• dropdrip@lemmy.ml
    13·
    4 days ago

    And then China rapidly developed to be the world’s leader. Meanwhile the USA continues to burn and Western-democracies crumble, espousing there’s no money for any public-programs. Quality of life degrades materially and education degrades. All whilst the media’s mouthpieces say socialism does not work, whilst the system of communist thought took two countries, in a hostile environment, from backwaters to parity of the world’s capitalist hedgemon.

    I unfortunately think it’s true that the majority of a citizenry do not understand the social order/the economy that they live in, nor do they have an interest in it.

  • Cris_Citrus@piefed.zipEnglish
    22·
    5 days ago

    Actual question, what caused the collapse of the soviet Union? I’m sure answers will be simplifications but I wish I knew more about the history

    • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
      171·
      5 days ago

      This article makes a succinct argument, but essentially the reasons for its fall:

      • The cold war arms race upped by Reagan - a huge drain on both material and mental resources that would’ve been better allocated to other industries. The US’s constant military pressure and brinksmanship forced the USSR to play catchup against an opponent with a larger chip stack.
      • The USSR acted as anchor and banker to many third world revolutionary projects, which proved an additional drain on its economy. PRC avoided this mistake by being strictly non-interventionist, and avoiding these dangerous foreign policy traps.
      • De-linking from the world economy and not being able to take advantage of the newest technology and consumer products from the west. The PRC corrected this mistake by the 1980s.
      • Capitulations by Gorbachev to begin the process of privatization and dismantle the planned economy. PRC also avoided this by strengthening its publicly owned portion of the economy, refusing to privatize them, and making sure they commanded the top position.
      • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.mlEnglish
        4·
        3 days ago

        Basically “because the most powerful countries in the world tried their absolute hardest to kill it for decades and they finally succeeded in its slow death.” Pretty much everything other than de-linking from the world economy was brought on by the West.

        AKA “socialism doesn’t work because it’s our mandate to ensure it doesn’t work”

      • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOP
        15·
        5 days ago

        It’s also important to add the overarching context here which is that the US got to sit WW2 out and develop its industries while the rest of the world burned. So, when it started the Cold War, the US was far ahead economically and used its advantage to drag USSR into the arms race. And the western world has been riding that advantage ever since.

      • FoundFootFootage78@lemmy.mlEnglish
        31·
        3 days ago

        De-linking from the world economy and not being able to take advantage of the newest technology and consumer products from the west. The PRC corrected this mistake by the 1980s.

        Is this not evidence that the Soviet (and Chinese) economy was less innovative than the West’s.

        • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
          5·
          3 days ago

          Read the article I linked above for the answer. Richer countries like the US and western europe industrialized at least a hundred years before. Both the USSR and PRC were largely feudal economies in the early 1900s. But the soviet union (despite starting out from about the same point as Brazil in 1920) caught up to the US within a few decades, beating it to space, and forcing it to allocate tonsof resources to state-run research and development projects.

          It wasn’t even really the USSR’s choice to de-link, it was heavily attacked by all the western countries during it’s civil war, and they embargoed the country when they lost. The west rode their hundred-year head start on industrialization and resource advantage from hundreds of years from colonialism and slavery, and also funded the newly defeated fascist countries like germany and japan to become anti-communist bulwarks producing consumer goods.

          The PRC has now surpassed the US in most tech sectors, once again proving the superiority of socialism.

        • Aria@lemmygrad.ml
          3·
          3 days ago

          You’re comparing 300 million and 1500 million people to the entire rest of the world. And in that rest of the world is about 1000 million people with significantly better living conditions, infrastructure, institutions and education, who of course have huge advantages in being able to create advanced technologies.

          And even then you’re ignoring that there are industries where the Soviet Union and China both managed to become world leaders.

    • MattEagle [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      171·
      5 days ago

      Bad reforms. Deng Xiaoping did a good job reforming China without demonising its communist history. Khrushchev chose to demonize Stalin, and in doing so compromised the integrity of the communist party. Two decades of degeneration later the party’s economic policy gets a lot worse and stagnation sets in. The rest is history.

        • MattEagle [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          20·
          5 days ago

          Of course. The Soviet Union was constantly hounded by the international bourgeoisie since the day of its creation. Here I’m only referencing the lynch-pin of the collapse.

      • Cris_Citrus@piefed.zipEnglish
        9·
        5 days ago

        Interesting, can you expand on what you mean by Khrushchev demonizing Stalin compromising the integrity of the communist party?

