USSR standards of living compared to USA

[Stain]

Did the soviets suffer from unemployment, homelessness, malnutrition, lack of adequate healthcare and education, etc. to the same level of USA? Can somebody recommend links or books on this topic? Thanks.

[Blanquist]

Yes, they had homelessness, malnutrition, all those things. The education was top notch though and the healthcare was adequate.

But workers in the west enjoyed a much higher standard of living. One needs to only look at basic figures such as meat consumption per-capita. Inequality was actually higher in the USSR than in the west, as shown by Leon Trotsky in his works.

[electrostal]

Did the soviets suffer from unemployment, homelessness, malnutrition, lack of adequate healthcare and education, etc. to the same level of USA?
Of course not.
In the USSR people had a right and a duty to employment. Homelessness and malnutrition wasn't a problem until the late 80s ( excluding the 30s and 40s ).

[28350]

Of course not.
In the USSR people had a right and a duty to employment. Homelessness and malnutrition wasn't a problem until the late 80s ( excluding the 30s and 40s ).

Workers of the world get back to work!

[electrostal]

Lenin said he who does not work shall not eat.
So, yeah, in socialism there's no place for parasites.

[Blanquist]

Lenin said he who does not work shall not eat.
So, yeah, in socialism there's no place for parasites.

And yet he never worked a day in his life.

[electrostal]

And yet he never worked a day in his life.
Lenin received an official salary as a state official.
But yeah, what do you think he did while in Siberia? Also Lenin's participation in one Subotnik is well known. This alone proves your absurd post wrong.
So, stop trolling please.

[Ocean Seal]

And yet he never worked a day in his life.
Well thats bullshit. He was just there not organizing, not leading, not taking care of tough decisions. But no the SU didn't have have homelessness or starvation beyond a certain point. Its standard of living was higher than most capitalist countries but it was probably lower than the US, W. Germany, France, England and a few other countries.

[Lee Van Cleef]

Workers of the world get back to work!
What would you propose? You think communism is just everyone sitting around a drum circle, having everything handed to them by robots? You'd at least need someone to build and maintain the robots!

Employment doesn't mean being worked to death.

Blanquist is also trolling pretty hard in this thread, but it is undeniable that the US had a higher standard of living than the USSR. I'm not sure where you got your info on inequality, though. I have a hard time believing that even Brezhnev took a bigger slice of the pie than Warren Buffet.

[28350]

Lenin said he who does not work shall not eat.
So, yeah, in socialism there's no place for parasites.
Well, if he said so. Are there any human parasites?


What would you propose? You think communism is just everyone sitting around a drum circle, having everything handed to them by robots? You'd at least need someone to build and maintain the robots!

I have no clue what the positive content of communism will entail. But it won't include work.


Employment doesn't mean being worked to death. If not that then bored to death.

[electrostal]

Well, if he said so. Are there any human parasites?
Read on social parasitism ( an actual offense under the Soviet Penal Code ) if you want to know more...

[Karabin]

Healthcare wasn't actually that great in the USSR.

My stepdad went on a holiday to the USSR in the late 1970's and he was in the Moscow Metro wearing jeans and everyone was gawking at him because they had never seen jeans before. Not exactly related, but something to think about.

The USSR definitely wasn't a paradise. But obviously there were some good things, such as the free healthcare, guaranteed employment and housing, free education, low violent crime and burglary/robbing rate etc. Another thing was the emphasis on physical education and gymnastics, so the average Soviet teen would have been relatively fit (Which cannot be said about most teens in Russia nowadays). There were also a lot of negatives that outweighed the positives. Everyone knows about the long lines to a shop to get basic items which were usually out of stock. There was also the corruption (Especially under Brezhnev) and then the huge inequality amongst the actual workers and intelligentsia/party officials.

[electrostal]

Healthcare wasn't actually that great in the USSR.
What?


My stepdad went on a holiday to the USSR in the late 1970's and he was in the Moscow Metro wearing jeans and everyone was gawking at him because they had never seen jeans before.
No, the Soviets had a whole series of magazine covers critcizing the "idolatry" of Western Jeans and stuff. They were highly sought after and what you're saying is simply false. There were for example Polish jeans but they weren't that "cool".
Google pictures of Soviets in jeans.


The USSR definitely wasn't a paradise.
You don't say...


Everyone knows about the long lines to a shop to get basic items which were usually out of stock.
Yes, in the 80s and especially after "liberalization"...

[Teacher]

The shortages were a phenomenon of the 80s.

The Soviet Union was obviously not as wealthy as the United States or Western Europe, but it started from a virtually non-existent industrial base in one of the most backward parts of Europe. It is not very realistic to have expected the Soviet Union to surpass the United States in wealth (although it was much more egalitarian).

If you are going to compare the Soviet Union's economic performance a more meaningful comparison would be to less developed capitalist countries like Argentina or India (which it completely blew out of the water).

The only countries to join the ranks of the rich, industrialized world in the 20th century were Japan, the Asian Tigers, and to a more limited extent the Soviet Union.

[Q]

Lenin said he who does not work shall not eat.
So, yeah, in socialism there's no place for parasites.

The hallmark of socialist consciousness.

[Blanquist]

The shortages were a phenomenon of the 80s.

The Soviet Union was obviously not as wealthy as the United States or Western Europe, but it started from a virtually non-existent industrial base in one of the most backward parts of Europe. It is not very realistic to have expected the Soviet Union to surpass the United States in wealth (although it was much more egalitarian).

If you are going to compare the Soviet Union's economic performance a more meaningful comparison would be to less developed capitalist countries like Argentina or India (which it completely blew out of the water).

The only countries to join the ranks of the rich, industrialized world in the 20th century were Japan, the Asian Tigers, and to a more limited extent the Soviet Union.

1. It wasn't much more egalitarian. The gap between the party-boss' and their families and the average worker was as high as the CEO and worker in America.

There was less equality in the Soviet Union, as shown by Trotsky in his works

2. The SU should be compared to India? Maybe it should be compared to Zimbabwe instead.

So, millions of people died and faced monstrous repressions and privation just so Russia could be more advanced than India? Which it already was in the first place.

3. "It is not very realistic to have expected the Soviet Union to surpass the United States in wealth"

So it was a brutal, disgusting regime based on an absolute lie?

[aquaruis15000]

According to studies I have read, at the highest point of inequality of the USSR, the best paid bureaucrats made only 5 times what the average worker did, and lived in normal apartments. Contrast that to the United States where it is more like 500000 times, and CEOs divide their time between a series of sprawling mansions and luxury condos. So while that does not factor in bonuses like special treatment, access to vacation homes and priority access to consumer goods, it was a lot different.

I will not speculate on whether or not it was better, since that is totally subjective. I personally am not looking for a ideal version of wage slavery but rather its aboltition.

[Stain]

Yes, they had homelessness, malnutrition, all those things. The education was top notch though and the healthcare was adequate.

But workers in the west enjoyed a much higher standard of living. One needs to only look at basic figures such as meat consumption per-capita. Inequality was actually higher in the USSR than in the west, as shown by Leon Trotsky in his works.


Of course not.
In the USSR people had a right and a duty to employment. Homelessness and malnutrition wasn't a problem until the late 80s ( excluding the 30s and 40s ).

Wait I'm confused. Who is right?:huh:

[Teacher]

1. It wasn't much more egalitarian. The gap between the party-boss' and their families and the average worker was as high as the CEO and worker in America.

There was less equality in the Soviet Union, as shown by Trotsky in his works

I don't know what your source is for this but I don't think it is factually accurate. The gap between the best paid and worst paid in the Soviet Union was somewhere between 1:7 and 1:10, and "party bosses" weren't even at the top of the ladder (the highest paid people were famous scientists, professors, administrators, artists etc). High-ranking administrators lived in the same apartment complex with the workers. The perks enjoyed by party officials were small things like getting to drive a government car. These perks were easily dwarfed by the "social wage" offered to all Soviet citizens in the form of free health care, transportation, virtually free housing, education, art and cultural events, etc.


2. The SU should be compared to India? Maybe it should be compared to Zimbabwe instead.

So, millions of people died and faced monstrous repressions and privation just so Russia could be more advanced than India? Which it already was in the first place.

Don't want to get into the "millions of people died / monstrous repressions" debate. Russia's economy was basically on par with countries like India and Argentina prior to the revolution. It was a poor agricultural economy with a small veneer of tariff-induced industrialization and railroads. Had the revolution not happened and launched the Soviet Union into rapid industrialization, it would have continued being a 3rd world backwater. The Soviet accomplishment is really remarkable and there is a reason so many people around the world wanted to emulate it.

[Comrade Trollface]

Did I mention that you could only get 2 flavors of ice cream? Sometimes they'd let you get a third one, but even that was always the same one. Crazy.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

A lot of factual inaccuracy in this thread.

