quote:

... In early 1968, the shortfall of furniture in Moscow shops reached a value of 22 million roubles, and yet nearly the same quantity of furniture produced in the city by local factories was being exported to other parts of the country. The quality of local furniture was so low that Musovites refused to buy it. Instead, the Moscow trade department had to request from the central authorities that more furniture be imported from abroad. In the 1970s, excess stocks of unwanted furniture piled up despite the continued housing construction, at a rate which caused distress to trade organizations. It turned out that customers rejected these items mainly because they looked bad.

Randarkman posted:

I think one of the things that felled Khruschev together with Brezhnev and his faction rallying party conservatives and military hardliners against him, was the relative failure of many of his reforms and policies, particularly in agriculture, which hurt his standing and popularity enough for them to move against him.

ronya posted:

the problem here would be one similar to Beijing's dilemma later on: these heavy industries, being critical to early communism, were all in politically critical regions. The Western political system had survived deindustrialization at great domestic trauma. The Soviet system would surely not survive the same. In the event, it risked it, and it did not.

Lightning Knight posted:

Oh I see. Fascinating! Thank you for correcting my spelling.

Ardennes posted:

As far as the military, it was expensive and certainly a drain on resources but the 25% number has been debunked, it was closer to 10-15%.

Randarkman posted:

I see. That's still a lot though.

Lightning Knight posted:

Huh. Could you expand more on this last idea?

ronya posted:

the problem of heavy industries that had outlived their usefulness - of factory floor employees by the hundreds of thousands whose skills, to minimal fault of their own, were no longer useful - wasn't solely faced by the West. The problem for the Soviet system was that many of the associated industries, either production of industrial inputs like steel and cement, or of heavy industrial outputs like tractors and tanks, were concentrated in politically sensitive places like the Moscow periphery itself or in the touchy Donetsk region. The political system was not stable enough to survive introducing the novel concept of potential unemployment to these industries

the same was true of the Chinese northeast, too. The Chinese found an answer, which was to set up SEZs in the south, far far away from the capital, and let those gracefully subsidize the declining heavy industry for two decades

ronya posted:

Yes - e.g., the manufacturing that consumed steel output were around Moscow. The steel had to go somewhere. Nobody said it would go to things people wanted to buy, but it was going somewhere.

I'm not sure I would put the turning point in 1985. The post-Cold-War statistics suggest that growth rates collapsed as early as 1970-1975 even as capital investment into heavy industry increased.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Since we're discussing Soviet economic and industrial history, what do people think about Loren Graham's Ghost of the Executed Engineer? It uses a biographical study of Volga engineer Peter Palchinsky to discuss early Soviet industrial policy, arguing (among other things) that Stalin's emphasis on hero projects set a frantic tone that never fully dropped out even after de-Stalinization and inhibited the creation of any institutional long view toward industrial development.

I read it back in grad school and liked it, but Russian history isn't my main field so I don't know if it's held up or not.

ronya posted:

the problem of heavy industries that had outlived their usefulness - of factory floor employees by the hundreds of thousands whose skills, to minimal fault of their own, were no longer useful - wasn't solely faced by the West. The problem for the Soviet system was that many of the associated industries, either production of industrial inputs like steel and cement, or of heavy industrial outputs like tractors and tanks, were concentrated in politically sensitive places like the Moscow periphery itself or in the touchy Donetsk region. The political system was not stable enough to survive introducing the novel concept of potential unemployment to these industries

the same was true of the Chinese northeast, too. The Chinese found an answer, which was to set up SEZs in the south, far far away from the capital, and let those gracefully subsidize the declining heavy industry for two decades

ronya posted:

the problem of heavy industries that had outlived their usefulness - of factory floor employees by the hundreds of thousands whose skills, to minimal fault of their own, were no longer useful - wasn't solely faced by the West. The problem for the Soviet system was that many of the associated industries, either production of industrial inputs like steel and cement, or of heavy industrial outputs like tractors and tanks, were concentrated in politically sensitive places like the Moscow periphery itself or in the touchy Donetsk region. The political system was not stable enough to survive introducing the novel concept of potential unemployment to these industries

the same was true of the Chinese northeast, too. The Chinese found an answer, which was to set up SEZs in the south, far far away from the capital, and let those gracefully subsidize the declining heavy industry for two decades

Lightning Knight posted:

If I wanted to know what day to day life was for regular people in the Soviet Union, in a non-fiction format, what kind of book would I look for?