        I come from a liberal country so most of what I know about Stalin is just that he sucked. No idea how much of that folks on ML disagree with, whether he had many legitimate issues, or folks in your community see him as having been more demonized by western voices- I would be open to perspectives on that subject

        Thanks for sharing your thoughts with me :)

        • Weydemeyer@lemmy.ml
          6·
          4 days ago

          Not OP, but I recall reading an essay by Carlos Martinez where he explained it as the following:

          Most people, regardless of what economic system they live in, don’t really have a real understanding of that system. Consider how many people actually understand what “capitalism” is today. While the Soviets did try what they could to educate their people in this regard, it’s kind of a human thing that most people just want to live their lives and aren’t going to bother trying to figure out how they economy around them works.

          So even if most people in the USSR didn’t really understand what “socialism” was, they did know that the improvement in their material conditions from the beginning of Stalin’s tenure to the end was truly incredible (and indeed, as impressive as China’s growth has been in recent decades by some measure the USSR under Stalin grew by even greater leaps). For good or ill, they associated the person of Stalin with “socialism” because Stalin was a socialist and Bolshevik revolutionary, and that period saw a massive improvement in their living conditions (WW2 notwithstanding of course).

          So by denouncing Stalin, many people in the Soviet Union saw that as a de facto denunciation of socialism, since the two were so closely tied together in their minds. If you equate Stalin with socialism, and the current leaders are denouncing Stalin, then at the very least that will lead to some confused feelings about socialism.

    • SuperApples@lemmy.world
      62·
      5 days ago

      My simplest explanation is that Russia’s powerful wanted to be in charge and look out for themselves, just extracting weath from the other union members who they tried to keep in line with violence. Democracy was a farce and there were no plans to transfer power to the proletariat. This lead to separatist movements in many countries, violent and peaceful.

      The Chernobyl incident seems to be the nail in the coffin, bankrupting the state if they didn’t get outside money. The Russian elite then shut the whole thing down, rigging the sell off of state assets (aka the whole economy) to create the oligarchy and an ultra capitalist Russia, and the reinvigoratation of the church and conservatism, undoing social progress too.

      I’m sure there other big factors too but they’re the main ones that stuck with me, after going to dozens of museums throughout eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Russia.

    • folaht@lemmy.ml
      44·
      5 days ago

      Short version: The blackmailing of oil rich Saudi Arabia and other nations by the US

      I’m going to against the grain of popular theory here and
      come up with my own and say the evolution of fossil fuels
      did not bode well for the Soviet Union, so bad luck really.
      You see, your system can be much better than the other,
      but if don’t have the resources and by resources I mean energy resources,
      because they provide production and transport, if you don’t have those,
      you’re out of luck.

      if you look at when the GDP in the Soviet Union started to stall,
      it’s around 1975, five years after the 1970 US oil peak,
      causing the US economy to crash and spiral out of control,
      while the Soviet Union and the Middle East was thriving.

      The USSR had an enormous amount of oil like the US did before,
      but the problem with oil is that it competes with coal and oil is more
      easy to transport, so it’s more likely for oil to flow to
      the country producing the most coal than the other way around.

      Prior to the 1970s, the US was the largest oil producer in the world by
      far and was thus exporting oil to the rest of the world.
      Since they were also producing the most coal in the world,
      oil was not a curse to them as electricity provides
      the basis for working factories and thus industrialization.
      Saudi Arabia, a nation with almost no resources whatsoever and zero coal,
      had a very long way to develop itself.

      The US then used Israel to start the Yom Kippur war, which it won.
      And the US then sent a diplomat to Saudi Arabia and told them that
      if they don’t want more trouble, they would do exactly as the US tells
      them what to do which was:

      • Sell all your oil in US dollars only, no exceptions
      • Invest all your profits in the US only, no exceptions
      • If you make profits from those investments keep. You can do what you want with it.
      • In exchange, we will give you military protection from other nations.

      This is the petrodollar scheme and it worked.
      And it didn’t just work for Saudi Arabia,
      but other middle eastern countries.
      On top of that SWIFT was introduced around the same time.

      This allowed the US to go into massive debt,
      receiving enormous amounts of money for investment,
      while the Soviet Union, whose growth was dependent on selling oil,
      saw it’s currency rate fall.

      And we’re seeing the same playbook happening right now again,
      with different factors and therefore different effects.
      This time China is the target, but it is producing the most coal in the world,
      the most solar power in the world, the most wind power in the world,
      and the most hydro power in the world.
      A low currency rate for a country that mostly sells
      manufactured goods instead profoundly different effect
      compared to a nation that mostly relied on
      the production and export of oil.

      And even the situation in Russia and Iran are different from last century
      as natural gas has strengthened both nations.

