypothesizing the communist party gaining traction
I saw some American coverage of the last Russian elections (which Putin won handily) but the KPRF did a bit better this time and there was some "opposition forces gain ground in Russia" in the stories, but they'd bury any mention of the KPRF deep down roflmao
Basically in the West, the Russian opposition = Navalny. But I think even he told people to vote for the KPRF in the last round just as a protest vote. I don't think the Western papers liked to mention that part either.
It's just part of the ideology now that communism = DEAD. End. of. History. It died with the USSR and is not an alternative. I don't know if it is an alternative, or whether the KPRF fits into that or not. But I think that's part of what's going on here.
cause they're asking about current russia compared to russia some time ago, not about socialist russia compared to contemporary capitalist states elsewhere
Had someone tried to study the almodt religious belief that even a terrible transition to capitalism will be beter than stagnant central planning? >inb4 not real capitalism
A lot of western economics helped ser it up
>Had someone tried to study the almodt religious belief that even a terrible transition to capitalism will be beter than stagnant central planning? >defy ~~*their*~~ dogma >get hanged like Galileo
The mad lad who does this would have to be more anonymous than Satoshi Nakamoto in order to not be cancelled. And also present an actionable alternative instead of just "factual revisionism"
>Here's a pic from 1989 after Gorby collapsed the economy
Lol.
Depends how you define better but the short answer is yes. >Higher birthrate >Lower infant mortality >MUCH lower AIDS >MUCH lower drug usage >Higher life expectancy in men >International prestige >No war from '45-94
The longer answer is that I guess it depends if you value freedom to buy a PlayStation over quality of life
The USSR promoted a broad, maximally accessible and unique Soviet identity based in a "brotherhood" or "friendship" of fraternal peoples, with national identities subordinated to the project of building a multinational state. It wasn't an "ethnostate" or "nationalism” in any sense and Stalin had the people who identified as nationalists killed.
Eventually but the logic behind the Soviet regime -- and an important distinction from anarchism -- is that this wouldn't happen until capitalism was wiped out completely all over the world. In the meantime, the communist movement would first establish itself in the form of a state (in which socialism becomes concrete instead of just an idea), and this state would repress residual class elements hostile to socialism, and be set up and organized to be integrated with other socialist states to bring into being communism in which the state would then "whither away." What happens at that point is left to the theorists to figure out but implies that centralized production, workers' organizations, etc. would live on even as the state dies in communism.
To add more about "nationalism," the USSR promoted national identities but this was different from "nationalism" as the Soviet government understood it, and the way the Soviets conceptualized "nationality" enabled both nation-making... and nation-breaking. So the USSR created *new* nations within its territory; like establishing lingua franca administrative languages, promoting respective cultures of these new nations, etc. Turkmenistan didn't exist until the Soviets invented it, before that they were stateless Turkmen who consisted of warring, semi-nomadic tribes. Within a decade, they were a unified nation with bounded territory, uniform language, and a mass print culture. These new nations were wholesale deliberate creations of Soviet policy and followed what they claimed was a "scientific" understanding of what constituted a nation.
On the other hand, there were brutal repressions. So, say "dasvidania" to the Volga Germans.
The average Russian today dies younger, is more likely to have AIDS, and is more likely to be addicted to some horrible heroine krok concoction than his Soviet counterpart.
It's not nostalgia they genuinely regressed very heavily.
Russia in the 70s was fairly comparable to the UK in the 70s by most health data. Russia in the 2000s was fairly comparable to fricking Africa in the 2000s lmao.
kek
A reminder that dentist procedures were being done without pain killers in the Soviet Bloc.
Also, they didn't invent a single medicine in their whole glorious decades long history.
Why Russia is still (relatively) poor?
Because they wasted 70 years on bullshit which was continuously _destroying_ their economy and natural resources instead of building a modern, 20-th century country.
Many indicators of a nation's health and livelihood have either barely recovered or not even recovered to pre-1991 levels. The collapse of the Soviet Union was catastrophic for its people.
