Inside the Soviet Army (1982)
militera.lib.ru
militera.lib.ru
Soviet Communists are frequently reproached for having attempted to build a socialist society but having produced something which closely resembles a prison. Such a charge is entirely unjustified. In the Soviet Union some of the inmates have larger cells than others, some eat well, others badly. There is complete confusion-a lot remains to be done to tidy up the situation. True socialism, in which everyone is truly equal, does not just resemble a prison-it is a prison. It can not exist unless it is surrounded by high walls, by watchtowers and by guard-dogs, for people always want to escape from any socialist regime, just as they do from a prison. If you try to nationalise medicine and, from the best possible motives, to guarantee work for all the doctors, you will find that they pack their bags and leave the country. Try to bring a little order into the situation and your engineers (the best ones), your designers, your ballerinas (again, the best ones) and many, many others will also flee abroad. If you continue your attempts to establish a model society you will need to build walls around it. You will be forced to do this sooner or later by the flood of refugees.
The problem with communism isn't that so many of it's services are nationalized, it's that one-party politics leads to an ossified, excessively powerful, corrupt bureaucracy with no checks and balances.
Any political system that lacks dynamism and protects cronyism would suffer the same problems, regardless of it's ideological base. That's why in practice Fascism and Communism produce functionally indistinguishable resultant states.
They are usually MUCH better than the U.S. model (in that everyone has basic healthcare and nobody gets bankrupt), but I wouldn't use words like "efficient" and "cost effective" to describe them.
At least within a democracy, they don't get "that" ossified, but you do get a massive, powerful and somewhat corrupt bureaucracy (at least in my country).
I find it incredible that the waste generated is less than the waste from the U.S. insurance system, yet it is so.
He says only that the effect is to place the doctors into a sort of "prison" scenario. Prisons can be efficient and well run. The problem is that they're prisons.
Imagine your own sector being socialized.
> The Soviet Union does not need new territory.
> A communist regime cannot feel secure so long as an example of another kind of life exists anywhere near it, with which its subjects can draw comparisons. It is for this reason that any form of Communism, not only the Soviet variety, is always at pains to shut itself off from the rest of the world
This is a massive insight. Most current analysis of Putin centers around a WWII Lebensraum perspective of his actions. Modelling his behavior in terms of neutralizing breakaway territories seems a much better fit.
Putin isn't a communist and Western media is widely available in Russia so there is no benefit in regards to information flow in expanding the border. And there is no significant economic difference between Russia and her neighbours, the Soviets were trying to hide the evidence that average people in the West had it better than the new Soviet man.
Putin's actions look much more like those of the 19th century Russian Empire than of the USSR (which never used nationalist rhetoric).
I assume you live in US? Do you not find it ironic that you blame Russia for taking this seriously (in their own backyard) while US have been staging government coups within other countries (with multiple death tolls) for decades?
And in regards to corruption:
"People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones"
Perhaps you should focus on your own backyard first ;)
At least South Korea is doing well because it has seen so much sacrifice of it's own people by enriching the nation's government and it's handful of conglomerates. They may be doing well but South Korea and Japan has the highest suicide rates, a sign that although economically prosperous do not equate to collective happiness. Chile for instance has a higher happiness index than of South Korea or Japan.
However, I will add that such economic progress is not at all miserable and unwanted situation. U.S. has provided much of the security guarantees and the environment for such successes.
All former soviet republics or sattelites. 20 years later all are modern democracies with much better economy than countries that had the bad luck to still be in "Russian sphere of influence".
Also, I believe that you meant Colin Powell speaking to the UN. I don't believe VP Cheney made any presentations to the UN in the run up to the Iraq War.
Sorry for the long(slightly off-topic) lead-in, enjoy(Harald Pinters Nobel Prize speech): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flvLfSSR1d4
I'm simply amused at ignorance of people who have very little understanding of the situation but try to give their 2 cents.
If government of South Korea was overthrown by anti-US activists; US would be dispatching troops to protect their military basis and citizens within a split second.
And I will bet you that the death toll would be in hundreds within first few days.
This is like China not willing to give up North Korea, it has it's function as a buffer.
NATO might have gotten away with limited defence/economic pacts with former Soviet satellites, but full NATO and EU membership was bound to provoke a reaction from Russia.
Apparently the US State Department didn't learn from its arrogance in Iraq, because such blatant provocation shouldn't have been allowed.
Provocation: Letting Ukraine voluntarily choose closer ties with the West
Not Provocation: Invading and annexing the Crimea
Gotcha.
Also, since when is the US State Department in charge of the EU?
Ukraine should have been quietly told that joining NATO or the EU was not possible.
>Not Provocation: Invading and annexing the Crimea
Strawman: This.
What Russia did is absolutely wrong IMO, but it is expected (just like the US doesn't like anyone else messing with South America or the Caribbean).
>Also, since when is the US State Department in charge of the EU?
The US has been the primary power in Western Europe since the 8th of May 1945. The US can directly control who enters NATO, and wields significant influence over the primary EU members. The possibility of Ukraine joining NATO or the EU would have gone through State and should have been firmly rejected.
