The 2 Simple Reasons the Soviet Union Was Doomed to Fail
aei.org
aei.org
Sometime in the 80's, the Soviets brought in some Japanese industrial consultants as part of a modernization push for Soviet factories -- they had started to become aware that the sophistication of their industrial capabilities had more or less stagnated somewhere in the 1940's or 50's. Feeling pressure from an increasingly sophisticated U.S. and Europe, they wanted to know what it would take to catch up with the Japanese, then widely considered to have the best, most sophisticated manufacturing processes in the world.
The consultants came and toured some of the major manufacturing cities and facilities, taking notes, interviewing workers and managers, testing final output and raw materials quality, crunching numbers, analyzing the supply chain, that sort of thing. Finally they met with the Soviet leadership in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), home of some of the major industrial capacity of the Union.
After reviewing the findings for several hours, one of the Soviets, impatient with all the details finally spoke up, "yes yes yes...we know all this...what we want to know is, how long will it take, if we put all of our national resources behind it (meaning, a space race level effort), for us to catch up with the Japanese?"
Their reply?
"Forever"
Their analysis revealed that the systemic and social issues in the Soviet Union (as well as a combination of material resources and other odds and ends) were so bad, that no matter how much effort the Soviets put into upgrading their manufacturing processes, and no matter how long they put that effort forward, the Japanese would always be ahead.
The consultants were quickly rushed out of the country and the study was never spoken of again.
Within the decade, the Union had fallen and it was all a moot point anyway.
Because of Japanese continuous improvement, or Kaizen, it is difficult, if not impossible to do.
As long as one is constantly improving, the others cannot catch up.
I believe this basic insight applies whenever your actions now influence your rate of gain in the future.
Oh great point! Yeah, the problem I think in most of these type of large systems migration choices is that they view only two discrete states, the present state and the target state -- and then try and build and plan for all contingencies. Some of the smarter ones try and define the target state primed to become the next present state with an eye towards a new target state, but in practice I don't think this style of thinking works very well.
In the Soviet example, they were looking at the present state of Japanese manufacturing capability and shooting for that as a target, while the Japanese were improving it every minute of every day. There is no goal in Kaizen, all that matters is the process of improvement. It's a very Zen way of looking at the world that I think thankfully is finding it's way into more modern principles of iterative development (it's amazing how ever-present Kaizen is in Western management training -- but I never got the impression that any of the texts really "got it", instead it's lots of discussion of studying it and trying to figure out how to adapt these two state processes to Kaizen principles without ever understanding the continuous nature of it).
In more than a few cases, the product specifications for an update or a new product can indicate near feature parity with a current competitive product, usually with a small increment past that current product.
Not what the competitive products would offer at the completion of the development cycle you're launching; not where the competing product would be in six or eighteen months; after however long it takes to get your new product to market.
Leading a moving target by an appropriate amount is a regular challenge of product development.
And you can win against Kaizen by going asymmetric. By allowing your competitor to optimize what you cause to be the wrong problem.
Kaizen isn't a perpetual advantage. Just look at what demographics are doing to the Japanese economy and manufacturing base. Korea is the new Japan in many ways, and any honest Japanese manager will willingly tell you as much. Korea came from literally nowhere to catch up to Japan, despite kaizen.
Disruption, rising costs, aging demographics, etc., can easily shift industrial edge from one country or region to another.
I'm not denigrating kaizen, mind you. It's still a valuable principle, and one that will continue to confer many advantages to the Japanese industrial base. But it's not a sufficient advantage in perpetuity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#Achilles_and...
Russia in 1917 was about as developed as Germany or Japan in 1850 - or Britain in 1750.
The funny thing is that this fact means the revolution totally contradicted Marxist doctrine, which predicts communism as a natural remedy to the excesses of capitalism. Russia hadn't even entered the captitalist "phase" yet - it was literally the least appropriate country in Europe to stage a communist revolution in.
PS: Of course with automation and computing many of the old assumptions stopped applying but it’s hard to complain when someone only sees 75 - 100 and not 150 years into the future.
Also, Lenin's modification of Marxist theory is somewhat irrelevant, the Marxist foundation was entirely wrong on a number of massive points: one more wasn't going to make a difference.
