The next Battlestorm Stalingrad video will be out next Monday! Hanson’s “The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy: An Economic History of the USSR 1945 - 1991 (The Postwar World).” is a great book on this topic. I come to slightly different conclusions from Hanson, but he’s still a recommended source. Another great source is Higg’s “Depression, War, and Cold War”, which discusses the USA during the aftermath of WW2, showing why the Great Depression only came to a halt in 1945.
Hello TIK! I can't see the spanish subtitles I sent you a couple of weeks ago. Could you take a look at it whenever you can, please? It was the video "The Myth and Reality of Joseph Stalin's Order nº 227
@Juan Rafael Cabrero - I've just published them now! I saw your message from a couple weeks ago, liked it and was going to publish them but forgot. Thanks for the reminder, and thank you for doing them!
I grew up in provincial city in USSR in 1980s. Can confirm, the economy sucked. We were lucky in that my grandparents got a flat as WW2 veterans, so we considered it "good" when we had 2 of my grandparents, my parents, my brother and me share a tiny 2 bedroom flat. There was basically no food variety, our TV black and white (bough on black market), and our "vacations" consisted of going to the forests to hunt for mushrooms.
Same for my mom, they did sometimes go to vacations at the black sea tho... Then again, we where one of the decently (but not TOO) well off. Even so she remembers how they never had anything, and unlike the vantinks and their parents who where useless people getting paid for doing nothing, remembers the 90's fondly despite the banditism which got her mother murdered. Plus most of the banditism was caused by said useless people that had nowhere to go because they had no real skills or anything to offer, but felt entitled to stuff because the soviet union no longer provided for them... And they, and the ones well off in the union are the ones remembering it fondly.
The WEF would like the developed world to live like that. 'You'll own nothing and you will be happy'. As well as be limited in how far away from home one can travel.
Except not everyone lived in Soviet(Russia's) cities under heavy surveillance. I visited few Baltics villages long after Soviets collapse and they were pretty much nice places under Soviets as older villagers told me. Pretty much everyone had barns(even people living in apartment buildings(3 stories max)), animals in barns and never starved or missed a meal. And being villages they had agrarian cooperatives(AKA collective farms) in every bigger than 500 heads village, dairy/poultry/pig farms(single or couple of those)... And those oldies lamented how assholes crooks and politicians stole most of resources from villages after their country became independent. They said: yeah, we didn't have newest Western gadgets and we wouldn't give a toss anyway...we had enough what we needed, were happier and healthier.
А у меня бабушка весь СССР бесплатно по профсоюзным путёвкам объездила, и дома всё было В 1987 купили комп IBM, когда они появляться начали только Да, наверное, если не работать - будете только за грибами ходить, а в свободное время жаловаться что ничего дома нет XD
I can remember a professor from Estonia- before the collapse of the Soviet Union, telling me that a Soviet machine tool was sold to the Japanese. He said this purchase surprised people because it was thought that Japanese machine tools would be far better than something Soviet made. Anyway, they followed up the sale to see why the machine was bought. It turned out, the machine was scrapped- the specialist steels in it were more valuable than its actual purchase price. All the "value added" to make the machine counted for nothing- it was just so many tons of metal. This is what happens where there is no market price mechanism. Generally, when you traded with the Soviet Union, because the rouble was "non-convertible", you indulged in barter and swapped things. On that basis about 1970 Britain sold something to the Soviet Union and in return got a whole load of steel. The government fobbed this steel off on to British Leyland and because of its quality, the company made a large number of cars that rusted badly alienating customers- or alienating them even more than usual.
That's an awesome story. Definitely believable, since there were really some ridiculous things going on in the Soviet Union due to no market system. Another is that Soviet chandeliers often fell from the ceilings because they were made too heavy (the state paid more for heavier chandeliers, so the makers made them heavier)
@@TheImperatorKnight My father's whole working life was wholly Russian orientated and he was a Soviet oil and gas/energy expert as a sideline. I can recall many years ago, that he told me that nearly 20% of their oil was just lost- leaky pipelines etc. One of the Estonians I met at the same time as the professor told me, that where she lived, a huge Red Air Force base had been built. She said that if you dropped a match down a well, the well would explode into flames. She said that so much aviation spirit had leaked into the ground it was in the water table- and thus made its way into the wells! I have so many oddball anecdotes regarding life in the Soviet Union from so many that had to live there and struggle with the endless problems in day-to-day life.
@@TheImperatorKnight another example : buildings. I am just renovating a flat in 1965 apartment block in Poland. Brick one, pre "big block fabrication". Not a single wall is straight, partition walls are off plumb by 5-6 cm, and that with 3-4 cm of plaster on them. Neither there is any corner 90 degrees. Reason: workers were given rewards if they laid more bricks than state-sanctioned norm dictated (udarnik/stachanowiec .. 802% of the state norm) . Straightness of the walls was not "on the menu". Coal quality. Pork quality, similar story. "5th level of freshness" .. and then there were "yellow curtain shops" (so you would not see what party members got available) On the other hand the *perceived* quality of life actually improved. Actually got into arguments with older members of family over "good ole days" where there was no unemployment, no beggars and no trash lurkers, and they were building building building.. ships that sailed with coal to Russia and somehow never really got back with anything, if at all. ( sunny 70's and credit boom - followed by 80's martial law when there were no things to pay this credit with) And let's not forget "black gold" oil and gas .. then and now, and how this shaped both late Soviet era and modern Russia.
@@TheImperatorKnight an Austrian Mountain guide, around 1980, showed me a pair of Ice screws (thats basically a tube, about 25 x 3 cms), made out of Titan -a gift from Russian mountaineers, which had them made after hours in some aerospace factory they were working in
I don't think he ever said "um" or "like" one time. This man speaks incredibly good. He knows what he wants to say without breaking to think and put it into his sentence. He also seems to thoroughly do his research and fact finding before making a statement or argument. Through the video, I just began to verify and fact find a few things and not once was he wrong on his nonopinipnated facts. His opinion, which I agree with everything he stated in the video, is just that. An opinion. An absolute intellectual. Please keep up you videos. It's hard to find alot of resourceful information today pertaining to the 2nd world war these days. Most of it being the same information and questions over and over. Not on TIKs channel. Everyday is new information.
My family lived in USSR, and all you told was true, everyone had money, but shops were empty. However, now they complain about shops being full, but it's hard to get money.
Socialism has been replaced with kleptocracy. Perhaps the oligarchs leave more for goods for the masses and allow prices to float to actual value. In a second-tier world country that can be hard on the masses. I bought a nice custom knife from Russia a couple of years ago and nothing else, ever in 76 years.
"everyone had money, but shops were empty." partially true. you could buy what you wanted at markets only it cost like 5 times as much. "now they complain about shops being full, but it's hard to get money." not true, it was true in the 1990s
I heard one of the bigest surprise refugees from the ussr had in the us was supermarkets. They never had any experience with stores filled with all kinds of food.
