Hypothetical: would the USSR have done better against Germany without Stalin?

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Hurricane
Sure, the people who were executed were properly documented, buried, and in most cases, the family was informed. But as I said, most of the deaths were not executions, but death through famine, various sicknesses and on the trains through or from the Gulags or exiles.

Even the famine dead have to be somewhere. Why hasn't Ukraine asked for international help in creating a Truth Commission to uncover as many victims as they can, not just bodies, but documentary evidence, disappeared towns, etc.?

The big problem is to approximate this figure, since the graves (if the dead was buried at all) are unmarked, small and undocumented.

Very convenient. You don't have to produce evidence, just assert it and claim its too hard to produce evidence. We just have to accept your word. S'no good. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

[Whoha]

Well, I don't Have the numbers, I do know that the Chinese will build the vast majority of the 7E7 tailfin assemblies that will be produced each year, with Kansas building the remaining ones.

[Hurricane]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Even the famine dead have to be somewhere. Why hasn't Ukraine asked for international help in creating a Truth Commission to uncover as many victims as they can, not just bodies, but documentary evidence, disappeared towns, etc.?

Umm, the fact that millions died in the famine has been universally accepted for decades. The documentary, eye-witness and physical evidence is overwhelming. I guess the leadership in Ukraine hasn't asked for a truth commission since this whole issue is undisputed.

Originally posted by chegitz guevara

The big problem is to approximate this figure, since the graves (if the dead was buried at all) are unmarked, small and undocumented.

Very convenient. You don't have to produce evidence, just assert it and claim its too hard to produce evidence. We just have to accept your word. S'no good. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

Don't put words I never said into my mouth. I never said it's "too hard to produce evidence". I only said it requires a lot of work (which to date only partially has been done), and that means that the estimates of these dead vary greatly between researchers. And again, this is not at all some "extraordinary claim", but a fact that is corroborated by loads of eye-witness testimonies, camp commander memoirs, documentary evidence and physical evidence.

[ErikM]

Originally posted by Hurricane
Umm, the fact that millions died in the famine has been universally accepted for decades. The documentary, eye-witness and physical evidence is overwhelming.

It may have been universally accepted, but certainly not because of overwhelming evidence.
See the post I have made on this subject here.

I guess the leadership in Ukraine hasn't asked for a truth commission since this whole issue is undisputed.

Or, because our glorious Ukrainian governmnent likes to stir up the famine issue each time it cannnot make payments for Russian natural gas deliveries...

[Kuciwalker]

Umm, the fact that millions died in the famine has been universally accepted for decades.

The same can be said of the existance of an omnipotent creator

[Hurricane]

Originally posted by Kucinich

Umm, the fact that millions died in the famine has been universally accepted for decades.

The same can be said of the existance of an omnipotent creator

Sure, but the burden of proof is on the one rejecting this universally accepted truth, i.e. you. So as long as the historians back my view, it is up to you to prove that they all are wrong.

ErikM, thanks for the link to your post. If you could link to a well-established historian who has written about the subject, it would be even better.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Hurricane
Sure, but the burden of proof is on the one rejecting this universally accepted truth, i.e. you. So as long as the historians back my view, it is up to you to prove that they all are wrong.

Not scientifically or philosophically.

I'm not disputing the famine or that lots of people died. What I'm saying is that we don't know how many? Was it millions, tens of millions, hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands? We don't know. All we have is a series of uneducated guesses which tend to skew towards the political bent of the guesser. This is why I have doubts. While I accept that millions, maybe even tens of millions of corpses can be laid at the feet of Stalin and his cult, it is an article of faith, informed only by the fact that I have heard it over and over again, but I've never seen hard numbers or real proof.

With most democides, there is overwhelming evidence that it occured. I'm not saying that it didn't happen. What I want are solid facts. I want to know how many, how it was done, when it was done, etc. That's what a Truth Commission could accomplish.

The murders of tens of millions of people is an extraordinary claim, regardless of whether or not it is a universally-accepted "truth." If I said Stalin liked to mutilate kittens, I'm willing to wager most people would simply accept it, because they've been told their while lives that he was a monster.

