I figured I’d ask here since you comrades know history and are on talking terms with reality, unlike a lot of stuff that is available to read online. I am really looking for a short answer, although I know there were many factors playing out over a long long time. Just the bullet points, if you please.
Edit: Thank you for these awesome answers, a lot of exactly what I was looking for and a lot of new directions to explore. Y’all really are the dope-ass bear B-)
One singular reason? Gorbie was a terminal naive idiot (i use term advisedly). But party that manages to produce him is a structurally flawed party. Nationalism started to rear its head since brezhnev, but that can be traced to excessive amnesties under khruschev, but those again can be traced to excessive violence under stalin. There were also obvious issues with planning and planning priorities and allocations (for example, with food production priorities), and especially new commodities introductions, which led to consistent electronic fumbling
Thanks, that covers a lot. As to the planning- do you think it became too centralized? Was that one of the problems?
I big problem afaik was simply the lack of computational power. The USSR was notedly slow and even unwilling to respect and adopt digital computers as a technology. It turns out that planning a complex economy (more or less) by hand is really hard and leads to mistakes!
This is unfortunately a historical continuity from tsarist Russia.
Khrushchev’s faction reintroduced capitalistic elements, he dismantled the successful policy of shared agricultural machinery between farmers, he attacked the very foundation of the soviet union, he rehabilitated several revisionist figures, he was chauvinistic towards the prc which led to the sino-soviet split.
Too centralized wasnt really the issue, but the increasing elitization of the bureaucracy was.
I’m very fuzzy on memory, but i think it was more like they were prioritizing production of x (say we need 1 million liters of milk or whatever), but not so much we have to deliver x (1 million liters of milk to drinking customers). So on paper production looks fine (cause they did produce it), while in some place sporadic absences occur (of milk or butter or meat or whatever else, random small foodstuff and not foodstuff), and then it rots somewhere else (kinda similar to grapes of wrath, if only for completely different reasons). So like large scale mis-allocation (including temporal as well) in planning. Or not optimizing for worker participation (that’s more related to car production/complicated industrial goods), because you can’t just fire guys, but there is no mechanism to say you’ll have to make cars with 35 man hours instead of 40 man hours (at least i don’t think they did). There were also grading issues of the commodities (steel is not just steel, bolts are not all the same, tomatoes are not just tomatoes) which would explode calculation complexities even further. Like imagine you make every bolt military grade for maximum tensile strength with tempering and shit, and it then used to build either a chair or a tank (actually, things i heard bolts were not that great, with very wide varieties around, but the point from planning issues stands)
(this also all combines with party members on the upper scale starting to inhabit different world shopping wise, more and more after the 70s, so they can’t even check themselves)
Maybe? I don’t think they should have bothered with intermediate commodities (at least without computers) and just gave factories free-er reign on what they do with their local plans, after 50s the factories themselves could figure out how much steel they need for bolts and metal sheets. (but again, i’m fuzzy on details, and maybe they did do that, however, sporadic translations of 5 year plan completions i’ve seen do mentions x tons of steel for some reason).
(i would have said, fuck it, we ball, cut down working hours to 6 by 1970-1980s tbh, to force the factories to adjust to automation)
Thanks, that speaks to how broad the area where the causes came from was. Like others have said, not just 1 or 2 direct things.
I definitely got your point about bolts tho, lol.
Economic structural critiques, which are many, are kinda not the main issue (structural, but not causative). Those who will then lead nationalist projects outside of ussr where joining party as late as 1989, despite already existing nationalist parties, they didn’t see collapse of ussr as inevitable even then (those people are obv careerist and not communists as evidenced by later careers).
so that’s why i think gorbie idiocy is very significant cause, it’s not like one man launching avalanche with a sound, it’s like one man spreading snow around for 10 years while constantly shouting. Yes, economy was kinda meh-meh, but it wasn’t like terrible 10% contraction in a year (which lots of governments survive even now) basket case.
I think the one and foremost problem that every serious analysis point out in common is the lack of computer utilization in the central planning process. This is both due to the technology still being at an early stage, but more importantly because at the later stage of the USSR factories were disincentivized to experiment with applying science to real production, because doing so would risk them losing their quotas and the economic bonuses that came along with achieving them.