My history teacher in China once told us that back in the 90s a bunch of Chinese merchants would go to the Russian border to sell several boxes of toothpastes and the Russian would give them an airplane or a bunch of army motorcycles, since Russia back then had almost little to no light industry, only heavy industry.
I’ve heard similar stuff too. On the northern border of China they traded heavy machinery and vehicles for small stuff like kettles and heat preserving containers
@TEXOCMOTP yeah, holdomir even kulakization weren't intended to murder off masses of people. the sovs were vicious but well intentioned. they considered their vicious qualities as necessary evils forced on them by the material conditions etc etc.
@Ornate Orator Great depression was a cryis of OVERproduction, and people still starved in a same time food was destroyed. It would be "beautiful" show of advantages of capitalism if people would die in significant masses in such crysis. Famine of 1930 happened because of DROUGHT. If You cant see difference in price of management mistake in both situations , it is sad.
famine after famine, massacre after massacre, mass incarceration after mass incarceration, why it's almost as if Marx advocated a Red Terror! oh wait. HE DID.
I absolutely love that you actually cite from the sources you list. Many channels from what I've noticed, if they even bother putting their sources in, rarely add direct citations.
Yes, I started putting the references in because lots of people were accusing me of "making stuff up" and telling me I should "read the books" that I'd already used and it was them who hadn't read them properly. Doing that stopped those comments instantly. It also allows viewers to check my points if they doubt what I say, and I can even double check if someone questions a point - I can quickly find the page reference and provide further info or quotes. Time consuming in the editing process but worth it.
That is how it ought to be done. Imagine designing a bridge as the chief engineer, but refusing to put in where you got your calculations from and whose material; science studies you used. Instead tell people "trust me" that the bridge will not collapse.
Neon Noir, actually that’s a very good point. Apart from the two world wars which weren’t the Americans responsibility. Japan’s involvement I think could be put in America’s lap possibly! I’d be interested in your opinion and as I alluded the Great Depression and Spanish flu certainly can be placed at America’s door!
“The Russian state has the advantage over others that it is governed directly by God Himself. Otherwise it is impossible to explain how it exists ... " (с) General Burkhard Christoph von Münnich ( 1683-1767 )
@Neon Noir Several American companies cooperating with hitler doesn't make all of American companies compicient in this cooperation nor it makes American people hitler's accomplices.
I have a Russian friend, when he was young (born in 1996), he lived with his grandparents in rural Russia. From his description, nothing has changed since the start of the 20th century. ( no electricity, no running water etc ...) He couldn't get out at night because of wolves. WOLVES.
In the 60s, there were still places in Italy with no electricity or running water, where people would live in single room dwelling with their animals. My dad recently told me when he was a kid in the 60s in West Germany, sometimes neighbors would come to their house and pay my grandfather to use their phones. And the people at the end of the street had to carry all the water to their house in buckets. And we're not even from a remote region of Germany. Crazy how recently many modern standards were still not fully established even in the richest countries in the world.
Yep, as a Russian I can confirm that life here isn't easy... Wolves aren't so bad by the way. At least you can hide from wolves in the house. Bears, on the other hand...
@@jim7297 Great Idea. In Germany we killed all the Bears and almost all of the Wolves. Since then we have to put in greater efforts by the year to hunt down deers, which, unchecked by predators, have grown out of control doing massive damage to the forests and crops.
Too good for TV tho. They see their viewers as dumb animals who want stupid special effects, unfitting music and everything getting repeated at least 3 times. TIK is hands down one of the best channels on YT. TV is dead anyways, 95% of todays movies suck.
A very close friend of mine,grew up in the Soviet Union,he always says the worst thing about living in England is the number of people who refuse to accept that their revered Soviet Union was not only an economic basket case but also a social hellscape deliberately inflicted on the population by the Party as a further means of social control.
@@30cal23 There, media and especially academia.After the Soviet Union collapsed, former Party officials ( whose names and positions were known) came to the London School of Economics to lecture on the utter failure of communism in precise details.Even though resident academics knew exactly who the former officials were , the academics denounced them as American "plants" so thoroughly indoctrinated into the leftist cult were they.
@@Ryandeanchickenpeen I recently saw footage from a Jim Lindsey visit to a liberal arts college describing how Mao used his Red Guards ( Antifa ) to eliminate his political enemies and how he subsequently used the army to eliminate the Red Guards.The footage she's the brainwashed goons ( "students") not only cheering for Mao but proclaiming their own willingness to die as revolutionary cannon fodder.I used to feel pity for the victims of brainwashing but today's examples are worthy only of contemt.
I visited Severmorsk (the military city next to Murmanske) in 1995 in a Canadian warship to mark the 50th Anniversary of Victory in Europe. Russian sailors were jamming hotdogs in their pockets to take home when we hosted a BBQ on our jetty after a ball hockey game with them. We brought up a lot more food from our fridges for them after we saw this.
Young @TIK provides a great service of entertainment. But I would argue that in these lonely times of self quarantine, the mind is provided If the necessary informational substance to maintain itself. In other words, I would go mad from Netflix without his information video service. Perhaps we should appreciate him for that. What do you think?
I worked with an engineer who had fled during Cold War. He spoke of how hard it was to design products since all plans had to be submitted with plans of how to switch back to military products within 24 hours.
Spent a couple months in Far East Russia (Siberia, just above China) in 1996 in a city of 300,000 or 600,000 people. (I forget) Everything was exotic and foreign so it took me a while to notice the almost total absence of old men. I only realized I hadn't been seeing any when I was walking down a city street and saw a white haired gentleman and was almost stopped in tracks. Took me a while to figure out why I was so struck by him. It was that, despite being in a very crowded, large city where I came in daily contact with hundreds or thousands of people, I hadn't seen an old man for weeks. TONS of old women, they were everywhere but all the old men had been killed in one fashion or another long before.
Yep, and still a problem in the Russian population today. Which is why you see so many Russian women in the west making a better life for themselves, and so few Russian men. Their life expectancy is in the high 60s years, due to war, typhoid in the prison system, and vodka abuse. The few Russian men you see in the west are the intelligent ones who can see the writing's on the wall under Putin.
@@jaggmeeler2039 change is always painful, helps when you transition with wealth often "appropriated" from others within the state it is less painful - but when you exhaust those resources and need to transition again, there is no piggy bank to alleviate some more pressures. That's my take on it anyways.
@@4h844 another thing about the collapse is the speed and way it happened. When the economy is built off massive inefficient large industries that relied on central command, it becomes especially painful when such command disappeared overnight. Literally the majority of the economy is gone instantly. Comparing to what China did, which is to allow smaller businesses first and do it regionally, only slowly privatizing large key industries over decades.