[ErikM]

Originally posted by Hurricane
ErikM, thanks for the link to your post. If you could link to a well-established historian who has written about the subject, it would be even better.

Two most widely cited accounts on the Ukrainian famine in the Western press are Robert Conquest's "The Harvest of Sorrows" and Richard Pipes "Russia under Bolshevik Regime".

None of them have my respect, and afaik their reputation among serious academic historians is rather low.

There are only two ways to arrive at a certain casualties figure - (i) documental evidence or (ii) estimates based on the demographic data.

(i) is very hard since, as you have mentioned earlier, it requires years and years of archive works, and many official records are missing (ie, they were destroyed during Nazi occupation in WW2). So the estimates are derived using (ii).

But if you ever done some sort of empirical research in any sort of science or engineering (high school/college projects count), then you know that no estimate is any good without reporting standard errors. Where are they in Conquest/Pipes studies? If they would honestly report that their estimate is something like 7 mln. deaths plus-minus 15 million error margin, then it would be clear to everyone just how good their research is. And take it from me, if their standard errors were +/- 300,000 they would be reported for sure

Just for an experiment, I googled "ukrainian famine" and clicked on the first western link on the first page. So here's your typical Ukrainian famine article ("Denied, Defiled, or Ignored" by some Orysia Tracz, who dwells in Canada. The article is rather long, so I'll only put some excerpts with comments.

"You know how a wound sometimes still hurts even though you thought it had healed long ago? The scar may be barely visible, but it tingles, burns, and smarts at the oddest moments. I have a scar like that on my soul, and ten years later it still aches."

// First, let's create a proper emotionial athmoshere.

"None of my relatives died in the Great Famine in Ukraine during 1932/33. The millions who starved in that genocide by famine lived in central and eastern Ukraine, under Soviet rule; my parents and their families were in western Ukraine, under Polish rule. Yet when the 50th anniversary of that nightmare was marked in 1983, I mourned as if the dead were my own. "

// I don't personally know anyone who died but I will write nonetheless almost as a witness.

"It would have been painful enough just remembering such an event, and honouring the millions of innocent dead who starved while there was plenty of food around -- unavailable just to them. What made the 50th commemoration of the Great Famine such an ugly experience was the deafening silence and disbelief of the majority of the Canadian media and the reaction of a certain segment of society. The various editors, columnists, and producers did not believe -- or did not want to believe -- that the famine actually happened, that it was deliberately orchestrated to forcibly starve the Ukrainian population so adamant in remaining Ukrainian and non- Communist, and so resistant to Stalin's collectivization. Not only did they not believe, they stonewalled and tried to ignore the event itself and its anniversary. For the media, Ukrainian issues were not "politically correct" in 1983. Simultaneously, the pro-Soviet segment in Canada did all it could not only to deny that the famine happened and was man-made, but to vilify and defame the Ukrainian survivors and their community for even daring to bring it up. Often, this was the group the media believed. The campaign, bolstered by the Soviet embassy, was so malicious that a decade later remembering those events still hits a raw nerve."

// Canadian conspiracy uncovered. How dared these Canadian editors to disbelieve those claims? Clearly, Canada is such a pro-Soviet country, that Canadian media, apparently controlled by the Soviet Embassy, simply denied to print anything that can be interpreted as anti-Soviet. Or maybe they just refused to print some empty claims like "there was plenty of food around" without any factual backing?

But wait, it gets better.

"While other tragedies of human history and of our own inhumanity to each other in this century were covered often by the print and electronic media, the Famine did not count. Because of Soviet disinformation, with a few exceptions it had been ignored for those fifty years. The fear of that Soviet system was so pervasive and so paralyzing, that some survivors of the Famine -- even those with no family at all left in Ukraine -- still refused to have their experiences recorded fifty years later in Canada."

// Wow... All hail KGB, as obviously they had enough resources to not only read anything that can be potentially printed in Canada, but also to exact revenge on any Canadian citizen who would dare to say something against the communists. The thought of applying Occam's razor and acknoweledging that "survivors" did not want to record their "experiences" since they had no "experiences " to tell, apparently never occurs to dear Mrs. Tracz.

