>OK, you and Charles can cozy up with stories about how good it was
>in the good old days. I actually know, or knew, a lot about the
>Soviet economy, and in my judgment the picture in the Thurning Point
>was fair, sober, reasonable, and realistic. It is not the case, as
>your analogy suggests, that the Soviet economy basically healthy
>with some glitches.
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I don't know much about it in the sense of systematically studying it, but I
would like to think being surrounded by people who lived in the USSR gives
me at least SOME knowledge. As Doug says, shitty consumer goods. On the
other hand, the goods were there; nobody was going hungry and threadbare,
and the homelessness rate was 0%, excepting a few vagrants who adopted it as
a lifestyle (yes, there were hobos in the Soviet Union). Unemployment was
also 0%, once again leaving out the hobos. Per capita calorie intake was
about equal to the United States. In addition, the very fact of its relative
egalitarianism gives it bonus points in Russian culture (my impression after
two years of living here is that Russians, on average, simply do not care as
much about acquiring material goods as most Westerners. The ostentatious
wealth display of the New Russians is looked on by most people with
revulsion.).
The shitty consumer goods in question were also expensive, but this was gotten around through rentals. A black-and-white TV might cost you 100 rubles, a month's salary. However, you could rent the same TV for 2 rubles a month. As I've pointed out before, if you take about teh Soviet economy, you have to include not just the planned component but a) private agriculture, which contributed up to half of produce consumed and b) the black market, which was an essential part of the system and was tolerated as such, though officially denounced.
The economy was mainly in crisis not because people thought it was going to fall apart, but because they were pursuing the age-old and slightly crazy Russian preoccupation of Catching Up With the West at All Costs, which the system was not capable of doing, and probably no system was capable of doing. There actually was GDP growth throught the Brezhnev and early Gorbachev eras, albeot miniscule _compared with the West_, which is the important thing if you're a Brezhnevian ideologue dead-set on proving the superiority of really existing socialism.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal