In Romania you would get arrested if you had a walkie-talkie. The fixed phones were installed only in the homes of people that were part of the regime (even if you had a very simple role like handling money). They invested some on PCs but only until it became clear that they allowed easy access to information. Then it was dead.
So in my view no communist country would invest in a national network because that would make information easier to transmit and this would undermine the regime. Keep people in the dark and they might be happy with their misserable life. Even people closer to the regime believed they had a good life because they received bananas and oranges before every Christmas...
As horrible as the regime was, you would not get arrested for having a walkie-talkie. And anyone could get a phone line, except there was a looong wait (years). And most likely you will end up on a "coupled" line, meaning that you and your neighbor will share the same line - you can listen in to your neighbor's conversation simply by picking up the phone.
I know a shepherd that was called to Militia for having one. He escaped because he played dumb. He was called many times after that just to be sure he had no "bad" intentions. All the time the militia men would ponder if he should mess up this guy's life or let him go. The shepherd had no intentions to fight against the regime whatsoever...
The long wait list was because nobody would process the list. All the people that the regime considered needed phones already had them. All the rest were "waiting". Years later I found out that in my city there was plenty of capacity. I'm a telecommunications egineer.
I believe the coupled line didn't need any approval: the number was already allocated. If your neighbor wanted he could allow you to connect but he was on the hook if you did any "bad" stuff (like planning a Revolution). There was also a problem from where to buy the second phone...
As far as I know these were the rules. Like in any regime people could bend the rules or follow them to the letter. It all depended on the specific situation and the people involved.
There were amateur radio operators in the Eastern Bloc countries, with equipment capable of transmitting a signal to the opposite side of the Earth on a good day. But they were licensed by the government, and were aware that their activities were being watched.
The old regime really hated not having control over you. That was the most important thing. As long as they knew what you were doing, and approved, they were fine with almost anything.
I've built a few low-power FM transmitters back then, and I was aware of the possible dangers. It was more of a high-schooler's hobby. But teenagers like to push boundaries anyway.
It depends where you lived during the regime, some parts of the soviet union had stricter controls over communications than others. I got arrested for having few pairs of jeans.
While that sort of thing was seen as being "too western" in the east, it was seen as being "queer" or "communist" in the west. The cold war era was very weird on both sides of the wall.
Having visited the USSR in the 1980s I can well imagine the problems you experienced (I traded duty-free shopping bags rather than jeans).
On the other hand, it's misleading to draw too many inferences from extreme cases. I was arrested recently for having a bag of very ordinary picket signs while not being anywhere near a political demonstration in time or space, but the repression in question was local in scope.
Military clothing. Tourists could visit department stores like GUM but were forbidden to purchase anything that was part of an official uniform like hats, boots, medals etc. Additionally, all outgoing baggage was x-rayed because you weren't supposed to take out money or forbidden items, but the people operating the X-ray machines didn't care even though it was perfectly obvious that I and everyone else in my high school group was smuggling out such material.
I wore a red army belt buckle on my jeans for years afterwards. I think it's still sitting in my friend's attic in Amsterdam.
It seems like that would depend on the era we're talking about. Party lines were a thing in the US, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony) That suggests they were still in widespread use in the 1970s. One imagines that other countries had them for longer yet.
While researching another topic in newspaper archives I recently came across a piece from the late '50s lamenting the number of people in Albuquerque, NM who were still on 4- and even 10-home party lines. By the time of the editorial this was already uncommon in cities (the point of the editorial was to complain that the Bell System had been very slow in upgrading Albuquerque), but at that time it was still very common outside of the few major cities in NM.
Right, it was probably just a symptom for the growth pains of the telecom industry. I would assume that industry had a whole range of extra issues in the Eastern Bloc, beyond the shall we say "natural" challenges of wiring up a whole territory.
In 1984 I recall ordering a phone line in Denver and being asked if I wanted a party line or a single line. My apartment was in Denver-proper and having a party line was still an option in 1984.
We briefly had a 9-line party line at my parent's house in upstate NY in 1989. Their building of the house prompted the local bell to install private lines.
They lived in the country, but not in an usually isolated area. 100% of the areas in rural areas had these in that region until the late 70s.
Some of the infrastructure was just retrofitted to provide private line service. I saw wood based mechanical switches in production (in very isolated areas in New York) circa 1997.
We had a 'party line' (same as what you're talking about) in rural Alberta Canada, 1/2 hour from a city of 3/4 million and not remote -- until the late 80s.
This was not a feature of a surveillance state, but an infrastructure cost/deployment issue.
Incidentally, my neighbours had a portable phone that had the same frequency as mine, I could also frequently listen in on their calls too. This was about 25+ years ago. They might have been able to hear mine too. They weren't very interesting so I was never worried about it.
>So in my view no communist country would invest in a national network
It's a shame that reality contradicts you then. See Allende's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn. In a much less positive vein, see China's rapidly developing communications infrastructure (hand in hand with massive surveillance and censorship)
At the time that OP is describing, censorship was very powerful indeed. Also, Allende's Chile cannot be easily compared to an Eastern Bloc nation in the '70s or '80s.
I could imagine some kind of network developed by an Eastern Bloc nation before 1990, but it would have been extremely centralized, hierarchical, and very strictly controlled.
> see China's rapidly developing communications infrastructure
The point GP was making is more nuanced than that. The governments of eastern Bloc countries were well aware their citizens were not well off and would remain so for a long time to come. I imagine that Chile under Allende hadn’t quite hit that stage, and presumably the government still had some belief they were on the road to prosperity. Also I’m no expert, and it might be splitting hairs but can we really describe the Chilean government of the time as “communist”?
He was a self-described Marxist socialist, implemented sweeping changes inc. widespread land reforms, and was the target of an US-backed coup. I'd day it hits all the checkmarks.
Yeah, I also immediately thought of Project Cybersyn when I read this post. On the other hand, Allende's vision for Chile would probably be better described as a democratic-socialist one than a "communist state" one.