First, I'm not quite sure you appreciate the cost of that industrialization. The USSR achieved fast extensive growth in its early years by forcing a very high savings rate. What does that mean? They exported lots of grain to buy machinery. Where did the grain come from? The peasants. What did the peasants do after their grain was taken? They starved. The general attitude during this time (which helped the Party consolidate power) was not so much of withholding food from dissidents, but rather withholding food from anyone who couldn't make a convincing case for how they were benefiting the party or the state. So most of the progress in bring up the USSR industrial capacity per person was due to increasing industrial capacity, but a notable part of it was due to decreasing the number of people as well.
Second, forced savings is a good strategy for playing catchup industrially when there are lots of obvious ways you can invest the savings (called extensive growth). Its possible to mess this up (see the Great Leap Forward) but if the beaurocrats are competent its possible. But when you've urbanized and need to start specializing more to keep growing the economy finding efficient ways to do so becomes harder (you're in intensive growth). Its here that government directed industrial policies tend to fail (or at least work more slowly than less directed solutions) due to coordination problems.
I am not sure of the %, I imagine it is not terribly large, but it is still there.
Other projects were built with student labor. University students were encouraged to provide volunteer work on such projects. They got on a train and traveled some place wherever help was needed. My father said it was quite fun. He spent a summer in Khazakstan, then another in Siberia.
While certainly prisoners were used in its construction, saying that it was "built with slave labor" is somewhat disingenuous. Perhaps you are saying that parts of it were built using prisoners, who were not paid for their services? If so, that is certainly the case.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Siberian_Railway#Construc...
In the 90s in the US, I had to spend 40 hours "campaigning" for candidates, if I wanted to graduate highschool. I wouldn't really call that slave labor, but, I certainly learned a lot more by planting sprouts.
http://www.amazon.com/Gulag-History-Anne-Applebaum/dp/076790...
The Gulag was created as a terrible economic experiment - that having a large body of "free" slave labour would be good for the Soviet economy.
There were huge, and often pretty pointless, projects built with slave labor and very basic tools - one example being the Baltic - White Sea Canal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Sea_%E2%80%93_Baltic_Cana...
Source: http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/tuttle.labor.child.britai...
In particular, I'm curious how you'll back up the "but a notable part of it was due to decreasing the number of people as well," considering USSR's population grew during the period you are describing [1].
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Soviet_Unio...
The population grew from 1926 to 1937, but not from 1930 to 1937 - which is the reason the producers of the 1937 census were sent to the gulag. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Census_(1937) And the discussion about Soviet population statistics in this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukranian_famine
I should also point out that during the 1920-1940 period the USSR did a lot of territorial expansion into the lands held by the Whites, and then later into the Baltic states and grabbing parts of Finland and Poland.
I'll admit, though, that given that we're talking about the industrialization period in general I shouldn't be talking about a decreasing population since over the whole early industrialization timeframe the population did rise even without considering conquest. I would have done better to day "but a notable part of it was due to keeping population growth down with the use of famines."
My great grandfather was one of the peasants you describe (his land was taken away). Although the state use of land was inefficient, it was not the continual famine that you imply. Food shortages occurred, but, they occurred under the Tsars as well. The industrialization that occurred pre and post WWII in the USSR seems pretty undeniable though.
Impressively, Nazi Germany was able to invent and field ballistic missiles, and to launch them at a rate never seen since, all while under constant bombardment.
Just don't ask where they got their factory workers.
What is forgotten today is that there were men who contemporaneously made the connection between communism and slavery while advocating for it, including George Fitzhugh:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Fitzhugh
Sociology for the South, or, the Failure of Free Society (1855) was George Fitzhugh's most powerful attack on the philosophical foundations of free society. In it, he took on not only Adam Smith, the foundational thinker of capitalism, but also John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and the entire liberal tradition. He argued that free labor and free markets enriched the strong while crushing the weak. What society needed, he wrote, was slavery, not just for blacks, but for whites as well. "Slavery," he wrote, "is a form, and the very best form, of socialism."
