Inevitable Soviet decline

1
Inevitable Soviet decline

• Economics over politics?

2
Authoritarian culture

• 300 years
• Secret police bureaucracy under Czars
• Czars licensed industrialization
• 1861 emancipation of serfs
• Put them on 49 year installment plan!

3
Communist revolution

• In a backward country
• Strikes spontaneous
• Marxist-Leninists seized chance
• Seized centre
• Ideology changed but not conditions

4
Ideology

• Community over individual
• Politics the job of elite
• some animals more equal than others!
• Justified Stalins rule
• Suppressed nationalities
• Purged millions in Ukraine
• Suppressed religion
• Centralized power

5
Stalins fears

• Criticism
• Counter-revolution
• Encirclement by capitalist west

6
No feedback

• Opposition considered immoral
• Voting an act of ritual
• Privileges for elite
• Party bureaucracy oversees state
• Central planning a disaster
• Bureaucrats hid errors
• Output measured in weight
• Very heavy TVs!

7
Perverted planning

• Administration replaced collective good
• Planners disregarded social environment costs
• metal eaters alliance
• Fiction of full employment
• Gigantomania

8
Stagnation

• Production reported to rise 8.5 1966-70
• Receded 3.7 1981-85
• Brezhnev

9
Reform

• Gorbachev (1985) price reforms too late
• Managers allowed to retain profits
• Inflation resulted
• Perestroika weakened centre
• Glasnost allowed criticism

10
Reform failure

• Bureaucrats resisted change
• Command structure of industry remained
• Rubles just accounting device
• Autonomy meant 5 year plans for industries
• Still tied to centre
• Inter-enterprise links stayed weak

11
Final decline

• 4 1990
• 10-15 first half of 1991
• 1992 crisis as farms hoarded grain to fatten
  livestock
• Soil erosion at crisis levels
• Breakdown of centrally allocated resources
• Hyperinflation barter
• 1990/91 Military still 40 budget 18 GNP

12
Social problems

• Religious harassment
• 200 mosques for 20 million
• Anti-Semitism
• Alcoholism
• Delinquency
• Hooliganism

13
Social problems

• Double burden on women
• Education promoted inequality
• Health care weak and IMR 25/1000

14
Environment

• Aral Sea salinized by irrigation
• Lake Baikal dead (worlds largest freshwater
  lake)
• Quota obsession meant 20 steel production dumped
  each year
• Nuclear accidents regular abuse
• 130 explosions used to move earth or build oil
  pressure

15
Impact

• 70m /190m in 103 cities breathe air with 5 times
  allowable limits of dangerous chemicals
• If individuals sued polluting enterprises
• Could close 80 factories overnight
• 270 mile canal from Caspian Sea to Aral sea
  uphill!

16
Energy

• 920,000 barrels oil spilled per DAY
• one Exxon Valdez every 6 HOURS!
• Cut-off valves only every 30 miles
• 5m acres boreal forest lost per year
• Worse than Amazon

17
Fall

• 1991
• USSRno more

18
Recap Soviet features

• Authoritarian
• Centralized
• Corrupt
• Repressive
• Inefficient
• Unequal

19
Change

• Yeltsin defied tanks in Aug 1991 putsch
• Apparently feeling no pain!
• Oct 1993 Duma rebellion
• Y. persuaded army to support him and shell
  parlmt.
• Clarity of anti-communist movement lost in the
  uncertainties of nationalism, fragmented parties,
  disputes between legislature and executive

20
Change?

• ¾ Moscow welcomed 1993 state of emergency
• 15 far right newspapers closed
• Swift polarization of rich poor
• 2/3 enterprises in corrupt activities
• Yeltsins daughter questioned

21
Change?

• Putin first elected (partly) on anti-corruption
  ticket
• 2003 Duma elections reinforcing Putins power