:USSR:

Yesterday @CoralMarks made a great reply on Andropov and how his approach to reforms and party work might have saved the USSR, had he lived long enough. I think analysing the downfall of the USSR is of great importance to us as leftists. The Soviet Union was an immense achievement but ultimately it failed and capitalism was restored. Future socialist projects need to learn from this to avoid making the same mistakes and to effectively debunk bourgeois "socialism always fails" propaganda.

On the top of my head a few points seems to be obvious:

  • The people in charge were too old. The system failed to include younger generations which made it lose touch with the people and made it harder to keep developing Soviet society
  • The development of the nomenklatura as a new bourgeoisie within the party made the system lose track of revolutionary goals and opened up for corruption
  • The Sino-Soviet split is one of the great tragedies of the communist movement as it prevented a strong communist block from forming. I don't know enough about it to say if and how it could have been prevented but it is certainly high on my "Things in history I wish would have turned out differently" list.
  • Cultural conservatism did more harm than good to the USSR. I understand the fear that western cultural products could act like a Trojan horse for capitalist ideology but ultimately attempts to prevent western culture from affecting the USSR was experienced as silly in the population and made Soviet culture look weak and outdated in comparison. Maybe a more permissive and confident cultural policy that invited foreign inputs and expanded upon them in a socialist context could have made a difference and put the socialist world on the cultural offensive. It shouldn't be that hard to pick up on a youth culture that rebelled against conservative bourgeois norms and see it through a socialist lens.
  • The balance that was found between protecting the revolution and the individual liberties of the people left the people dissatisfied and eroded trust in the system. It is a hard question; naive liberal permissiveness would have exposed the USSR to bourgeois subversion and brought the system down even faster but the people really didn't like the censorship and the secret police stuff. Maybe there are valuable lessons to learn from China about being permissive and even inviting of public criticism of material problems and concrete policies but cracking down on challenges to the socialist system, ie. people should be welcome to tell about how the bus system is run badly and how the guy in charge is corrupt but they shouldn't be allowed to say that done capitalist should own and profit from it.
  • The apparent wealth gap between the west and the AES countries was a highly efficient propaganda tool for the bourgeoisie. On one hand more could have been done to credibly tell people about the whole picture of how wealth and poverty coexisted in the capitalist west, for instance by facilitating cultural and personal exchanges with western proletarians. You might not believe it when the state media tells you about poverty in the west, but it is harder to dismiss when a poor American exchange student or guest worker tells you about his life story. On the other hand there was a significant gap and a greater supply of consumer goods, of treats, might have stabilised the system. The USSR was not as developed as the west and had to spend significant resources on defense, on the other hand Soviet industry was not as efficient as it could have been. The before-mentioned corruption and conservatism of an aging leadership proved disastrous to the USSR.
  • A series of failed liberal reforms under Gorbachev tried to solve the problems of the socialist USSR by making it look more like the capitalist west, but instead they accelerated the downfall that killed millions and impoverished the nation. Centrism is a dead end that ultimately leads in a reactionary direction. Problems in a socialist society must be dealt with in a socialist manner and policy must always be true to the revolutionary and proletarian roots.
  • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    With conditions in the USSR there was only so much they could have done, it was the first successful revolution in one of the weakest links of imperialism in a feudal land, I hate to say it but in a lot of ways it was a premature birth of another economic-political system.

    You couldn't really argue that by the 1950s. The Soviet Economy had surged and the country was heavily industrialized. Russians were outpacing the US in both technology and territory. And Communist Revolutions abroad had the Imperialist world on its back foot.

    I might argue that the Soviets were simply victims of their own success. They forced the US to compete both militarily and politically in a way they'd never done before. Everything from NATO and the Marshall Plan to Nixon's opening up with China to the Civil Rights Era of domestic reform was a sharp turn from how Western imperial powers had engaged in the past.

    The Soviets changed the terms of debate on a global stage, and Westerners had to match them with sugar coated liberalism.

    What could the USSR have done differently? Perhaps Dengism is the answer. Open yourself up to nominal exploitation while accumulating foreign capital. Secure the immediate surrounding territory, but don't extend your reach into the Western sphere (especially not a next-door nation like Cuba) and provoke a nuclear conflict. Build up an economic base at home before attempting to project military abroad.

    Of course, its possible that US friendly attitude towards China was only possible because the Soviets presented a compelling threat.

    Maybe what the Soviets really needed was an Imperial Fascist power for Americans to butt heads against. I guess modern Russia and the modern US are getting to fill that role for each other.

    • ABigguhPizzahPieh [none/use name,any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      The Soviets never had a serious lead over the US. The US commanded all of its own industry, all of western Europe, and Japan. The Soviets had to rebuild after WW1, WW2, and had to support new nations all over the world in a way that the US never did. The American empire had the overwhelming preponderance of force for all of the Cold War. Eventually, the Soviets couldn't even count on China after the Sino-Soviet split.

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        The US commanded all of its own industry, all of western Europe, and Japan.

        In the immediate wake of the World Wars, that was mostly just its own industry. The struggle for Middle East oil reserves and African minerals, particularly in the early years of the Cold War, were about securing resources necessary to rebuild the imperial core.

        Both the Soviets and the Americans were mostly doing exporting - particularly arms exporting - to secure their relative spheres of influence.

        The American empire had the overwhelming preponderance of force for all of the Cold War.

        The Americans had to play wack-a-mole against Communist insurgency throughout its own backyard while wrestling with an expansionary Soviet rival internationally. Its major advantages were in domestic population growth and urban development. But it didn't realize those advantages until well into the 60s.

        Post-WW2, the imperial world was exhausted and the future was far from certain. It took decades to recover, even in the insulated Western hemisphere.