The technological part is not a problem at all anymore, today central planning is essentially already practiced in an automated way by companies like Walmart. Scaling it up for nationwide production is definitely achievable and would lead to unimaginably better results than the planning of the USSR because of it alone.
The political/economic part of the problem is much more complex and has to do with the downhill direction the party took after the 18th conference. Basically what happened was that in order to tackle inefficiencies that preexisted due to various objective and subjective reasons, it was decided that it should be done by reintroducing markets, capitalist relations, financial incentives, private ownership etc. This led to the USSR losing its socialist characteristics little by little until it finally collapsed and became a neoliberal capitalist hellscape overnight.
Another very important note, also responsible for the above, is that democratic centralism after a certain point didn’t have enough of mass democratic active participation of the people in decision making through their unions (= soviets). Decision making relied too much on the central commitee and that lack of democratic input was very likely the reason why the revolution was betrayed. That’s not to say that the USSR was a dictatorship in the way capitalist institutions claim, it still had a much more meaningful form of democracy than the democratic facade of capitalism calling you to vote between 2 or 3 representatives of the capitalist class every 4 years and in the meantime being almost completely unable to do anything about it.
unimaginably better results than the planning of the USSR because of it alone
:o using technology to further societal progress instead of make line go up? What magicks this could be
the lack of computer utilization in the central planning process.
Red Pen or the Marxist Project has a vid on soviet cybernetics, where they show that the issue boiled down to bureaucratism causing the death of the project.
Thanks for this response! Do you have handy any more info about the specifics of
doing so would risk them losing their quotas and the economic bonuses that came along with achieving them.
? Like any actual numbers? The incentivization aspect of the USSR fascinates me. Here’s a poorly formatted quote from Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds that talks about that:
Top-down planning stifled initiative throughout the system. Stagnation was evident in the failure of the Soviet industrial establishment to apply the innovations of the scientific-technological revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, including the use of computer technology. Though the Soviets produced many of the world’s best mathematicians, physicists, and other scientists, little of their work found actual application. As Mikhail Gorbachev complained before the 28th Communist Party Congress in 1990, “We can no longer tolerate the managerial system that rejects scientific and technological progress and new technologies, that is committed to cost-ineffectiveness and generates squandering and waste.” It is not enough to denounce ineptitude, one must also try to explain why it persisted despite repeated exhortations from leaders—going as far back as Stalin himself who seethed about timeserving bureaucrats. An explanation for the failure of the managerial system may be found in the system itself, which created disincentives for innovation: 1. Managers were little inclined to pursue technological paths that might lead to their own obsolescence. Many of them were not competent in the new technologies and should have been replaced. 2. Managers received no rewards for taking risks. They maintained their positions regardless of whether innovative technology was developed, as was true of their superiors and central planners. 3. Supplies needed for technological change were not readily available. Since inputs were fixed by the plan and all materials and labor were fully committed, it was difficult to divert resources to innovative production. In addition, experimentation increased the risks of failing to meet one’s quotas. 4. There was no incentive to produce better machines for other enterprises since that brought no rewards to one’s own firm. Quite the contrary, under the pressure to get quantitative results, managers often cut corners on quality. 5. There was a scarcity of replacement parts both for industrial production and for durable-use consumer goods. Because top planners set such artificially low prices for spare parts, it was seldom cost-efficient for factories to produce them. 6. Because producers did not pay real-value prices for raw materials, fuel, and other things, enterprises often used them inefficiently. 7. Productive capacity was under-utilized. Problems of distribution led to excessive unused inventory. Because of irregular shipments, there was a tendency to hoard more than could be put into production, further adding to shortages. 8. Improvements in production would lead only to an increase in one’s production quota. In effect, well-run factories were punished with greater work loads. Poor performing ones were rewarded with lower quotas and state subsidies. Managerial irresponsibility was a problem in agriculture as well as industry. One Vietnamese farm organizer’s comment could describe the situation in most other communist countries: “The painful lesson of [farm] cooperatization was that management was not motivated to succeed or produce.” If anything, farm management was often motivated to provide a poor product. For instance, since state buyers of meat paid attention to quantity rather than quality, collective farmers maximized profits by producing fatter animals. Consumers might not care to eat fatty meat but that was their problem. Only a foolish or saintly farmer would work harder to produce better quality meat for the privilege of getting paid less. As in all countries, bureaucracy tended to become a self-feeding animal. Administrative personnel increased at a faster rate than productive workers. In some enterprises, administrative personnel made up half the full number of workers. A factory with 11,000 production workers might have an administrative staff of 5,000, a considerable burden on productivity. The heavily bureaucratic mode of operation did not allow for critical, self-corrective feedback. In general, there was a paucity of the kind of debate that might have held planners and managers accountable to the public. The fate of the whistleblower was the same in communist countries as in our own. Those who exposed waste, incompetence, and corruption were more likely to run risks than receive rewards.