Ronald Reagan was reportedly surprised and shocked in January 1981 when getting his first briefing on the Soviets and the Soviet economy and remarked “I had no idea they were doing so badly”. This of course 10 years before the collapse.
And who do you think gave the USSR that final push down the stairs? Ronald Reagan did. He conspired with the Saudis to keep oil prices down, and then tricked the Soviet military establishment into trying to keep up with the "Star Wars" defense system hype, bankrupting the Soviet government.
A 70 year old Slovakian man I know remembers the occasional communist police raids on his house looking for illegal hidden wealth. I recall a reporter in 1970’s Moscow telling about shortages and how people would get in any queue that was forming even without knowing what it was for - also the reaction of a Russian visiting the US in 1980 and first hearing about grain sales to his country: “That’s impossible the USSR feeds the world!”.
There's a famous photo of Yeltsin standing in an American supermarket laden with foodstuffs... he's just flummoxed at what he's seeing. Reports were that he was majorly depressed afterward asking, "my God, what have they (communists) done to our country!?"
@@quan-uo5ws By the time Yeltsin was in power it was already destroyed. It was ruined beyond repair before Gorbachev. Yeltsin was the one that pulled down the curtain and he got all the flack for it. The problem is the system that preceded the one Yeltsin wanted to implement didn't manage to create any effective bureaucratic talent. It's the reason why Russia even today is in the gutters. They somehow managed to fix this problem a little by privatization and allowing certain key people total control over certain resources who we call oligarchs in the western media. I think it's a mistake to call them that. We should just call them for what they really are---- robber barons.
@@marktwain8121 No, there was an arranged diplomatic visit by Gorbachev to a supermarket but Yeltsin took a quick look during a different trip. Both visited supermarkets but at different times.
Hi TiK, just to support this, while studying Soviet Cold War politics I read a few accounts (including Khrushchev, though he is about as reliable as a German General) which stated that by the early 60s the leadership recognised that they were economically trapped: on one hand the population could see the lack of consumer goods and they needed to start producing them; on the other their industry (and reading between the lines their strategic self-concept) was not capable of producing them, and there was no capacity to do so without taking production away from elsewhere.
@@TheImperatorKnight It was a long time ago as an undergrad. The only source I remember by name was Khrushchev's memoirs, because I was very excited to find a copy in the library, and shortly after very disappointed by the contents. If you plan on looking it up, the reference came around the early 60's.
@@TheImperatorKnight It's in Khrushchev's autobiography. You really ought to read it. It's a macabre Alice-in-Wonderland tome. One passage has Khrushchev being dispatched to a truck tire factory to figure out why Soviet truck tires kept blowing out. He arrives and inspects the factory, watches the tires being made and immediately sees the problem: the workers are winding the reinforcing cords to loosely, so that as soon as big loads are put on the truck, they just give way and pop. Khrushchev the magnificent troubleshooter instructs the workers how to do their job properly and the tire problem is solved. In fact, Khrushchev was Stalin's heavy who went around solving problems at workplaces by threatening to shoot the managers and one out of 10 workers as saboteurs and wreckers. He genuinely enjoyed the role of being a brutal thug threatening dire consequences if performance didn't improve. Here's the thing: the workers and managers pretended not to know quality was lacking, and Khrushchev pretended to believe them. But his bloody threats were usually enough to get a factory to cut out the on-the-job drinking, absenteeism, carelessness, and poor workmanship for at least a little while.
It took 100 years for the last places in the southern United States to recover from the US Civil War and they didn't get essentially wiped off the map like swaths of Soviet territory did. It is very possible that the Soviet Union hadn't recovered yet 20 years later.
@Doctor Detroit Don't forget that Russia is nearly unique in the world in that they have almost no national debt. No one would ever loan them any money so they are not as beholden as the rest of the world.
I lived in the South during the '80's and can attest to this fact. Partly it's just a regressive, complacent culture but the Civil War really didn't do them any favors.
and the Carthaginian Empire never recovered from its wars with the Roman Republic ... . Try comparing apples with apples. Anyone can go hundreds or thousands of years into the past and make spurious comparisons. Tell me, when you want to make a point about the 1% do you compare yourself to ca. 12th Century landlords or do you actually make a point of finding more contemporary individuals when it suites hmm...? How was West Germany doing in 1950? How about Italy or France? How about Japan?
Another factor is the inherent inefficiency of centrally planned economy. The incentives for factory directors are different than in a capitalist economy. It resulted in factories hoarding everything: machinery, input materials, even extra workers to deal with spikes in demand. They would also prefer to make machine parts, etc. in-house, since outside supply was unreliable. Overall this resulted in USSR using about 3 times as much energy as USA per unit of goods. The planners lamented that their country had everything, from natural resources to great mathematicians and engineers, but the economy just didn't work.
I see this dilema in some semi-nationalised developing world countries to. Public sector hoards to the level where other industries die out while everyone laments the "huge resources"
As a Finn, my dad always remembers fondly the time the Soviet Union was our neighbour instead of modern Russia. After the war, trade between Finland and the Soviet Union was really beneficial for Finland. We would trade them by Western standards mediocre heavy industry goods which for the Soviets was a major source of foreign technology. After the Soviet collapse, there was no good market for Finnish goods that were only okay by say Swedish or German standards which created a pretty heavy shock for our economy. I always found my dad's opinion about the matter fairly odd, given how the Soviet Union was the biggest threat for our independence and existence.
Smola I am a cultural Finn or sentimnetal towards Finland. Here in Michigan USA we have many Finnish descendents. I dated a beautiful girl years ago named Keikkonen.sorry for slelling is been 30 yrs. Post Covid i need a vacation. Finland is on my list.
Professor Maltsev passed away in January 2023. I'm pleased to have met him when he visited South Africa in 2017, and smiled at hearing his name mentioned here. What a character he was; bought and sold 80 automobiles in his first ten years of living in the US upon defecting. Most of them lemons, but he just loved the ability to acquire and dispose of entire cars on his whim, something only senior soviet politicians could do.
Interesting, as a child living in the USSR from anecdotal evidence I think there was an increase in living standards, at least for some people, in the cities. There was a lot of housing built under Khrushchev and many people got private apartments as opposed to communal apartments. A lot of families had a small dacha with a land plot of typically 600m^2 in the country where they would grow their own food (working there on the weekends), I have fond memories working on our plot. I assume these harvests were never officially counted. As a child I don't recall ever being hungry. There were a lot of activities for children, free of charge, sport clubs, various technical clubs and even computer classes in the 80s.
Under the Soviets about 3.5-6 million Ukrainians were starved through confiscation of grains. A similar amount of Russians also starved in the 1930s. . This was due to the war against small farmers with 8-20 employees called Kulacks and forced collecovisation which produced and continued to produced poor crop yields. This was lead by communist ideology which had a noticeable jiewish tinge coming out of a range or grievances such as the non virtually existent pogroms (which killed no one) and Jackob Schiffs financing of the Bolschevicks. (It's no surprise they were handed over to German Ensatzgroupen). By 1950 the cosmopolitans seems to have been purged. Eventually the Soviets showed a recovery from these ideological idiocies.