Sure, they contributed, but, at what scale?
http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/work.php
Built between 1931 and 1933, the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal was the first massive construction project of the Gulag. Over 100,000 prisoners dug a 141-mile canal with few tools other than simple pickaxes, shovels, and makeshift wheelbarrows in just 20 months. Initially viewed as a great success and celebrated in a volume published both in the Soviet Union and the United States, the canal turned out to be too narrow and too shallow to carry most sea vessels. Many prisoners died during construction.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/06/international/europe/06rus...
Vorkuta, a city built by gulag labor in the tundra 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow and 100 miles above the Arctic Circle, is slowly dying - and those who remain in many cases cannot afford to leave.
A Soviet-era sign that remains atop a central building exhorts people to mine more coal, the resource that first attracted the gulag's architects in the 1930's and resulted in forced labor by two million prisoners before the camps shut down in 1950's.
You seem to be pointing out that the GULAGs existed and are providing sources for this fact. I'm not really disputing the existence of the labor camps. Let me ask you this, do you know anyone who lived in the USSR, who worked in the USSR and who was not a convict in a labor camp? I know lots. Are you saying that they do not count?
So, did they spend some more months and modify it or did they just abandon it. I'm guessing the architect met with a nasty accident?
Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
So why do large companies manage to run centrally planned systems whereas centrally planned states seemed doomed to fail?
Examples abound in the last economic downturn.
The main advantages of the market seems to be that failure is usually localized and containable -- although we came frighteningly close to a widespread meltdown in 2008 -- and, arguably, markets are better at promoting information flow and responding to new demands (although I suspect the growth of IP law and the existence of trade secrets counteract this to some extent).
But it's worth noting that the mean life expectancy of a publicly quoted corporation is around 30 years -- and the USSR made it through just over seven decades.
The first world war put an end to the old order and made nationality non-discretionary -- and we're still dealing with the fallout today (as witness the permanent floating founder visas thread on HN).
Everyone has obligations that tend to reduce their freedom. The ones who think they don't are called psychopaths.
In personal development, an early stage is to understand that you can be independent. E.g. you can choose how to act and how to react to the outside world.
A higher level of development is to realize that we're inter-dependent. No man is an island.
There will always be constraints on our options. I don't like it, but I'm getting used to it.
There is no absolute freedom, and there are no truly free contracts.
Think evolution of organizations, economically inefficient ones die. People learn (in the Lamarckian way, too) what works best at the present time.
Also...
To quote an argument from your blog, there are many tens of millions of people needed to keep our civilization working efficiently (some specialized jobs might only have a few dozen practitioners, according to you).
And to keep up with research and new methods, in every decade a large percentage of all those jobs will be totally different.
Centrally planned system just can't touch that -- they can't even avoid traffic jams with a few million cars! (And those cars aren't [yet] genetically and culturally programmed to optimize their behavior individually and in groups.. and change a lot culturally every generation.)
Own petard, etc. :-)
Edit: A bit clearer, hopefully. Non-native language.
Scale matters. Most of the time when companies in a market system collapse, very few people starve or die.
The Soviet Union was a prison state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soviet_and_Eastern_Bloc...
Soon after the formation of the Soviet Union, emigration restrictions were put in place to keep citizens from leaving the various countries of the Soviet Socialist Republics,[1] though some defections still occurred. During and after World War II, similar restrictions were put in place in non-Soviet countries of the Eastern Bloc,[2] which consisted of the Communist states of Eastern Europe.[3][4]
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/opinion/18beckerman.html
Most in the group were pessimistic about their chances — but none more than Mr. Mendelevich. He felt sure they would get caught, but to his mind, a group suicide was preferable to a life of waiting for an exit visa that would never arrive. Even a botched attempt, he figured, would at least attract the eyes of the world.
Early the next day, as the plotters walked onto the tarmac, they were, indeed, caught. The K.G.B. had known of their plan for months. And the two leaders were later sentenced to death.
But Mr. Mendelevich was also right that their desperate act would make their demand for free emigration impossible to ignore. Now largely forgotten, this planned hijacking, and the Soviet government’s overreaction to it, opened the first significant rip in the Iron Curtain, one through which hundreds of thousands would eventually flee. With great drama, it undermined Communist orthodoxy. After all, if the Bolsheviks had built the perfect society, why would any well-adjusted citizens want to leave, let alone risk their lives to do so?
