
Nehru, the Patron Saint of Soviet Sexual Liberation? - dcgudeman
https://thewire.in/197695/nehru-patron-saint-soviet-sexual-liberation/
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balance_factor
This is the sort of thing that led to the decline of the Soviet economy, which
had been doing very well up until that point. People nowadays usually remember
the creaking Soviet economy of the late 1980s, but from the late 1920s to
Stalin's death, the Soviet economy grew by leaps and bounds. While the US was
in a depression, Russia was building massive steel plants in Magnitogorsk. In
fact Russia didn't even have enough manpower to do it, so imported American
and European labor, and contracted to American and European firms.

The aim was to build up the means of production (capital, in western parlance)
to western levels.

However when Stalin died, and the revolutionaries of 1905 and 1917 died and
faded away, the second generation of Khrushchev's and the like slowed down the
infrastructure capital spending and started increasing consumer production and
freebies like this. A number of other things happened as well around this
time, but all in the same direction - capital spending went lower, sops to the
populace started, and a long economic, and then political decline set in. This
sop was part of that. Ultimately, the money to keep up the park came out of
capital spending, leading to the decline of the USSR on some level.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
But that was the problem with the USSR, wasn't it? Gorbachev said (quoting
from memory from maybe two decades ago) that the USSR could produce a military
that could go toe to toe with the US, but they couldn't produce toothpaste for
their people. And his reforms started when he said, what's wrong here?

The Soviet command economy wasn't as productive as the US's economy, and it
never would have been. And if you think that all that production should have
gone to the military forever, and never have gone to making people's lives a
little less drab, then I would ask: Why?

~~~
cmrdporcupine
They spent their resources on the military because the whole capitalist world
wanted to crush them. If they hadn't armed themselves to the teeth the western
armies would have rolled right through after the end of WWII and later.

~~~
nradov
I'm sure the people in Eastern Europe who were conquered and enslaved by the
Soviets wished that the Allies had kept rolling east. But by 1945 the western
armies were tired of fighting and had no desire for another brutal war of
attrition.

~~~
kunimu
>I'm sure the people in Eastern Europe who were conquered and enslaved by the
Soviets wished that the Allies had kept rolling east.

Do you have a citation that this was the general feeling in those countries,
or only among those people mistreated by the Soviets?