Yes, and by a lot. It is important to remember that 1985 onwards, the period of the "look at the empty shelves in USSR", was a result of economic chaos that happened upon introduction of market reforms. Not to say that market reforms are evil, but rather that the way they were executed was a collosal frickup thay destabilized the supply chain and eventually killed the state. Before that USSR was basically a somewhat better Brazil - a big developing country with corruption, but one that was definetly improving, and a complete shitshow. Now Russia is more like Venezuela.
Also important to realize that Russia and the other constituent Soviet republics were backwater shitholes in 1918. Comparing the USSR to the United States really isn't a fair comparison.
Especially after it was nearly wiped out TWICE and rebuilt its society from scratch. A foreign soldier has never set foot in the US for the past 200 years (since the war of 1812).
that’s because of a complete systemic collapse and reform. any time a powerful state collapses they experience heavy post demoralization and recession. Russia also happens by chance to be a even more corrupt form of USSR thanks to the oligarchic unchecked power. The sanctions and shitty government may make Russians bring the communist party to power since it would be logical to start focusing on a domestic nationalized economy.
>The sanctions and shitty government may make Russians bring the communist party to power since it would be logical to start focusing on a domestic nationalized economy.
It'd be an interesting historical twist if that happened, like Putin being a Bonapartist figure during an interregnum but what actually happens in the future is the communists coming back into power so it becomes a second socialist republic.
>the future is the communists coming back into power so it becomes a second socialist republic.
Would be kino, if only for the massive butthurt it would cause
Not saying that's gonna happen of course, and I'm not even Russian, so what do I know? But you can see how it might happen "logically" if you follow an analogy in the French Revolution ending in a restoration (so Russia is in its version of the French Second Empire) which then failed and established the French Third Republic.
There's also a debate about how "for real" the communists in Russia are. Some say they're a controlled oppo party and just another bunch of crooks. Some say they're playing the long game. I don't know what they are. Hell if I know. But I've also heard one person say that the reason Putin tries to co-opt the aesthetics in some ways, or tolerates them as an oppo party (even if they're at least in part "controlled") is because they have enough purchase with enough people in Russia that they're a force that he has to at least deal with, even if not strong enough to take power right now. But who knows! History can always move in weird directions.
>"look at the empty shelves in USSR", was a result of economic chaos that happened upon introduction of market reforms.
bull fricking shit. empty shelves and bread lines in the USSR were the norm because of price controls, which always and invariably lead to deficits. the market reforms were only contemplated because the economy was already imploding to begin with.
Both are factors. Price controls were unironically the absolute most moronic thing any Communist government can implement. They shoehorned Capitalist reformism into a new economic structure where it inevitably leads to lots of hoarding.
The USSR has looked VERY different throughout it's inception and demise.
The problems with the USSR is that their bureaucracy sank them. They changed the entire economic system to something completely new, and they did this multiple times in a decade even.
It was honestly a mess. There was too much manpower involved in just managing the fricking thing, and the discrepancies among professions and how they paid you was maddening. The USSR of 1950 was a completely different animal than the one in 1965, and it kept changing time and time again until the fell.
The US, for all it's problems, kept the same economic system with small reforms added. The USSR operated under a free market in some towns, like a Stalin terrorized country in another region, and then it could be a mix, depending on what factory you worked at.
And this mess is just in regards to workers pay. I can only imagine the fricking disasters that permeated every nook and cranny of the USSR.
>Pic related paying workers by output pre-1965 USSR
pro tip: wage reforms only helped a little. They kept falling behind the US and Europe in all economic areas.
>They were paid in topkeks
Lmaooo
Another problem was how much production was focused on the military which was practically wasted from a purely economic standpoint. You can produce a lot of tanks but the labor and materials could've been better spent on other things to improve the productivity of the economy overall rather than the products sitting in tank yards awaiting World War III. The tragic irony perhaps is that the centrally planned economy was critical to the USSR's victory in World War II but became its undoing in the decades afterwards and the bureaucracy -- including elements of the bureaucracy embedded in the Soviet military-industrial complex -- froze attempts at making reforms, and no small amount of paranoia among the senior leadership that had their formative experiences in the bloodiest war in human history didn't help either.
The U.S. leaders knew this and came out of the war with a significantly larger economy than the USSR (more than twice as large? at least?) and could make the Cold War into an economic competition, while for the USSR to match the U.S. in military power (which it could do, and exceed in certain dimensions) would require a proportionally much higher percentage of their national economy on the military.