EDIT: Downvotes and no replies, I can't tell whether I am on Hacker News or reddit.
Nations have a right of self-determination. Russia and USA can argue for their interests, but if USA and Russia agree "oh, country X will be in your sphere of influence" without giving country X a voice and a veto-vote there - that is evil and insulting to people living in those nations, just as Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement before WW2.
Such divisions should be unacceptable to the global community.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/bolivia-angered-by...
Putin probably remembers his history. In World War II, Germany nearly overran Russia, and it started from the middle of Poland. If it had been able to start from the eastern border of Ukraine, Russia might well have not survived.
So Putin may feel, historically, that Russia's survival is at stake if Ukraine joins NATO. (I am not saying that Putin's desire to control Ukraine is moral or ethical. I am merely saying that it is understandable.)
Do you see any armies marching to protect Ukraine's territorial integrity? Russia isn't a small state that can be easily threatened, and nobody in the West has the stomach for a real war. I bet Russia could take all of Ukraine with no response beyond a boycott and some air-strikes.
P.S. The US has done far worse things than what Russia is currently doing in order to keep South America and the Caribbean within their sphere of influence. Small neighbours of great powers seldom get to exercise real independence.
If we followed your ideas, the Baltic states would never have broken away from Russia. That actually worked out quite well for them.
Practically: Because that is the way the world actually works. If you've got a big power like Russia, with a leader that is willing to use that power, then your choices have consequences. You'd better think about those consequences when you're making your choices.
[Edit: If you're a neighbor to a big power like Russia, then your choices have consequences. The point was not that Russia's choices have consequences, but that Ukraine's do.)
The current situation is more like the 19th century "great game". The Ukraine is in Russia's turf, and Putin is all about rebuilding the lost greatness of the nation (while enriching himself & friends as much as possible).
Maneuvering to place the Ukraine under the umbrella of NATO, dominated by the US, or the EU, dominated by Germany, just feeds that message. I don't watch Russian news, but I'm sure the last 6 weeks have been longest victory lap of all time.
People are reverting to WW2 stories because they can't figure out WTF the point of US policy is, and it's easier to say "OMG, Hitler!" than attempt to explain why the Vice President is flying around re-affirming US willingness to go to war with Russia in order to protect Estonia and Latvia.
Don't forget that it was provided by a KGB defector who was sentenced to death and was living under protection of his asylum country. Anything that's not a verifiable fact should really be assumed to have a massive bias.
The really interesting things to me are:
1) Invisible divisions, and the system to split units
2) Hiding top-tier equipment from the West -- even at the cost of not allowing their own soldiers to know what equipment they're supposed to ultimately use. Vs. the US, where soldiers are expected to be intimately familiar with their assigned weapons systems.
3) A really naive view of economics, that the military is "free" because the State provides it. It doesn't correctly assign the cost as that of the foregone alternative -- a tank means 100 fewer cars, etc.
4) "Role before Rank" promotions -- officers being promoted into a role above their rank as a precondition to attaining that rank. In the US system, that only really happens for certain General Officers; everyone else is promoted and then assigned, with most early to mid career promotions being either automatic or based on seniority and checkboxes.
The essence was "to be a senior dev you must already be doing these things". The proof (observed by two senior people and acknowledged by colleagues at and below your level) that you were fully performing the given role meant that you would be given the job title and salary to match.
We felt this was an improvement on other systems as it made it very clear what it meant to the individual. In that they needed to improve, learn things, operate differently, to be able to progress from one tier of recognition to the next and left it up to the individual to say whether they wanted to or not. It also handled the scenario of demotion... failure to maintain a standard of work meant that you'd set your role (and thereby rank) at the step below.
Did this work? Mostly, yes.
Definitely some rough edges when it came to dealing with long-time serving people who didn't (or couldn't) improve themselves. For those people the title and salary seldom matched their expectations.
While off topic a bit... I found this structure pretty discouraging.
If you don't promote your developers into the role they are actually fulfilling, it quickly begins to feel like you're taking advantage of them. That is, treating them and giving them the responsibilities of a Sr. Engineer but only compensating them like a typical engineer (or developer).
There's only so many 'atta boys you can give someone before it seems like you're dodging meaningful compensation for their efforts.
We put in place quarterly reviews that were heavily focused on employee improvement, learning and application of that learning. Promotions were automatic and didn't need many levels of buy-in to approve. It was simply "are you doing the job of a senior dev? Congrats, then you are one".
This was also strange as to most it was very different from quarterly or annual reviews they'd encountered elsewhere that had focused on project progress and milestones. The business goal was to build and retain the best team, focusing on that meant the project goals naturally followed.
It's worth pointing out that one of the reasons this system works in the US army is that non-commissioned officers are trusted with a great deal more responsibility than their Soviet counterparts were. The mechanical promotion of junior officers would be impossible without 15 year veteran NCOs taking care of a lot of the grunt work that Soviet officers got stuck with, simply because the system wouldn't trust NCOs with it.
I just found the post fascinating. Reminded me of this for some reason: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnJbtbh4tDE
Seriously, USSR didn't have plans to occupy and assimilate random foreign countries. Not as far as I know.