According to most measures, by 1979 the USSR had a gini co-efficient (measure of inequality where 0 = perfect equality in financial terms, 1 = perfect inequality) of 0.29, the same as the UK in the 1970s. Whilst on the lower side, 0.29 isn't that impressive a score, it was something that most European nations achieved through Social Democracy in the post-WW2 period.

There was wage inequality in the USSR, but it was significantly less than that in the west at the time, and certainly far less than that in the west currently. There's a book on it by someone who studied average wages in the USSR in the 1970s, where the average industrial worker was on 200-300 rubles, up to state officials and artists who were on 1500+ rubles.

So yeah, the picture seems to be inequality, but significantly less than that which we see under neo-liberalism, but not necessarily less than is achieved under Social Democracy as seen in Europe post-WW2.

What bemuses me further is that some people in this thread say that there was no homelessness and malnutrition in the USSR...aside from in the 1930s, 1940s and 1980s. So there was only no homelessness and malnutrition in the USSR in the 1920s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s? Firstly, I find it hard to believe this was the case for the 1920s, but if so then, so what? This was a period of continued and explicit capitalism in the USSR. Further, the 1950s and especially 1960s and 1970s were the scene for the economic slowing, stagnation and decline in the USSR.

So if your poster boy for high living standards is the 1960s and 1970s USSR then, well, you're looking pretty weak.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

The Soviet accomplishment is really remarkable and there is a reason so many people around the world wanted to emulate it.

Just to pick you up on this.

Yes, there is a reason so many people wanted to emulate it. And it lies in the idiocy of the economists of the day. The mainstream western economists believed that the Soviet model - huge amounts of state capital investment - was one that could be applied in the west, hence the rise of Keynesianism. Unfortunately, they failed to factor in the ability of the Soviet government to force people to move around, to force labour (in Gulags and so on) and generally the political interference in the USSR which led to a situation of forced labour and very little economic democracy (not that there was/is much of this in the west, we might add!).

You can read all about this in William Easterly's book 'The Elusive Quest For Growth'. He's a big shot on the international aid scene with ties to the World Bank, IMF etc., and he has essentially admitted that a lot of the interest in the west regarding the Soviet economic model and the high levels of output it achieved were actually down to some very faulty economics.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Interestingly, the application of the Soviet economic model to aid programmes in newly liberated former colonies in Africa in the 1960s is seen by Easterly to be part (a large part!) of the reason for the absolute stagnation of many African economies since the 1960s, up to the present day.

[Skyhilist]

Ahhh the USSR. I recall my mom telling me about a trip she once took their. She said all of the citizens wanted to buy her jeans and her other clothes since they looked so new and so different. She said that they had very limited options in terms of things like how they expressed themselves in certain matters. Too bad. If you ask me, Stalin really fucked up the future of that country.

[Comrade Trollface]

Like if it was so great, why wouldn't they let anyone leave?:rolleyes:

[electrostal]

Did I mention that you could only get 2 flavors of ice cream? Sometimes they'd let you get a third one, but even that was always the same one. Crazy. Why are you spamming this thread up?
http://www.mintorgmuseum.ru/images/vocabulary/morozhenoe.jpg










According to most measures, by 1979 the USSR had a gini co-efficient (measure of inequality where 0 = perfect equality in financial terms, 1 = perfect inequality) of 0.29, the same as the UK in the 1970s. Whilst on thUe lower side, 0.29 isn't that impressive a score, it was something that most European nations achieved through Social Democracy in the post-WW2 period.I'm not sure if GINI and so on means much when it comes to, especially, the USSR and socialist countries. I really wonder how come the UK and the USSR had the exact score given the much smaller social inequalities in general ( from wage discrepancies to property ones and so on and so forth...) in the USSR's case.


Further, the 1950s and especially 1960s and 1970s were the scene for the economic slowing, stagnation and decline in the USSR. What? Stagnation in the 60s? What nonsense. That was the apex of the USSR.

[electrostal]

Interestingly, the application of the Soviet economic model to aid programmes in newly liberated former colonies in Africa in the 1960s is seen by Easterly to be part (a large part!) of the reason for the absolute stagnation of many African economies since the 1960s, up to the present day.
Yes, the countries would have been much more advanced now had the USSR not built a few schools and roads and accepted African students...

[Comrade Trollface]

http://www.mintorgmuseum.ru/images/vocabulary/morozhenoe.jpg
Oh yeah, they showed us lots of pictures of all sorts of things that you couldn't actually get in the stores. Maybe it was different in Moscow. But the USSR wasn't just Moscow. You will notice however that even in that picture, all of the ice cream appears to be either vanilla, chocolate or raspberry. You could usually get vanilla or chocolate, but I only remember being able to get raspberry at a special 'ice cream festival.' That was in Kiev though. I don't know if you could even get all that out in the sticks.

But yeah- maybe you know more about my childhood (and my mom's childhood) than I do. Tell me more!:rolleyes:

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Oh yeah, they showed us lots of pictures of all sorts of things that you couldn't actually get in the stores. Maybe it was different in Moscow. But the USSR wasn't just Moscow. You will notice however that even in that picture, all of the ice cream appears to be either vanilla, chocolate or raspberry. You could usually get vanilla or chocolate, but I only remember being able to get raspberry at a special 'ice cream festival.' That was in Kiev though. I don't know if you could even get all that out in the sticks.

But yeah- maybe you know more about my childhood (and my mom's childhood) than I do. Tell me more!:rolleyes:

Your Western decadence is sickening comrade. Comrade Lenin teaches that our new society will be built on the ruins of the caplitalist's failed 31 flavors project. Embrace revolutionary simplicity!

Now put on your blue overalls and get back to work.

[electrostal]

Fair enough then, I apologize.
People I talked to, though, praised Soviet ice-cream as very good.

[Comrade Trollface]

Your Western decadence is sickening comrade. Comrade Lenin teaches that our new society will be built on the ruins of the caplitalist's failed 31 flavors project. Embrace revolutionary simplicity!

Now put on your blue overalls and get back to work.See, at least that's honest. I just hate it when these Stalinoids piss on my leg and tell me that its raining. But it only proves my point- the prospect of only having 2 ice cream flavors regularly available seems so preposterous that electro couldn't even entertain the possibility without reacting defensively. I wonder how log it will take him to lick his wounds and regroup, perhaps arguing that, despite having wasted his time on a rebuttal, he does not hold that this says anything important about how the Soviet economy was being run. I beg to differ however.

EDIT: it was quite good as I remember, but then the best ice cream in the world is almost always the ice cream that one eats at the age of 5;)

[electrostal]

I wonder how log it will take him to lick his wounds and regroup, perhaps arguing that, despite having wasted his time on a rebuttal, he does not hold that this says anything important about how the Soviet economy was being run.Well I was proven wrong about ice-cream and I said I was wrong, so let's move on.
Elaborate on the bolded part please.

[magicme]

I believe that generally the US resident was much better off in material stuff terms than his or her soviet counterpart.

I'm a bit disappointed in this thread, the OP asked for links or books. Maybe is doing an essay or whatever? I know I'm guilty of this too but I excuse myself as what I know about this subject could be written on a stamp. I'm assuming that many of the people who've posted here have much more knowledge, as evinced by their responses, but maybe the OP wants to check up on what you all are saying.

I have a question but it probs doesn't deserve its own thread. Were people prevented from making their own ice cream in the USSR with ingredients they could buy from the shops?

[aquaruis15000]

A lot of factual inaccuracy in this thread.

According to most measures, by 1979 the USSR had a gini co-efficient (measure of inequality where 0 = perfect equality in financial terms, 1 = perfect inequality) of 0.29, the same as the UK in the 1970s. Whilst on the lower side, 0.29 isn't that impressive a score, it was something that most European nations achieved through Social Democracy in the post-WW2 period.

There was wage inequality in the USSR, but it was significantly less than that in the west at the time, and certainly far less than that in the west currently. There's a book on it by someone who studied average wages in the USSR in the 1970s, where the average industrial worker was on 200-300 rubles, up to state officials and artists who were on 1500+ rubles.

So yeah, the picture seems to be inequality, but significantly less than that which we see under neo-liberalism, but not necessarily less than is achieved under Social Democracy as seen in Europe post-WW2.

What bemuses me further is that some people in this thread say that there was no homelessness and malnutrition in the USSR...aside from in the 1930s, 1940s and 1980s. So there was only no homelessness and malnutrition in the USSR in the 1920s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s? Firstly, I find it hard to believe this was the case for the 1920s, but if so then, so what? This was a period of continued and explicit capitalism in the USSR. Further, the 1950s and especially 1960s and 1970s were the scene for the economic slowing, stagnation and decline in the USSR.

So if your poster boy for high living standards is the 1960s and 1970s USSR then, well, you're looking pretty weak.