1. The myth of the Jewish revolution was created by the right-wing Russian emigration after the civil war. 2. Jacob Schiff did not finance the Bolsheviks because he was against socialism - he supported the February revolution.
In the early '70s I met a man in Yugoslavia, a Dalmatian, who served in the Austro-Hungarian army in WW1. He spent part of his time in the army on the Bosphorus counting the grain ships exiting the Black Sea. He said it was a constant parade. "And now how many?" he said. "The grain ships are going the other way now!"
@@panzerofthelake506 Lol. Moving on the surfacd of the water with engines? Man, Bosphorus is open for any ships during peace time according to international treaties.
@@piotrzielonka1987 : You’re missing the point. If it was during the Dalmatian guy’s A-H army service, the question is who was producing the grain on the ships exiting the Black Sea? A-H was an ally of the Ottoman Empire, so it’s plausible that he was stationed there at the time, and able to observe the traffic. But where was the traffic originating? Russia and the Ottoman Empire were at war, so how would Russian grain travel unmolested through the Bosporus? The second question is, if it was during some time spent by the Dalmatian in the post-WW1 Yugoslavian (Royal) army, or even the post-WW2 Yugoslavian (Socialist Republic) army, the question would be how would the Dalmatian be deployed on the Bosporus, as a Yugoslav army member, when the Yugoslavia doesn’t even border the Bosporus, and Republican Turkey was never an ally of Royalist or Republican Yugoslavia? Do you get it now? That whole story told by the Dalmatian dude is jumbled up, and sounds either garbled in being relayed to us, or possibly just a tall tale to begin with.
@TIK I'm 58 years old. I remember being a teenager and seeing news stories on US TV about the plight of the Soviet population and how they had to queue up for everything, bread, meat, etc. It was disturbing because having no knowledge or the capacity to understand what I was seeing and hearing on TV, I felt badly for the population and wondered why they allowed such things to happen to them.
I can definitely tell you that Soviet demographics never recovered from WWII. Russia's population today is permanently smaller thanks to losing 1/6th of its entire population (and a substantially higher amount of child-rearing aged men and women) in WWII and the purges/famines that preceded it.
There was an upward demographic trend in the USSR. the population grew. The restoration of capitalism killed millions of people. Russia is now dying out (like all post-socialistic countries of Eastern Europe)
My grandmother was born in 1942 in South Africa. She remembers they had rationing well into the 1950's as a result of the war's deprivations. TBH It'd be interesting to investigate the relatively autarkic economy of South Africa post-1961.
Hmm this is an interesting point. However in SA there were clearly defined classes/races from which extraction can be done. This kept the wealth centered in the hands of whites and a bit of Indians and extracted from the blacks. This is somewhat similar to what Hitler might have aimed through WW2 I guess
@@murahasfunstuff7618 Despite that there was still tens of thousands of Whites who were poor. Almost like apartheid nor BEE can't make anyone rich by itself.
Essentially, thinking you can centrally plan every interaction and aspect of an economy is like thinking you can do a better job of consciously regulating every homeostatic process in your body than having your body systems do them automatically, sort of like how every individual interacts autonomously in an economy.
@Gipsy Danger especially when it's more like 40 million. You must also take into account Holodomir and post-war starvation, and civilians including those "internally deported" to gulags.
@Plamen Stoev 'The now free east European republics became pray for the west economies.' Or rather the EU....Don't blame the failure of centrality and bureaucracy of the EU on the USA or rather more 'capitalistic' countries like China, South Korea & Japan.
@Plamen Stoev 'The thing the the Ameirkan army has bases in east Europe. Not somebody else. The politicians there got to visit Washington so guess who is the big boss' Well, Germany and the USA are competitors in high-quality manufacturing. The way the USA won the cold war was by providing countries with trade security and world markets in exchange for an alliance. So, no there are differences, and your conspiracy theories are bogus.
Speaking of recovery, David Glantz's wife is recovering from several serious infections. She is recovering, but thoughts and prayers are never wasted. :)
Dude, the Soviet economy was at the core, a wartime economy that was unable to transition to anything apart from what Stalin's blueprint, had prioritized. We all need to understand that WW2 had seriously traumatized and shaped the Soviet psyche. They refused to be caught unprepared, by a western block that appeared poised to strike it. Military goods received the highest priority. People were expected to cope with economic hardship. The economy since the Bolshevik Revolution was always geared toward empowering the state and weakening the family.
They did this, on the back of the modern equivalent of 10s of trillions of dollars in damages caused by the Axis. Imagine if the entire United States from Florida to New York or so, and as deep as Pennsylvania, was leveled/burned/bombed/destroyed, and around 15% of the population of the United States died in the process. Do we think the US would EVER fully recover from that? How long would it take? That's what happened to the USSR in WW2. No, they never recovered, they were forced into an arms race by Truman, and somehow, they managed to stay afloat until the 1990s, and they even took the lead in the space race briefly. That is INSANE.
@@mercb3astSuch an argument might be plausible if one completely ignores Germany, which not only recovered from an equal destruction but grew to thrive.
That was strong, I'd say, mind-blowing. My parents are soviet people, and the information I received from them and the media, and school didn't seem to be providing a complete picture. I knew that something crucial was missing, but I couldn't figure out what that was. Your content is awesome, and this video is ... wow. It covers so much more than promised in the title. With all that is happening now (China's screwup with the coronavirus, constitutional changes in Russia, just to name the few), it gives you some sort of closure. History is indeed not just about dates and names
I only really scratched the surface here. I'd really recommend Hanson's book, and some of the Mises articles, especially from the Soviet medical minister I quoted from in the video. There's a reason I'm now favouring Austrian School economics rather than the mainstream Keynesian/Socialist 'economics' because they're providing a narrative that not only fills the gaps, but also makes a lot more sense. They also predicted the current recession we're now in (which is why I'm prepared for it) while most of the mainstream were completed taken by surprise
@@SamuelJamesNary The disease didn't cause the pending recession, but it was one of the tipping factors. Other factors include near zero interest rates, inflated stock prices compared to value, encouragement to borrow rather than save, and the dick measuring contest between Russia and Saudi Arabia. Plus more that I can't think of right now.
The term Kulak was used broadly to label anyone who went against Lenin's collectivzation policy. It initially included anyone who owned 8 acres of land, but was used to include anyone who happened to have more than their neighbor.
I grew up during the Cold War. We were told that we were fight a near peer that was close to our economy. After the Berlin Wall fell, we found out the economy they were closest to was Belgium.