"Objectivity, credibility, and fairness were a primary concern to those on the receiving end of Famine information. And the idea that the Famine happened and its story must be told was not a welcome one. The Manitoba Department of Education finally included the Famine in a world issues course, part of a grade 12 social studies curriculum. But the course "would not favour either side of the issue. The curriculum would be designed to teach that a famine did occur in Ukraine in 1932-33 and that millions of people perished. The reason the famine occurred will be open to discussion." [emphasis o.t.] Would the reasons for the Holocaust be "open to discussion"?!

// Manitoba Department of Education is full of commies, that is obvious. How dare they to teach the subject objectively? To Mrs. Tracz it is obvious: Holocaust. Russians had a secret program of exterminating Ukrainians. How come Ukrainians fought alongside Russians in the WWII after that and how come about a third of a population of Russia and Ukraine is of mixed Russian/Ukrainian heritage is a topic not worthy of discussion.

"Letters to the editor in Winnipeg papers were equally cruel, and at times pathetically comical in their logic. J. Goray reacted to a positive review of Robert Conquest's Harvest of Sorrow by Tom Oleson in the Winnipeg Free Press:

... It is obvious that Mr. Oleson's lack of factual information...led him to rely on the discredited Robert Conquest.... [Walter Duranty and others] maintained the famine was grossly exaggerated, while others such as William Randolph Hearst, Malcolm Muggeridge, Robert Conquest, Victor Krawchenko and other falsificators of history adopted a hostile, anti-Soviet policy of slander and vilification. In any case, millions of people from all over the world visited the Soviet Union including the Ukraine during the time of the `famine' and it would have been impossible to conceal such an apocalyptic event as the death by starvation of seven million people had there been such a catastrophe. "

// When Mr. J.Goray actually attempts to use logic and states the obvious, that it is bloody impossible to kill one third of a country's population without anyone noticing, Mrs. Tracz quickly dismisses it as "pathetically comical". I am a bit at a loss what is it Mrs. Tracz finds so comical about Goray's letter, but it never hurts to describe your opposition as pathetic clowns.

"To my horror, an appalling comparison surfaced: this famine "hoax" was perpetrated to diminish the number of those exterminated in the Holocaust of World War II. Did anyone really believe that any people wanted to compete over how many more millions died in one genocide over another?"

// Hmm, yes. I would think that Nazi propaganda would have nothing against writing off some of their victims on their enemies, Communist Russia.

"There are enough scholarly works available to the public documenting the Famine; readers can judge for themselves Robert Conquest's, James Mace's and Malcolm Muggeridge's credentials and compare them to Walter Duranty's."

// Walter Duranty's was a Times correspondent in the USSR that has written a sequence of generally positive articles of the Soviet Russia, for which he won a Putlitzer prize. Another commie, obviously. But how can we possibly compare credentials of a Putlizer Prize winner who actually was there at the time of this event with Prof. Robert Conquest, who was not?

"As skulls continue to emerge from the Ukrainian soil, both from the Famine and the mass executions of the later 1930s, there is no more need for the "other point of view," "both sides," "objectivity," "pursuing the truth," "evaluating for ... trustworthiness," and "non-political investigations."

// Well said Orysia Facts, who needs them?

[Hurricane]

I guess we just have to wait for some new research then.

[VetLegion]

Originally posted by ErikM

Nice hypothetical experiment VetLegion, but why speculate? Let's take a look at what really happened after Soviet Union fell apart! After all, 13 years have passed since break-up of the Soviet Union; Stalin's industrialization was accomplished in shorter period of time.

It is a weak comparison between deindustrialization of Russia and and industrialization of SSSR.

First and foremost, the system fell apart in Russia after 1990 because it was rotten. It had a disease for 70 years. Capitalism hit Russia unprepared, and it showed. Things were different back in the period we are discussing, many people from Tzarist or NEP days were still alive. Many of the worst practices of communism had yet to take root in the population.

Soviet Union in late 1980s was, as you put it, underindustrialized but still industrialized. SU was still a huge market for automobiles

Hey, doesn't Lada still sell about 1 million cars per year?