We must have read the same report, as I saw the same 5 to 1 ratio of inequality on pay. And this was at the high point.

I have to disagree about the 1960s being the bottom though. O contraire, that was probably the highest point the USSR ever reached. It was riding the wave of the global capitalist boom that followed the destruction of World War 2.

Things were never better, before or since, in terms of living conditions in the USSR. Maybe you can get Rocky Road ice cream now, but only if you can afford it.

As a side note, I grew up in America but my ice cream choices were also limited. I only got ice cream once in a long while, and it was that Neopolitan mix with three flavor: chocolate, strawberry and vanilla. Or you could do what I did and mix them all together :thumbup1:

[Comrade Trollface]

Introducing more flavors (perhaps even 1 or 2 a year) would not have created considerable redundancies in the Soviet economy. And it wasn't as if the Soviet economy wasn't already full of glaring redundancies. But it just wasn't a priority. All those little 'quality of life' things that only add up to something big and tangible in aggregate might as well not have existed as far as the Party/State elite were concerned. And this was largely because the folks making these decisions were not directly affected by them. Anyone who was high enough on the ladder to have any pull with decisions like that had access to all sorts of imported goods for themselves and their families.

In a nutshell, the problem was class. The workers did not control the means of production any more than they do under bourgeois capitalism, and the people who were in charge were removed from the little every day concerns of the working class because of the privilege that was granted to them by their high positions.

This, as far as I can gather, is why the USSR had more tank varieties than it had flavors of ice cream.

[aquaruis15000]

Introducing more flavors (perhaps even 1 or 2 a year) would not have created considerable redundancies in the Soviet economy. And it wasn't as if the Soviet economy wasn't already full of glaring redundancies. But it just wasn't a priority. All those little 'quality of life' things that only add up to something big and tangible in aggregate might as well not have existed as far as the Party/State elite were concerned. And this was largely because the folks making these decisions were not directly affected by them. Anyone who was high enough on the ladder to have any pull with decisions like that had access to all sorts of imported goods for themselves and their families.

In a nutshell, the problem was class. The workers did not control the means of production any more than they do under bourgeois capitalism, and the people who were in charge were removed from the little every day concerns of the working class because of the privilege that was granted to them by their high positions.

This, as far as I can gather, is why the USSR had more tank varieties than it had flavors of ice cream.

So, what class do you think ruled the USSR? I am not disagreeing with you. In fact, I think this is one of the most poignant characterizations of the USSR I have ever seen. That's why I'm interested in your opinion.

Also, don't you think the stick can be bent the other way, so to speak? I've read that more money is spent on ice cream in the United States than is spent on public education in all of Africa.

[electrostal]

And this was largely because the folks making these decisions were not directly affected by them.Soviet living standards kept rising until the 80s, as it would be expected. How do you explain these facts? As far as bureaucrats were concerned, according to your logic here, the people's didn't "need", I don't know, fridges or personal automobiles....


The workers did not control the means of production any more than they do under bourgeois capitalismThe fact that there was a right to employment ( in other words freedom from not ending up on the street because of this or that ) and some other guarantees, not to mention anything else, proves your wrong here.

[magicme]

Home-made ice cream (I know about this as I've done it myself) is IMO much nicer than the commercially produced rubbish I can get in England today so I'm assuming that goes for soviet union too. So probably people in the USSR who wanted different, nicer, fresher ice cream made it themselves.

It's a pity you or your family didn't do that, though as you kind of just said there wasn't anything to stop you. As for the tank comparison, I bet people were relieved that the USSR had been mass-producing tanks in the 1940s and I believe that the experience of WW2 may have provided a good reason for people to want more of them. Like having seventy seven flavours of ice cream available wouldn't have been much use for stopping the German invaders.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2010/jun/17/how-to-make-ice-cream Is a good intro, check it out. I promise you it's nicer (use egg yolk).

[aquaruis15000]

The fact that there was a right to employment ( in other words freedom from not ending up on the street because of this or that ) and some other guarantees, not to mention anything else, proves your wrong here.

So Sweden is socialist? Because they have right to employment too.

[Comrade Trollface]

Soviet living standards kept rising until the 80s, as it would be expected. How do you explain these facts? As far as bureaucrats were concerned, according to your logic here, the people's didn't "need", I don't know, fridges or personal automobiles.... In the 80's, we were still facing constant shortages of staples that should have by all rights been produced in vast quantities domestically. And as a case in point- the automobiles that you speak of were, by the way, generally unusable by anyone who wasn't an auto mechanic. And only a very small percentage of Soviet citizens ever got their hands on one. In my entire extended family, only my grandfathers (one of whom was a Party member) had succeeded in obtaining the authorization to buy personal vehicles. And the my paternal grandfather had to give his to my uncle, who actually had the mechanical chops to keep the piece of shit running for more than 5 minutes at a time.

Now don't get me wrong- the scarcity of automobiles wasn't necessarily such a bad thing in retrospect. But the way that this scarce luxury was distributed demonstrated both a monumental failure of imagination and an obvious betrayal of socialist ideals. Why not have communal motor pools instead? I mean its not like anyone needed a car to get to work or anything. The transportation infrastructure was designed with this in mind. That is one of the things that I will wholeheartedly admit that the USSR had over the US.

So why take such a resource-intensive and scarce luxury resource and make it private property? Because the elites had their imported cars, the officials directly below their grade had their shitty Soviet cars as a matter of course and everyone else had to wait their turn. No other mode of distribution was imaginable at that point. The absurdity of private automobile ownership in the USSR is yet another case in point of how the state recreated class and how the class system made anything like socialism an impossibility.
The fact that there was a right to employment ( in other words freedom from not ending up on the street because of this or that ) and some other guarantees, not to mention anything else, proves your wrong here.The right to employment (even if the state could not take that 'right' away at will- which it could and did) is not the same thing as control over the means of production. A capitalist who gives everyone in his little town a paycheck as long as they do whatever work he needs done and don't displease him is not giving the workers of his town control over the means of production. He is simply being a paternalistic capitalist. Sort of like the USSR's paternalistic state capitalism.

[electrostal]

Perhaps, but isn't this continual rise in living standards a fact that makes you question the idea that "all this" might as well not have existed as far as the Party/State elite were concerned?


The right to employment (even if the state could not take that 'right' away at will- which it could and did) is not the same thing as control over the means of production.
Perhaps but I don't think that you can possibly say that the workers did not control the means of production any more than they do under bourgeois capitalism precisely because of these and other facts.

BTW here's what Lenin wrote on "syndicalism":
http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/party-congress/10th/16b.htm

[Comrade Trollface]

Perhaps, but isn't this continual rise in living standards a fact that makes you question the idea that "all this" might as well not have existed as far as the Party/State elite were concerned?I'm sure the little shits meant well, but what else can you expect when the folks calling the shots don't have to eat the slop that they dump into the common troth? That's how you get more tank varieties than ice cream flavors. If they gave a shit, then they certainly didn't act like it.


Perhaps but I don't think that you can possibly say that the workers did not control the means of production any more than they do under bourgeois capitalism precisely because of these and other facts.
What are you talking about? In what way did the workers have any control over the means of production? How did the situation in the USSR differ significantly from that nice paternalistic capitalist set-up that I mentioned? Or would you say that paternalistic capitalism = workers' control?



BTW here's what Lenin wrote on "syndicalism":
http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/party-congress/10th/16b.htm
I read it years ago, remembered how the Bolsheviks just went and reproduced the class system, LOL'd, decided that Lenin can go eat a bag of dicks. If you don't trust working people to rule themselves, then I fail to see what your problem with capitalism is.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

We must have read the same report, as I saw the same 5 to 1 ratio of inequality on pay. And this was at the high point.

I have to disagree about the 1960s being the bottom though. O contraire, that was probably the highest point the USSR ever reached. It was riding the wave of the global capitalist boom that followed the destruction of World War 2.

Things were never better, before or since, in terms of living conditions in the USSR. Maybe you can get Rocky Road ice cream now, but only if you can afford it.

As a side note, I grew up in America but my ice cream choices were also limited. I only got ice cream once in a long while, and it was that Neopolitan mix with three flavor: chocolate, strawberry and vanilla. Or you could do what I did and mix them all together :thumbup1:

Fairly sure it's a book. I just can't remember who it's by, but it's the only one that did a really good analysis of the wages of various types of people in the USSR around 1979ish.

Also, I was talking more about the 1960s being a return to more overt Capitalism in the USSR, as opposed to the level of economic growth. Yes at teh time it rode the wave of global capital's economic growth, but it was these policies that set the scene for the Brezhnev stagnation and the USSRs eventual decline and integration into the world economy.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Yes, they had homelessness, malnutrition, all those things. The education was top notch though and the healthcare was adequate.

