Why did the USSR fall?

[JKSCHW at aol.com]

As everyone here know, I am no defender of planning or authoritarian 
socialism, but Jim's comment here is only one theory, and not necessarily the 
most plausible one. First, high growrth rates for developing societies are 
not unusual, and the USSR did in fact develop from an agricultural to an 
industrial society. Second, estimates of these growth rates do not depend on 
taking Soviet statistics as gospel; there was a  lot of good independent work 
to the same point. Third, and on the other side, an average from 1928-41, 
45-75 is not very revealing, since it misses the big fall off from 1960-75, 
when growth rates fell a lot. The highest growth rates are 1922-41 and 
1945-60, reconstruction after war and industrialization, what you'd expect. 
Fourth, many Soviet factories produced much waste, but not all, or the USSR 
would not have attained the very real industrialization and increase in 
living standards it did.

Finally there is the question about why the system came apart. Michael 
Ellman, a very distinguished exoert on planning and no particular fan of the 
USSR argues (in his anthology, The Dinintegration of the Societ Economy), 
that the system was deliberatelt dismantled by the perestroichiki rather than 
merely collapsing. Had not Gorbachev, et al, taken apart the central planning 
apparatus and put nothing in its place, it is at least possible and perhaps 
likely that we would still have the USSR to kick around into the indefinite 
future. In consumerist terms, that does not mean that it woukd have been a 
success.

--jks

In a message dated 00-04-25 05:33:05 EDT, you write:

<< So, the following is based on false statistics. The GNP estimates

 produced by Soviet planners were based on false reporting. Whole

 industries were empty shells producing goods that existed on paper, but

 in fact were useless.

 

 

 >>Excluding the period of war and recovery associated with World War II, much

 >>of which was fought on Soviet territory, the Soviet gross national product

 >>(GNP) grew at a high average rate of 5.1% per year during 1928-75, based on

 >>Western estimates (see Table 1, p 24). Even during 1950-75, after basic

 >>industrialization had been completed, the Soviet economy still grew

 >>rapidly--much more rapidly than the US economy during those years, as Table

 >>1 shows.

 

 All of which begs the question why did the superior economic entity

 collapse in the face of the inferior? No. The answer is that soviet

 industry proved to be a paper tiger. >>