One more thing, and it’s more about the actual collapse of the USSR:
This led to the USSR losing its socialist characteristics little by little until it finally collapsed and became a neoliberal capitalist hellscape overnight.
My understanding is that most people wanted the USSR to continue, but still it fell. Check out these pics:
So was the actual collapsing part initiated by the leaders and then everyone followed, or how come those 77% that voted “stay” ended up actually USSRexiting?
I don’t have exact statistics for the first question at hand, maybe someone here does. That’s a great book by Parenti by the way
On the last question, it’s true that the vast majority of people in socialist states wanted socialist relations to continue. A lot of people at the time wanted to see progress and change, but not to actually change the socialist mode of production. Propaganda promised them a better life with all the fancy and shiny gimmicks the west had, but they weren’t told that this would come at the expense of everything they considered a given. The wide and free access to quality healthcare, the right to work, the guaranteed housing and basic necessities that everyone had simply because it’s a human need, were all taken for granted after so many years.
The reason I’m pointing out the erosion of pure socialism from within, is that this is the material background in which the collapse came to put the final touch. The capitalists had regained too much power, the west started having more influence, contradictions were arising because of this blending of socialist and capitalist relations, and because of all that it came to its weakest point. This should be researched in much more detail than I’m able to give without doing research myself, but it’s a general sum up. It’s both wrong to conclude that the USSR fell solely due to the western sabotage attempts, and it would also be wrong to conclude that it fell because socialism “didn’t work” (despite the ridiculous amount of evidence showing that it not only worked but created something never seen before for millions of people that previously couldn’t even read and became the number one competitor to the USA). The answer lies in between.
Cool, thanks for that.
There are at least two ways to explain it:
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A play-by-play timeline or proximal causes. Gorbachev, economic crisis, Yeltsin, illegal dissolution + coups, Shock Therapy.
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An anslysis of the more important and actual causes that made the proximal causes possible at all. An abandonment of class struggle, the conversion of the party to leading faction bureaucracy over political struggle and development, challenges in recovering from the decimation of their population in WWII, the slow invasion of liberalism and failures to understand propaganda (USSR academics began to believe that capitalism in the USSR would actually benefit them like it did imperialists!), unpopular economic planning decisions (e.g. insufficient consumer goods), and of course, constant and extreme outside pressure from imperialists (sanction, sabotage, wars, brinksmanship, propaganda), and not enough friends to support each other through challenges (I believe that without the Sino-Soviet split, the USSR would still exist).
I have in no way presented exhaustive lists and will have lefy out important things. You won’t understand it without reading the types of longer form materials already presented and without knowing the real histories around the USSR. Its inception, immediate invasion by imperialists, the fallacious propaganda machine about Stalin (there are plenty of criticisms if times under Stalin without the nonsense), etc etc.
Thank you, yea I know some history so what you said makes sense but I feel I’m definitely missing something.
illegal dissolution
I believe that without the Sino-Soviet split, the USSR would still exist
These are the directions I’m going to read in. I posted this map under another comment
and your point about illegal dissolution addresses it, but idk anything about it tbh.
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This is a very complicated topic, that’s difficult to summarize in bullet points. I can provide a basic outline, but I’d recommend reading Socialism Betrayed by Roger Keeran, as well as the blog Invent the Future’s book-length analysis, that’s more up to date than the Keeran book. And for the most comprehensive, day to day analysis, I’d recommend reading Vladislav Zubok’s Collapse.
That is like 900 pages of reading ':D
Can you still do the basic outline? Please??
Thank you for the recommendations, though.
If you’re looking for something easier I’d recommend Hakims videos
Think he has book recommendations in it for further reading but he goes over most of the major points well.
Im at work but very high level some of the issues are below. Apologies I may not be writing these out the best but will try to edit later.
- Computational problem
Since this was before computer started to become widely used, central planning of a large economy like the USSR was difficult. This lead to some economic problems.