But workers in the west enjoyed a much higher standard of living. One needs to only look at basic figures such as meat consumption per-capita. Inequality was actually higher in the USSR than in the west, as shown by Leon Trotsky in his works.
Where did Trotsky show that there was more inequality in the USSR? I think that they had very little in the way of homelessness and malnutrition by the 1950s. I know that during the years of forced collectivization there was starvation and massive dislocation.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

And yet he never worked a day in his life.
Au contraire. He was the hardest working man in revolution business.

[A Marxist Historian]

A lot of factual inaccuracy in this thread.

According to most measures, by 1979 the USSR had a gini co-efficient (measure of inequality where 0 = perfect equality in financial terms, 1 = perfect inequality) of 0.29, the same as the UK in the 1970s. Whilst on the lower side, 0.29 isn't that impressive a score, it was something that most European nations achieved through Social Democracy in the post-WW2 period.

There was wage inequality in the USSR, but it was significantly less than that in the west at the time, and certainly far less than that in the west currently. There's a book on it by someone who studied average wages in the USSR in the 1970s, where the average industrial worker was on 200-300 rubles, up to state officials and artists who were on 1500+ rubles.

So yeah, the picture seems to be inequality, but significantly less than that which we see under neo-liberalism, but not necessarily less than is achieved under Social Democracy as seen in Europe post-WW2.

What bemuses me further is that some people in this thread say that there was no homelessness and malnutrition in the USSR...aside from in the 1930s, 1940s and 1980s. So there was only no homelessness and malnutrition in the USSR in the 1920s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s? Firstly, I find it hard to believe this was the case for the 1920s, but if so then, so what? This was a period of continued and explicit capitalism in the USSR. Further, the 1950s and especially 1960s and 1970s were the scene for the economic slowing, stagnation and decline in the USSR.

So if your poster boy for high living standards is the 1960s and 1970s USSR then, well, you're looking pretty weak.

What are these "most measures." Income inequality? If so, they are worthless and deceptive. Capitalism is about capital ownership, not income.

The only really fundamentally meaningful measure of social equality is capital ownership, which is harder to compute than income for a statistician, as nobody requires the capitalists to report their holdings to the government.

Register capitalists, not guns, is what I always say.

As for malnutrition in the 1920s, 1940s and 1930s, they certainly had a lot to do with the Russian Civil War, Barbarossa, and Stalinist forced collectivization stupidity, so yes, they have to be excluded from any meaningful comparisons.

Do you think that if the anarchists and syndicalists, or the Workers Opposition, or whoever you prefer, were in charge in the 1920s in Russia somehow there would be less malnutrition? Quite the contrary, there would have been far, far more, without the Bolsheviks getting the railroads running through "war communism" and then the necessary NEP concessions to the peasantry which Kollontai et. al. opposed.

As for the 1980s, perhaps after Gorbachev abolished central economic planning in '89 there were the beginnings of malnutrition here and there, though very little if any homelessness I should think, but it was when capitalism was restored under Yeltsin that they exploded.

The true marker of the wastefulness of the "era of stagnation" under Brezhnev was that caviar was made dirt cheap to keep the workers happy and not complaining, resulting in darn near wiping out the sturgeon. This was definitely not a period of malnutrition, it was a period of drunkenness and eating oneself sick.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Just to pick you up on this.

Yes, there is a reason so many people wanted to emulate it. And it lies in the idiocy of the economists of the day. The mainstream western economists believed that the Soviet model - huge amounts of state capital investment - was one that could be applied in the west, hence the rise of Keynesianism. Unfortunately, they failed to factor in the ability of the Soviet government to force people to move around, to force labour (in Gulags and so on) and generally the political interference in the USSR which led to a situation of forced labour and very little economic democracy (not that there was/is much of this in the west, we might add!).

You can read all about this in William Easterly's book 'The Elusive Quest For Growth'. He's a big shot on the international aid scene with ties to the World Bank, IMF etc., and he has essentially admitted that a lot of the interest in the west regarding the Soviet economic model and the high levels of output it achieved were actually down to some very faulty economics.

This is why state planners and economists got excited, they looked at the figures and said cool.

But enthusiasm for the USSR was among the workers and peasants. It was workers who provided the voting base for the mass French, Italian, Finnish and Greek (both next door, may I point out?) Communist Parties, and the generalized popular enthusiasm for Russia and China in Africa and Asia, and for Cuba in Latin America.

Not government bureaucrats.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Interestingly, the application of the Soviet economic model to aid programmes in newly liberated former colonies in Africa in the 1960s is seen by Easterly to be part (a large part!) of the reason for the absolute stagnation of many African economies since the 1960s, up to the present day.

Artificially applying pseudo-communist measures to colonial capitalist economies is naturally going to have problems.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

See, at least that's honest. I just hate it when these Stalinoids piss on my leg and tell me that its raining. But it only proves my point- the prospect of only having 2 ice cream flavors regularly available seems so preposterous that electro couldn't even entertain the possibility without reacting defensively. I wonder how log it will take him to lick his wounds and regroup, perhaps arguing that, despite having wasted his time on a rebuttal, he does not hold that this says anything important about how the Soviet economy was being run. I beg to differ however.

EDIT: it was quite good as I remember, but then the best ice cream in the world is almost always the ice cream that one eats at the age of 5;)

Yes, it was all run from the top. Bureaucratized. A degenerated workers state misrun by a corrupt bureaucracy that paid little attention to consumer feedback, among its many problems.

But worth defending against capitalism, as the fate of the USSR after the collapse demonstrates all too graphically.

-M.H.-

[Comrade Trollface]

But worth defending against capitalism, as the fate of the USSR after the collapse demonstrates all too graphically.
In the end however, it proved impossible to defend that system against itself.

[A Marxist Historian]

So Sweden is socialist? Because they have right to employment too.

Where'd you get that idea? There's plenty of unemployment in Sweden, especially for immigrants.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

In the 80's, we were still facing constant shortages of staples that should have by all rights been produced in vast quantities domestically. And as a case in point- the automobiles that you speak of were, by the way, generally unusable by anyone who wasn't an auto mechanic. And only a very small percentage of Soviet citizens ever got their hands on one. In my entire extended family, only my grandfathers (one of whom was a Party member) had succeeded in obtaining the authorization to buy personal vehicles. And the my paternal grandfather had to give his to my uncle, who actually had the mechanical chops to keep the piece of shit running for more than 5 minutes at a time.

Now don't get me wrong- the scarcity of automobiles wasn't necessarily such a bad thing in retrospect. But the way that this scarce luxury was distributed demonstrated both a monumental failure of imagination and an obvious betrayal of socialist ideals. Why not have communal motor pools instead? I mean its not like anyone needed a car to get to work or anything. The transportation infrastructure was designed with this in mind. That is one of the things that I will wholeheartedly admit that the USSR had over the US.

So why take such a resource-intensive and scarce luxury resource and make it private property? Because the elites had their imported cars, the officials directly below their grade had their shitty Soviet cars as a matter of course and everyone else had to wait their turn. No other mode of distribution was imaginable at that point. The absurdity of private automobile ownership in the USSR is yet another case in point of how the state recreated class and how the class system made anything like socialism an impossibility.The right to employment (even if the state could not take that 'right' away at will- which it could and did) is not the same thing as control over the means of production. A capitalist who gives everyone in his little town a paycheck as long as they do whatever work he needs done and don't displease him is not giving the workers of his town control over the means of production. He is simply being a paternalistic capitalist. Sort of like the USSR's paternalistic state capitalism.

Yes, it was bureaucrats, not rank and file workers, who controlled the means of production in the Soviet degeneerated workers state, just like it is bureaucrats not workers who control 99% of unions.

but the bureaucrats didn't own the means of production. And that's what's really important.

-M.H.-

[Teacher]

I have a book called Socialism, Politics, and Equality by Walter Connor that is about this question of egalitarianism. It is long and goes into a great amount of detail about the question (which is not at all easy to answer). That being said here is the data from a few tables that I pulled really quick:

Average pay by occupational category in the USSR in 1973:

Intelligentsia - 134.1
Routine nonmanual - 84.5
Worker - 100.0
Peasant - 76.5

Average monthly earnings from the construction industry in Leningrad (stats published in a 1970 study):

Managers - 177.3
Scientific-technical employees - 130.3
Skilled mental workers - 112.6
Other mental workers - 85.7
Physical-mental workers - 132.3
Skilled manual workers - 123.1
Skilled machine operators - 110.3
Unskilled manual workers - 100.0

[Deicide]

Apparently Khrushchev got a pension of 500 rubles per month. Which is utterly absurd when you put into comparison with what the average worker earned. And he didn't have to do anything, just sit on his fat ass. The meagre wages is what turned people to brewing alcohol, running illegal sewing operations (i.e. making counterfeit clothing of western brands, such as Adidas), etc. I've mentioned this before, my mum used to make 80 rubbles per month in her secretary job, when she got home, she would work into the early hours of the morning making counterfeit clothing with a sewing machine stolen from a factory. Sometimes she would make 80 rubles in 1 day by making counterfeit clothing.