      • justaman123@lemmy.world
        1·
        3 days ago

        I like this answer. You can play word games all you want with different ideaologies but what power comes down to is hard material fact and right now China has all the cards. They got the stuff and they got the power.

        Also during this oil crisis, because they knew it was coming, there’s always an oil crisis coming, they just stopped importing oil.

        I think Chinas long-term thinking is eventually going to beat out Americas quarterly shareholders value maximizing, and I think eventually was about 8 years ago

      • NebulaNomad@lemmy.world
        24·
        3 days ago

        I was born in an ex-USSR country. You probably just miss being young, not the actual regime. It was objectively horrible.

        • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOP
          9·
          3 days ago

          No, I don’t just miss being young. If you think everyone having a guarantee of housing, food, jobs, healthcare, and retirement is terrible then you’re frankly a selfish sack of shit. Nobody in USSR worried about losing their job and ending up on the street or not being able to save enough to retire in dignity. These were not the kinds of things people had to worry about while everyone lives under the gun in the wondrous capitalist system. On top of that, the fall of USSR was one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of the 20th century. Countless millions of people had their lives ruined and lost everything, but some parasites got theirs at the expense of everyone else, and now go around telling the rest of us how terrible communism was.

          • NebulaNomad@lemmy.world
            23·
            3 days ago

            In my country food was rationed, you would wait in endless queues for hours just to get 1/4 of a bread. There was not much other than bread, milk and some vegetables (meat was rare). If you did not have a job, the state would take you and send you to a crazy big project of the state where you would probably die (work camp). If you had different oppinions about politics, you were basically captured, tortured and then killed. Every second neighbour was an informer for the state, no one to trust. Maybe your country was much better, but I can’t understant how you can praise that. I love the ideology of socialism, but USSR was a horrible implementation of that.

            • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOP
              3·
              3 days ago

              Ah yeah, it’s so much better now with seniors living under the bridges and scavenging for food in the trash. Also, it’s funny how you ignore the fact that USSR existed under a siege during the entirety of the Cold War right after having been invaded by fascists during the second world war and was not allowed to develop peacefully. Then after USSR fell, the west immediately poured a bunch of money into Poland and the Baltics to prop them up which is where a bit of prosperity some people saw actually came from. Meanwhile, go look at what happened to other republics which weren’t of interest to western propaganda. See how people are doing there now.

              And sure, USSR could have done better in many ways. It was literally the first attempt at building socialism. However, what happened after has demonstrably been a disaster on an unimaginable scale. And now it might even lead to a third world war and a nuclear holocaust.

      • wooferTwo@thelemmy.clubBanned from community
        721·
        5 days ago

        Propaganda like putting people on animal trains and giving them a nice vacation in Siberia?

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOP
      15·
      5 days ago

      I sure have. Here’s a book produced by US military about it which makes it crystal clear that the program played a minor role in the war:

      • Scrogu@lemmy.zip
        16·
        4 days ago

        Thank you for this detailed reply. West point is surely an objective source.

        AI analysis confirms soviet union would likely have still won but that aid was very significant from 1942 onwards.

    • LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins [none/use name, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      10·
      5 days ago

      oh by the way, definitely don’t look up when the majority of aid arrived (after the Soviets already turned back the Germans and had pushed halfway to Berlin)

      They won the battle of Moscow in 1941, honestly probably saving the entirety of Europe by blunting and turning back the German advance. By the time they won Stalingrad and Kursk the germans were literally halfway defeated.

      All of that is prior to the vast majority of lend lease aid arriving. And when the aid arrives, lol, you have all these Russian military commanders talk shit about the quality. Wow, the U.S. gave something like 12000 tanks compared to the 120000 the USSR built. The Russians complained they were dog shit and wouldn’t use them, lol

      the best part is all of this info is readily available from Google’s own llm in case you’re too fucked to death stupid to think for yourself! it’ll even tell you “this info is from pro western sources,” because if you ewanna know what the Russians themselves thought of lend lease, it was “it was even more useless than that!”

    • LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins [none/use name, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      111·
      5 days ago

      hey you’ve got something in common with the reactionary old men i work with- a blind belief that the U.S. magically did all the work for the Soviets because they gave them a few trucks, as if the Soviets didn’t also rebuild their entire industrial base mid war in a feat comparable to the U.S. losing the entire eastern seaboard only to pack up and move everything west of the appalachians (while, again, being literally less than 50 years removed from “being a dirt farming tsarist shithole with the worst industrialization in literally all of Europe”)

      I wonder what else you have in common with these worst losers i know.