Absolutely. And who did they elect in 1945? SOCIALISTS. Compare that to the German Economic Miracle. www.histclo.com/country/ger/chron/20/pw/dec/1950/gem.html
@@Diwana71 You may not like the British, but they played a key role in the War. Much of NAZI industry was geared toward waging the war in the West rather than giving the Ostheer the support needed to win. As a result of the war in the West, the great bulk of the Ostheer entered the Soviet Union on foot with horse-drawn carts. www.histclo.com/essay/war/ww2/air/eur/sbc/eco/sbc-gie.html
@@dennisweidner288 The bulk of the ostheer entered the war on foot and horse, and remained on foot and horse throughout the war because of a fundamental shortage of oil before the war, and critical shortages late in the war. The western fronts, until maybe the US landings in Italy, had marginal impacts on the German waging of war.
There's a channel called Ushanka Show that talks about growing up in the late 70s and 80s in the Soviet Union. It's pretty fascinating to hear some of his stories. He moved to the US in the 90s so he has a pretty unique perspective from both sides.
I'm from Poland, born last year of the communist regime. The shortages and queues are so infamous here, we have a board game about it, called "Queue". Great export of the Soviets: economic collapse through export of central planning. Many seen to have forgotten those terrible times, sadly. There's plenty of people in my parents' age group who look back at communism with childish nostalgia. They also only think in terms of propaganda taught to them in schools.
Central planning is really good for crisis'. It's not good for anything else. All the major powers in WW2 used a command/centrally planned economy in WW2. It's good at coordinating macro economics, and for correcting bad trends. It's terrible for driving an economy that needs to be agile to react to innovation and consumer shifts.
İt's not true Albert Speer wasn't said a shit like that.You probably mean iron ore which İmperial Germany had tons of thanks to Alsace Lorraine.Lets look at: İn 1939 Greater Germany's population which including Austria,Sudetenland and Bohemia was almost 87 million which including 80 million German speaking peoples against 68 million of İmperial Germany's population in 1914. İn 1939 German steel production was some 23.7 million tons against 17.6 million tons of İmperial Germany in 1913. İn 1939 Germany produced 204 million tons of black and bituminous coal and 211 million tons of brown coal against İmperial Germany produced 277 million tons of coal in all types in 1913. İn 1913 Germany generated 8 billion kwh/h of electricity while in 1939 Germany generated 66.3 billion kw/h. Areas like steel,coal and electricity production Germany was just 2nd largest country after USA. Yes,in some areas Germany did never recovered like shipbuilding industry and iron ore mining which İmperial Germany was second largest in the World in 1910s. Also Wehrmacht was not so dominant in 1939 unlike İmperial German Army in 1914 which had more heavy artillery pieces and machine guns than rest of Entente combined. So in overall Germany actually recovered from WW1. Sources: books.google.com.tr/books?id=ksK_tW1qYRQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=book+war+economy+in+third+reich&hl=tr&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiVrYqN5JzoAhUF5aYKHQEFCpUQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=steel&f=false books.google.com.tr/books?id=EfEdkyz_D0AC&printsec=frontcover&dq=united+states+strategic+bombing+survey+reports&hl=tr&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjWnKXZ5pzoAhXBy6YKHcEFD4kQ6AEIRjAD#v=onepage&q=united%20states%20strategic%20bombing%20survey%20reports&f=false books.google.com.tr/books?id=LcHkCZxfGpwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=nazi+economic+recovery+1932-1938&hl=tr&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiMidbIlaToAhWktXEKHcm3BgwQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=nazi%20economic%20recovery%201932-1938&f=false en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_Germany
Russian parents of school friends in the 1970s told me about their fixation with preserves, mostly vegetables, stored in 2 litre glass jars that were hung outside apartment kitchen windows - most of the year round it was cold enough ! Pickled this, pickled that seemed to be their first priority. Also even tiny plots had gardens for vegetables or fruit that were mostly stored.
It's a very complicated question, with more than 1 answer. Yes, Soviet manpower was impaired. Yes, the Soviet sphere of influence was too large to effectively manage. Yes, maintaining the balance of power with NATO used massive resources. But, comparing the pre WW2 Soviet economy to the post WW2 economy shows that the post WW2 economy was much stronger. However by Western standards, the economy was very weak, as the bulk of the Soviet GDP was absorbed by the military and modernization projects. This is also seen in pre and post war China, one could successfully argue that China didn't recover from WW2 until the 1990's. So, this really just sums up the difference between the newly emerging communist vs the established democratic systems.
@@billosby9997 He's comparing apples to oranges and yes i watched the video. But it's a very complex question and has more than one correct answer. Things like "not my idea of a workers paradise" needs to be tempered by what came before the revolution. The "fudged" numbers, they all lied, they had to, so they didn't get shot or sent to a gulag for failing. The leadership believed one set of numbers and in reality they were completely wrong. Which could explain why the Soviets suffered famines. Capitalism and communism, one's an apple, one's an orange. The goals of one is not necessarily the goals of the other. Communism's goal was to advance the nation, not the people.
@Erich Kirk Finland had a population of 80,000 during the early Middle Ages, and grew slowly but surely into empire. However, the last famine was 80 years before the Soviet famine.
@Dwarov 1 That's a load of horseshit. There's no way that the Soviet Union produced more food than the rest of the Allies combined. One, food was one of the most important items the Soviets requested via lend lease. Two, half of their best agricultural land was occupied by the Nazis for at least 2 of the four years that the Soviet Union participated in the war. 3 their agricultural ministry was listening to crackpot scientists who said that Soviet peasants could make plants grow in poor climates and soil by sheer willpower. And four, the other Allies owned over half of the rest of the world's landmass and could count the majority of the entire world's population as their citizens/subjects.
For the entire period of the war, the Allies delivered 4.5 million tons of food to USSR. For comparison - the volume of grain harvest in the USSR was: 1941 - 55.9 million tons. 1942 - 29.7 million tons. 1943 - 29.4 million tons. 1944 - 49.1 million tons. 1945 - 47.3 million tons. Total - 211.4 million tons. Thus, a direct percentage of allied assistance is 2.2% of the volume of the soviet harvest.
@@СергейРублев-т7я Interesting numbers. However you do not mention the original reason of the food shipments. USSR needed to get through the winter of 1941-1942. I assume a big percentage of 1941's harvest grain was left in the occupied territories. You also didn't mention the phenomenal losses in merchant shipping from the arctic route. A lot of tons ended up in the bottom of the north sea.
I met a Ukrainian man who left Ukrain somewhere in the 80s or early 90s. He said that a major road - basically a freeway - was still diverting around a shell crater in the road that was never fixed. Dirt track instead of fixing a hole. That's communism.
I live in the United States of America today. My school district cannot afford to employ teachers full time, so the school week is 4 days a week. That's capitalism.
