Fish of hemp posted:Clearly Soviet Union was capable producing quality stuff: you can't get dude to space and back alive if you put him in a lovely spaceship. How come this quality never transferred to consumer products? The Soviet Union was fairly good at producing an elite capable of managing major scientific and technical projects. The same types of people are not necessarily good at designing consumer products - good consumer products are designed around what consumers want and how they will actually use them, which requires a good system of information feedback not readily available in the Soviet Union.
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Dec 21, 2014 18:43
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 13:12 |
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100 million herds of goats died during the five year plan for agriculture. Not 'people' as such...
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Dec 22, 2014 13:36
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icantfindaname posted:The purges were of people involved in politics and public life. A bunch of mathematicians sitting in a room cranking out ICBM designs don't have to interact with politics at all Look at how wrong you are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev#Imprisonment Nobody was immune from the purges, although the politburo was the single worst place to be under Stalin. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 11:42 on Dec 24, 2014 |
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Dec 24, 2014 11:38
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I don't think you understood his question, which I really take to be: (a) How often were people accused of political offences after Stalin? and (b) Was the accusation of a political crime enough to tarnish an individual? and (c) How serious was it? I think you'll find that in all cases there was a marked improvement in the Soviet Union after Stalin, but that after that things still went through phases of being better or worse on some or all of the parts of this question, partly related to policy and partly related to crisis. Repression is often dialled up in line with the strength of resistance. What I think you'll find is that in any society where lack of belief in the superstructure of belief is a crime, given the inherent unprovability of this and how it often boils down to the word of one person against another, accusations of this variety are often abused. The parallels with witch burning trials are to some extent useful here: if you want to gently caress some guy so you get your promotion instead, you can machinate unpleasantly against him using this sort of system. I believe this was a general problem in the Soviet Union and other associated Republics. In addition, in Soviet society and other related Eastern-Bloc countries, there were substantial apparatuses of surveillance (most notably in East Germany). As such, a great many people are often subject to the arbitrary will of the surveillance apparatus. In many cases the way this manifested itself is that your position in society permitted you a certain latitude to bend the rules, but that the inevitable infractions against the rules gave the state ammunition to take you down with if it was felt to be necessary or depending on what person is policing you that day. Political monitoring was stronger in some areas of life than others, most notably in the military apparatus. I can't give a more complete picture as unfortunately I am not qualified.
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Dec 24, 2014 13:11
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MAKE NO BABBYS posted:You guys are real weird thinking the thread is somehow glorifying Stalin. It doesn't strike me like that at all. Huh? MAKE NO BABBYS posted:OP - I wish that the current Russian govt wasn't so loving lovely, because I find Russian art, history, architecture fascinating... But I can't give them my tourism money. What's the modern impression of films like Russian Ark? What do modern Russians think of those interested in seeing Chernobyl ruins or other abandoned USSR structures? I hate suffering tourism, but I am fascinated by the structures and their history... I did a paper on Gulag Archipelago in 7th grade and it's never escaped me. Just go to another former Soviet or Eastern Bloc country you don't dislike then. They all have the wreckage of the communist era to look at. Tony Homo posted:What do you think of Gorbachev? Given way too little credit in general.
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Dec 25, 2014 10:19
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 13:12 |
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I think we all just have to count our blessings that D&D's Russian thread hasn't discovered this one yet.
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Dec 25, 2014 16:56
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