That's what Allende's supporters say, yes. But one of the things I took away (of my own accord) from the book, "Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile", is that the conservatives were rightfully fearful of Allende's government moving inexorably toward communist central planning. (Note: the book is, IMO, unbiased wrt the politics. It's basically a Ph.D thesis on Cybersyn and--because as a thesis paper it needs to make some novel argument beyond documenting the history--why Chile's early experience with integrating advanced technology into its economy failed. In as much as it's not clickbait, the book title is more matter of fact--Cybersyn was an Allende-era program. The author wasn't trying to treat Cybersyn as some sort metaphor for Allende's policies.)
One of the reasons Cybersyn failed was because it was difficult to get private enterprises to cooperate with the central authority--either the Cybersyn group (which in the grand scheme of things was a relatively small affair), or any other government group. This was deeply frustrating to the government and to Allende. The pace of government takeovers was accelerating rapidly until Allende's assassination.
Of course, part of the reason private enterprise refused to cooperate was because of it's antagonistic relationship with Allende's government and the left generally. We could "blame" the capitalists for this failure. But that's sort of beside the point. The fact remains that for those and other reasons, Allende was on the path to something akin to communism (Venezuela if not Cuba) simply because that's where circumstances were leading him. He couldn't go around, under, or over the opposition; the only way to achieve his originally modest goals was to conquer the opposition--that is, nationalize the bulk of Chilean industry so he could directly pull the levers necessary to achieve his goals.
> see China's rapidly developing communications infrastructure
You're referencing the greatest historical demonstration of the positive, rapid results of abandoning Communism. Courtesy of Deng Xiaoping very publicly opening China to embracing market economics instead. To the extent China abandons Communism, is the extent to which they'll continue to develop.
They've even had to come up with a special name for it, because of how embarrassingly Communism failed in all regards compared to the post Xiaoping era.
> is the extent to which they'll continue to develop
Is this necessarily true? The rapid development is a because they opened up to other economies from a position of underdevelopment, but there has to be a set point somewhere considering they have a massive population and more or less the means of production.
Romania was a bit of an outlier even among Warsaw pact countries, though. All these regimes were quite paranoid about anything that might challenge their power but the Romanian one went to the extra level of repression and control.
>> a national network because that would make information easier to transmit and this would undermine the regime.
That is the old thinking. Today many such countries are realizing that such information networks are great tools both for surveillance (China) and manipulation (Russia). Telephones were once seen a threat, until they realized that intercepting telephone calls is far easier than intercepting letters. North Korea is probably behind the curve on this front. Give everyone a smartphone. Get them to direct as much of their lives as possible through that phone. Now you can watch them better than ever before. That students will use the phones to organize protests pales in comparison to the intelligence streams they create.
Telephones were once seen a threat, until they realized that intercepting telephone calls is far easier than intercepting letters
How many people can send /receive such letters? You would have to be INSANE to put anything in writing, just as John Gotti didn't send memos on Gambino Family stationary. Merely complaining about brown veggies or lack of veggies would get you locked up for spreading dangerous propaganda.
The internet on the other hand...can spread those ideas in an instant. Not to mention planning
But most people were born into the regime eventually, they had no clue about alternatives. In fact they feared the alternatives. Dangerous ideas were nipped in the bud and entire families sent to each country's version of Siberia.
They didn't need to intercept much: Just as most US citizens in a "decent" neighborhood would report a shooting, quite a few would report even their family members for saying dangerous things. Then, a nice chunk were officially part of "KGB" network, informers. Maybe 10% of the population...
The Soviets certainly did care about minor complaints, but that isn't an issue today. Today's more modern repressive regimes aren't concerned about minor things. They are much more interested in things like metadata (ie that X is friends with Y). They would rather have that complaint happen than not. The modern oppressor fears silence, fears a lack of data. See the "going dark" debates.
Asking the population to report on itself has limitations. They have to know what is to be reported. They need to know what is good and bad. But what if the dangerous idea is something that you don't want the population to know anything about? What if you want to supress an idea without anyone knowing what you are doing? That's the modern context: removing data and changing stories without anyone knowing that you are pulling strings.
>>They have to know what is to be reported. They need to know what is good and bad. But what if the dangerous idea is something that you don't want the population to know anything about?
Oh they did. Everything foreign, anything that is not the party line. Report to the local police and they sort it out, keep an eye on things. When you risk 20 years in a gulag AND your family sent away you keep your mouth shut. You learn from other people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny would have lasted 30 minutes under Stalin, give or take a few :)
>>in my view no communist country would invest in a national network because that would make information easier to transmit and this would undermine the regime. Keep people in the dark and they might be happy with their misserable life.
Makes me think about a virtual Berlin Wall of sorts, which in the history of things is an obscure wall in that it was built no so much to keep things and people out but to keep people in.
Quoting a book I recently read that taught me this is in order...
"""Communist regimes have routinely refused their citizens the right to exit--that is, to escape--the misery and destruction they have implemented within their own borders. In some cases, they erected walls to lock the masses into their workers' paradise: cement barriers patrolled by secret police with guns aimed not outward at some perceived enemy seeking to enter, but inward upon the unarmed, immiserated populace.
The ultimate symbols of that repression were the Berlin Wall, erected in August 1961 to keep the East Germans from fleeing to free West Berlin, and the fenced in people-zoo that was the Soviet Gulag, the prison system created by Lenin and Stalin."""
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism – Paul Kengor
I must say I immediately thought of the Berlin Wall (which didn't just go around West Berlin but also includes a separate wall that divided all of the DDR from the BRD) when Trump talked about a US border wall.
I have no belief that Trump wishes to keep people in! But once things are implemented, scope creep almost always follows. And US border "protection" is scrutinizing departing passengers as well as arriving ones.
> So in my view no communist country would invest in a national network because that would make information easier to transmit and this would undermine the regime.
Could think of it the other way. They would invest it in it so they can ensure people only transmit the right information.
Stasi or KGB would love to have access to something like Facebook.
>Stasi or KGB would love to have access to something like Facebook.
They could only dream about making all people carry a device which can record and report precise location and all movements and allow listening and watching through the device remotely at any time.
> The fixed phones were installed only in the homes of people that were part of the regime (even if you had a very simple role like handling money).