>was basically a somewhat better Brazil
Now that's a damning statement. Look at how Brazil and the Russian empire compared at, say, 1900 and that was the former riding the peak of the coffee and rubber boomm followed by underpeprforming the entire following century almost as bad as neighboring Argentina did. Russia did that much worrse than both.
Germans truly got their value out of agent Lenin.
The USSR was in a death spiral, its large centralized industry just couldn't adapt to modern economic conditions. It was designed for a different time, where consumer goods weren't that important and all that mattered was heavy industry. That time was gone and the USSR could never adapt to the modern economy without working markets. The USSR would have either opened up like China or end up like a huge shithole even worse than it was. It would probably have collapsed around 2000 though.
>end up like a huge shithole even worse than it was
that is what happened
You don't understand how much worse it could be
Many older Russians are nostalgic for it. There was a melodrama "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears" from 1980 that's about working girls who move to the city and I've heard it's a fairly realistic movie about ordinary life -- won best foreign film at the Academy Awards -- and is subtly critical of aspects of the society but the story is about people who are hustling in order to try and "make it" and not really "the system" per se. It doesn't depict Soviet life as a utopia.
People don't really seem to lack the basics. People weren't starving. And while this is a movie, it tracks with what the older generation said about those times. What's interesting to me is how even in 1980 it looked like the late 40s/50s in the U.S. in terms of how people dressed (rather conservatively and old-fashioned). So I imagine as this Soviet middle class was developing there was demand for more variety.
Also in terms of the subtle criticism of the system, the main character is studying in a university and she's also working in a factory and living in a worker's dormitory and complains to her friend "I'm studying all this stuff about physics but they have me working in a factory, and is this the rest of my life?"
There's a funny scene where a T.V. reporter shows up at the factory and is going to do a segment on model socialist workers at the factory who can solve every problem or whatever, she's like "pose with this wrench!" and gives her some canned / scripted responses to the questions, but she goes off script and says she kinda just landed at the job and the pay stinks and she's overqualified for this job.
By pretty much every indicator, yes.
Now there are no not enough high tech jobs but straight up almost none. And a lot of the factories shut down too. So if this happened today she would be working in a supermarket for fraction of the pay, and forget about the dorm, she would be paying like half of her income for rent.
>By pretty much every indicator, yes.
What indicators? Why do you think this is the case, but every Russian not? Are they moronic?
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/03/24/75-of-russians-say-soviet-era-was-greatest-time-in-countrys-history-poll-a69735
okay
they were the norm and yet happened only in the 80s?
>75% of russians
yeah, and one could assume that 75% of them were also born after 1991; since the article does not specify the demographic age. i wonder why.
>According to Pipiya, nostalgia for the Soviet Union is more common among older generations, but it exists among younger people as well.
okay
>People don't really seem to lack the basics.
If by basics you mean potatoes, sure. Anything else was pretty much always in deficit.
>People weren't starving
Depends on the time period and region. Most of the European USSR was in food surplus throughout the post-war period, but only because this region produces insane food surpluses regardless of management.
>muh movie
Literally ever single piece of media in the USSR was checked by the state security apparatus. They won't show fricking food shortages.
Besides, the movie is set in Moscow - alongside Pidorburg the region where surpluses from throughout the empire got redirected. Here in the Baltics pretty much all our meat and dairy production got redirected to Moscow and Leningrad, with only scraps being left for local consumption - despite us consistently producing significant surpluses. And that's not even talking about investment and industrial output.
Of course not, they wouldn't have given up on gommunism if it wasn't for an imminent threat of a literal starvation crisis near the end of the 20th century. Gorby has saved Russians from mass deaths from starvation (I'm not talking about apparatchiks and their cousins - weeping crocodile tears after their reduced - not lost mind you - they still have pensions four times the average) privileges.
What advantages does cyrrent russia have over the USSR?
Dont even have macdonalds now
less command economic policies but that does not really matter anymore so I find it strange how no analysts are hypothesizing the communist party gaining traction
I saw some American coverage of the last Russian elections (which Putin won handily) but the KPRF did a bit better this time and there was some "opposition forces gain ground in Russia" in the stories, but they'd bury any mention of the KPRF deep down roflmao
Basically in the West, the Russian opposition = Navalny. But I think even he told people to vote for the KPRF in the last round just as a protest vote. I don't think the Western papers liked to mention that part either.
