Hacker News Reader

Comment by DubiousPusher | Hacker News Reader

This is great. I've been interested in understanding how the Soviet economy worked for a long time. I've found only a handful of articles like this one. Unless you're willing to delve into hardcore economic academic papers (I am not) it's hard to get an actual informed perspective. Most Googling around will basically return you the rote response that it basically didn't work. Which, despite the many issues with the Soviet economy, is obviously not true.

View on HN

It's probably the language barrier - anything English is basically one-sided cold war propaganda repeated ad nauseam. Anything more detailed tends to be Russian, German or generally Eastern European since US literature tends to not care about more detailed looks into how the country worked besides repeating the same lines about food queues and other cliches.

(And that makes sense, we tend to focus on our own country and environment.)

BAM is an interesting case. One of the largest engineering projects of the 20th century, and they had to convince volunteers to join.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baikal%E2%80%93Amur_Mainline

> Which, despite the many issues with the Soviet economy, is obviously not true.

The first thing I hear from any ex-Soviet who grew up in the USSR is how their lives were impacted by the constant shortages and censorship of issues with the supply chain. There's a classic joke from the USSR that goes:

"Comrade, aren't you excited for when the USA finally falls?"

"No, who will we buy our grain from?"

Another one:

"Isn't it true that the USA is rotting from within?"

"Yes, but what a smell!"

Millions of people in the USSR starved to death, and their consumer tech was among the most unreliable and poorly-made available internationally. This despite Soviet mathematicians and engineers being among the finest and hardest-working on the planet. They could only just overcome the constraints that the centrally-governed economy placed on them. The only notable exception is military hardware, which was actually funded.

What do you mean "it's obviously not true [that the Soviet economy didn't work]"?

My favorite one went like this:

A guy walks into the store, looks mournfully at the bare shelves, and asks the worker at the counter, "So, comrade, you don't have any meat today, do you?"

"Comrade, did you not read the sign at the entrance? This is a seafood market; we don't have any fish. The meat shop is across the road - they don't have any meat."

I've been trying to remember this joke for so long, thank you!

Well, the country septupled its GDP over the 70 years of Soviet rule. For a time, between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of WWII it was one of the fastest growing economies in world history. While facing terrible famine and hunger before WWII, the Soviet Union largely ended starvation by the mid-late century. The Soviet government managed to extend the benefits of sanitation, healthcare and electrification to tens of millions of the people living under its power.

To me, while we might see many many problems within the Soviet economy and see many ways it could have been better, it is clearly not an economy that "didn't work". And by some measures, we can even say it "worked" better than the post Soviet economy.

I found Zubok's recent book 'Collapse' to be quite informative in this regard if you haven't read it, not exactly what you are looking for but in the first half it deals with Gorbechev's economic reforms and there is some fairly detailed discussion of the economy and how it functioned.

> I've been interested in understanding how the Soviet economy worked for a long time.

After the '91 collapse Western scholars briefly got their hands on some Soviet archives and worked to piece this together. The Soviet economy was run by fixers; Party people that answered to Party leadership and mediated the difference between the State's official socialist schemes and reality. The system was opaque and kleptocratic in the extreme and, except for a brief period after the collapse, it appears not much has changed.

A concise survey of the archives can found found in: "Behind the Facade of Stalin's Command Economy: Evidence from the Soviet State and Party Archives" (Paul Gregory, 2001).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com