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Depends on what part of Soviet history you're looking for. If you want a examination of, say, Russia during the stagnation, Robert Kaiser's Russia: The People and the Power isn't a bad. Hendrick Smith's The New Russians is a good read of Soviet life under Gorbachev, with updated versions including a chapter on the failed coup and subsequent big splat. Both are contemporary pieces, and so some of their attitudes and arguments are colored by contemporary American politics, but neither past the point of usefulness.

Alexei Yurchak's Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (which was recommended to me by Baloogan, of all people) has a lot of good material in it, but I'm slightly hesitant to recommend it as it's a fairly high-level sociological read and the author spends more time theory-wankingcrafting than is helpful for non-specialists.

axeil posted:

Here's a question I just thought up. Was it ever possible for the Soviet Union to succeed? What would that have looked like? Could there have been a "nice" and prosperous USSR? What if the US had been friendlier post WW2? It seems to me by the time you get to the 70s their decline was pretty much inevitable but I'm not a Russian historian so I'm curious what the more knowledge people here think.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

That's kind of a loaded question, honestly, and takes for granted that how the Soviet experiment ended was the natural and expected conclusion of things. As someone old enough to remember watching it all go down on the evening news, I can tell you that most everyone was taken by surprise that things fell apart like they did at the end of the 1980s. Everyone knew the Soviets were in trouble, but seen from outside the conventional expectation until very late was that Gorbachev's reforms would allow things to keep staggering along and that some form of Soviet Union would persist into the future at least as one of the world powers, even if it wasn't any more a superpower. Not for nothing does a lot of 70s and 80s sci-fi include Soviet space stations and off-world colonies and the like.

But to answer the question and indulge the counterfactual, I tend to think that if Brezhnev and co hadn't shoved Khrushchev out and then held so unimaginatively on to power for as long as they did, there would have been a better chance of a modern Soviet state weathering the crises to come.

axeil posted:

Here's a question I just thought up. Was it ever possible for the Soviet Union to succeed? What would that have looked like? Could there have been a "nice" and prosperous USSR? What if the US had been friendlier post WW2? It seems to me by the time you get to the 70s their decline was pretty much inevitable but I'm not a Russian historian so I'm curious what the more knowledge people here think.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

That's kind of a loaded question, honestly, and takes for granted that how the Soviet experiment ended was the natural and expected conclusion of things. As someone old enough to remember watching it all go down on the evening news, I can tell you that most everyone was taken by surprise that things fell apart like they did at the end of the 1980s. Everyone knew the Soviets were in trouble, but seen from outside the conventional expectation until very late was that Gorbachev's reforms would allow things to keep staggering along and that some form of Soviet Union would persist into the future at least as one of the world powers, even if it wasn't any more a superpower. Not for nothing does a lot of 70s and 80s sci-fi include Soviet space stations and off-world colonies and the like.

But to answer the question and indulge the counterfactual, I tend to think that if Brezhnev and co hadn't shoved Khrushchev out and then held so unimaginatively on to power for as long as they did, there would have been a better chance of a modern Soviet state weathering the crises to come.

Ardennes posted:

I just don’t think the Soviets could weather the depressed oil prices of the 1990s, they were completely screwed.

A rather blunt assessment maybe, but I just don’t think there was a way to get around it.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

That's kind of a loaded question, honestly, and takes for granted that how the Soviet experiment ended was the natural and expected conclusion of things. As someone old enough to remember watching it all go down on the evening news, I can tell you that most everyone was taken by surprise that things fell apart like they did at the end of the 1980s. Everyone knew the Soviets were in trouble, but seen from outside the conventional expectation until very late was that Gorbachev's reforms would allow things to keep staggering along and that some form of Soviet Union would persist into the future at least as one of the world powers, even if it wasn't any more a superpower. Not for nothing does a lot of 70s and 80s sci-fi include Soviet space stations and off-world colonies and the like.

But to answer the question and indulge the counterfactual, I tend to think that if Brezhnev and co hadn't shoved Khrushchev out and then held so unimaginatively on to power for as long as they did, there would have been a better chance of a modern Soviet state weathering the crises to come.

