>Is it really that fair to compare >Soviet TVs with Japanese? Russia >was
once a poor and barely >industrialized country. For all its >many faults -
and there were >many - Soviet planning did manage >to industrialize the
place to the >point where you'd even think of
>comparing a Soviet TV with a >Japanese one. Do people ever talk >about
Turkish or Indonesian TVs?
Here in Japan I can buy Indonesian spaghetti, tomato sauce and ketchup. Apparently because of the large domestic food market, Indonesia exports a lot of foodstuffs now. Of course the Nikes here are made in places like Indonesia, but I mean non-US brands.
If my memory serves me, one way in which US consumers got to buy so much from around the world in the early to mid 80s was the STRONG dollar. For a while there I was living off of canned Polish hams because they were so cheap. At the time the Japanese and Koreans were busy turning TVs into another reliable but marginally profitable commodity item, the US was giving us THE DOS and then WINDOWS PC! (As I said before, too bad the 'free trade' Americans stopped the Japanese from developing a TRON OS PC).
My brother, who was in the US Navy in that period (early to mid 80s), said Soviet surface ships were better built than a lot of the aluminum junk he had to sail on. After hearing some of his stories about failed equipment during the Reagan military buildup, one does have to wonder even about the quality of the military goods.
My limited experience in the Army makes me wonder. For quite a while, the US M60A1 and then M60A main battle tanks (old, cheap, and retrofitted) were far more reliable than the General Dyanmics M1/M1A1 Abrams that the US Army developed in the 1980s. It would have been interesting to see if Iraq ever really got to use a Soviet T-72 or T-80 tank what they could have done (but since air power was so uncontested, there actually weren't many classic tank battles, and Iraq had mostly older Soviet stuff, and then Gorbachev refused them more advanced tank ammunition). Does anyone wonder why, after being replaced by several versions of B1s and B2s, the US still calls out the B-52s for every aerial bombardment? Cripes, those planes were supposed to be obsolete in the 70s!
My brother also said, after a trip to Yugoslavia, that as a consumer society, they were fairly well developed (we recently discussed on list about the nostalgia for the Soviet Union; the ex-Yugoslavs must be even more devastated by memory).
It would be interesting to get down to the nitty gritty of what the US, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union had to offer its citizens before the collapse of the latter two. But instead we have to deal with textual analysis and interpretation of still yet another reactionary, Hayek. Oh boy.
Charles Jannuzi