I'm doing a presentation on the soviet union for school soon and i would like to know all your opinions on this.
I've got: an over-bloated bureaucracy (which was prone to corruption), rural poverty (which is very unfair as basically all countries have rural poverty- difference is that some countries actually help these people), and a lacking light industry that led to economic dissatisfaction from the populace.
I might share the PowerPoint here for your feedback although its very small as its for a vocational exam that is only a few minutes
Mostly your third point. Light industry should have been expanded on far more than anything else. There was also a lot of gangs and private markets in the latter era. There was a lot of backlog from the party not being efficiently purged to get rid of opportunists. Honestly there wasn't enough aggressive foreign policy against the United States, they didn't defend themselves as well as they should have.
I'm not certain that the huge expenditure on the arms race could have been avoided but it certainly didn't help the USSR economically.
I found this article where the author waxes on about what he'd wish for a new Union State interesting. He mentions some of the things most liked and disliked about life in the USSR.
It's political model was flawed, it led to successively less people participating in elections. Which promoted corruption in the long run.
Marxism and Leninism weren't taught in schools, it was barely a part of people's lives. That was clearly a mistake. It seems people there were as politically ignorant as they are here in the West. Maybe a little less so.
Technically Marxism-Leninism was a part of all higher education programs, no matter if you were into humanities or sciences. The curriculum of the subject, however... Uh... Let's just say that it was a little detached from reality. Making students write out quotes about evil bourgeoisie or different low-value shit from transcripts of old party meetings is just... Blegh.
One of the criticisms of the Soviet Union that I have is how they failed to properly anticipate and react to Germany which resulted in the disasters of 1941 with millions of people being sent into German camps and prisons
I can't blame them for that, it's because Hitler acted in a really unpredictable way lol. Stalin never thought Hitler could possibly be crazy and stupid enough to repeat the crucial mistake which lost WWI for Germany - opening up a war on two fronts at the same time. He was sure that Hitler would only turn his attention eastwards once the western front had been completely settled - a completely reasonable judgement at the time...
Too much centralization of power, first around Stalin, then around the party bureucracy.
i'd argue that decentralization is the primary issue, you see the same shit happening in china today, with local governments turning themselves into what are essentially little fiefdoms with overly redundant bureaucratic structures to dissipate responsibility and protect the powerful.
something something fractal structures need to be pruned, like trees.