Are you talking about landline telephones? Everybody had those, it was not a privilege.
> They invested some on PCs but only until it became clear that they allowed easy access to information. Then it was dead.
OTOH there was an industry that was making 8-bit personal computers, that were using cassette tapes as external memory - mostly Sinclair Spectrum clones, and at least one or two local designs that never quite caught up. Those tended to be owned by schools and other institutions.
> no communist country would invest in a national network because that would make information easier to transmit and this would undermine the regime
Dont forget paper. Printing was 100% state controlled in Poland under Russian occupation. Every printer had inspectors assigned and usage strictly logged.
Even people closer to the regime believed they had a good life because they received bananas and oranges before every Christmas...
People who work in elite tiers in the U.S., e.g. finance, tend to have a similar mentality. Granted they get a bit more thrown at them in the way of trinkets (e.g. a nice condo or house, rather than a basket of oranges) in exchange for keeping their heads down and not rocking the boat. And they don't have to worry about getting shot or sent to a labor camp (or more commonly, banned from professional employment) specifically. But the basic mentality is basically the same.
in the US I can buy the same Coca Cola that Buffet and Gates can. I can many of the same products they can, drive to same places, and for the most part shop where they do.
the difference between capitalist societies and dictatorships, communist regimes, and the like is, the majority of that the powerful have access to the every man does as well. there is no restriction from buying as much as you can afford. there is no one saying you need to wait for your turn to buy food or what brands you can buy.
so, no we don't have anything in common with these people described. we just don't have the ability to really conceive how much of the world had to live and even today have to live. Oh sure we can say "I understand" but we really don't. if we did we would realize how much of what we rant about is so truly meaningless
First of all, the capitalist-communist and repressive-free political axes have little to do with eachother. Setting that aside...
> the difference between capitalist societies and dictatorships, communist regimes, and the like is, the majority of that the powerful have access to the every man does as well. there is no restriction from buying as much as you can afford. there is no one saying you need to wait for your turn to buy food or what brands you can buy.
No, that's the difference between a society with scarcity and one without. Rationing has existed in the West, too - outside of war time.
The difference between a communist society and a capitalist one is who owns the means of production, and how the economic profits from it are distributed.
The Communist Party of the USSR owned the means of production, but distributed the profits from it incredibly unequally. [1] (For decades, the party promised that communism would be reached Soon(tm). And we just need everyone to work hard for a few more years...)
Capitalists (And, to a smaller extent, people with 401Ks) of the USA own the means of production, and distribute the profits from it incredibly unequally. (While telling half the population that they too are going to be wealthy. Just work hard for a few more years... And vote Republican - because taxes and regulation and foreigners are the reason they are poor.)
The reason you can buy Coca-Cola at 7-11 is because the USA produces more then enough staples. Were there a serious, long-term food shortage, you'd see ration cards[2] being implemented before you could say 'But, markets!'
> In a kolkhoz, a member received a share of the farm's product and profit according to the number of days worked, whereas a sovkhoz employed salaried workers. In practice, most kolkhozy did not pay their "members" in cash at all. In 1946, 30 percent of kolkhozy paid no cash for labor at all, 10.6 paid no grain, and 73.2 percent paid 500 grams of grain or less per day worked.[5] In addition the kolkhoz was required to sell its grain crop and other products to the State at fixed prices. These were set by Soviet government very low, and the difference between what the State paid the farm and what the State charged consumers represented a major source of income for the Soviet government.
Not many people know that instead another socialist country did try to build such a network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
The project was probably overly ambitious and anyway could not last for more than 2 years given the suicide of Allende just after the coup, but it is still fairly fascinating.
Socialist =! communist. Allende's government doesn't have much in common with Soviet Unions brutal authoritarian communism, which is the only practical form of large scale communism as per history. Allende socialized some small parts of his economy (only coal?), but it was mostly a market economy even during his height of popularity.
Also, there's a lot to say about cybernetics and how a lot of it is pretty dead and for good reasons. I imagine most people see the cool Star Trek-like control room and enjoy Cybersyn on a visual design level than a "this was a good idea for government" level.
I think its obvious that authoritarian governments do poorly with information technology, outside of whats needed for military dominance, due to its democratizing effects. The SU couldn't have a Western-style internet because it would have become a political threat to the SU and strangled in the cradle.
Allende was a little left of, say, France, who had a system like this:
France's Minitel network doesn't get enough ink, imo. Its impressive this proto-web network took off. We're talking nearly 10m sales in a country that had about 50m people at the time. France Telecom estimates 25m people had access to Minitels, so half the population. 50% wired in 1980s is very, very impressive.
Unnaturally concentrated power always opposes coordination outside of state-managed structures - greater consolidation leads to greater oppression.
> Soviet Unions brutal authoritarian communism ... is the only practical form of large scale communism as per history
This is wrong. The USSR started as a socialist republic, but Stalin turned it into a totalitarian dictatorship. The USSR was as communist as the DPRK is democratic (that is: not at all)... their failings are the failings of a dictatorship.
Lenin himself set up the Soviet system and he himself put Stalin in control. It was a brutal dictatorship from literally day 1.
This socialist fairy tail of the 'good' soviet union that was destroyed by the evil Stalin is socialist self-rationalizations.
The USSR was communist in the sense that it was lead by people who strongly believed in communism and had a socialist economy that they hoped to transform into communism.
Stalin was a strong ideological believer in communism and his communism was just as real as that of Trotsky or Lenin. His actions, specifically collectivization, very clear target the achievement of an ideological goal, that the majority of the party ideologically agree on.
> The USSR was communist in the sense that it was lead by people who strongly believed in communism
Genuine belief is hard to assess, especially in an end-state goal like Communism that is remote from the immediate means sought to pursue it. What is absolutely clear, though, is that Leninism was fundamentally divorced, both in it's understanding of the prerequisites circumstances for the socialist step on the route to communism and in it's understanding of the implementation of that step from the form of Communism (Marxism) which it claimed to be an expression of.
Well, many of them lived in poverty and fought in the underground with very little chance of success for a very long time. Also, all the internal record we have, when they are by them-selves, all basically reinforce that. They used communist language and talked about archiving communist goals.