I didn't live in the Soviet period but I always assumed it wasn't this bad purely through seeing the leftovers of the era all around me as I grew up: old Soviet furniture, old electronics, old gas stoves, old apartment blocks and cars on the street etc. So in my logic if you can afford a flat with a bed, table and a TV: life ain't bad... Now that I am older I am so sure TBH... Up until you realise that woodgrain TV cost a 2 day trip and 5 months of wages, I later heard of cars being just money sinks (hence the stupendous price of 5 and a half grand for a car they could have reasonably sold for a grand) and how the government made good chunks of the currency unusable: TWICE. But if anything it just shows how shyte the 90s government was with everything folding in on itself left right and centre which kinda explains the love communism has: it's not what was, it's in comparison to what immediately followed.
Pretty much this and same here. Ecspecially when talking to my mother and grandparents have told me. It wasnt nowhere bad as westeners want it to be potrayed.
I lived in USSR. Now I live in the west for the past 22 years. Let me tell you: With all the problems we had in the USSR, no other country doesn't even come close to it and never will. We had education that wasn't based on stupid tests, that boosted our creative and problem solving capacities 10 fold and routinely we call the westerners "retarded" because of that. We had family values and no gay parades. We had a country that cared about its citizens as it could. It wasn't the richest country but it was rich enough. There are 2 Capitalisms - For G7-and the Billionaires and for Colonies - the slaves. They say Capitalism, but they should have said G7-Capitalism or Slave-Capitalism. Russia got the 2nd one... And now the G7 population is getting a 2nd one as well. Because we can't afford to own a house anymore. So we are have-nots. Yes we live, work, rent and dye. That's it. The only people who can afford a higher quality of life are legal-criminals: Stock market traders, prostitution rings, medical workers and members of parliament. For them 1st-Capitalism works great. For everybody else - you are just a slave to the system who doesn't even have a right to reproduce, make a family, because the laws are so bad against you and women demand so much that nobody can deliver and nobody wants to make a family anymore... Well, it's not that bad or dramatic, but trust me, it's not getting better at all... I miss USSR, I believe it was brutally murdered by Gorbachev and Yeltsin who just sold their soul to the west and given up everything their own parents fought for. They should have allowed private property and investments - that's it! Instead they just dismembered a living organism and now we have civil wars. Well, Never Trust The West...
As I've just replied to you elsewhere Dan - Which countries are Capitalist? Please let me know so I can move there. Remember, Capitalism is when there's no forceful coercion of money (e.g. taxation) and no monopoly (e.g. multiple court systems rather than just the State's one), since Capitalism is the Private (individual) control of the means of production. The former Soviet block never had Capitalism and doesn't now. Giant hierarchies of society that dominate a region and the economy cannot be classed as an individual (Private) and therefore not Capitalist. Again, see my Public vs Private video ruclips.net/video/ksAqr4lLA_Y/видео.html which will provide you with the correct historical definitions of the terms.
@@TheImperatorKnight Then Real Capitalism™ is as meaningless as Real Communism™ is. Like for all this pontification about the supposed superiority of the free market I don't see any Bioshock style underwater cities being founded, your definitions are laughable. You described "Corporations" to be a state for whatever reason (if your color coding is to be considered). Which is in line with the silly lolbert nonsense around "corporations bad" and "corporations are made by states", is Mars Inc. (the confectionery company) also a collective or state? Real Capitalism never existed nor will it ever exist (because the standards set for it are impossible in reality, the moment the private home owners association does something that isn't 100% in agreement it's tyranny). This "not real capitalism" nonsense is as stupid as "not real communism" to deflect and respond to criticisms of the system in practice. No system operates ideally. Ever.
Tik, I travelled to Russia in 1993; even though we were on a tour, the amount of food we received was pretty small, and of mediocre quality. When my wife and I stopped off at a bistro to grab something to supplement our meal, there was hardly anything to be found. People - mostly older/elderly, we're on every street corner, trying to sell their personal belongings, like stainless steel silverware, etc. So things were tough in the 90s as well. More evidence of this poverty comes from a story Raisa Gorbachev liked to tell, of when she and Mikael drove about 2 hours south outside of Moscow, and she saw villages of farm families living in small log/lumber cabins, some without electricity. Apparently she just cried, incredulous that a supposed super-power could still have such lack of opportunity for the working citizen.
The UK economy in 1945 was also geared to wartime production, particularly in heavy industry and armaments production (like the Soviet Union), but by 1950 (with some rationing still in place, like petrol rationing) was largely changed over to a pre-war type consumer economy. Surprisingly, despite the wartime destruction there, exactly the same thing (with more emphasis on trade exports), had occurred in West Germany. A consumer economy never seemed to properly develop behind the Iron Curtain; it was geared towards a perpetual war time economy. Russia, to a certain extent, is still in this mode today.
West Germany also got millions of dollars from the United States to rebuild after World War 2. The Soviets (and their Eastern European allies) didn't, so they had to rebuild for themselves.
@@benbaselet2026 Except it's not. They lack the industrial capacity due to corruption and lack of investment that follows from that. Hence them importing such basic and simple to fabricate military hardware such as drones from a relatively industrially backward state like Iran. Speaks everything you need to know about modern Russian military capacity. Embarrassing in the extreme. And all due to Putin's systemic corruption.
If Khruschev accuses Stalin of anything it is only because he was personally doing exactly that himself. And he was in charge of Ukraine during "Holodomor", when dispatched food resources from Moscow were stupidly mismanaged.
That's exactly it, though. Deaths during the Holomodor weren't due to genocidal policies (which some people still say even in light of all of the evidence opposing it), it was due to terrible mismanagement and going overboard with class warfare against the Kulaks. But once you start drinking the Alternate History Hub Kool-Aid, the truth begins to get warped.
@Deanimator there is plenty of documentation that backs up the holocaust. the reason why "holocaust" isnt mentioned in nazi documents is because its a post war term that was created to explain the entire period of nazi anti jewish racism. in nazi terminology the operations that made up the holocaust -aktion reinhard, aktion 14f3, sonderaktion 1005 to name a few, are backed up by documentation. this is despite the fact the nazis made a largely successful effort to destroy all records in regards to their genocidal plans.
A Finn told me his country knew they needed to keep good relations with the Soviet Union so they sold things to the soviets . But there was nothing they could buy with Roubles ..so they bought the only thing they could from the Soviets, Military equipment. This is why about 1/3 of their military used Soviet equipment. And was some of that gold from Spain?
So, even in the '50s, it's been quite obvious, that economical integration&trade - is the way to cooperate and create new connections and strengthen older ones, weak they are or strong - we don't discuss that now. And that it, integration, decreases the chances of war. But, according to the modern state of things, this obvious phenomenon of the past is now not so obvious as it's been just a few decades prior. What a wonderful time we have the ability to live in.