Still waiting after these 13 years, in fact. Didn't come by some reasons. In fact, during 90s former Soviet republics exported capital to the Western world - to the tune of estimated $30 bln per year, to find its proper place in Swiss bank accounts, Spanish sea-side real estate, and English football teams.

Russia is not the safest place to invest in. Fault for that doesn't lie with Swiss banks or English football teams.

Where did it come from? Why, from the garage sale of all this infrastructure that Stalin built in 1930s. Indeed, why bother producing something while it is much easier to sell the "people's property" for scrap and arbitrage away domestic/international price differences. And US T-bills are much safer investment than producing tractors or railroad tracks for domestic consumption.

And rather than scream murder, we should realize that this is exactly what should have happened in the free market environment with an unrestricted trade. Capital flows where profits can be obtained most easily first.

You missed the part where I mentioned protectionism

I see Russia today is not a WTO member (nor is Ukraine). How protectionist are they anyway? Historically tariffs, quotas and other forms of protectionism are very effective tools for closing the domestic market and pushing native industry. What is going on in Russia?

Only when our glorious entrepreneurs run out of the Soviet-era inheritance to sell, have we seen some domestic investment. And where do those investments flow? Computers? Sadly, Intel makes better microchips than Minsk Computing Tecnologies. Aircraft? Airbus is better than Tupolev. Automobiles? Ladas are not competitive vs. BMWs. Agricultural machines? Please. Nope, investment flows towards the greatest profit potential, which in Russia happens to lie in
- oil and natural resources
- food processing
- light industry.

[Which, incidentally, is the point I made a couple of posts back].

What you do is give a land grant to BMW and beg it to build a factory in Russia. Same with Intel. It will bring know how and employ domestic workforce. If you make it a condition to sell stuff to you, even better.

Maybe there was a shortage of talent involved in Russian privatization/capitalization/post-industrialization or how is this thing supposed to be called?

Obviousely. There is a single country that did all that properly, and it is Slovenia.

But maybe it is just that Russians are ugly ducklings of Europe, who cannot possibly do anything right. After all, Western press never fails to remind us how corrupt Russians are in those rare moments they are not completely drunk.

Your bitterness is somewhat understandible. Of course Russians are not the ugly ducks of Europe and you can see this simply by seeing that Russians living abroad integrate seamlessly. Something is obviousely rotten with the system still in place in Russia (and other transition countries).

What communism destroyed best is responsability. Serb can translate as many texts as he wants about good workers being payed more than bad workers, and I call bull**** on all of them. SSSR had zero uneployement and it says it all. Lack of responsability is the root and cause of all current problems. It will undoubtly gets out from companies by market forces, but state administration is another thing. It does not have a market to compete in and it will take much more time to reform it.

After entertaining Western audiences with heart-breaking stories on how Nazi occupation was so much better than the Soviet one, Eastern Europeans painted their MiG-29s and T-72s in NATO colors and started rebuilding their economies full steam. They only were communist for some 40 odd years, they were more accustomed to free market economy, they started earlier, and so their economies have recovered faster.

Exactly, time under communism is a big factor. Free market SSSR I was talking about would have been under communists even shorter, with all the benefits of that.

I also argue that mafia type of crime, very bad for the business climate, is very much a product of years of communism. How many ex-KGB kept their methods but switched occupation?

What about their heavy industries, though... Give me some big names in Eastern European manufacturing, as I sure as hell cannot recall any.

Croatian shipbuilding survived. Slovenia has a strong industrial sector, including car & trucks factories, agricultural machinery and so on.

Granted, much more was destroyed than survived . We have only ourselves to blame though.

Moreover, what happened to those glorious industrial giants of the Soviet Era? Robotron? Icarus? Energopol? Sold out, restructurized, closed down, barely eke out an existance.

As I said, responsability. Comes with private ownership, because people don't care about other people's property. It is that simple. If companies aren't private, they won't function in the market.

Otherwise, sure, they are prosperous developing economies... Banks, tourist agencies, breweries, soft drinks, etc. All fine and dandy, but where is the heavy industry on the scale necessary to maintain a powerful military?