Actually, that testament is hard to actually link to Lenin directly. There has been a lot of research on this and the document is extremely suspicious.
Stephen Kotkin in his Stalin biography goes into a lot of detail on all aspects of the testament.
Also, threw-out his career he went with Lenin and Lenin put him into the positions. Basically he had Lenins support all the way until days before he died. A bit strange to say the least.
> Basically he had Lenins support all the way until days before he died. A bit strange to say the least.
That's a misrepresentation at best, since the documents were written up over several months. In any case, it doesn't matter, since Stalin created the Troika, ensured that Lenin was unable to contact outsiders without his authority, made sure that his will and testament was never to be spoken of in public, and consolidated power and control to himself.
Communism is about giving the power to the proletariat. Stalin can hardly be said to have done that.
Please actually inform yourself about these things.
> In any case, it doesn't matter, since Stalin created the Troika, ensured that Lenin was unable to contact outsiders without his authority
This is at best an exaturation. Many non-Stalin allies had contact with Lenin during most of that time.
> That's a misrepresentation at best, since the documents were written up over several months.
When these things were actually written is not at all clear. The information is actually inconsistant and we don't have the original documents.
The testament was known and debated extensivly inside the party.
> Communism is about giving the power to the proletariat. Stalin can hardly be said to have done that.
Literally the first thing Lenin did is take as much power for himself as possible. So much is made out of the differences between all of these guys, but in reality they are more simular then different.
The theory they were opperating under was that the state should take control guided by the proletarian party to transform into communism. That was Lenin and many other people interpretation of Marxism and Stalin was very much a studend of Lenin in that respect.
Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 by Stephen Kotkin is a great new biography of Stalin it goes into great detail on the testaments and Stalin idiology.
It is true that it was Lenin who brought Stalin into the inner circle of command.
Later on, however, after Lenin was bedridden due to strokes, Lenin explicitly stated that Stalin was not to assume party leadership.
This directive was ignored because of Lenin's declining authority in the party.
It's funny how everyone's dog-piling in response to things I didn't say. I invite you to find any of the topics you bring up in my original post. You won't.
Stalin, Trotsky, and Lenin may have hoped for Communism, but their actions built a brutal dictatorship. I don't care what they called themselves - I care about the results. No one "accidentally" builds a dictatorship.
I'm not supporting Communism, or the USSR, I'm calling out intellectual laziness. Communism is a specific ideology, there are plenty of real and valid criticisms - but "look at the USSR" is not a valid argument.
The USSR is a good argument against dictatorships, monarchies, totalitarianism, on and on... but Communism is one thing it was not.
The error that you are making is that when we are looking at ideology and evaluation if it could help to improve the world.
With Communism there are massive amounts of problems, but a major one is how to think of the transition, and how to enact the transition.
The USSR had to be a dictatorship because otherwise they and everybody who thinks about it for 5 min understand that the transition to communism will simply not happen.
So if you have a ideology that practically unreachable then that is a massive problem for that ideology and its ability to actually improve the world.
The very extreme proposition dictated by communism forces the people who follow the ideology into extreme actions.
You will be mistaken to consider USSR before Stalin to be much milder.
It did not have any reservations before expropriating crops from peasants and then killing said peasants with chemical weapons when they uprisen. Meanwhile in cities OGPU will happily shot you after a trial by three people, or even without one.
Leo Trosky, who is still unfortunately sometimes considered as "Stalin done right", reasoned like this:
Communists in power have to extract production from workers whether they like it or not, and maybe in the future the socialist state with advance to the condition where these workers will no longer feel expropriated. But until then, just use force.
Plenty of people viewed it as dictatorship the whole time, most of which just confined their thoughts to themselves (diaries sometimes, kitchen talks sometimes).
I lived there before the collapse. It was a communist state. With centralized planning. And all the waste that goes with it.
After Stalin, the Soviet Union had several levels of "above president" parliaments (with an elect and/or rotating boards), such as the "Supreme Soviet", that had enormous power. Presidents where forced to resign, some where placed under house arrest.
A dictatorship did not exist there in the form of a president.
Communism is Marxism. You will never be able to separate them. Nor change the fact that they don't cure human suffering, they produce it.
> After Stalin, the Soviet Union had several levels of "above president" parliaments, such as the "Supreme Soviet", that had enormous power.
The office of President wasn't created until 1990, and there was only one person to hold that office.
Are you thinking of the Premier (formal head of government before 1990), or the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (head of state)?
> Presidents where forced to resign, some where placed under house arrest.
The dictators (such as they were) were usually the General Secretaries of the Communist Party (including the three that were Premiers). Like most real dictatorships, rather than theoretical ones, there was a lot of power within the upper bureaucracy and shifting practical, if not consistent legal, checks on the power of the leader (particularly, the Politburo was powerful), and like most 20th century and later dictatorshios there was also a lot of political theater behind which the actions of the dictatorship were cloaked to give a veneer of legitimacy.
> Communism is Marxism. You will never be able to separate them.
Communism is broader than Marxism; as well as things like anarchocommunism, it also includes Leninism, which while it claims to be Marxism rejects several key components of Marxism.
> The office of President wasn't created until 1990, and there was only one person to hold that office.
I was being general (and going throughout USSR's history, not just after 1990). There were all kinds of titles and offices and committees, with a central official that the public could see: Chairman, General Secretary, First Secretary, etc.
"President", from the outside perspective [we are not in the Soviet Union], is good enough for the description against the argument that was being made (of a Stalin type "dictatorship").
If you have to nitpick on the word, your argument will never end...
> The dictators (such as they were) were usually the General Secretaries of the Communist Party (including the three that were Premiers). Like most real dictatorships, rather than theoretical ones, there was a lot of power within the upper bureaucracy and shifting practical, if not consistent legal, checks on the power of the leader (particularly, the Politburo was powerful), and like most 20th century and later dictatorshios there was also a lot of political theater behind which the actions of the dictatorship were cloaked to give a veneer of legitimacy.
And after all that said, no one can still name just 1 / like they name Stalin?