So the 'mafia' guys, if you will, used to steal equipment from factories and then give them to women to make clothing or anything else they wanted making. It was a 'business' in a sense. People used to steal all sorts of things, even the bosses were stealing.

That's how the organised crime groups started, in Lithuania at least, initially they were Soviet citizens trying to improve their life's by engaging in 'illegal' activities to make more money as the wages were horrendous, unless you were high-ranking nomenklatura. Over time, the groups became more organized, started to involve themselves into more serious things, such as drugs and stealing cars (in the 80s). By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, they were full fledged gangsters who were kidnapping people, shooting people, putting people into barrels of acid. Between the years 1991 and 1993, in Kuanas, the second biggest city of Lithuania, around 30 - 40 people disappeared. They just started disappearing 1 by 1. They were all men from organized crime groups. The Mafia's starting killing each other as there were too many groups which made business less profitable. These groups all formed in the Soviet Union. Some of these guys went to school together. The bodies of these people haven't been found, it's speculated that they were put into barrels of acid or buried in forests.

[Klaatu]

Of course not.
In the USSR people had a right and a duty to employment. Homelessness and malnutrition wasn't a problem until the late 80s ( excluding the 30s and 40s ).

As far as the 1930s, I've read that the Great Depression (which had affected the West) did not happen in USSR. On the other hand, there was the 1940s, with World War 2 going on, yes there would have been shortages, but the same goes for Europe and the U.S.

[A Marxist Historian]

Apparently Khrushchev got a pension of 500 rubles per month. Which is utterly absurd when you put into comparison with what the average worker earned. And he didn't have to do anything, just sit on his fat ass. The meagre wages is what turned people to brewing alcohol, running illegal sewing operations (i.e. making counterfeit clothing of western brands, such as Adidas), etc. I've mentioned this before, my mum used to make 80 rubbles per month in her secretary job, when she got home, she would work into the early hours of the morning making counterfeit clothing with a sewing machine stolen from a factory. Sometimes she would make 80 rubles in 1 day by making counterfeit clothing.

So the 'mafia' guys, if you will, used to steal equipment from factories and then give them to women to make clothing or anything else they wanted making. It was a 'business' in a sense. People used to steal all sorts of things, even the bosses were stealing, lol.

That's how the organised crime groups started, in Lithuania at least, initially they were Soviet citizens trying to improve their life's by engaging in illegal activities to make more money as the wages were horrendous, unless you were high-ranking nomenklatura. Over time, the groups became more organized, started to involve themselves into more serious things, such as drugs and stealing cars (in the 80s). By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, they were full fledged gangsters who were kidnapping people, shooting people, putting people into barrels of acid. Between the years 1991 and 1993, in Kuanas, the second biggest city of Lithuania, around 30 - 40 people disappeared. They just started disappearing 1 by 1. They were all men from organized crime groups. The Mafia's starting killing each other as there were too many groups which made business less profitable. These groups all formed in the Soviet Union. Some of these guys went to school together. The bodies of these people haven't been found, it's speculated that they were put into barrels of acid or buried in forests.

What's Bush Jr. and Seniors monthly pension? A wee bit higher tha 500 rubles I do believe?

Not to mention that Khrushchev's pension was all he had. He owned no property, unlike the Bushes with their ranches and oil companies.

This doesn't mean that bureaucrats like K didn't have unjustifiable privileges, but this just wasn't capitalism.

And now these charming Mafia types are running Russia instead. That's capitalism, Russian-style.

That the USSR generated capitalist elements like them was indeed natural. Why? Because you can't build socialism in one country, especially a backward country like Tsarist Russia. Low wage rates weren't just because of too much bureaucratic privilege, though that was part of it.

-M.H.-

[Deicide]

What's this little whiny lecture of yours about? Where did I claim that private capitalism existed in the USSR? I don't know what you've been reading.

[Tukhachevsky]

People that idealize Soviet Union are crazy or uninformed.
Also the workers and peasants didn't support the party, just see how they praised axis divisions invading Soviet Union as liberators, they felt oppressed and enslaved.

I'm not denying of course, the feat of putting man in space or the development of czarist labor camps in gulags, which was actually a perfect tool of industrialization and forced settlement in remote areas like Siberia, but the common image of Soviet Union as a dictatorship of the proletariat.
I bet the proletariat of Georgia, Kalmykia or Siberia didn't have a word in the country politic. It's hard to have a voice when you are being mass deported.

[aquaruis15000]

So why is Stalin so popular in Georgia until this day, with the last survey I read saying that something like 85% of Georgians want the USSR back?

[A Marxist Historian]

People that idealize Soviet Union are crazy or uninformed.
Also the workers and peasants didn't support the party, just see how they praised axis divisions invading Soviet Union as liberators, they felt oppressed and enslaved.

I'm not denying of course, the feat of putting man in space or the development of czarist labor camps in gulags, which was actually a perfect tool of industrialization and forced settlement in remote areas like Siberia, but the common image of Soviet Union as a dictatorship of the proletariat.
I bet the proletariat of Georgia, Kalmykia or Siberia didn't have a word in the country politic. It's hard to have a voice when you are being mass deported.

I'm the last one to idealize the USSR under Stalin or his successors, as should be clear from my postings. But if the masses supported Hitler, why did he lose?

You should change your nic from Tukhachevsky to Vlasov.

-M.H.-

[Tukhachevsky]

So why is Stalin so popular in Georgia until this day, with the last survey I read saying that something like 85% of Georgians want the USSR back?

Because as you know Stalin was georgian.
And although I utterly doubt any statistic coming from CIS countries, I suppose they prefer to be part of the USSR than to be have an hostile nation on 3 fronts, occupying parts of their land. The less of two evils, etc.
There are many georgians living in Russia and I doubt they were part of this census.

[Tukhachevsky]

You should change your nic from Tukhachevsky to Vlasov.


Because of the comment about Gulags?

If you change the labor from involuntary to voluntary- making it shorten the incarceration time or something like that- and if you stop prosecuting people because of ideology or censorship; it's a perfect formula to deal with criminality and low development in countries like Mexico or Colombia, full of criminal organization who actually use prisons and the corrupt system to their convenience.



But if the masses supported Hitler, why did he lose?

I'm not a specialist in world war 2, but it's noteworthy that during germany 1930 federal elections, even with the SS and SA scaring the population and killing important elements, the nazists only had 18% of votes. It's a very lackluster number.
But maybe I misinterpreted you: if you are referring to massive support inside soviet union, well, Hitler was a bad strategist, an arm chair strategist. He choose to make the war a war of extermination instead of a war of liberation, giving a big chance to Stalin invoke patriotic sentiments.

[Robocommie]

http://englishrussia.com/2010/12/06/the-history-of-ice-cream-in-the-ussr/

Astounding how you can always find leftists from the global west who are just so god-damn ready to swallow that image of everyone wearing grey overalls, eating porridge, living in a horrible bleak world without color, constantly surrounded by barbed wire and soldiers with barking guard dogs.

You guys think you're undermining capitalism when you go along with this bullshit, but really you're undermining socialism, by feeding into the right-wing narrative of what happens when any society attempts revolution. One of the biggest things holding people back from revolution is that they think the bullshit they're forced to deal with is still better than the horrific totalitarian alternative as painted by Glenn Beck. So yeah, thanks for contributing to that.

[aquaruis15000]

Judging from your posts, it seems you're already one. Fair play.

Then there's communism, which won't like anything that existed in America or the USA.

[aquaruis15000]

That stuff looks dang good! I wish I had some right now

[Robocommie]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIzOma9Pyv8

Seventeen Moments of Spring, a 1973 miniseries and spy thriller produced by Soviet state television, regarded as one of the most popular Russian television series of all time. Starring Soviet actor Vyacheslav Tikhonov, who plays SS operative Max Otto von Stierlitz, who is in fact a Soviet spy, Colonel Maxim Isaev, operating in deep cover in Berlin. The show actually became the inspiration for a bunch of Russian jokes which play off of the main character.

"Colonel Isaev wakes up and finds he is in prison, with no memory of being arrested. 'Who got me?' wonders Isaev. 'Was I arrested by the NKVD or the Gestapo? Ah, I know. When they come in, if they have black uniforms I'll tell them I'm Standartenfuhrer Stierlitz. If they have green uniforms, I'm Colonel Isaev.' Suddenly, a policeman in a blue uniform comes in and says, 'Comrade Tikhonov, you really need to lay off the vodka!'"

Anyway.