It's just part of the ideology now that communism = DEAD. End. of. History. It died with the USSR and is not an alternative. I don't know if it is an alternative, or whether the KPRF fits into that or not. But I think that's part of what's going on here.
Probably because communists already failed terribly
Just fascism left to try
Of course. Just look at how great life is in Cuba versus any capitalist shithole around the world.
moronic mongol
why moronic?
cause they're asking about current russia compared to russia some time ago, not about socialist russia compared to contemporary capitalist states elsewhere
Had someone tried to study the almodt religious belief that even a terrible transition to capitalism will be beter than stagnant central planning?
>inb4 not real capitalism
A lot of western economics helped ser it up
>Had someone tried to study the almodt religious belief that even a terrible transition to capitalism will be beter than stagnant central planning?
>defy ~~*their*~~ dogma
>get hanged like Galileo
The mad lad who does this would have to be more anonymous than Satoshi Nakamoto in order to not be cancelled. And also present an actionable alternative instead of just "factual revisionism"
>Here's a pic from 1989 after Gorby collapsed the economy
Lol.
Depends how you define better but the short answer is yes.
>Higher birthrate
>Lower infant mortality
>MUCH lower AIDS
>MUCH lower drug usage
>Higher life expectancy in men
>International prestige
>No war from '45-94
The longer answer is that I guess it depends if you value freedom to buy a PlayStation over quality of life
>No war from '45-94
Soviet–Afghan War
Dec 24, 1979 – Feb 15, 1989
The USSR promoted a broad, maximally accessible and unique Soviet identity based in a "brotherhood" or "friendship" of fraternal peoples, with national identities subordinated to the project of building a multinational state. It wasn't an "ethnostate" or "nationalism” in any sense and Stalin had the people who identified as nationalists killed.
>building a multinational state
Wasn't the point of communism getting rid of the state?
Yes, and then it was co-opted by an imperialist bureaucracy.
Eventually but the logic behind the Soviet regime -- and an important distinction from anarchism -- is that this wouldn't happen until capitalism was wiped out completely all over the world. In the meantime, the communist movement would first establish itself in the form of a state (in which socialism becomes concrete instead of just an idea), and this state would repress residual class elements hostile to socialism, and be set up and organized to be integrated with other socialist states to bring into being communism in which the state would then "whither away." What happens at that point is left to the theorists to figure out but implies that centralized production, workers' organizations, etc. would live on even as the state dies in communism.
To add more about "nationalism," the USSR promoted national identities but this was different from "nationalism" as the Soviet government understood it, and the way the Soviets conceptualized "nationality" enabled both nation-making... and nation-breaking. So the USSR created *new* nations within its territory; like establishing lingua franca administrative languages, promoting respective cultures of these new nations, etc. Turkmenistan didn't exist until the Soviets invented it, before that they were stateless Turkmen who consisted of warring, semi-nomadic tribes. Within a decade, they were a unified nation with bounded territory, uniform language, and a mass print culture. These new nations were wholesale deliberate creations of Soviet policy and followed what they claimed was a "scientific" understanding of what constituted a nation.
On the other hand, there were brutal repressions. So, say "dasvidania" to the Volga Germans.
In healthcare?
Lol.
In economics?
Inflation and Overpopulation is to blame.
DUDE NOSTALGIA LMAO
The average Russian today dies younger, is more likely to have AIDS, and is more likely to be addicted to some horrible heroine krok concoction than his Soviet counterpart.
It's not nostalgia they genuinely regressed very heavily.
Russia in the 70s was fairly comparable to the UK in the 70s by most health data. Russia in the 2000s was fairly comparable to fricking Africa in the 2000s lmao.
kek
A reminder that dentist procedures were being done without pain killers in the Soviet Bloc.
Also, they didn't invent a single medicine in their whole glorious decades long history.
Why Russia is still (relatively) poor?
Because they wasted 70 years on bullshit which was continuously _destroying_ their economy and natural resources instead of building a modern, 20-th century country.
>russia
>overpopulation
More like underpopulation