The answer is "its an etheric dictatorship that could be this or that or anything I want it to be to for the arguments sake"?
> Communism is broader than Marxism; as well as things like anarchocommunism, it also includes Leninism, which while it claims to be Marxism rejects several key components of Marxism.
Which is all similar to the various radioactive Plutonium isotopes. None of which you are going to want to ingest. Because if you do, its only a matter of time before you die.
> And after all that said, no one can still name just 1 / like they name Stalin?
Uh, since I said the list included all three Premiers that were also General Secretaries of the CPSU, that's equivalent to naming Kruschev. (Lenin was before Stalin and Stalin was Stalin.)
> Which is all similar to the various radioactive Plutonium isotopes.
Arguably, in the case of Marxism vs. Leninism, it's more similar to the relation between the abstract concept of a “democratic republic” and the concrete state known as the “German Democratic Republic.”
You've named all people who could be removed just as easily as they where placed into power.
That is not a dictatorship. I'll provide an example -
Saddam Hussein was a dictator... He had the power/authority, ability, and the will, to kill half the country's population to control the other half. Not that he did it.
Thats a real dictatorship.
Another way to think about this -
Within the Soviet Union, Russia spans 11 time-zones. Just by size alone (and the diversity it provides), the country was too large to have any effective dictatorship over because of all the different regional alliances. And they had constant problems that would never end, to prove it.
Even today, Putin himself has admitted that one of the biggest problems in Russia is that both state organizations and regional authorities will not do what they are told.
That's simply not true. Russia is very centralized. Whatever power local overlords wield, gets stripped immediately should they anger Moscow. They're usually assigned from outside and as such alien to locals.
Oh, so you're just ignoring the Red Terror? Or the murder of the Cossacks before Stalin came to power? Lenin never murdered anybody?
The failings of the Soviet Union are the failings of an ideology whose explictly stated goal was the overthrow of every existing social institution. Stalin merely implemented the Bolshevik vision on a much grander and bloodier scale.
Unless your argument is that the Bolsheviks were wrong (which would include people before Stalin).
Ideology is not nearly as important as material circumstances in describing how history happens.
> Stalin merely implemented the Bolshevik vision on a much grander and bloodier scale.
I have a serious hunch that you haven't actually done any scholarly inquiry into the ideological landscape of the revolution and how that fits with its material reality.
> Unless your argument is that the Bolsheviks were wrong (which would include people before Stalin).
Well yes, of course they were wrong. The government Lenin established had to make essentially impossible compromises in order to survive. Lenin himself wrote about how they were making ideological compromises due to the exigencies of their circumstances. He thought that those compromises could be undone once the state had been stabilized. He died before that happened, and it never happened. The Soviet Union was always in a state of constant peril due to internal and external forces. It does not help that they were always militarized since its inception. No good civil institutions can come out of a state of perpetual war.
My personal hot take which is not a position I would take if I had to give my opinion grounded in scholarship about the time period is that the revolution could have succeeded if the SPD hadn't order the Freikorps to crush the revolution in Germany; granted that they did so, it would have perhaps been better for the socialist cause for the USSR to collapse than cling to power.
On the other hand, Stalin's USSR did the lion's share of the work in defeating Nazi Germany. What would have happened if he were deposed and the Soviet Union failed to industrialize?
I can't remember where I read it, I'd have to do some googling, but from what I remember there were very real material obstacles to the Red Army making it all the way to Germany. While the German revolution of 1918 was absolutely a tragedy (in a myriad of ways) there's some decent scholarship on how isolated the Soviet state would still have remained. iirc things like Polish nationalism, and internal disagreements within Russia( bol vs Left SR; bolsheviks wanted to wait and the Left SRs wanted to march all the way to Germany)
At first they did their fair share in helping Nazi Germany, their official ally until Germans decided that their pact is not useful any more and suddenly attacking them in June 1941.
Yes. Yes, it is. I'm not saying Russia did not have any problems, but its absolutely unarguable that their ideology made them implement policies that made the problems worse.
Strategic. Stalin preferred to have absolute power within a smaller, weaker economy (but one with vast territorial and material resources available for the future) than to be part of a distributed power structure in a larger economy. This is a very common pattern among dictators, and this is where I cite Bueno de Mesquita and Smith's Logic of Political Survival or dictator's handbook, depending on whether you want the theoretical or narrative exposition of the same basic idea. Better yet, read both.
I totally disagree with you and I don't think de Mesquita would agree with you either.
Many of the things Stalin did can not be explained by that theory. Stalin already was in complete control, more so then almost any other dictator even.
Yet he risked when he collectivised agrocultre that for essentially idiological.
We know that Stalin saw himself as an intellectual, he read a lot and not just marxism. His last great work was a book about the economy, he spent years working on it. Everything we know about him, and how he grow up shows his intense interest in marxim.
Read his letters when he was in exile, all he does is ask for books.
OK, but just so we're clear I'm not the person arguing that Stalin wasn't an intellectual, and have never held that view.
I mention de Mesquita because I think his collectivization policy was very much in line with reducing the size of the selectorate and strengthening his control. That said it's hard to assess that theory in terms of collectivization and industrialization in only a couple of sentences, so I apologize if that seems hand-wavey.
My problem is just that while the farmers had power as a collective, they could really not threaten the political survival of the dictatorship.
History suggest to me that Stalin had reached absolute power and then he finally could dedicate himself to what he actually wanted to do.
The reason collectivization does not make sense as a strategy for political survival is that it massively endangered his position. He had major opposition to these polices because of how extremely damaging they would be.
I feel like I'm missing something; you're saying the farmers (I presume you mean the kulaks, the landowning peasantry - please correct me if I'm wrong)couldn't really threaten Stalin, but at the same time say that implementing his policy massively threatened his position. It can't be both at once, and while collectivization turned out to have a heavy economic cost in the medium term, Stalin was able to blame the farmers for trying to hoard grain and eliminate their leaders. And as we can't see the future, it wasn't obvious beforehand how bad of an idea collectivization would turn out to be, so I presume he felt it was a gamble worth taking.