[The CPSU Chairman]

It seems that this topic has already been pretty thoroughly covered on this thread (and I hope to see the discussion continue, though I notice that one of the main participants has unfortunately been banned), but I just would like to note that I don't think it makes much sense to compare the standard of living in the USSR to the standard of living of the most developed imperialist states. The USSR, let us all not forget, was a developing country throughout its existence. It started out at the level of, like, India (and I mean India at that time, not India today), and was forced to develop in relative isolation in the middle of a hostile Capitalist world. Considering their circumstances, I think they really did quite well. Give me the choice of living in a shack in a Kenyan slum, a peasant hut in the Thai countryside, or God forbid, somewhere under one of the U.S's far-right neocolonial puppet regimes in Latin America at the time, as opposed to living in the kind of conditions Soviet citizens could expect whether in more developed areas like Moscow, Kiev and Leningrad or even more remote places like Armenia and Uzbekistan, and i'd take Soviet citizenship in a heartbeat. If you're going to compare the USSR to a Capitalist state, you have to put it in its proper context.

As for this discussion about Soviet ice cream. I think this is a rather strange way to compare the living standards of the West and the USSR. While such consumer goods are important, I think it's more important that Soviet citizens all had guaranteed employment, excellent education (I believe, and correct me if i'm wrong, that the USSR churned out more doctors, engineers and scientists than any other country in the world), quality healthcare even in the least-developed regions of the country, lack of homelessness and lack of violent crime, so on and so forth. This isn't to say that the problems with Soviet central planning, resulting in shortages of many consumer goods, were insignificant; it's just to say that things like ice cream should rank fairly low on our list of priorities, especially in a developing country like the Soviet Union. Housing, employment, food, healthcare, transportation, etc should be the top priority, and in most of these areas the USSR definitely was better off than the Capitalist world, not only the undeveloped countries but even the developed ones. When people talk about living standards, that's the part that should matter most. Soviet people may not have had 2,000 flavors of ice cream, but they didn't go to bed hungry at night, which is more than we can say for the majority of the Capitalist nations of the world.

[The CPSU Chairman]

I'm gonna try to put a Youtube video here, I hope i'm doing it right:

ExHCAjRsZhA

Oh yay, I got it right. Anyway, I want to include this comment from the guy who posted the video, as I feel it's relevant to this thread:

"My experience in helping my parents make this film in the USSR in 1961 was very special and helped form my view of the world ever since. I appreciate all the comments, or at least most of them. I roamed the streets of Moscow and other cities at age 17. It was the first time I was not afraid to walk in the night. I grew up in Oakland, CA where you needed to be afraid to survive. You can interpret that any way you want."

[Robocommie]

As for this discussion about Soviet ice cream. I think this is a rather strange way to compare the living standards of the West and the USSR. While such consumer goods are important, I think it's more important that Soviet citizens all had guaranteed employment, excellent education (I believe, and correct me if i'm wrong, that the USSR churned out more doctors, engineers and scientists than any other country in the world), quality healthcare even in the least-developed regions of the country, lack of homelessness and lack of violent crime, so on and so forth. This isn't to say that the problems with Soviet central planning, resulting in shortages of many consumer goods, were insignificant; it's just to say that things like ice cream should rank fairly low on our list of priorities.

It's definitely trivial, and those other things you mention are the most important fundamentals, but I think it's good to get a look at the human side of Soviet existence, and understand that day to day life in the Soviet Union was not some Orwellian post-industrial nightmare.

[The CPSU Chairman]

It's definitely trivial, and those other things you mention are the most important fundamentals, but I think it's good to get a look at the human side of Soviet existence, and understand that day to day life in the Soviet Union was not some Orwellian post-industrial nightmare.

Of course, I agree with you completely there. And I actually find the subject of things like Soviet ice cream and other aspects of daily Soviet life quite interesting, and I think they do deserve to be mentioned here. I just meant, in my other post, that I think some people on this thread are making too big a deal about things like that, without giving due consideration to the wider context of the Soviet Union at the time.

[Tukhachevsky]

I recommend a movie from the same author of Burnt by the sun, Nikita Mikhalkov, called Anna: Ot shesti do vosemnadtsati (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106290/) (it's the only name imdb gives to english version, it would be something as Anna from 6 to 16).
You can easily find subtitled torrents only by searching the director name.

He filmed his daughter from 6 years, living in Soviet Union pre-Afghanistan war, to 16 years old, post-perestroika, post-glasnost, and passing through all russian crisis.
It's very beautiful and tell a lot about soviet culture from the 80's and early 90's without being specially critic of communism.

[A Marxist Historian]

Because of the comment about Gulags?

If you change the labor from involuntary to voluntary- making it shorten the incarceration time or something like that- and if you stop prosecuting people because of ideology or censorship; it's a perfect formula to deal with criminality and low development in countries like Mexico or Colombia, full of criminal organization who actually use prisons and the corrupt system to their convenience.

No doubt Vlasov would agree. But that's not why I said that. I said that because of your bizarre assertion that the people of the USSR all welcomed Hitler with open arms.

Yes, you had some Ukrainians who initially were pro-Hitler in West Ukraine, where the Soviet Union had only occupied two years ago and where Ukrainian fascism had been rampant then--and in fact pretty much still is.

But the fact is that the Nazis weren't defeated because of Stalin's allegedly brilliant generalship, in fact the Stalin-Hitler pact led the masses to the slaughter. It's because the working people and peasantry of the Soviet Union mobilized to defend their revolution against the Nazis, not because of Stalin but despite him.





I'm not a specialist in world war 2, but it's noteworthy that during germany 1930 federal elections, even with the SS and SA scaring the population and killing important elements, the nazists only had 18% of votes. It's a very lackluster number.
But maybe I misinterpreted you: if you are referring to massive support inside soviet union, well, Hitler was a bad strategist, an arm chair strategist. He choose to make the war a war of extermination instead of a war of liberation, giving a big chance to Stalin invoke patriotic sentiments.

You had appeals to patriotic sentiments all over Europe vs. the Nazis--and the armies of all the bourgeois governments crumbling like paper mache. Even, or indeed especially, in France, the traditional enemy of Germany. And the French Army was pretty much just as well armed as the German and, plus the Brits, larger.

No, it wasn't Russian patriotism that defeated Hitler, though that's how Stalin preferred to present matters. It was the workers defending their revolution.

When the Blitzkrief was halted in its tracks in Moscow in December 1941, the turning point of WWII, the Nazis had not gotten around yet to exterminating anybody except the Jews. It was the workers of Moscow who stopped Hitler.

-M.H.-

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I think what a lot of you are missing is that, regardless of the USSRs economic performance and living standards/social factors relative to the USA or the private capitalist west, the key is actually to measure the USSR - and all other 20th century State Socialist nations - relative to the key tenets of communism, namely a classless, stateless, moneyless society (probably in that order of the stages of things that might be abolished). When we do this, we can see that, even after nearly three quarters of a century, the USSR fell woefully short of anything we could term 'Socialistic'. It simply replaced private capitalism, where private capital controls production, the labour market and indirectly (or directly!) consumption and so on, with state socialism, where the huge state fulfilled this role.

[A Marxist Historian]

I think what a lot of you are missing is that, regardless of the USSRs economic performance and living standards/social factors relative to the USA or the private capitalist west, the key is actually to measure the USSR - and all other 20th century State Socialist nations - relative to the key tenets of communism, namely a classless, stateless, moneyless society (probably in that order of the stages of things that might be abolished). When we do this, we can see that, even after nearly three quarters of a century, the USSR fell woefully short of anything we could term 'Socialistic'. It simply replaced private capitalism, where private capital controls production, the labour market and indirectly (or directly!) consumption and so on, with state socialism, where the huge state fulfilled this role.

Well, yes, you can't build socialism in one country after all, and Stalin made an extremely nasty botch of the attempt.

But that's not what we are discussing.

What we are discussing is the achievements of the Russian workers revolution, the only successful workers revolution in history. Yes, the Russian workers did not succeed in building socialism, and the seizure of power by Stalin and his bureaucrats played a very negative role.

But, as the saying goes, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

And despite all the unpleasant sides of the Soviet Union under Stalin and his successors, that the workers could build a powerful state, abolish unemployment and homelessness, provide free medical care and education for everybody, and shove Nazism and fascism into the dustbin of history--is the proof that workers can rule, that this is not just a pipe dream of crazy intellectuals.

The Russian Revolution is and remains the workers answer to capitalist barbarism, and it is time to stop spitting on the red flag.

-M.H.-

[Karabin]

Ahhh the USSR. I recall my mom telling me about a trip she once took their. She said all of the citizens wanted to buy her jeans and her other clothes since they looked so new and so different. She said that they had very limited options in terms of things like how they expressed themselves in certain matters. Too bad.

Haha, my stepfather had a very similar experience :lol: In Yugoslavia (Where my family is originally from), the Russians were always considered to be poor people during those times.


What?