So after 13-15 years of capitalism in Eatern Europe I cannot find a single country that developed an industry on the scale similar to Stalin's Soviet Russia.

You are talking about countries that had a recession for much of the period, many actually expiriencing a drop in living standards, GDP, industrial output and so on. You can't compare that to the period of intensive rebuilding during the early years of Stalin's rule.

So let's not dismiss Stalin's accomplishments before someone manages to do something similar.

We are in the realm of hypothetical. Even if Stalin did it again it would come out differently due to butterfly effects and so on.

For close examples we could look at countries during their initial industrialization phase (not deindustrialization as you did). We need to find a capitalist country that industrialized fast, to the point of acquiring as much heavy industry as possible. England, Germany and perhaps Sweden industrialized pretty fast. Finland, South Korea and Taiwan may be more modern examples.

However, I am not an economist and I don't know much about those countries' industrial development (although it does interest me), so that is not the approach I am taking.

I am taking the easy way . I asked what were the advantages of Stalin's model of industrialization over a free market based model (with state interventions within usual limits, stopping much shorter of owning companies and such)? What did he do markets could not do better?

You answered IIRC that: 1) there was not enough capital accumulated in SSSR for capital intensive investment to take place, and 2) that heavy industry doesn't provide enough profit to attract investment by itself.

I think neither is really obvious, although you may have a point with 1). In that case I believe import of foreign capital (loans, foreign direct investment, or both) would have been possible.

As I said, not being an economist, I can't argue my points much in much more detail since this is what seems obvious to me.

And oh yes, the human cost. The repressions.

I am not arguing the moral ground actually, but repressions are bad for the economy, fact

[VetLegion]

Just to annoy Serb

[chequita guevara]

There's a new book out, Gulag which relies heavily on Soviet archival data. It should upset a few sacred cows on both sides of the fence.

[ErikM]

Originally posted by VetLegion
It is a weak comparison between deindustrialization of Russia and and industrialization of SSSR.
<...>
You are talking about countries that had a recession for much of the period, many actually expiriencing a drop in living standards, GDP, industrial output and so on. You can't compare that to the period of intensive rebuilding during the early years of Stalin's rule.

It was not Russia's (or anyone's) objective to undertake deindustrialization though. Nor can I recall any polytical party in Eastern Europe that promised their electors a recession. It's just what happened.

And looking back, it seems obvious to me that it was bound to happen but of course hindsight is always 20/20.

We are talking about Stalin's Russia, though. We are talking about 20s and 30s; about Europe that was devastated by WWI and hit the Great Depression just after a recovery. What makes you think that our hypothetical free market Russia would fare better in these conditions?

First and foremost, the system fell apart in Russia after 1990 because it was rotten.

True, but the same can be said about Russian monarchy as well. Russian revolution did not just come out of the blue.

Things were different back in the period we are discussing, many people from Tzarist or NEP days were still alive. Many of the worst practices of communism had yet to take root in the population.

I do not argue that Russia could not have achieved higher living standards in 1941 under free market economy (although it cannot be taken for granted). I argue that it is unlikely that Russia would of developed either substantial heavy industry or powerful military that way. And higher living standards would be a poor consolation against German panzers.

Russia is not the safest place to invest in. Fault for that doesn't lie with Swiss banks or English football teams.

True - but what makes you think that post-WWI Russia would be an investor's heaven? And who would do the investing? Remember we are talking about the worst years of the Great Depression, so international capital was not exactly abound.

You missed the part where I mentioned protectionism

I did not; I actually praised Japan for its protectionist policy. I agree that Russia should be more protectionist today than she is.

What you do is give a land grant to BMW and beg it to build a factory in Russia. Same with Intel. It will bring know how and employ domestic workforce. If you make it a condition to sell stuff to you, even better.

It does not work that way in a free market environment. Why build an Intel's subsidiary in Russia if we can buy their products directly. And what's in it for Intel? Among Russia's problems is the fact that its geographically far away from major consumer markets. Other things being equal, Intel will be better off building an outlet in South Korea or Brazil simply because of transportation expenditures.