Yes it can both be true. Farmers when left alone don't unify build an army and attack you. The simply can not do that for essentially logistical reasons.
However, when you try to completely change a whole society, destroying a very large quantity of its economic assets, while also doing massive internal reforms, both in the state and the party, you put yourself in a dangerous situation. Not primary because of the farmers but rather that the very political system you build your power on starts to collapse.
> Stalin was able to blame the farmers for trying to hoard grain and eliminate their leaders
Not sure what you mean by 'he was able to blame', of course he was, he controlled virtually ever channel of information.
Most of the population, and certainty the farmers did not 'buy' this propaganda.
> And as we can't see the future, it wasn't obvious beforehand how bad of an idea collectivization would turn out to be, so I presume he felt it was a gamble worth taking.
Literally every single expert, including communist from his own party knew it was a horrible idea. Its not like this was the first time they tried to get the farmers to do things they did not want to do. During the initial (1917-1921) attempted to claim the farmers property they learned that it was not at all an easy thing to do. The hole regime almost collapsed in 1921 and they had to bring back markets even when they hated the concept.
He had to replace lots of people and use every political tool in the book to actually manage it. Its a true testimony of Stalin political control that he was able to pull this off.
I can well imagine that Machiavellian strategies of that type go on in most politically powerful peoples heads, but as far as I know Stalin never stated anywhere that his aim was to reduce the size of the economy, and the beliefs of everyone under Stalin carrying out the massacres seem to have been true ideological fervour for communist doctrine, so I would chalk it up to ideology personally.
I don't think he wanted to reduce the size of the economy as such, but he certainly seemed to want to reduce the number of people who could effectively oppose him and was willing to tolerate short-term economic setbacks to that end.
The Bolsheviks wouldn't even say they were communist if you asked. Lenin's main contribution to Marxist theory as that of a 'vanguard party', the idea of having an intermediary step between capitalism and communism (a 'dictatorship of the proletariat') to manage the lengthy and difficult transition. A very Russian 'strongman leading' idea IMO, and there are certainly other schools of thought on how that transition should work.
Bolsheviks were a faction in Russian communist movement (vs. Mensheviks), they would totally say they were communist.
Lenin's idea of transitional phase did not materialize until the failure of "war communism" policy in 1918-1920 became apparent. That phase was more-or-less direct attempt at implementing the tenets of Communist Manifesto literally.
The Cossacks were split along class lines too, there is a lot of documentation on that. Young and poorer ones fought for the reds, wealthier and older landowning ones for the whites. Lenin at least was smart enough to keep some elements of the market economy around, tells a lot about his university education and coming from a minor noble family. Stalin was a huge piece of shit with three grades of religious education. If Lenin didn't kick the bucket too soon, the whole experiment would probably last a bit longer.
> Lenin at least was smart enough to keep some elements of the market economy around
No he was not smart enough. He pushed the idea so far that they were about to collapse and then in a emergency move they liberalized because they had no other option.
He and everybody else hated allowance that they had to make for the market. All of them absolutely hated it and the thing they debate most is how to get ride of the market.
> If Lenin didn't kick the bucket too soon, the whole experiment would probably last a bit longer.
It was not so much a 'experiment' as something that was forced on them because they did not have enough power. The NEP was collapsing because even within the NEP the USSR did so many counterproductive things, it could not have continued so much longer.
Stalin did exactly what everybody wanted, but most people disagree with him about if they could actually do it.
The USSR was a miserable failure, but it was not a totalitarian dictatorship prior to Stalin's rule... "merely" an authoritarian oligarchy. The Bolshevik's ideology did not align with their actions - they didn't destroy the state, they built it.
Their best achievement was scaring the US into going to the Moon.
So then blaming communism for these actions is a bit of a stretch. It's like blaming capitalism for any atrocities committed by rank and file US soldiers/agents.
I specifically replied to the claim that Bolsheviks were some mild, Singapore-style autocracy in their pre-Stalinist period. They were not, this was systematic, and of course it didn't get much better once Stalin assumed power.
You were downplaying pre-Stalinist regime, suggesting it was not near as bad. I contrasted it with one of thousand factoids to give a taste of zeitgeist then.
Its not sales. The Minitel was technically free to get but expensive to use since you had to pay heavily taxed services at the minute instead of data volume. And it was slow as hell. When the net finally reached the public in France there was no doubt whatsoever which one was the best tech. Oh and the Minitel was all about centralized networks. Glad it died.
>When the net finally reached the public in France there was no doubt whatsoever which one was the best tech.
That's almost 15 years of technological progress, of course the web/internet would replace it, the same way it replaced all other dial-up/BBS services.
>The Minitel was technically free to get but expensive to use since you had to pay heavily taxed services at the minute instead of data volume.
This, historically, was the telecom model. In the US (pre breakup) the telephone company would hand you a free phone for your home and it would be paid for by monthly fees. You never bought it nor ever owned it. This isn't a novel thing nor a real criticism imo.
> I think its obvious that authoritarian governments do poorly with information technology, outside of whats needed for military dominance, due to its democratizing effects.
Citation needed. Information technology has not done one whit to democratize China.
Uh, what about the Arab Spring? Modern communication technology is what enabled those revolutions.
In China, policies like the great firewall exist because the internet does challenge the central government. China is stable because 1.) people are happy with the CCP's economic results, 2.) the state controls large Chinese tech companies, and 3.) the government regularly "disappears" vocal dissenters. Expect a state crackdown if their economy starts crumbling.
And if they took place in the 60s, those revolutions would have used telephones and radios and leaflets. It's not clear that they would not have been possible without modern communications. Centuries of history have made it clear that you don't need Twitter to start a bread riot.
The outcome of the Arab Spring has also not exactly resulted in democracy across the board, either. Remind me -
how have things in Syria been, lately?
> In China, policies like the great firewall exist because the internet does challenge the central government.
As it turns out, you can just use more IT to repress the 'democratizing' effects of IT.
Speaking of closer to home - if the United States were to turn into a authoritarian state tomorrow, the 'democratizing efforts of IT' would not protect you. If jack-booted thugs were knocking on their literal office door, Facebook, Google, Apple, Snapchat, etc will turn you over faster then you can blink.