Nowadays that obviously wouldn’t be the case and this is covered well in the book “People’s republic of Walmart”.
- Leadership Issues
The western idea of a dictatorship wasn’t accurate but the party did have some issues with leadership. Ossification (spelling might be wrong but too many old people in leadership) made it unable to pivot in some ways it could have. Also I believe it was Kruchev that allowed effectively any class to join the party (even bourgeois) led the party to become revisionist over the years.
As others mentioned they actually ended up reintroducing some market forces as a result of the reformists but not in smart/controlled way like China which led to other economic issues.
Will try to flesh this out more when I have a chance.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Aight so first of all, the Soviet Union was formally structured as a voluntary union of independent nations that were bound together by the Union treaty, under the leadership of a single political party, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Remember this for later.
Secondly, World War Two decimated the Soviet population and the ranks of the Communist party. This left the USSR with a labor shortage that it did not quickly recover from, as well as a Communist party full of cadres who may not have been the most qualified people.
This leads us to Nikita Khrushchev, who did several things that hurt the USSR both in his immediate tenure and in the long term. First, he gave his “secret speech,” in which he denounced Stalin, blaming him solely for the excesses of the great fear, the purges in the party, and the injustices that had occurred in that time. He also denounced Stalin for encouraging a so-called “cult of personality,” which led to a campaign of De-Stalinization, in which Stalin’s statues were torn down nationwide, Stalingrad was renamed, and Stalin’s body was removed from Lenin’s tomb, etc. The consequences were severe: the international prestige of the Soviet Union and communism were seriously damaged, with mass resignations from communist parties all over the world. The secret speech and De-Stalinization led to a blow in the self-confidence of the CPSU that it never recovered from.
Khrushchev then attempted to compete with the west in the realm of consumer goods, wanting to prove the superiority of socialism by using the Soviet planning apparatus to supercharge the mass-production of these goods. The trouble is that, at least as far as we know, state planning without a market distribution system is ineffective at creating the kind of consumer economy that western, capitalist countries enjoy (if such an economy is even desirable for a socialist society in the first place.) Under Stalin, most consumer goods had been manufactured by Artels (co-operative businesses) that had flexibility from state planning and relative independence. Khrushchev nationalized these cooperatives, which vastly increased the amount of inputs and outputs that state planners needed to keep track of, over-complicating the economic plans, eliminating flexible small and medium sized businesses and leaving only giant corporations, creating toxic incentives and various absurdities in the Soviet economy. As an example, in the 1980s, under Perestroika, a delegation from the optics industry in the west was invited to tour a Soviet optics factory. They were impressed by the level of optics technology that was being produced, which was comparable to anything in the west, but the factory manager complained that his ability to produce optics equipment was hampered by the factory needing to divert its resources to fulfill quotas for bicycles. Over time, this policy also led to an informal economy of unregulated market activity, as various enterprises and connected people used semi-legal or illegal ways to acquire and trade scarce consumer goods.
This all led to a liberal “Khrushchevite” tendency or faction to grow within the party and within the intellectual quarters of Soviet society- a tendency that measured Soviet success by comparing it to the west in every way. While Leonid Brezhnev was more successful successful in managing the economy, he failed to correct the fundamental distortions in the economy created by Khrushchev, or the faction in the party he created. Mikhail Gorbachev came from this tendency.
I’m tired and don’t want to write much anymore, so someone else pick up from here or I’ll come back to it later, but I’ll make a long story short: Gorbachev fucked everything up. He made all these problems worse by trying to fix them, surrendered unilaterally to the west in terms of the cold war, empowered a group of national leaders that were incentivized to demand more and more local powers to their countries, until those leaders broke the whole thing up.
socialism betrayed is a very good book. I’m not going to try to summarize it at all, but one point that the book makes was the growth of the grey/black market outside of the legal soviet economy. starting in the 60s (maybe the 50s? I don’t remember), the grey/black market really took off and was ultimately larger than the legal economy. Soviet leadership failed to address the needs served by the black market economy with the legal economy, creating a class of people who were incentivized to work outside of the legal economy and thus helped support material conditions for people who weren’t aligned with soviet leadership/the CCCP. this isn’t as glamorous as other potential factors (cold war, afghanistan, great man theory of soviet leadership) but when I read socialism betrayed this point stood out to me as highly significant.