The essential weakness of the Soviet Union was exposed: to survive, the regime had to imprison its own population. This would be the beginning of the end.
Jews were understandably at the forefront of the emigration battle. Even as they were forbidden to exercise any kind of Jewish identity, they also had no option to assimilate in Soviet society. Their internal passports were stamped “Jew,” a word that three generations after the 1917 revolution signified little more than their status as outsiders. Many had come to feel that their existence inside the Soviet Union was untenable, that the only way to escape this paradox was to move away. But the doors were firmly shut; those who requested permission to leave were refused and then ostracized.
The push to emigrate, which had begun in the early 1960s as an underground movement, had grown by 1970 into an open campaign. Letters to the United Nations were signed by hundreds of Soviet Jews. Only a few months before the hijacking attempt, the Kremlin had called for a public relations counteroffensive that would paint Zionism as “a vanguard of imperialism.” A large press conference was arranged with “acceptable” Jews, including the prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya and the comedian Arkady Raikin, vowing loyalty to the Soviet Union and denouncing Zionism as expressing “the chauvinistic views and racist ravings of the Jewish bourgeoisie.”
Sergei Brin, who you mention, was his family also shot? If you applied for the paperwork properly you were allowed to leave.
Yes, the country effectively had closed borders, and yes, it was downright impossible for most people to leave. A trickle of emigrants who were begrudingly permitted to leave officially began in the 1970s owing to international Jewish repatriation policies and so on, but that was not an option for most people.
Nevertheless, to suggest that people were simply shot for attempting to leave is an absurd level of hyperbole. They weren't shot, they were just prevented from doing so via the usual bureaucratic means.
There is the small number of people who attempted a beeline across the border - similarly to the Berlin Wall climbers - past the spotlights and the guards and all. Thankfully, there were not many of them, as this is a very stupid approach to crossing any national border anywhere. The American-Mexican border may prove to be an unusual exception.
My point is, there was a lot to see inside the country. Were we technically "trapped" there? Absolutely. But to grok the actual significance of this, consider the single-digit percentage of Americans that hold foreign passports. Vanishingly few Americans have ever traveled outside the country, and a non-trivial number have never left their state or been beyond a neighbouring one.
So, while the fact that the borders were closed is important, and if that's your sole point, well, sure, but if you're likening it experientially to a prison, I think that's a little over the top. There were certain people who really wanted to leave and for whom that was undoubtably true. But as with most Americans, most Soviets were somewhere in the middle on that.
This is not an apologia or a whitewashing of the fact that our borders were closed, but an attempt to convey the human factor in a more nuanced, perceptive way.
>>The constant comparisons to a prison reflect the theoretical reality of leaving the country accurately, but poorly reflect the psychological perception of the issue by most citizens.
Of course, with information control from the cradle...
>>Vanishingly few Americans have ever traveled outside the country, and a non-trivial number have never left their state or been beyond a neighbouring one.
I thought Soviet didn't allow people to move to the place they wanted? Or was that just the big cities?
But sure, people traveled in the military service...? :-)
In the 90's big companies developed the technique of paying the big accounting firms for consultancy work which subverted the independence of the auditors and paved the way for Enron. The accounting treatment of leases and uncancellable suggests that there have been similar "successes" in subverting the setting of accounting standards.
Elsewhere we see big companies having sufficiently close ties to political power that they can subvert the police and the courts and even the law making process. This also ends badly.
I don't see any prospect of researching how large companies work and then turning that into a blue print for socialism 2.0. Large companies seem to be viable because of a separation of business and government that is fundamentally incompatible with the common ownership of the means of production.
As an organization grows, it requires people in support structures that are less linked to the ultimate bottom line. Ludwig von Mises proposed the idea that an organization requires a level of bureaucracy, in the absence of market signals. So to the extent that an employee is removed from from the direct market operations of the company, a bureaucracy is required.
Now, the reason companies don't outsource all their work to bidding contractors is that there is some value in holding resources in reserve. A bid-contractor is only as good as the next assignment, he may leave for another company when you need him the most. The solution is to have a contract where the particular individual will reserve his time and energy to one company (a.k.a. an employee). The employee will be effectively "slacking off", but will be on call for when his resources are needed.