Silver2195 posted:

"Seen from the outside" is the key phrase here. Does this show that the final outcome was due to a confluence of unlikely events? Or does it just show that Western "experts" on the USSR were totally wrong?

Lightning Knight posted:

If I wanted to know what day to day life was for regular people in the Soviet Union, in a non-fiction format, what kind of book would I look for?

The_Other posted:

Typo posted:

The USSR would have survived without Gorbachev's reforms, the system was flawed but stable and have weathered worse in the past. What destroyed the USSR was Gorbachev's attempt to transform it from a Communist system to a Social democracy, and Yeltsin using the opportunity to dismantle the USSR as a coup against Gorbachev.

As late as Spring 1991 the USSR could have survived: socialists and liberals both kind of accept the fall of the USSR as an inevitability: the socialists believe that it did not correctly apply socialist principles, liberals think socialist principles were inherently self-contradictory. But the truth is that the USSR fell because of a two "one-man" revolutions: the first by Gorbachev, the second by Yeltsin. The fall of the USSR was circumstantial and not some sort of historical inevitability.

quote:

To say that history's greatest economic experiment--Soviet communism--was also its greatest economic failure is to say what many consider obvious. Here, in a startling reinterpretation, Robert Allen argues that the USSR was one of the most successful developing economies of the twentieth century. He reaches this provocative conclusion by recalculating national consumption and using economic, demographic, and computer simulation models to address the "what if" questions central to Soviet history. Moreover, by comparing Soviet performance not only with advanced but with less developed countries, he provides a meaningful context for its evaluation.

Although the Russian economy began to develop in the late nineteenth century based on wheat exports, modern economic growth proved elusive. But growth was rapid from 1928 to the 1970s--due to successful Five Year Plans. Notwithstanding the horrors of Stalinism, the building of heavy industry accelerated growth during the 1930s and raised living standards, especially for the many peasants who moved to cities. A sudden drop in fertility due to the education of women and their employment outside the home also facilitated growth.

While highlighting the previously underemphasized achievements of Soviet planning, Farm to Factory also shows, through methodical analysis set in fluid prose, that Stalin's worst excesses--such as the bloody collectivization of agriculture--did little to spur growth. Economic development stagnated after 1970, as vital resources were diverted to the military and as a Soviet leadership lacking in original thought pursued wasteful investments.

Typo posted:

The USSR would have survived without Gorbachev's reforms, the system was flawed but stable and have weathered worse in the past. What destroyed the USSR was Gorbachev's attempt to transform it from a Communist system to a Social democracy, and Yeltsin using the opportunity to dismantle the USSR as a coup against Gorbachev.

As late as Spring 1991 the USSR could have survived: socialists and liberals both kind of accept the fall of the USSR as an inevitability: the socialists believe that it did not correctly apply socialist principles, liberals think socialist principles were inherently self-contradictory. But the truth is that the USSR fell because of a two "one-man" revolutions: the first by Gorbachev, the second by Yeltsin. The fall of the USSR was circumstantial and not some sort of historical inevitability.

evilweasel posted:

I think you're writing out the actual coup against Gorbachev by the conservative Communists in here, which was kind of key to why Yeltsin was able to take power.

Lightning Knight posted:

Thanks!


Do you think it would've been impossible for the USSR to peacefully transition to social democracy, or democratic socialism, etc., without collapsing as it did? Do you think Gorbachev was wrong to do what he did, either in a moral or technical sense?

Typo posted:

Why?

Great powers do not collapse because of economic crisis

Russia in the 90s saw their economy shrink by 40%, it wasn't economic stagnation but economic collapse. It was worse than anything in the USSR since the 1930s, certainly worse than anything the USSR experienced in 70s-80s. not only did Russia not collapse, but Yeltsin even managed to stay in power.

The USSR would have underwent a series of economic crisis, but USSR as a country could have survived into the 21st century easily.

Ardennes posted:

The public has been completely exhausted by the years of austerity falling the crash of crude prices in 1985, someone had to be blamed and a coup wasn't going to work as long as you had the same issues. Likewise, the public was fatigued by Yelstin and the outgrowth of the 1990s by 1995, and it took a massive marketing campaign to get him elected again (the poll numbers trace within weeks of the arrival of American advisors). By 1999, they were ready for a new leader, guess who.

quote:

At a certain point if the public can't eat, they are going to demand change, and by 1991 too much anger had been built up about the situation the country was in.

