Tropink t1_j2c8chb wrote on December 31, 2022 at 4:15 AM

Reply to comment by An_Overt_Amalgam in This day, 100 years ago, the USSR was created by SENPA-A-A-A-I-I

Russia was already an economic powerhouse, fastest growing economy after the abolition of serfdom, and while they did get richer by exploiting and looting their neighbors with the help of the Nazis (what happened to the eastern part of Poland; and who drove tanks into Hungary to keep them their puppet?), they were much poorer than all their European counterparts; and even Japan, a country with less than a third of its population, no natural resources, that had been ravaged by the war, and had not one but two atomic bombs dropped in them, as well as intense napalm strikes over its country, had a greater economy than the USSR (in absolute terms, per Capita it wasn’t even close). The USSR was a total failure, only second to Mao’s China, or Pol Pots Cambodia.

An_Overt_Amalgam t1_j2cf4yg wrote on December 31, 2022 at 5:15 AM

No, my point was that it was not a total failure by reasoning of it being different from Maoist China or Cambodia, as you pointed out. Unlike these countries the USSR had enough capital to keep the lights on despite losing more than 20 million people in World War II and the purges/famines, and for being a planned economy in a time before digital computing they were pretty resourceful and were able to accomplish quite a lot in terms of economic and scientific development. It was unquestionably a disaster, but it was a worthwhile attempt that unquestionably could have gotten further given a different postwar political landscape, and I think it’s a loss for humanity that we didn’t get to see some of the historical alternatives that could have permitted. The failure, really, was that the violent restructuring of the twentieth century was coalesced into a liberal order that required and was capable of undercutting mass politics the world over to enforce its own terms of geopolitics.

Addressing the comparison to Japan, the two are incomparable: Japan got aid money thrown at them to rebuild and then enjoyed a massive boost as the staging ground for the Korean War, all in a homogenous society in an area the size of a postage stamp with nary a competitor in the region, while the USSR had to recover behind the iron curtain with the same Stalinist regime it was stuck with before. (It’s worth noting that the US was able to do a lot with Japan because their leadership had lost. We came in and immediately enacted massive land reforms, which we turned around and denounced as soon as Cuba tried to do it in their own country because it meant American companies would have to cede land to the public.)