Your comment is a really good one, you make a ton of great points, and I really appreciate it. I never considered the loss of immense amounts of radical elements of the Bolsheviks in WW2 as something significant for the revolution, it’s surprising that I’ve never before seen that analysis, and it’s great that you point that out, making me think quite a bit.
As you make clear, the decisions made by the soviet administration, weren’t made in a vacuum. The conditions of the birth and development of the USSR make it basically a miracle that it lasted as long as it did, surviving extremely destructive events such as WW2, the collectivisation of land, or the cold war. My point isn’t to criticise the USSR itself, or to say that it was illegitimate, it’s just to place some criticism in order to learn from the past and to do better in the future. It’s a fact that political power of certain sorts was too centralised in the USSR, and its dissolution is the perfect example to me of that.
I’ll talk about an example of what I mean by a sovietization of political power. In the 90s, with the dissolution of the USSR, Cuba suffered the loss of its main trading partner. Being blockaded by the US, the island was very reliant on Russian oil and other exports, and the economy of the island took a massive, unprecedented hit, losing a huge portion of its GDP (I wanna say around 30% but don’t quote me on that) in the span of just a few years, in what’s known as the “periodo especial”. The response from the institutions was the opposite of what you’d expect in such a dire situation: the government willingly encouraged people, mainly through worker unions, to be involved in the economic planning and disaster management.
The unions were not only encouraged to promote meetings between workers and asked for policy and ideas to mitigate the effects of the crisis and to increase productivity: they were given power to choose which workers were carrying out redundant or inefficient work (or work that became unnecessary or impossible due to the crisis) and to move these workers to other parts of production or to fire them altogether for them to be relocated somewhere necessary. They were given nearby land upon request for workers to grow organic crops to rely less on purchase of food to sustain themselves, turning every leftover space in the city into an organic food garden. They were given the right to decide generally which sectors of the economy and society would suffer more the brunt of the crisis and the necessary reduction in expenditure to prevent shortages under the policy of controlled pricing. And while of course a lot of this policy was ultimately decided and detailed by authorities, they did so taking into account the democratic will of the workers union as well as the studies done by experts in the institutions. This is a stark difference, in my opinion, with the state-directed Perestroika for example. If you want to read on this issue, there’s a great book called “how the worker’s parliaments saved the Cuban revolution”, by Pedro Ross. Millions of people participated democratically and actively in the restructuring of the economy in one of the most all-encompassing examples of democracy I’ve ever seen.
Again, all of this isn’t to diss on the USSR, or to say that the reason why the decisions made by the country boil down to “soviets bad”, it’s a much more nuanced discussion and as you say there’s a huge variety of reasons why the democratization of the USSR wasn’t as intense as it should have been in my opinion. It’s just a good frame in my mind to analyse the reasons for the dissolution of the USSR, and to improve in future socialist societies learning from the mistakes of the past.
Your comment is a really good one, you make a ton of great points, and I really appreciate it. I never considered the loss of immense amounts of radical elements of the Bolsheviks in WW2 as something significant for the revolution, it’s surprising that I’ve never before seen that analysis, and it’s great that you point that out, making me think quite a bit.
As you make clear, the decisions made by the soviet administration, weren’t made in a vacuum. The conditions of the birth and development of the USSR make it basically a miracle that it lasted as long as it did, surviving extremely destructive events such as WW2, the collectivisation of land, or the cold war. My point isn’t to criticise the USSR itself, or to say that it was illegitimate, it’s just to place some criticism in order to learn from the past and to do better in the future. It’s a fact that political power of certain sorts was too centralised in the USSR, and its dissolution is the perfect example to me of that.
I’ll talk about an example of what I mean by a sovietization of political power. In the 90s, with the dissolution of the USSR, Cuba suffered the loss of its main trading partner. Being blockaded by the US, the island was very reliant on Russian oil and other exports, and the economy of the island took a massive, unprecedented hit, losing a huge portion of its GDP (I wanna say around 30% but don’t quote me on that) in the span of just a few years, in what’s known as the “periodo especial”. The response from the institutions was the opposite of what you’d expect in such a dire situation: the government willingly encouraged people, mainly through worker unions, to be involved in the economic planning and disaster management.
The unions were not only encouraged to promote meetings between workers and asked for policy and ideas to mitigate the effects of the crisis and to increase productivity: they were given power to choose which workers were carrying out redundant or inefficient work (or work that became unnecessary or impossible due to the crisis) and to move these workers to other parts of production or to fire them altogether for them to be relocated somewhere necessary. They were given nearby land upon request for workers to grow organic crops to rely less on purchase of food to sustain themselves, turning every leftover space in the city into an organic food garden. They were given the right to decide generally which sectors of the economy and society would suffer more the brunt of the crisis and the necessary reduction in expenditure to prevent shortages under the policy of controlled pricing. And while of course a lot of this policy was ultimately decided and detailed by authorities, they did so taking into account the democratic will of the workers union as well as the studies done by experts in the institutions. This is a stark difference, in my opinion, with the state-directed Perestroika for example. If you want to read on this issue, there’s a great book called “how the worker’s parliaments saved the Cuban revolution”, by Pedro Ross. Millions of people participated democratically and actively in the restructuring of the economy in one of the most all-encompassing examples of democracy I’ve ever seen.
Again, all of this isn’t to diss on the USSR, or to say that the reason why the decisions made by the country boil down to “soviets bad”, it’s a much more nuanced discussion and as you say there’s a huge variety of reasons why the democratization of the USSR wasn’t as intense as it should have been in my opinion. It’s just a good frame in my mind to analyse the reasons for the dissolution of the USSR, and to improve in future socialist societies learning from the mistakes of the past.