Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

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>Competing on a few key sectors is easy when you sacrifice the livelihood of your whole nation, spoil their property, and send millions to the Gulag to deter any political opposition.

Don't forget that Russia (and thus USSR) started of as a poor agrarian nation to begin with, much behind in industrialization than the US, UK, etc.

The pictures of huge queues aside, USSR was a huge jump in standards of living and consumption for millions of people compared to before (which even included a tradition of serfdom).

USSR had also started quite early with non-central planning (NEP was a "free market" attempt similar to today's China), but ended it to quickly allocate resources between WWI and WWII to being able to withstand invasion. Quite prescient it was too.

I'd say USSR would have done much better without Stalin at the helm, without WWII that had a 30+ million human toll, and with NEP continued (it was stopped sometime in the late 20s).

>And the Soviets did not compete in "Science". They competed on military and space exploration mainly, but most of the other areas of Science were left dry by the Soviets, or left to crazy experimentation based on pseudo science in agriculture.

Maybe invest in some science history books? The "crazy experimentation based on pseudo science in agriculture" (Lysenko I guess) is a known early example (then again the west had its own share or pseudo science, remember lobotomies?), but they had tons of important scientists and engineers in all fields, much beyond "space exploration and military" -- from Kolmogorov to Basov, and tons of inventions we depend upon today...

> Don't forget that Russia (and thus USSR) started of as a poor agrarian nation to begin with, much behind in industrialization than the US, UK, etc.

This is not true. Revolution in Russia was performed by industrial workers, not by agrarians. Also, Russia was third-fourth economy in the world just before war. Other countries in the world were much poorer and agrarian.

>This is not true. Revolution in Russia was performed by industrial workers, not by agrarians.

That's not an argument against what I said. The whole country was predominantly agrarian (and much more so than any western power).

That a small industrial minority in big cities was involved in the revolution doesn't change that.

>Also, Russia was third-fourth economy in the world just before war. Other countries in the world were much poorer and agrarian.

Yes, but we don't compare Russia to e.g. African countries or Latin American, but to the European and US western countries it had to compete with.

You can compare Russia with Japan, or Korea, or Singapore, or China. Apples to apples.

If you look at historical values of GPD, you will see that grown in first world countries (Europe, Russia, the United States, Canada, and Japan) started at about 1850, and they outpaced rest of the world in about 1900. I see no correlation between data and Stalin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(P...

> The pictures of huge queues aside, USSR was a huge jump in standards of living and consumption for millions of people compared to before (which even included a tradition of serfdom).

A huge jump? Versus the tsar regime, probably - it was a catastrophe in itself. But compared to the Western world, GDP growth was miserable and clearly behind all "modern" countries in comparison.

https://artir.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/all19501.png?w=640

It was, anyway, clearly going to hit a wall economically.

> About Science

Your argument does not refute anything of what I mentioned. The Soviets were behind in most disciplines. And their had clear ideological barriers that prevented them from doing actual Science, in case you forgot:

> Already in 1920s, certain fields of scientific research were labeled "bourgeois" and "idealist" by the Communist Party. All research, including natural sciences, was to be founded on the philosophy of dialectical materialism. Humanities and social sciences were additionally tested for strict accordance with historical materialism.[2]

> After World War II, many scientists were forbidden from cooperation with foreign researchers. The scientific community of the Soviet Union became increasingly closed. In addition to that, the party continued declaring various new theories "pseudo-scientific". Genetics, pedology and psychotechnics were already banned in 1936 by a special decree of the Central Committee. On August 7, 1948, the V.I. Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences announced that from that point on Lamarckian inheritance, the theory that personality traits acquired during life are passed on to offspring, would be taught as "the only correct theory". Soviet scientists were forced to redact prior work, and even after this ideology, known as Lysenkoism, was demonstrated to be false, it took many years for criticism of it to become acceptable

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

and...

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

There is this thing about soviets is that you can't at the same time fight Truth in all areas of daily life, and at the same time promote the scientific method. It's just not compatible.

> A huge jump? Versus the tsar regime, probably - it was a catastrophe in itself. But compared to the Western world, GDP growth was miserable and clearly behind all "modern" countries in comparison.

I'm curious, how useful is a GDP measurement in a "communist" country where there are no monetary transactions to obtain the most important human needs -- housing, education, daycare, leisure, vacations, etc?

You need to learn more about these countries then. Don't just buy the propaganda.

One of the ways Marxist-Leninism splits from traditional Marxism is Lenin believed (or realized that) a communist state would need to go through a transitionary market period with strong regulations and planning. The USSR never abolished money. That is way way way farther then they managed to get. There were super markets (not great but I Western standards, but they were there). They believed an ideal socialist state would take a long time to achieve.

Here's a link about shopping and money in the USSR: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/...

China is basically the same story, but the market was even stronger.

I’m aware that there were money and shopping in the USSR, thanks. I’m also aware that there was no real estate market in the USSR, daycare and education of all levels was free, vacations weren’t paid for, etc. I’m assuming none of those are in GDP calculations? That was my question.

Very convenient how you left out the last two sentences in the paragraph about Lysenko and Lamarckism:

>After the 1960s, during the Khrushchev Thaw, a policy of liberalization of science was implemented. Lysenkoism was officially renounced in 1963.

Hmm. Almost like you started with your mind made up and went looking for the quickest thing that confirmed it.

Of course, the US didn't engage in any cooky political pseudoscience from the 1930s to 60s. Only the bad guys were backwards 80 years ago right?

> The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, also known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study or Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment or the United States Public Health Services Study of Untreated Syphilis in Black Males was an infamous, unethical, and malicious clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service. The purpose of this study was to observe the natural progression of untreated syphilis in rural African-American men in Alabama under the guise of receiving free health care from the United States government.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

Well say, what do you know, it's almost like going back 80 years and finding some old fucked up political shit is an unfair way to prove a country is backwards.

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