Free traders would tell that this is good because Russia can specialize instead in her comparative advantages. Which is oil and natural resources, obviously. Ricardian theory of comparative advantage implicitly assumes perfect factor mobility though - in other words, that labor from heavy industry will flow towards areas of comparative advantage. But resource extraction simply does not require all that much labor, and so Russia is currently stuck with structural unemployment. So it is my opinion is that free trade is a bad economic policy for Russia.

If Russia puts high tariffs on microchip and/or car imports, then your scenario is possible. But again, you don't have to convince me that some good old protectionism never hurt anyone

There is a single country that did all that properly, and it is Slovenia.

Slovenia.
But it is harder to do everything properly in a big country with poor roads, like Russia I mean, Moscow has survived transition fairly well, and it has bigger population than Slovenia. It is when we move away from the capital that things get uglier.

What communism destroyed best is responsability. Serb can translate as many texts as he wants about good workers being payed more than bad workers, and I call bull**** on all of them. SSSR had zero uneployement and it says it all. Lack of responsability is the root and cause of all current problems. It will undoubtly gets out from companies by market forces, but state administration is another thing. It does not have a market to compete in and it will take much more time to reform it.

Stalin did cultivate responsibilty - through terror.
It takes years, if not centuries, to create responsible government structures as you describe. Russia did not have all the time in the world before WWII.

I also argue that mafia type of crime, very bad for the business climate, is very much a product of years of communism. How many ex-KGB kept their methods but switched occupation?

I disagree here. Soviet Union propagandists always took great pride in comparing crime rates in USSR and in the US, for instance.

Responsibility for the outburst of crime that occured in post-Soviet countries largely lies on Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Kuchma & co. They destroyed the old law enforcement structure without creating anything in its stead.

Poverty and unemployment helped, too.

Croatian shipbuilding survived. Slovenia has a strong industrial sector, including car & trucks factories, agricultural machinery and so on.

Granted, much more was destroyed than survived . We have only ourselves to blame though.

True that

For close examples we could look at countries during their initial industrialization phase (not deindustrialization as you did). We need to find a capitalist country that industrialized fast, to the point of acquiring as much heavy industry as possible. England, Germany and perhaps Sweden industrialized pretty fast. Finland, South Korea and Taiwan may be more modern examples.

I disagree that such a country exist. Industrial revolution in Germany and England took about 50 years. Remember, industrial revolution is always preceded by an agricultural one - a country's agriculture should be large enough to sustain mostly urban population. And it takes a long time. Russia in Stalin times was not even on the verge of agricultural revolution, let alone industrial one.

Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and other dragons industrialized fast but not quite as fast as Russia. And they did not have to maintain huge military which certainly should have helped.

I asked what were the advantages of Stalin's model of industrialization over a free market based model.

You answered IIRC that: 1) there was not enough capital accumulated in SSSR for capital intensive investment to take place, and 2) that heavy industry doesn't provide enough profit to attract investment by itself.

I think neither is really obvious, although you may have a point with 1). In that case I believe import of foreign capital (loans, foreign direct investment, or both) would have been possible.

Heavy industry is not unprofitable per se. It is just that it takes time before it becomes economically profitable vs. other investment opportunities. Heavy industries require large capital outflows for years before they start to generate any profit.

To give you an example, it took (iirc) 20 years before Boeing 747 sales generated enough revenues to cover development expenditures. From then on, it was profitable but 20 years is a huge amount of time by market standards.

For projects such as Boeing to be economically viable, interest rates must be very low. But interest rates cannot be very low as long as there many opportunities to make a quick buck in retailing or light industries. This is basically why light industry always precedes heavy industry and why entrepreneurs in E Europe have often found it profitable to tear down Communist era factories and to replace them with shopping malls.

I am not arguing the moral ground actually, but repressions are bad for the economy, fact

No doubt true - but so are depressions, almost by definition I just cannot see how our hypothetical free market Russia would be somehow immune from the economic downturns in the inter-war period.

Respectfully,
- ErikM

[Saras]

Just some minor corrections - blaming Russias problems on the free market is silly, and everyone knows it. It just suits some political agendas, that's all. What Russia needed and still needs is rule of law, contract enforcement and other dull crap that we call civilised society.