GPG won't help you, either. In fact, it'll make it all that much easier for them to find you. A dictatorship doesn't need to decrypt your messages, if using encryption to communicate is enough to send you to the GULAG. (Or if they can employ the $5 rubber hose.)
Incidentally, what I described is all possible in China. So much for computers liberating us.
And what came of the Arab Spring and its western cousin, Occupy Wall Street? Pretty much nothing, excluding moderate success in Tunisia. They were all crushed, either by the state itself, or through foreign intervention.
There was always a work around for those embargos during the Cold War. I know someone who did time in the 80s for sending DEC kit to Bulgaria in crates marked "tractor parts".
This thread is downvote hell but I'll bite - blaming the US's extremely well known efforts in destabilizing the Middle East and Latin America for unrest, unstable government and stunted economic development in those regions is very fair. The "mistakes" many of these countries made were often along the lines of electing a left-leaning government or simply becoming stable regional power and interrupting Henry Kissinger's bizarre worldview about the balance of power. After the initial few "interventions" the chaos can feed itself for a few decades.
It's an interesting part of Stafford Beer's life story all right. But as somebody recently said on twitter, Uber has solved the calculation problem (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem) but certain parties on the left are still going on about Cybersyn, apparently mostly because of its retro-stylish control room. There's even a trendy cybernetics-inspired conference in New York this month: cybernetics.social
Gerovitch seems as good a guide as there is to the topic, speaking as someone who's been hearing about it and reading bits and pieces for over 10 years (of course it's never mentioned in CS programmes).
Eden Medina's 2011 book about Cybersyn was well received and tends to crop up in trendy bookstores. I don't mean to disparage all this but there are good reasons why the notions of cybernetics are not central to pedagogy in any field these days.
Uber has solved the economic calculation problem except for that little detail that it loses billions of dollars ever year.
In fact, any business that can make a profit without subsidies has solved the economic calculation problem, at least on a smaller than nationwide scale. Maybe if Amazon in 20 years has vertically integrated enough that it is the only business operating in the country and it replaces money with just telling everyone what to do and the whole thing operating on pure faith in Amazon's benevolence it would have solved the economic calculation problem.
Arguably, Wal-Mart solved this years ago. Wal-Mart is very centralized. It's so centralized that store thermostats are controlled from Master Control in Bentonville, Arkansas.
One of Sam Walton's big points is that Wal-Mart's success was not due to scale. It was because they were moving data around instead of inventory. Retail used to involve lots of product taking up space in warehouses, store back rooms, and shelves in the store. All that costs the retailer money. Wal-Mart was the first big chain to get this under control, so that product flow followed sales flow very closely. This has an enormous financial benefit. Big retailers typically pay 30 days behind shipments. Wal-Mart (and presumably Amazon) usually have sold the product before they even have paid their supplier. So their inventory cost is negative. Now that's cash flow management.
Wal-Mart was one of the first retailers to bar-code everything. They meant everything. Wal-Mart has a buying center in Bentonville, known in retail as the Corridor of Doom. They put up signs along the line of "If your product isn't bar-coded, don't bother coming in". In typical Wal-Mart fashion, they made the suppliers apply the bar codes, both at the retail item and case level. (They've been trying to move to RFID, but it hasn't worked out as well.)
Gosplan was always very slow. They had a monthly information cycle and an annual decision cycle. Wal-Mart had a daily information cycle and a weekly decision cycle years ago, and it's probably faster now. If Gosplan had made it to the bar-code era, they might have been able to make centralized planning work.
It was someone else's tweet, so I'm afraid I can't comment in any more detail on what they meant.
The general idea that 60s cybernetic thinking has little relevance to the concrete present possibilities of economic coordination via internet, that seems sound to me.
If Uber had solved the economic calculation problem their algorithm wouldn't need to change prices in response to increasing demand -- that's the very argument of ECP, that without information conveyed through prices it is impossible to efficiently allocate resources.
Let's say you have two uber customers at 1am on a Saturday night and one available car, A needs to get to work or they lose their minimum wage job and B is a young professional out drinking with friends who just got a text for a booty call. Which do you suppose is going to get the ride according to uber's "solution" to the economic calculation problem?
Though I would like the see the actual argument other that "some dude on twitter said".
Probably worth distinguishing between the "cybernetics" of control loops and mechanical control systems, which is still very much a thing, versus "organisational cybernetics" and similar attempts to automate human organisations.
Yeah that was really excellent application and it is a shame it didn't have time to show all the benefits it can provide.
Centrally planned economies had most to benefit from such systems as it could create feedback loops based on economic indicators, how to optimally scale up economy.
Anybody remember the kremvax April-fools hoax on Usenet (1984)?
From chernenko@kremvax.UUCP Sun Apr 1 15:02:52 1984
Relay-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83 (MC840302); site mcvax.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 4/1/84 (SU840401); site kremvax.UUCP
Path: mcvax!moskvax!kremvax!chernenko
From: chernenko@kremvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.general,eunet.general,net.politics,eunet.politics
Subject: USSR on Usenet
Message-ID: <0001@kremvax.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 1-Apr-84 15:02:52 GMT
Article-I.D.: kremvax.0001
Posted: Sun Apr 1 15:02:52 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 1-Apr-84 12:26:02 GMT
Organization: MIIA, Moscow
Lines: 41
<.....>
Well, today, 840401, this is at last the Socialist Union of Soviet
Republics joining the Usenet network and saying hallo to everybody.
One reason for us to join this network has been to have a means of
having an open discussion forum with the American and European people
and making clear to them our strong efforts towards attaining peaceful
coexistence between the people of the Soviet Union and those of the
United States and Europe.
We have been informed that on this network many people have given strong
anti-Russian opinions, but we believe they have been misguided by their
leaders, especially the American administration, who is seeking for war
and domination of the world.
By well informing those people from our side we hope to have a possibility
to make clear to them our intentions and ideas.
Some of those in the Western world, who believe in the truth of what we
say have made possible our entry on this network; to them we are very
grateful. We hereby invite you to freely give your comments and opinions.