GM should have collapsed, all the megabanks and companies that were too big to fail show us how central planning works without control.
Some things need central planning(mass production), communism is state capitalism with only one megacompany. That is a supermonopoly.
I have friends that were in communist Russia, if you made -talked something that upset some member of the party(they were God), depending on the offense, you, your sister, your son won't be able to work anywhere(there is only one company after all). Nothing else was needed to control every one.
An employee is free to resign if he would prefer to work for someone else. He can't be sent to a gulag. Customers aren't forced to accept a company's product or service, and can choose a competitor instead. Managers can fire incompetent or insubordinate workers. Customers can criticize a product without fear of being shot.
Customer, manager, employee, investor -- everyone is in the situation voluntarily, so they must negotiate on the basis of mutual self-interest. The company as an entity is more stable because its constituents aren't essentially at war with one another.
Let's be honest, job mobility even in market economies is a difficult affair for everyone but highly qualified professionals. The fact that IT workers can get a new job in a month is not indicative of the economy at large.
Second, even huge megacorps are tiny compared to countries. Microsoft is about the same population as Antigua and Barbuda, and if Antigua and Barbuda tried to go the Soviet state controlled economy route I predict that they would be much more successful at it than the Soviets were because its much easier to govern a smaller country.
Imagine if the company was all of society.
What I'm more interested in is this idea of democracy (inefficent, but least of a number of evils) vs. enlightened dictatorship (efficient, sucks if your priorities are different from leader's).
Small is beautiful in part because you don't need to convince a lot of people with disparate motivations to do something.
The same pattern arises in startup vs. bigco, and visionary CEO vs. design by committee.
Hedrick Smith gives many examples of this kind of lying in his book _The Russians_. While that's certainly part of the problem, I think you're missing the deeper issue that the parent is pointing to: the amount of bandwidth necessary to do efficient economic calculation is far greater than what can be done by a committee of nomemklatura and their computers. They simply don't have the fine level of data detail and massively parallel computing power that a distributed economy provides.
[1]http://www.amazon.com/Naked-Economics-Undressing-Science-Rev...
[2]http://www.amazon.com/Road-Serfdom-Documents---Definitive-Co...
[3]http://www.amazon.com/Marx-Mises-Capitalist-Challenge-Calcul...
2) China was centrally controlled to disastrous results for a long time but from Deng Xiaoping onwards - where we see most of the growth - there have been more and more reforms both to regulation and to government. So not only are there now a lot of capitalist-like incentives and "special economic zones" as well as partnerships with companies outside of China the regional governments have been give more power to customize things to their local conditions. That's not to say the party isn't in control and there isn't massive corruption, but it's a very sophisticated system that's entirely different to the mechanisms of government and economic calculation that the Soviets employed. The recycling of sovietology is not fruitful though. Timothy Geithner being an Asia specialist is no accident. Also, there is a significant faction in the party that wants to transition to democracy (or a "Chinese version" of it), including some in the party central think tank and former generals. It's beyond me to gauge its strength other than to say it wouldn't surprise me if they won the argument and that we'd see a transition in the next three decades to something that looks like a cross between post-war South Korean/Japanese authoritarian democracy and post-communist Russian plutocratic democracy.
All that said, it must also be remembered that the USA is not purely free markets either and has had a significant portion of the economy state-funded and directed via military and space investment; to say nothing of the unique role that universities play in all western capitalist democracies that often goes under the radar of economists. That said, look at the wikipedia list of US inventions and Nobel prizes. There is much more to that incredible record than free markets, it's common law, bankruptcy law and many democratic anti-corruption techniques. Hence Hayek's "The Constitution of Liberty"[1], and Popper's "The Open Society and its Enemies"[2] which continue the reading above to the complex of arguments about the rest of the social aspects of free societies. From across the sea, this has to be the greatest problem with a certain brand of American free marketeer that turns to Mises' work, done before Hayek, and merely sees Hayek as a regurgitation. This is not the case Hayek has a much more powerful articulation of a political philosophy beyond just an economic theory. Agree or not, it's something which needs to be engaged with. I hope these qualifications and extensions help.
[1]http://www.amazon.com/Constitution-Liberty-F-Hayek/dp/022632...
[2]http://www.amazon.com/Open-Society-its-Enemies-Routledge/dp/...
