Ask/Tell us about the Soviet Union!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Ask/Tell us about the Soviet Union!

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

FrozenVent posted:

If Russia had a life expectancy of 44.4 years in 1925, and everyone else was at 70 or whatever, that still sucks, sorry. And 1958 is after the discovery of antibiotics, something Stalin had little to do with. Plus I'm sure there would have been ways to achieve that without forced labor and political execution; most western countries did after all.

For what it's worth the actual Soviet propaganda really loved statistics like that, i.e. "thanks to Communism we are now building 20x more cars than in the Czarist era". No poo poo you're building more cars than in 1910.

(Also that's one of the reasons there was a constant struggle to find spare parts for your car -- the capacity went into building more units which looked better in reports; spare parts, or quality, were for losers)

# ¿ Dec 21, 2014 17:46

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 13:49

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

HonorableTB posted:

I hate to acknowledge that Stalin did anything correctly, but the New Economic Plan was designed to make USSR (primarily Russia) competitive with the rest of the industrialized world, and that's exactly what it did. Of course, millions of people died on the kholkozi and during the construction of Gulags, but you can't deny that Stalin's plan for industrialization worked because the end goal was to put the USSR on par with Western Europe at the very least in terms of industrial output and by the end of WW2, the USSR was the world's second largest economy (only behind the USA) despite having suffered the most damage and destruction during Operation Barbarossa. None of that would have been possible without the NEP and Gulag system, as terrible as that was.

You have some things confused pretty badly. NEP was introduced by Lenin as a more liberal alternative after the civil war as the War Communism was harsh and unsustainable; allowing some cooperation, small private enterprise, farms and so forth. Stalin put an end to it with collectivization and totalitarian state-controls-everything policies. I don't know by what bizarro metric do you consider USSR the second largest economy by the end of WW2, they mass produced a lot of military hardware but everything else was in shambles and barely managed to put out bare necessities. Also you might want to give some credit to Lend-Lease for the industrialization, besides the obvious natural resource cheat codes. As far as the last sentence, as one example you know that grand Baltic Sea - White Sea Channel tens of thousands of GULAG prisoners died building, not to mention all the costs? It was too narrow to have any shipping going on, not that there was anything worth shipping, so was pretty much totally useless.

Basically you're full of poo poo and / or trolling, idk.

quote:

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?

What Gagarin rode to space was an ICBM with great military applications of the kind for which no costs were spared. Putting a dude in space was secondary, though still useful.

pigdog fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Dec 21, 2014

# ¿ Dec 21, 2014 23:22

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

davey4283 posted:

I don't know why that's so hard to believe.

Cause you mostly get over it in 20+ years. Either there's some exaggeration going on or she's an outlier. Putin is worrisome though.

# ¿ Dec 29, 2014 22:12

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

There's a little bit of difference between, say, disliking gays and "fantasizing about the genocide of gays". In fact it's a little bit insulting that you wouldn't consider the latter kind of views out of the ordinary.

# ¿ Dec 29, 2014 22:59

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