Here are the data for our backbone site:
Name: moskvax
Organization: Moscow Institute for International Affairs
Contact: K. Chernenko
Phone: +7 095 840401
Postal-Address: Moscow, Soviet Union
Electronic-Address: mcvax!moskvax!kremvax!chernenko
News: mcvax kremvax kgbvax
Mail: mcvax kremvax kgbvax
And now, let's open a flask of Vodka and have a drink on our entry on
this network. So:
NA ZDAROVJE!
--
K. Chernenko, Moscow, USSR
...{decvax,philabs}!mcvax!moskvax!kremvax!chernenko
The author focuses on the political dimension of seemingly technical proposals,
the relationship between information and power, and the transformative role of users of
computer technology
One of the things that programmers who are also business people need to keep in mind, is that information technology is often a tool of power or regulation. Power is limited by information/knowledge. You cannot exercise power over something that you know nothing about. If your knowledge of something is incomplete, then your power over it is also incomplete. (It is also easy to see this in RTS games, where the mechanic is called the "Fog of War.")
This principle is also readily apparent in social media. Information technology was used to disperse power and put it into many hands, with widespread results in current day society. Information technology can also be used to aggregate power into fewer hands. Many forms of social media are an example of both dispersal and aggregation at the same time.
Startups accomplish goals by aggregating power. Creating new markets and ecosystems is both the aggregation and dispersal of power. Exercising your right of association in such a situation is the exercise of power. It is very important, therefore, to remember that 1) power corrupts, especially arbitrary power absent oversight and therefore 2) power is best exercised transparently.
I would really be interested in the opinion of anyone on HN who lived in the Soviet Union as to whether this sounds plausible as an explanation. It does to me, but I don't think I would have the ability to recognize an implausible explanation of how the Soviet Union worked, as I had no real-world experience of it.
An economist who defected from the Soviet Union, Yuri Maltsev, has been quite vocal about his experiences in the Soviet Union. There are plenty of videos of his presentations: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=yuri+maltsev
But, he doesn't hang around HN.
He saw his well-educated colleagues reduced to stealing paper-clips. When he visited the US, friends asked him mainly for mascara and condoms: https://youtu.be/1KzaJwEaOwU?t=96
In 47:50 of this video (https://youtu.be/s88pMN3qDRQ?t=2870), he states something extraordinary: the Soviet economy was between 6% and 7% of the US economy when he defected to the US. The US and UK intel. agencies had higher estimates of between 45%-90%.
My father insists that the productivity failures of the late Union were due to large-scale theft, corruption, and lack of accountability on the part of... Pretty much everyone in the supply chain. Even if some factory director were doing a good job, there were a million and one reasons outside of his control that impacted his productivity. A third of the GDP going towards the Red Army did not help.
If that is indeed an accurate assessment of the situation, then computer-driven planning would not have done one whit to fix it. You can't fix these kinds of institutional problems, without changing the management culture - as anyone who has worked on a 'agile-in-name-only' team could attest to.
Anecdote of the theft: My mother's uncle was some regional agricultural inspector/manager/auditor. Didn't actually do any farm work himself. Every year, around harvest time, he would, for a few weeks would come back from work with a trunk loaded with fresh produce, meat, etc.
Now, consider that, and extrapolate it to the entire country. Yes, things got done, but not as well as they could have. Corruption is a huge tax on the economy.
And the incentives spiral downwards. If everyone cheats, the only sensible course of action is to also cheat.
This is exacerbated in communist countries (like North Korea) that don't provide their people with enough via legit means. If you are hungry, and your standard rations aren't enough, cheating to get enough becomes vital, which encourages more cheating and even less given away freely and the race to the bottom starts.
Bureaucracy, lack of reforms, unreliable chips/components, paranoidal secrecy and tendency to lie in their economical reports - sounds pretty much Soviet Union to me.
It's a novel set as a series of historical vignettes. While it is semi-fictional, it's been widely praised for capturing the initial optimism and the growing absurdity behind the Soviet economy, the people trying to control it and its effects on the citizens in general. It does describe in part the attempt to computerize the economy and how the system was gamed, etc.
Probably because it's proponents didn't have enough clout in the party, and faced too much institutional inertia.
Reading the manuscript, that appears to be the case:
>Industrial managers and government bureaucrats opposed the computerization of economic planning and management because it
exposed their inefficiency, reduced their power and control of information, and ultimately threatened to make them redundant. On the other hand, liberal economic reformers viewed
Glushkov’s proposal as a conservative attempt to further centralize the control of the economy and to suppress the autonomy of small economic units.
In other words, for entirely practical reasons. Not because evil communists didn't want people to have too much freedom, as the top comment in this thread suggests.
* Recent scholarship on the 'co-construction' of users and technology emphasizes the role of users in defining, modifying, redesigning, and resisting new technologies ...
* (In the US), users (were civilians and) ... redefined the ARPANET ... (from) ... its initial purpose as a resource sharing tool ... (into) ... a venue of communication ..., when email service emerged as a 'smash hit.'
* (In the USSR), individual ministries ... (appropriated) ... the role of primary users of management information systems ... and ... transformed the original concept of a national network into a patchwork of ministry-subordinated data banks, ... (transforming) ... the tool ... from a vehicle of reform into a pillar of the status quo.
These kind of topics need far more depth and detail for informed discussion that a forum discussion would allow, and its easy to get tied up clarifying misinformation and propaganda.
Those who are interested already know, others are happy with a superficial understanding of issues. There is little doubt many states were terrified of communism and what its success could mean and also communist states whenever tried devolved in some form of totalitarianism and a great betrayal of the people and principles.
Communist states have not been able to deliver on the promises and neither have capitalist states. The only constant is there are always a group of elites who manage to concentrate power, influence and wealth and drive agendas.
The part about Khrushchev's failed reform of economic management was interesting as if he had failed to refactor Soviet systems from monolithic into micro-service based.
So in my view no communist country would invest in a national network because that would make information easier to transmit and this would undermine the regime. Keep people in the dark and they might be happy with their misserable life. Even people closer to the regime believed they had a good life because they received bananas and oranges before every Christmas...