I used to work for an import company out of W. Germany as a sales/warehouse manager. Yes, before reunification. We had an exclusive arrangement with E. Germany for certain products. Musical instruments, knick knacks and a few other products. They would send a half dozen representatives over every 6 months. They each would carry 3 suitcases. 1 half filled, the other 2 empty. The first thing they wanted to do when they got of the plane? Disney! They would stand among the thousands of people, and saw Disney is only for the rich people! My boss got tired of it one visit and just waved his arm and said "yes, look at all the rich people"! The next thing they did was fill their suitcases with shopping. Sometimes leaving the garbage they brought behind.
Whilst food might have been unexciting in the 50s and 60s there wasn’t starvation in U.K. Milk Meat potatoes and bread were the staples of my youth but we had enough to eat.
E Fig. Roosevelt made certain of that:) Looking back it was no bad thing. The days of empire were long gone. In fact as far as I understand the finance of empire meant that it cost more to upkeep than it returned even before WW2. However without the legacy of empire would U.K. have had the manpower to hold the Axis in North Africa? Personally I doubt it! At that point Britain was the only country who was able to take the war to the Axis powers. If they hadn’t then we may well of been looking at a very different world. With the Persian oil fields in the hands of the Italians or Germans and the Suez Canal taken. If that had been the case I believe Britain would have negotiated a peace in Europe and possibly joined in the invasion of Russia. Without British and American support Barbarossa would have been successful and Germany would have made war on America whithout a doubt. Who knows the results of that piece of fantasy. One of the few advantages that remain of empire is I can make myself understood in most places in the world. So all said not the worst ending to empire.
Well you're writing in English and arguing in it, so it's quite alive in a different way. Hell, the code for the machine you're using and this website is based on English
Actually it was not so much the War--it was the Socialists they elected at the end of the War, Notice how German and other Western European countries recovered very rapidy after the War. www.histclo.com/country/ger/chron/20/pw/dec/1950/gem.html
I lived in Italy for about four years, starting in 1969, to 1973. My Dad was stationed at Aviano AFB for these four years, and we lived nearby in Budoia, Italy. I noticed a lot of road construction, in major cities, that later I figured out, was not just simple road maintenance, but rather they were still rebuilding bomb damage from WW2. So, they were still in the process of fixing up cities as late as 1969, from the massive war damage!
Purple Pussy In Aarhus in Denmark permanent new buildings were not built until late 1990’ties after this bombing (bombed by nazis on food and by car) blog.dengamleby.dk/aarhusogandenverdenskrig/2016/02/22/februar-1945-raedselsnatten-i-guldsmedgade/
So what? The Frauenkirche in Dresden wasn't rebuild before the late 1990s, mostly because East Germany didn't bother to do it. You will still see weird housing in citys where the allied bombing almost destroyed the entire city.
"But the Soviets were producing way more Coal, Steal, and Cotton!" Producing Coal is bad for the environment. Steel is even worse. And they had to drain the Aral Sea to grow the Cotton in Uzbekistan. The Soviet Union was a walking environmental catastrophe.
Same happened in the American South. The scars cotton production left on the land are still visible today. It is the cotton plant's need for water that damages the land. So, yeah the Aral Sea is gone, and so are chunks of the topsoil in the American South which is still poorer than the Northern states today. So, the lesson I learn from that is humans don't always learn from history, and whatever the system human stupidity is intractable.
To begin with, Soviet Union barely recovered from its own inception - Bolshevik revolution... especially in terms of population and _agriculture_, not to mention few other necessities. Today's Russia GDP per capita is laughable - comparable to Polish. And it is not that strange, as many people in SU mentioned that they first eaten fully during Brhrezniev era.... also: controlled socialists economies actually had FASTER recovery during first few years after wars, but lost to West in the long run - for obvious reasons.
To be fair they did start to industrialise after being founded (that the right term?) and did improve production. Some retarded communists believe that's due to communism instead of people being replaced by machines, but still.
@@mickeymegabyte lol not really they can say thanks to every one fighting the nazy before they did cuz before that the (world greatest war machine )could not finish the job with uk .before that ussr was just a collaboraters regime
The US has seen massive economic growth over the last 20 years. But the average American has seen a decline in their wealth, and a decline in stability. Economic growth, doesn't always mean more wealth for everyone in society. In the USSR, there was economic growth, but only the government itself and the management class who ran it, saw the benefits of said growth, the people didn't.
'' ... but the average American has seen a decline in their wealth, and a decline in stability ...'', so, lessons learned. Don't be average, Be exceptional.
I don't think the question is "Did the Soviet Union ever recover from WW2 ?" but instead "Did the Soviet Union ever recover from WW1?" The answer is "NO!" The horrific crimes of Lenin and his Bolshevik murderers began when WW1 ended. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin magnified the brutal oppression, the genocide, the ruthless and cruel enslavement of the Russian people. Victory in 1945 might have won some decades of peace, but in 2022 we're back at Square One again. All these decades later, Russia is once again controlled by another ruthless, cruel, murdering Bolshevik Commissar named Vladimir Putin. Putin has turned the clock back 100 years to Lenin's era, with his idol Stalin as his mentor and inspiration. God help us all.
World War 2 seriously damaged the Soviets. But Stalin’s pre-war purges gave Hitler a fantastic head start. As TIK says, if Hitler had supported the Russian peasants they’d have happily helped him destroy the Red Army. They absolutely hated Stalin for his purges and famines.
Just catching up on your channel and came across this video. In college, I did a course on post-war Japan and I recall reading that it took Japan until 1960 to return to its 1937 GDP. I can easily believe that the Soviet economy took much longer to recover.
There was even a joke: ,,Why did the Soviet Union start importing grain in the 1980s? Because the last of the Tsars left the stocks "only" for 70 years."
I lived in the FSU in the mid- to late 1990s. There were buildings in the center of this large city that looked exactly like pictures of buildings you might see from World War 2. About 40% of the city lived in wooden homes with no running water or indoor plumbing. The best I can say is that life in the FSU at this point was hard and existence was spartan. Friends told me that things bottomed out in 1991 to 1993. I was there in 1993 and it was tough. Things actually looked a bit better in 1995 from my perspective, but things got tougher again when Russia default on a portion of their debt in 1998. It wasn't bad for us as our income was in dollars so all Russian goods were much less expensive though there were some major problems accessing our funds which were in banks outside the FSU. Housing was probably better in the early 60s and 80s than it had been in the 30s and 40s. More people had modern apartments though they were tiny by our standards. Staple food items were generally available because everyone had a small farm plot and grew a great deal of food. But consumer goods were rare, expensive and very poor quality. I always thought that it was tough to believe the Soviets won based on the shape of their cities and economy in 1995.
I visited the Soviet Bloc in 1980, which of course was hard to do at that time. I saw many buildings that still had war damage. I was a little bit surprised. Also they seemed to have a lack of heavy equipment. For example, I would see crews of 50 workman to pick up a train rail, rather than machinery.