And don't forget USSR depended heavily on Romanian furniture :)
The first three parts are a rundown of how the Soviet Army was organized at the time of writing (the early 1980s). This part was of great interest then, because reliable information on the Soviet Army was hard to come by in the days of the Iron Curtain, and the author (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Suvorov) was a recent defector. But for today's reader, this part is pretty dull, all tables of organization and maps of military districts. They're all safe to skip.
Part IV ("Mobilisation") departs from the data-dump format of the earlier chapters to talk about how the Soviet Army is organized so that in wartime it can double its number of units overnight, through a system the author calls "invisible divisions." If you wondered how the USSR was able to turn things around after the early disasters following the Nazi invasion in 1941, this chapter will be of interest.
Part V ("Strategy and Tactics") is where the book starts to get really interesting, because here it starts giving you insights into how different the way the Russians looked at war is from the way Western armies do. Part VI ("Equipment") expands on that theme by showing some examples of how that type of thinking informed the way the Soviets designed weapons that became world-famous for their effectiveness, like the AK-47, the T-34 tank, and the Hind helicopter.
Finally, Parts VII ("The soldier's lot") and VIII ("The officer's path") are narrative descriptions of the lives of enlisted conscripts and officers in the Soviet Army.
Overall, I found the book useful because the author's experience in that system taught him a lot of lessons about leadership -- especially leadership in situations where you're expected to achieve impossible things with limited resources and mediocre (at best) people. And the stuff about Soviet strategic thinking and weapons design has lots of interesting things to say about the value of simplicity, reliability and scale over things like feature richness or even user comfort.
These are not arguments you hear a lot from Western writers, so they are a refreshing alternative take. He's writing about weapons, of course, but the arguments are presented in such a fashion that you can easily extrapolate the lessons to really any kind of product.
(I actually referenced one of those lessons in a previous comment on HN, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5062096)
You don't have to read the book front-to-back to get the good stuff out of it; skip over the early chapters and start at Part V and you'll get all the nutrition with none of the boring, out-of-date tables and charts and maps.
http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov12/07.html
is spot on! Been there.
Right...
MiG-25, Mach-2.8. All steel.
SR-71, Mach-3.5. Uses titanium for 85% of its structure.
The YF-12 was a twin-seater derivative of the A-12 that was developed as a fighter aircraft, complete with a look-down/shoot-down radar and missile bays.
The F-12 never made it to production, but a small number high-speed of weapons tests were conducted with the 3 YF-12 airframes that were built.
With that said, the MiG-25 should certainly not be belittled as a marvel of aviation. It was a blisteringly fast interceptor and reconnaissance aircraft, with an impressive radar system for its time. It filled a special role in the Russian Air Force until last year[2].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_YF-12 [2] https://medium.com/war-is-boring/21d12739b5db
All that being said, I point out that the plane did what they set out to do, and regardless of whatever compromises had to be made, it was an aerospace achievement.
Final sentence of Conclusion: "Protest today. Tomorrow it will be too late."
Even Russians will say Soviet Union is shit or people will react like, 'why are you learning russian and so obsessed with Soviet Union', I think it's because I think it could've been a great system, it's a noble ideology that men and women of all races are integrated and all receive the similar dividends but human greed and corruption always ruins things. I don't like the way people have been persecuted because of Soviet Union, but I find it's technologies and philosophies very interesting.
Socialism ends in death and misery, every single time. At this point death and misery is a feature, not a bug that can be fixed.
But the biggest issue would be that someone else would now control that money. And there are no guarantees that they would do it better.
The Bolsheviks were dictatorial bastards, no doubt. And many people think Bolshevik communism is the only way to go, it certainly is not.
Ah yes, the True Scotsman defense for socialism.
Not that it matters, because pointing to the UK of all places (or any place else on your list, for that matter) as an example of socialism is, to put it mildly, 'confused' about socialism, those countries, or both.
Also, USSR was not socialist, it was technically a state capitalism system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism
Leninism and its descendents might, but every country in the developed West -- where the 19th Century socialists criticism of capitalism was focussed, and whose conditions their program was largely designed for -- adopted, between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, a substantial portion of the socialist program, and its generally not ended in "death and misery", indeed, compared to those same countries experience under the system for which the name "capitalism" was created, its alleviated the "death and misery".
You can't really judge "socialism" by the results of a particular family of efforts to implement it outside of the context for which it was designed, which is exactly what judging socialism by Leninism and its descendants is.
For a start, socialism goes back further than Marx. The defining characteristic of socialism is the abolition of ownership of private property. Socialism, in the Marxian view, was what was going to arise given the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Everywhere this has been tried, it has ended in death and misery.
The creation of a welfare state is not socialism. It's not even close, unless you want to do some post-hoc rebranding.
"To everyone according to their needs" sounds noble in theory but I'm not sure it would ever be workable in practice, without externalities (like labor camps, authoritarian force) subsidizing it.
I can mail you a copy in Russian (: If there is one in a local book store, not sure Rezun is popular currently.
Challenge accepted.