If I had to point to one specific thing it would probably be the USSR’s failure to integrate globally, but also a failure to sustain a national project after the great patriotic war. I’ve always found it useful to contrast the failures of the USSR with the current successes of China, and I really believe Chinese leadership has taken the ultimate fate of the Soviets as a harsh lesson.
For instance, the USSR had a very inconsistent foreign policy. Leadership would bounce back and forth between supporting foreign revolutions or claiming neutrality. China otherwise has a consistent policy of minimal to zero intervention in foreign affairs, for better or for worse. China also benefits from integration into the global market, which the USSR failed to do. Instead the USSR attempted to create its own alternative market, like its own standards for automobile parts and etc. I remember this ended up being a problem for Cuba after 1991 because suddenly they had a bunch of Soviet farm equipment that wasn’t compatible with western parts.
So I have to guess there were more problems like that, like with factory equipment, computers, building materials, etc. Competing standards in the capitalist west that were perhaps available or cheaper, but incompatible within the Soviet Union, or perhaps not available at all because of sanctions or trade embargoes.
Does anyone know more about the USSR from this angle? I’m into stuff like standards for nuts/bolts or railway grades.
also yes it can’t be overstated
that the dissolution was illegal and a coup.
I dont think foreign policy is that big of a factor. The US is the quintessential unreliable partner yet it is the most traded with.
That’s because they have massive military threats backing them up. The US is a huge trading partner due to gunboat diplomacy.
There used to be a carrot too. Enough of the ruling class in the USA knew not to fuck around with the money. That the promise of stable money and investments was the drug that would bind the international bourgeoisie to the USA. This is as true in allied countries as enemy countries. Yet the last few admins don’t seem to know how to do anything except press the sanction button and it’s destroying the carrot.
Thanks, global standards never occurred to me as possibly contributing to the collapse. Kind of like how the US has 30/127" bolts and everyone else just calls it 6 mm.
I’m into stuff like standards for nuts/bolts or railway grades.
I’m pretty new to Lemmy but hexbear has by far the highest concentration of cool people on the planet. First the anti-genocide stuff and now people who know what they’re about? I’m in heaven. Big hug.
the dissolution was illegal and a coup.
This might be a big part of what I’m missing. Do you know of any trustworthy documentaries about it?
China otherwise has a consistent policy of minimal to zero intervention in foreign affairs, for better or for worse
This isnt totally true, they did however mostly keep to their neighbors, Korea, Afghanistan, Vietnam/Cambodia.
Yeah but all of those examples are from over 40 years ago. Current modern China has a neutral, commerce oriented policy towards other nations, and that’s for better or for worse. For instance they’ve sold guns to both sides of the Kashmir conflict. And up until like 2 years ago they sold a ton of weapons and infrastructure to Israel.
China is also notoriously forgiving in regards to debts and loans though, especially when it comes to impoverished African nations.
Corruption plays a major role as well. Leaders after Stalin didn’t take necessary steps to suppress corruption which slowly ate away the society. The lack of focus on the light industry and overspending on the military played a role as well.
Plus
allowed western capital to flow in without restrictions(unlike China) and they basically bought the country.Internally: Bureaucratism (AKA Careerism)
Externally: US Pressure in the form of the Arms race and economic decoupling which divested crucial economic production capacity from consumer goods to heavy production and armament, eventually causing the standards of living to widen too much in comparison to the west.
How much one or the other was more important is hard to know, but the two death blows came in the form of the Sino Soviet Split, and the Soviet Afghan war.
- Arms race, and in particular:
- Not being able to allocate that brainpower and other resources to actually productive industries.
- Acting as the anchor and banker to other countries, and letting the US drain their resources. The US had the larger poker chip stack, and got the USSR to pay the high ante on way too many pots.
- Decoupling / isolating from the world market, and not being able to capture and advance technology.
There are many other smaller ones but these two IMO had the most disastrous long term consequences. The PRC rectified both by refusing to get involved in international disputes, and by accepting “the bargain” of limited external capitalist exploitation in return for tech and expertise.
- Arms race, and in particular:
depoliticization of the military
gynaCorrupt politicians destroyed it from the inside so they could be way more corrupt (privatize everything, strip the copper wire out, and be pedos).
Lead poisoning leads to treatlerism, which leads to treason, which leads to naive belief in western economic practices