The Soviets had poor healthcare. But that is not to say the Soviets achieved great things with developing healthcare; the infant mortality rate came close to the levels of the top 15 advanced countries, life expectancy of 70 by 1970, highest doctor-to-patient ratio in the world etc. But when it comes to it, Soviet healthcare wasn't good (Albeit free). Overworked doctors, shortages of medicine, poor equipment, horrid organisation and generally low quality service plagued the healthcare system. You wouldn't want to be a sick Soviet, that's for sure.


No, the Soviets had a whole series of magazine covers critcizing the "idolatry" of Western Jeans and stuff. They were highly sought after and what you're saying is simply false. There were for example Polish jeans but they weren't that "cool".
Google pictures of Soviets in jeans.

That makes sense, especially after Skybuttons comment. I must have mixed up "not having" and "Not being able to get". Regardless of this, my stepfathers story still holds.


Yes, in the 80s and especially after "liberalization"...

No, this was prominent in the 60's and 70's too but not on the scale of the 80's. The average Soviet usually carried around a shopping bag with them so that they could immediately by a certain good for themselves, their family and even their friends before the item ran out as it inevitably would.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Well, yes, you can't build socialism in one country after all, and Stalin made an extremely nasty botch of the attempt.

But that's not what we are discussing.

What we are discussing is the achievements of the Russian workers revolution, the only successful workers revolution in history. Yes, the Russian workers did not succeed in building socialism, and the seizure of power by Stalin and his bureaucrats played a very negative role.

But, as the saying goes, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

And despite all the unpleasant sides of the Soviet Union under Stalin and his successors, that the workers could build a powerful state, abolish unemployment and homelessness, provide free medical care and education for everybody, and shove Nazism and fascism into the dustbin of history--is the proof that workers can rule, that this is not just a pipe dream of crazy intellectuals.

The Russian Revolution is and remains the workers answer to capitalist barbarism, and it is time to stop spitting on the red flag.

-M.H.-

The revolution itself achieved very little, in terms of positive, pro-Socialist change. The 1920s was a time of State Capitalism, the infamous NEPmen. By the time Stalin got in, industrialisation occurred and living standards rose significantly in some aspects, there was little to no connection to the initial struggles by Russian workers at the turn of the 20th century and either side of WW1.

[Psy]

The revolution itself achieved very little, in terms of positive, pro-Socialist change. The 1920s was a time of State Capitalism, the infamous NEPmen. By the time Stalin got in, industrialisation occurred and living standards rose significantly in some aspects, there was little to no connection to the initial struggles by Russian workers at the turn of the 20th century and either side of WW1.
Prior the revolution Russia was a backwards feudal nation with the old Russian aristocracy being an obstacle Russia from entering modernity. The revolution threw Russian feudalism into the trash bin of history and trusted Russia in modernity. Thus the Russian Revolution accomplished the same changes as the French Revolution in the long run, the Russian monarchy is dead, the Russian aristocracy is dead, the Russian Orthodox Church no longer has a seat of power in the Russian state.

[MuscularTophFan]

Prior the revolution Russia was a backwards feudal nation with the old Russian aristocracy being an obstacle Russia from entering modernity. The revolution threw Russian feudalism into the trash bin of history and trusted Russia in modernity. Thus the Russian Revolution accomplished the same changes as the French Revolution in the long run, the Russian monarchy is dead, the Russian aristocracy is dead, the Russian Orthodox Church no longer has a seat of power in the Russian state.
The big difference however is that the French Revolution turned France into a secular democracy. As for the Bolshevik Revolution(Russian Revolution was in Feb. 1917) took power from one class and gave it to another wealthy class to abuse the Russian people.

As for secularism it doesn't really help us atheists with people like Lenin and Stalin taking power and killing lots of people? Now theists constly shove "hurr atheists are like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao!" in our faces consistently just really pisses me the fuck off.

Russia would be a lot better off Czars where overthrow and there was not Bolshevik takeover.

[Psy]

The big difference however is that the French Revolution turned France into a secular democracy. As for the Bolshevik Revolution(Russian Revolution was in Feb. 1917) took power from one class and gave it to another wealthy class to abuse the Russian people.

As for secularism it doesn't really help us atheists with people like Lenin and Stalin taking power and killing lots of people? Now theists constly shove "hurr atheists are like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao!" in our faces consistently just really pisses me the fuck off.

Russia would be a lot better off Czars where overthrow and there was not Bolshevik takeover.
The transitional Russian government didn't do anything about about the Russian Orthodox Church or the aristocracy thus did nothing about moving from feudalism to modernity.

Now as for the killing the God of the bible killed was more people the Lenin and Stalin. If we going by the King James Bible then God killed around 25 million people and enslaved many more so the Bolsheviks still have less blood on its hand then then Yahweh God. The immorality of the biblical God is not a new, there is a TV movie called "God on Trail" where a group of Jews during the holocaust debate the morality of Yahweh.

dx7irFN2gdI

[MuscularTophFan]

The transitional Russian government didn't do anything about about the Russian Orthodox Church or the aristocracy thus did nothing about moving from feudalism to modernity.
Secularism would have happened anyway, with or without the Bolsheviks.


Now as for the killing the God of the bible killed was more people the Lenin and Stalin. If we going by the King James Bible then God killed around 25 million people and enslaved many more so the Bolsheviks still have less blood on its hand then then Yahweh God. The immorality of the biblical God is not a new, there is a TV movie called "God on Trail" where a group of Jews during the holocaust debate the morality of Yahweh.

dx7irFN2gdI
Let's not get into a numbers game on "who killed more" bs. The bible is immoral by our modern standards because:

1.) Supports slavery
2.) Supports the death penalty for homosexuals.
3.) Supports war, genocide, and racism
4.) Supports killing non-believers

Along with whole bunch of other horrible shit.

[Psy]

Secularism would have happened anyway, with or without the Bolsheviks.

How?

The Mensheviks mentioned no desire to deal with the Russian Orthodox Church that and even fought aside them when the Russian Orthodox Church sided with the White Army and defended the landed aristocracy.



Let's not get into a numbers game on "who killed more" bs. The bible is immoral by our modern standards because:

1.) Supports slavery
2.) Supports the death penalty for homosexuals.
3.) Supports war, genocide, and racism
4.) Supports killing non-believers

Along with whole bunch of other horrible shit.

Which the Bolsheviks didn't do and most of the death of the Bolsheviks were cause by shear incompetence not malice.

[MuscularTophFan]

How?

The Mensheviks mentioned no desire to deal with the Russian Orthodox Church that and even fought aside them when the Russian Orthodox Church sided with the White Army and defended the landed aristocracy.

Secularism happens in every country. There is no need to go on an anti-religious massacre against religious people. UK still has a state church at it's one of the least religious countries on earth. Russia would be just as secular and non-religious as it is today with or without the 1917 revolution.

[Dire Helix]

Russia would be a lot better off Czars where overthrow and there was not Bolshevik takeover.

I suggest you educate yourself on the matter before coming in here and spouting ignorant crap like this. If your view of the October Revolution is one of a takeover by "another wealthy class to abuse Russian people" and Lenin killing people for the heck of it(and to give petty-bourgeois kids fancying themselves as leftists bad rep, apparently), then I have to conclude that not only are you not educated enough to speak about this, but aren`t exactly bright either. There`s tons of literature on this out there. Start reading it. The excellent article by ComradeOm is a good starting point and it`s available right here on RevLeft:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/russian-revolution-bolshevik-t105275/index.html

[A Marxist Historian]

The revolution itself achieved very little, in terms of positive, pro-Socialist change. The 1920s was a time of State Capitalism, the infamous NEPmen. By the time Stalin got in, industrialisation occurred and living standards rose significantly in some aspects, there was little to no connection to the initial struggles by Russian workers at the turn of the 20th century and either side of WW1.

An amazing statement. The original Bolshevik Revolution, which excited the whole world with its dramatic and unheard of reforms and social transformations, achieved very little? That is so ridiculous I don't even know how to answer.

The workers seized the factories and tried to run them. Didn't succeed very well, so you had to have backward steps like the NEP to keep the economy going, but all banks and heavy industry were socialized, the NEPmen were after all traders, merchants, and small capitalists producing consumer goods. They were staring to get out of hand by the late '20s, but ocmpared to the horrors of Tsarist capitalism, it seems hard to describe them as "infamous."

Despite all the huge destruction of WWI and the Russian Civil War and Jewish pogroms and starvation, by the mid '20s, the USSR had rebuilt itself to an economic level equal or better than under the Tsar, workers had free medical care, "affirmative action" for college admission and lived in houses instead of shacks and holes in the ground like Donbass coal miners. Pretty good considering what Tsarist Russia had looked like.

