I think that you put too much importance in the semantics, especially the meaning of the word "private." It is true that in early stages of industrialization, ownership and control of the means of production remained in the same hands - and that is probably the only legitimate use of the term "private." However, with the rise of joint stock corporations, cartels etc. the term lost its meaning -as the ownership and control were separated. A joint stock corporation is in principle in the same relationship to its owners as the Soviet style enterprise - i.e. techno-managerial class exercising actual control of the firm on behalf of the owners who otherwise have little say in how the firm is run (for an analysis of the Soviet style firm see George Feiwel, _The economic of a socialist enterprise_).
So "privatness" or the form of ownership is not really that important, what really matters is management style and, far more importantly, macro-economic factors. What sets Russia and Western Europe apart is the banking infrastructure and skilled industrial labor - the latter had them because commercialism and industrialization in the West developed over a long period of time, a few hundred years. Russia did not have them because Russia remained mainly feudal society that lived off raw exploitation of human and natural resources with little or no investment, at least until 1862 when feudalism was officially abolished.
So as the Result, Russia found itself a bit backward by, say, few hundred years vis a vis the West and needed to catch up pronto, or face serious military threat. So what really set the Russia case apart form the West is that "capitalist" institutions that developed more or less "organically" in the West (by this I mean banking and credit institutions, social networks, skilled labor, self-management etc.) were mostly absent in Russia and had to be implemented by design and form above. That argument is explicitly proposed by Alexander Gerchenkron, but Trotsky argued along similar lines.
> 2) The Stalinist regime may have sounded many a peasant-populist note, but
its official
> ideology was always socialism.
For anyone familiar with the Soviet system, the word "official" is a joke. It carries no weight whatsoever.
>
> 3)The Soviet industrialization drive did meet with much initial success.
It was this success,
> especially in contrast to the depression-blighted Werstern economies of
the 1930s, that gave
> it immense prestige in the eyes of progrssive people internationally, and
a certain amount of
> credit with the Soviet peoples, the barbarity of famines and purges
notwithstanding.
>
> 4) But at a certain point, in the late 60s and 70s, Soviet growth rates
slowed down, and it
> became apparent to large numbers of people that Stalinism's promise to
catch up with and
> overtake the West simply wasn't being kept. Soviet goods were no match for
Western
> goods. The USSR missed out on the entire cyber-revolution. The cost of
keeping up with
> the US militarily became insupportalbly high.
But that only proves my point that Soviet state socialism was only a transitional solution to the problems of rapid industrialization. It worked well in the initial stages, because it accomplished two most pressing goals: providing capital for industrialization without borrowing it from Western banks, and controlling inflation that was an inevitable result of their austerity measures (limiting consumption) and agrarian policy (transferring labor from labor-intensive agriculture to industry). And central planning achieved these goals splendidly.
As far as the slump of the late 1950 and 1960 is concerned - the planners were well aware of that (see for example Chanavce, _The transformation of communist systems_) and blamed insuffcient labor productivity or rather productivity rates growing slower than consumption level. Normally, that causes inflation, but due to price controls, inflation was nominally non-existent, so the trend manifested itself as chronic shortages of consumer goods. Any periodical attempt to correct these inflationary pressure by price adjustments resulted in civil disobedience and under the counter economy.
Of course, the planners knew that and tried different solutions since 1956. The "perestroika" was only the final stage of that long reform process.
>
> 5)While the Soviet and Eastern bloc peoples did, to an extent, judge the
bureaucracy in
> terms of its broken promises of limitless progress, this assessment was
practical as much as
> ideological. The masses were probably more concerned about things like not
having enough
> toilet paper and not being able to get their broken fridges repaired than
they were about
> attaining some Communist or peasant-populist utopia.
Exactly. It is the US ideologues on the right and also on the left who were more concerned about Soviet ideology than living conditions in Russia and E Europe.
Wojtek