2) Like I said, window dressing. The major corporations are effectively part of the government as far as anything major goes, and internally communistic like any corp. I guess you do get the advantage of one weakened chain link from the corporate leadership to the gov't, and that's somewhat significant, but you can certainly draw parallels from the current chinese miracle to the 1950s soviet miracle -- gotta remember, they beat us to orbit.
I have tried to see if I could find any numbers on phone installations up to the fall but haven't found any.
Also according to one of the main KGB execs the SDI program was when they realized that they weren't able to compete with the US anymore.
Ironically the SDI project besides from it being impossible to implement, had it been fully implemented, it would have cribbled the US economy too.
There is also a nice quite from Arthur C. Clarke about the SDI project in which he observed that any system as powerful as the vision of the SDI project would be more dangerous in itself than the dangers it was supposed to protect against.
In any case you seem to be mistaking Soviet Union for Mongolia or some other equally well-developed country. Moscow stats - http://mgts.ru/company/about/foundation - 162K new lines in 1970, 89K - in '71, 130K - in '72, etc.
Parent poster is making it clear that such a point was well over decades before the soviet union fell, so it's hard for the theory to explain the fall.
Anyway it's a theory I heard somewhere I make no claims about it's validity. However I do believe there is something to it which explains why North Korea is so gong ho about controlling information (and being so successful at it)
There is a reason why they weld the radio station to one frequency and why the the US is trying to smuggle radios over the border.
http://www.amazon.com/Arsenals-Folly-Making-Nuclear-Vintage/...
The article is fairly serious, but has some dry humor mixed in. This line was the funniest:
> In the 1970s and early 1980s, the Soviet leadership, however, was not intellectually prepared to heed lessons from the School of Salamanca. The shortest quotation about the intellectual capacity of the Soviet leadership came from the Politburo minutes: "Mr. Zasiadko has stopped binge drinking. Resolution: nominate Mr. Zasiadko as a minister to Ukraine."
A night watch spots a shadow trying to sneak by. "Stop! Who goes there? Documents!" The frightened person chaotically shuffles through his pockets and drops a paper. A soldier picks it up and reads slowly, with difficulty: "U.ri.ne A.na.ly.sis"... "Hmm... a foreigner, sounds like..." "A spy, looks like.... Let's shoot him on the spot!" Then reads further: "'Proteins: none, Sugars: none, Fats: none...' You are free to go, proletarian comrade! Long live the World revolution!"
While China today isn't nearly as bad as the USSR was, their authoritarian government that still jails and executes political opponents hasn't stopped their political stability and economic success.
Who you jail and the effect that said jailing has on other people also matters.
But, now that you've brought it up, do you think that they're equally bad? (Note - "both bad" doesn't imply "equal".)
This was in the 1930s under Stalin. USSR has more history than that; when I lived there, no one I knew was shot, no one was exiled; nor was anyone afraid of being shot or exiled (I can tell you what they were afraid of, though). My great grandmother's generation certainly remembered those times though.
Your statement plays on the perception that I have seen in the US that the USSR was this terrible place and all of its citizens hated it. I don't know if you are from the US, so, I will not make any assumptions. I can tell you that the propaganda machine here in the US is at least as good as it was in the USSR.
For the purpose of the article (and my comment) it really doesn't matter how the populace felt. My second comment had some snark due to your "idiotic statements" comment. But, there is a lot of reported history of purges, removal from film (had an article right here on HN about that), and exile of people whose opinions didn't jive with the current regime.
In USSR, I recall propaganda that said that everyone in the US was racist and that blacks were uniformly mistreated. Of course, the reality is that there was slavery, there was the civil rights movement and that now things are different. Broad statements like that smack of propaganda.
I am pretty sure the statement applied to the whole run of the USSR. Maybe more in parts and less in others, but they ignored the reality of their situation.
You seem to be trying to add things to what I said that have nothing to do with the statement and truly I am never happy with the "well your just as bad/worse" argument. It really doesn't have anything to do with what I said or prove me wrong. For example, the whole second paragraph of the above post has nothing to do with what I said.
"Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia" http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Empire-Lessons-Modern-Russia/...
The description and reviews are very comprehensive.