And this was definitely linked to the workers struggles of the previous period, in fact the state bureaucracy was largely former workers who had led those struggles. Under Stalin they were replaced by -- rank and file workers who had largely sat out the union and revolutionary struggles. By the early '30s, just about any worker who had been working in a factory in 1917 and was still alive and healthy and wasn't a Trotskyist or something could have been promoted into the state bureaucracy if that's what he wanted.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Secularism happens in every country. There is no need to go on an anti-religious massacre against religious people. UK still has a state church at it's one of the least religious countries on earth. Russia would be just as secular and non-religious as it is today with or without the 1917 revolution.

Massacre? What kind of Nazi style right wing propaganda are you getting that from.

The only "massacres of religious people" that went on after 1917 were th massacres of Jews during the Civil War by the Whites, with the intimate involvement of the Russian Orthodox Church, who had always been in favor of killing Jews.

During the Russian Civil War the total number of Jews murdered, raped, crippled and mutilated by the Whites and the Church and other bandits exceeded 200,000.

And then of course you had an even bigger "massacre of religious people," i.e. Jews, when Hitler invaded, which most of the Whites were all in favor of.

Orthodox Christian priests who collaborated with the Whites, which is most of them, were punished appropriately, but the Soviet state never, even under Stalin, banned any kind of religion, and certainly never staged any "massacres" of believers. Indeed during WWII Stalin bent over backward for the Church, too much so.

-M.H.-

[Psy]

Secularism happens in every country.

*Cough*Afghanistan*cough*Iran*cough*Israel*cough* the former CSA (Confederate States of America).



There is no need to go on an anti-religious massacre against religious people. UK still has a state church at it's one of the least religious countries on earth. Russia would be just as secular and non-religious as it is today with or without the 1917 revolution.
And what outside the Red Army would have stopped the Russian Orthodox Church building armies to defend Russian feudalism. You seem to forget the Russian Orthodox Church had mass hangings for those that fought against the White Army during the civil-war.

[MuscularTophFan]

*Cough*Afghanistan*cough*Iran*cough*Israel*cough* the former CSA (Confederate States of America).
All of those countries you just listed are eventually going to be secular godless places in a couple of year. Maybe not Afghanistan. That place is stuck in the 13th century.

However the youth in both Iran and the south are not religious at all. Religion as a whole will probably die out sometime in the 21st century when humanity is able to become immoral.



And what outside the Red Army would have stopped the Russian Orthodox Church building armies to defend Russian feudalism. You seem to forget the Russian Orthodox Church had mass hangings for those that fought against the White Army during the civil-war.
So what you are saying is that the ROC is bad so we atheists should be just as brutal and evil and religious people? I hate organized religion but I don't support banning it either. That's a form of authoritarianism. Just like religion gradually die out.

[MuscularTophFan]

Massacre? What kind of Nazi style right wing propaganda are you getting that from.

The only "massacres of religious people" that went on after 1917 were th massacres of Jews during the Civil War by the Whites, with the intimate involvement of the Russian Orthodox Church, who had always been in favor of killing Jews.

During the Russian Civil War the total number of Jews murdered, raped, crippled and mutilated by the Whites and the Church and other bandits exceeded 200,000.

And then of course you had an even bigger "massacre of religious people," i.e. Jews, when Hitler invaded, which most of the Whites were all in favor of.

Orthodox Christian priests who collaborated with the Whites, which is most of them, were punished appropriately, but the Soviet state never, even under Stalin, banned any kind of religion, and certainly never staged any "massacres" of believers. Indeed during WWII Stalin bent over backward for the Church, too much so.

-M.H.-
I never said the ROC wasn't evil or anti-Semitic, but you seem to be whitewashing some of the stuff the Soviets really did. You don't metion the fact religion was also banned internally in the Soviet Union under Stalin and don't mention the anti-religious campaign that was continued after World War II under him.

Yes I'm an atheist but I don't support murdering religious people.

[Psy]

I never said the ROC wasn't evil or anti-Semitic, but you seem to be whitewashing some of the stuff the Soviets really did. You don't metion the fact religion was also banned internally in the Soviet Union under Stalin and don't mention the anti-religious campaign that was continued after World War II under him.

Yes I'm an atheist but I don't support murdering religious people.
The ROC's main grievance with the USSR was seizing property, why should Marxists give a shit about the property of a ruling class? Why should churches get to keep their property in a workers society?

Why is anti-religious propaganda bad, religion is anti-worker propaganda so shouldn't a workers state counter that propaganda?




So what you are saying is that the ROC is bad so we atheists should be just as brutal and evil and religious people? I hate organized religion but I don't support banning it either. That's a form of authoritarianism. Just like religion gradually die out.
The ROC was the ruling class of Russia at the time since we are talking about a feudal society. So the ROC had to be crushed to break its rule over Russia.

[A Marxist Historian]

I never said the ROC wasn't evil or anti-Semitic, but you seem to be whitewashing some of the stuff the Soviets really did. You don't metion the fact religion was also banned internally in the Soviet Union under Stalin and don't mention the anti-religious campaign that was continued after World War II under him.

Yes I'm an atheist but I don't support murdering religious people.

Huh? Religion banned internally under Stalin? That's just plain wrong, and absurd. During WWII, you had the head metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church appearing on platforms together with Stalin and blessing him.

Sure, there were some anti-religious excesses at times, mostly in the early '30s in the ultraleft period, but they pale before the excesses Stalin carried out vs. all other dissenters.

Baptists got persecuted a bit in the latter years of the USSR, but you had nothing comparable to Clinton's extermination of the Branch Dravidians. And of course you had the anti-Semitism of Stalin's last years and afterwards, but that was discrimination against Jews as an ethnicity seen as pro-American and pro-Israel, not religious persecution.

-M.H.-

[Paul Cockshott]

Did the soviets suffer from unemployment, homelessness, malnutrition, lack of adequate healthcare and education, etc. to the same level of USA? Can somebody recommend links or books on this topic? Thanks.

For a comprehensive summary you should look at 'From Farm to Factory', by Robert Allen.
The relevant place to compare it with is not the USA the richest country in the world in 1928, whose national income percapita in 1928 was 4 times that of the USSR at that date, but with Brazil, Ecuador, Columbia etc ie the northern part of South America whose national income per head in 1928 was the same as the USSR, but by 1989 national income per capita in the USSR was $7000 roughly whilst in the bulk of latin America it was $4500.

[Robocommie]

The question I think though, is the way that national income was distributed among the populace. That kind of data is perhaps not easily available I imagine but the question is crucial from a socialist perspective.

[MuscularTophFan]

The ROC's main grievance with the USSR was seizing property, why should Marxists give a shit about the property of a ruling class? Why should churches get to keep their property in a workers society?
Thousands of priests where killed in the Soviet Union.
Many minority religions where sent to gulags/mental asylums.


Why is anti-religious propaganda bad, religion is anti-worker propaganda so shouldn't a workers state counter that propaganda?
The state should be completely neutral when it comes to religion or god in general. We shouldn't be forcing our atheistic views on others just like how I don't want xtians to force their views on me.




The ROC was the ruling class of Russia at the time since we are talking about a feudal society. So the ROC had to be crushed to break its rule over Russia.
Yes ROC did need to be crushed but not though anti-religious violence but though secularism. The more developed and industrialized a country is the less religious it is. That's why Russia in the 1910s was so religious. Separation of religion and state is the best you can do.

[MuscularTophFan]

Huh? Religion banned internally under Stalin? That's just plain wrong, and absurd. During WWII, you had the head metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church appearing on platforms together with Stalin and blessing him.

Sure, there were some anti-religious excesses at times, mostly in the early '30s in the ultraleft period, but they pale before the excesses Stalin carried out vs. all other dissenters.

Baptists got persecuted a bit in the latter years of the USSR, but you had nothing comparable to Clinton's extermination of the Branch Dravidians. And of course you had the anti-Semitism of Stalin's last years and afterwards, but that was discrimination against Jews as an ethnicity seen as pro-American and pro-Israel, not religious persecution.

-M.H.-
99% of all churches in Soviet Union where closed when World War II started

Stalin did used religion as a propaganda during WW II. Afterwords however he began another anti-religious campaign.

[lenin1988]

How about we just say stalin was a traitor and a enemy to communism and forget his name?

[Psy]

Thousands of priests where killed in the Soviet Union.
Many minority religions where sent to gulags/mental asylums.

Many of those priests were responsible for the hanging of leftists during the civil war, and where spies for the White Army.



The state should be completely neutral when it comes to religion or god in general. We shouldn't be forcing our atheistic views on others just like how I don't want xtians to force their views on me.

No, that is how Scientology defends itself from criticism. The workers state should debunk the religions it can, any religion that can survive the harsh light of science and reason is worthy of survival.



Yes ROC did need to be crushed but not though anti-religious violence but though secularism. The more developed and industrialized a country is the less religious it is. That's why Russia in the 1910s was so religious. Separation of religion and state is the best you can do.
The best you can do is push the scientific method onto the masses.