-----Original Message----- From: "Michael Dawson -PSU" <mdawson at pdx.edu>
The point isn't that things were
> completely unliveable, but that the resources were wasted and the poeple's
> wishes were ignored.
People's wishes were not ignored. Actually the government paid a lot of attention to opinion polls (as does the current Chinese government, I believe). The primary domestic function of KGB informants in the Brezhnev era was to gauge people's opinion to this or that government proposal.
---
You yourself describe the tolerance for drunken
> "consumer goods" workers. If things were so great under Brezhnev, why do
> the folks keep electing IMF allies?
1. Putin is not an IMF ally. He is a state-directed economic growth/protectionism guy. The leaders of most CIS countries are elected in name only. Actually Russia is the most democratic state in the region.
2. I never said it was "great." I said it was good and bad. This exchange shows me how politically charged discussion of the USSR still is; if you don't paint a totally black image of the system, you are accused of being an apologist. If I point out that peasants had a lot of leisure time under the tsars, as they did, that hardly makes me an apologist for tsarism. If I point out that Americans generally have relatively high incomes, that does not make be an apologist for the American system either.
>
> Meanwhile, the entire problem was built into the Communist power structure.
> As Gorbachev knew, the elites were so busy trying to justify themselves and
> keep the military economy/Cold War game from imploding, they couldn't devote
> proper attention to ordinary people's conditions.
Most people in Russia say Gorbachev was too busy trying to be the Good GenSec in the West to devote proper attention to ordinary people's conditions. Gorbachev is an order of magnitude more unpopular than Brezhnev. A large segment of the population agrees with the rhetorical question Limonov hurled at him in public in 1996: "When you sleep, do you dream of bloody children?"
>
> I don't trash the idea of economic planning. I trash the idea of
> undemocratic economic planning. Why make excuses for the USSR? It was a
> failure.
It was a failure in building a Communist utopia. In terms of modernizing an enormously large backward area, it was a tremendous success. Actually, even after the economic collapse of 1989-1998, nationals from supposedly successful China immigrate illegally to Russia where they work for peanuts and are generally disliked. The USSR also had possibly the greatest system of support for hard science in the world. I have connections to a number of Russian scientists through work. One of them has a Noble Prize and is very high up in the KPRF. Most of them certainly don't think the Soviet Union was ucky and bad. But who cares what people in the former Soviet Union think, I guess.