Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

In line with the same type of intentionally forgotten history, US investors and business persons built and provided a large portion of the Soviet industrial capabilities prior to WW2 [1], which the Soviets later pretended were their own accomplishments. It's a theme that repeats throughout all of Soviet history, where Communist propaganda collides with market economy prosperity, on up to the famous 1959 Kitchen debate between Nixon and Khrushchev [2], or Yeltsin's visit to the Texas supermarket [3].

Communism universally, completely failed at providing superior material prosperity, which was one of its most touted foundational claims. Worse, it failed at providing nearly any consistent materialism at all, as witnessed by the second great Soviet famine under Stalin in 1932-33 [4], in which millions of people perished.

[1] http://www.americanheritage.com/content/how-america-helped-b...

[2] http://adst.org/2015/07/nixon-vs-khrushchev-the-1959-kitchen...

[3] https://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2014/04/when-boris-yeltsin...

[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/re...

Let's not have yet another battle about how bad communism was. On HN, generic tangents are always off topic because the discussions they produce are predictable. Ideological battle is the worst subtype of those.

I know the theme is adjacent to the article's material, but so are plenty of other things, some of which are specific rather than generic, and those are the ones that can seed good conversation. Who even knew this massive event had taken place? or that Herbert Hoover played a central role? I sure didn't.

Relitigating communism, on the other hand...not so much. Nearby generic themes trigger quick reactions because we all have many pre-existing associations to them. But for internet discussion, they are the black holes we need most to steer clear of.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair enough. I thought it fit well with the parent article. I get your point about how wandering anywhere near Communism as a discussion can quickly lead to low quality argumentation.

You are taking this way too far as an argument. Russia at the time was miles and miles behind any Western nation in terms of development. They knew it, which is why they thought their revolution would fail unless Western nations, German workers in particular, would start their own revolution.

So they already started with a huge handicap - on top of that WWI and the civil war after the revolution, which was a fight tooth and nail, as bad as it gets, put them down even further.

So even if the "experiment" would have stopped right then and there and they would have switched to pure capitalism, what kind of development would you have expected?

This is not to take anything away from your mention of their propaganda efforts to appear a lot bigger than they are, but your argument leaves out some important "details".

> So even if the "experiment" would have stopped right then and there and they would have switched to pure capitalism, what kind of development would you have expected?

I would expect something more like 350 million strong Norway, not 140 million strong Honduras that is the result of a century of communist experiment.

I am often reminded that Eastern Europe was always poor. Guess what? So were Norway at the time of divergence. Moreover, poverty and corruption is a direct result of communism that can't be ignored.

Well, Norway discovered oil and managed to distribute the profits evenly (I think). Not many oil-rich countries did that.

And regarding Eastern Europe, it was not always poor, for example the Czech part of Czechoslovakia was more prosperous than Austria both before and immediately after WW2, but that changed during communism and Austria is still much more prosperous nearly 30 years after the fall of communism.

You see the irony, right?

Norway, capitalistic, manages to distribute the profits.

USSR, communistic, fails. It spends all the oil and gas and all other minerals known to man on communisty things like insane amount of weaponry, help to fellow communist regimes who never pay back, etc, etc. But its citizens lead the life so miserable that the only joy is binge drinking and the country dissipates overnight. And from this point it only gets worse.

>So even if the "experiment" would have stopped right then and there and they would have switched to pure capitalism, what kind of development would you have expected?

this is exactly what was done when the things hit the rock bottom. It was a choice - either continue the "experiment" and everybody dies from hunger ... or pause the "experiment". They paused it. It is called "New Economic Policy" - remotely similar to what China does today. Allowing limited capitalism. As result the country almost immediately rocketed into economic recovery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy

Or, for those who prefer to listen to a lecture:

Lenin and the Russian Revolution - Professor Catherine Merridale FBA -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRIzW7A9lhs&feature=youtu.be

The Fate of the October Revolution Under Stalin - Professor Bob Service -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5eP_HoNUx8

If you only want to listen to one choose the first one, it's really good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com