(Btw absolute shock therapy made this even worse, but the public had no way of knowing this in 1991.)

Typo posted:

public opinion didn't matter in pre-1985 USSR, it hardly mattered even after Perestroika, the Soviet "public" had being demanding changes for decades but they didn't matter because political power was held by the party alone. There was little/no avenue for political opposition that the party could not co-op or suppress. Public opinion only started to sort of matter because Gorbachev decided that it -should- matter since they -would- matter in a Social Democracy.

quote:

If you can see that Yeltsin could stay in power despite economic pains inflicted on the public worse in the 90s than anything during the late Soviet era, than a Soviet Communist party could have done it too. The CPSU had -better- tools to stay in power in 1985 than Yeltsin did in 1996.
One of the enduring myth of the Soviet collapse was that it was a popular revolution which overthrew the Soviet Union, or that the USSR fell because of public pressure, it wasn't. Dissolving the USSR was a never a popular goal outside of a bunch of small SSRs like the Baltics and Georgia. In the rest it was the goal of Yeltsin alone.

quote:

Russia and Communism both have history of top-down centralized changes, Yeltsin dissolving the USSR/neoliberalism was actually a lot like Stalin imposing collectivization: it was a top-down decision made by one man while the vast majority of the population had no input on the decision making process.

Typo posted:

1) Yeltsin had the power to act during and after the coup because Gorbachev allowed free elections (the only real one in russian history prob) in 1991 which Yeltsin won and became Russian president

2) the August coup was not inevitable, the complaints the conservatives had against Gorbachev mainly had to do with allowing the fall of the Warsaw Pact and not using more force against separatists, both of those were avoidable

3) The coup also occurred because Gorbachev's political failures were one too many, had Gorbachev for instance, have gotten more western economic aid in exchange for allowing German reunification 89-91, it's likely the coup wouldn't have taken place

4) Gorbachev had the option of pre-empting the coup, or alternatively simply cede to the coupster's demands

5) Even after the failure of the coup, Yeltsin did not have to dissolve the USSR, he could have, for instance, grabbed the presidency of the USSR for himself rather than dissolving it to get rid of Gorbachev

so basically the August coup while key only caused the collapse because Gorbachev's actions led up to it and Yeltsin actions after it. By itself the coup did not cause the USSR to collapse.

evilweasel posted:

I strongly disagree. The coup was certainly not inevitable nor was its collapse inevitable; but once it failed I think the USSR's goose was cooked because the collapse of the Party's control was nearly inevitable. Yeltsin grabbing control of it wouldn't have saved it. Its one of those odd situations where the legal fictions mattered, I think. Yeltsin's legitimacy was as the popularly elected president of Russia. The whole USSR system was built on the fact that the Party governed the state, not the other way around. Yeltsin grabbing control of the Party wouldn't have changed the reality that its hold on power had utterly collapsed. It would have been a meaningless historical anachronism, like a title of nobility or something, that had no actual political meaning. The coup was an attempt by factions of the Party to regain control of the Soviet state; when it failed in the face of Yeltsin's resistance, it became clear beyond dispute that power was gone. The Party, in the sense of the governing political entity of the USSR, instead of a standard political party, was dead.

quote:

Once the Party collapsed, I don't see how you could maintain the USSR: the USSR was simply a rebrand of the Russian Empire, held together by the ideology of the Party and the top-down control of the Party. The most significant reason it needed to exist - to keep a big buffer between Russia and Germany to avoid a repeat of Barbarossa - was long gone. If Yeltsin had tried to keep the other states under the control of Russia in an openly imperialist structure, what would be the point? What would Russia have gained? It wasn't going to save the Soviet system, that had died with the collapse of the coup. I think that trying to maintain the Russian Empire, without any ideological basis, would just have been a further drain on the already strained Russian economy for no actual gain except prestige.

Ardennes posted:

As for Yeltsin and the party, Yeltsin was a nationalist and had no use for the party or the Soviet Union as a whole, he wanted a Russia by rid of socialism and the "liabilities" of ethnic minorities. His entire goal was to have a smaller and pure Russia.