Well, actually Mises beat Hillel to the punch by 50 years -- his first essay on the subject was, I believe, in 1920.
And Chris is being soft on Stalinism in denying popular opposition to the regime while it existed. Collectivization was a civil war from above, so horrific and so delegitimating to the USSR that many in Belurus and Ukraine initially welcomed the Nazis as liberators. As Chris well knows. This was followed post GPW (WWII to you ignorant westerners) by a seven year insurrection in Ukraine that required the Red Army to suppress it. It was CIA-financed, but obviously based in real popular discontent. Moreover there were workers' revolts, a number of them socialist in character, that were savagely suppressed throughout the 50s and early 60s, details widely available. Chris knows this too.
I'm writing as someone who thinks, as do most post-Soviets, that the end of the USSR was a world-historical tragedy of the first water; that even at its most inhuman, despotic, and barbaric, Stalinism can claim great and substantial material and moral accomplishments as well as being liable for terrible crimes, and that the system was probably reformable -- it was pushed, or maybe jumped; it did not merely come apart. So I'm no simple anti-Communist like Mike P., although if regarding the USSR as a cruel dictatorship and a disgrace to the name of socialism makes me an anti-Communist I guess I am one. But the appraisal has to be more complicated.
All that said, Hillel may not have been only one to get the fragility of the system right -- as I said, the Austrians got it too, and much much earlier -- but he's almost the only modern Sovietologist, whether revisionist, totalitarian school, or middle of the road, to call this one, and he deserves credit for that.
--- James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> Chris Doss points out an error in Ticktin's view
> that the Soviet population ever offered any
> political opposition to the bureaucracy. But that
> does not take away from the fact that Ticktin
> pointed out the utter depletion of the Soviet
> Union's economic dynamic when both the regimes
> apologists and its cold war critics were colluding
> in a massive overestimation of the quality of Soviet
> industrialisation, the latter uncritically
> reproducing the former's quantitative output
> figures.
>
> Only Ticktin, as far as I can see, anticipated the
> economic collapse of the Soviet Union, and deduced
> it from the economy's central failing - that it had
> abolished the market without creating an alternative
> economic regulator. 'Planning' in the USSR remained
> an empty letter because the bureaucracy distrusted
> the populace too much to put them in charge of the
> plan. And Ticktin worked out that the Soviet economy
> had run out of steam 1973, in his essay, 'Towards a
> Political Economy of the USSR', when everyone else
> was lauding, or bemoaning Soviet success.
>
> Nostalgia for Brezhnev says very little about what
> happened then, and everything about how people feel
now.> ___________________________________
>
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