dongiovanni wrote:
I don't know. Didn't they go from archaic farming methods in 1918 to the launching of the world's first spacecraft in 1957? Didn't they give women access to birth control for the first time? Didn't they eradicate unemployment and extend the life expectancy? Yes, the U.S.S.R. was far from perfect, but to paint it as absolutely dystopian is inaccurate. The U.S.S.R. had significant issues in that it was not democratic (free speech/press, dissent control issues), but to paint it as a wretched dystopia is not correct. I'm not even arguing that it's preferable here (I do believe it is), but, given the rest of Russia's history, it certainly wasn't the biggest atrocity.
Well, the issue is that painting anything as absolutely dystopian would be false, and heck, nobody would deny that Russia overall has had a terrible history. The issue is that the USSR was all in all a failure. Yes, it did begin with massive economic growth, large improvements, things like that, but when one keeps in mind that it had massive killings by the government(literally millions of people by many accounts), misallocated resources(as noted by shortages in the USSR), extremely high inequality(the USSR was more unequal in resource distribution than the US, despite the fact it wasn't supposed to be unequal at all), high levels of pollution, poor quality of consumer goods(readily displayed by Nixon in the kitchen debate with Khrushchev), was totalitarian, AND eventually failed and is believed to do so due to it's inability to handle information(a point brought up against the planned economy in the Socialist Calculation Debate), or at best due to problems with mechanism design where good economic activities by controllers were not as encouraged as necessary to achieve goals. I mean, really, the duration in which the planned economy has remained and the results we have seen from the planned economy(including China's pragmatic defection from economic planning to positive result) so far do tend to indicate that the system used either does not work well compared to other options, or that it does not work at all. Either way, Dogbrain seems vindicated for his comments.