Comparing the USSR economy in 1920 to the USSR economy in 1970 isn't really possible; not merely for accounting reasons but also because of trade policy and scientific progress. Lots of things were invented from 1930-1970 and many of them were consumer items. In terms of housing stock for population the USSR housing crisis ended by the 1960s. Which is as good as you can get for a measure because it's comparing the electronic age to the steam age. No steam trains in 1970! Diesels instead! Comparable? Not really. USSR economy was dysfunctional but not That dysfunction after Khruschev. It could have tottered on indefinitely without Reagan . Another reason it's incomparable is that all of Eastern Europe wasn't occupied by the USSR in 1920 unlike the USSR in 1970. It's like comparing apples with pears.
The Soviets never recovered from getting into the driver's seat, after killing the chauffer and mechanic, and smashing the car, maiming the family travelling with them,........ out in the sticks, ........with no ambulance service.
Hello Tik i would like to add some materials to your point. 1. Some officers of GSFG were complaining about supplying german people with more food then their familes in USSR could get. Back at home they were on a brink of famine. Of course those officers were repressed. 2. Provision shortage was so severe that state allowed distribution of qwasy-private land for growing food. It was 600 sq meaters of land so you couldn't grow too much food and sell it. This strip of land helped my family to sirvive in 50s and 90s. 3. When you talked about pulling money from people i remembered that this was one of the reasons why soviets start to bild Light automobiles industry in late 60s. With forein aid of course. Goverment was swarmed with letters from people who yarn to buy their OWN car. So money flow from people and they were HAPPY. Car worth like 4 year income of worker who prodused it. 4. Since there scarce of everything and no private property people started to steal. Everything. There were sayings like "Everything is common, everything is mine", "Take from factory every nail, you own this plase your not a guest". When USSR collapsed it spreads so wild that theivery almoust loose negative connotation. You couldn't buy, you have to get it somewhere, somehow.
liking video before even watching. as an economist now i only watch WW2 through economics not battles. Also as an economist i can say that TIK videos are amazing!. i am glad with small monthly donation that i am part of this great channel.
"liking video before even watching" A dangerous move, but thank you :) "as an economist now i only watch WW2 through economics not battles. lso as an economist i can say that TIK videos are amazing!" Interesting! A lot of viewers think I shouldn't make these types of videos and that I don't know much about economics. I'll admit I have gotten some things wrong (probably in this video too) but I'm not completely ignorant as some claim. "i am glad with small monthly donation that i am part of this great channel." Thank you! I have put the Patron list in alphabetical order, which might make it easier for you to see your name/username
@@TheImperatorKnight thx for reply. also when someone ask me about WW2 and what was ww2 about, and could it end differently --- i just point to your video - OIL. Oil is difference why Italian army was crap and why soviet army was amazing from 1942 -1945(L&L) ,and why rest of Europe with huge population and industrial potential that was under German control --- was mostly liability to Germans -- without oil rest of Europe and factories and fields in France Belgium, Hungary where useless.
"Oil is difference why Italian army was crap and why soviet army was amazing from 1942" I need to do more on the Italians in WW2, because yes, the Italian navy was basically trapped in port for half the war due to the oil shortage.
"( how much is the cost of patreon ? )" It's as little as $1 (you get your name in the video for this), although there are tiers for more ($5 for Q&A questions). Check out the links in the description
So, the old graphic of a T-34 tank up on end with caption, "this tank farm in Ukraine is a classic example of land misuse", wasn't far off the mark reflecting the chart you showed and its discussion.
Very interesting video! I wonder if the USSR would have fallen sooner without WW2? Even if their economy was stagnating or falling they gained a lot of territory they could exploit in the war. And a lot of lend-lease equipment.
But was this mainly a problem with socialism or with Russia? Tsarist Russia did not develop a free market economy either. They abolished serfdom in the 1860ies, but they did not get free farmers except for pockets here and there, and it has been said that Russia was the only country where factories were run by nobles and serfs, as opposed to factory owners and laborers, in the late 19th century. An exaggeration, I am sure, but it does seem to have some hold to it. Russia was entering the age of industrialization still partially stuck in feudalism and merkantilism in so many ways.
Russia was always behind the west no matter under the Tsarist Russia or under USSR. But poor economic performance is a common thread of socialist countries. Even China recognized it does not work and so allowed the private running of some companies with the caveat they can control that company at anytime if they feel there is an issue or if they simple want to. China is still very much socialist and very much control of the means of production but in a more loose way allowing profits thereby allowing people to care more and hence produce more. China only did this when they saw the USSR collapse due to its terrible economic situation, they knew that was their fate unless they did something fast. So the answer is both.
@Nuclear Confusion But the freedom to sell your labor and engage in free contracts protected by an independent judiciary (neither wich is allowed under serfdom), was considered a very important prerequisite for a free market by 19th century scholars?
@Nuclear Confusion Also there is the question about how free the markets of the western and central powers realy were. Britain and France had waste colonial empires, with protected trade and little democratic control. While Germany and Austria-Hungary had industrial cartels and a huge land owning nobility with a hand on the steering wheel of government.
@@janetd4970 What's sad is that many contemporaries saw Russia at the turn of the century as on the verge of an economic breakthrough. I dont think they where anywhere near achiving that by1914.
07:07: "statisticians not daring to challenge ....."; the census statisticians under Stalin did actually get it (literally) in the neck, when they produced a census that indicated that the population had dropped as a result of the famines. They weren't just told to come back again with acceptable figures - they were shot.
Stop repeating silly Cold War propaganda. In your picture of the world everyone in USSR was shot. By this logic it's because Stalin declared that famines are good and can't lead to food shortage? And communists believed him (you say that they shot those traitorous statisticians)? Brainwashed idiot, that's who you are.
@@ImperativeGames WTF are you talking about, you moron - what are you, some kind of sad Soviet apologist? And what is all the incomprehensible dross about Stalin. You obviously don't know very much about Soviet history - I do, and I've also been there and talked to the people that lived through that shit. So go try your crap on someone else, not on me.
@@Maelli535 I'm not apologizing real crimes Stalin committed - he wasn't a nice guy, no, he believed in "lesser evil" principle. But I'll try to open you to reality. "I know someone who doesn't like Stalin" doesn't mean anything scientifically (statistically). You can discover a super-cure for cancer but pharmaceutical companies making billions on various drugs and treatments will hate you... and some will want to kill you. In other words, you always have enemies. So, individual opinions doesn't matter. - 51% of Russians admire Stalin and only 14 have negative feelings toward him www.levada.ru/2019/04/16/uroven-odobreniya-stalina-rossiyanami-pobil-istoricheskij-rekord/ Even more, 70% think that Stalin had positive influence on the country overall (although most people hat Stalin's camps and Gulags - he won The War, saving everyone from Plan Ost). But wait' there is more. - On the other hand, people *really* hate Gorbachev: 47% think that he did *nothing* good for the country, and 34% neutral, which leaves us with 19% who have good opinion about him. 24% thinks that Gorbachev is a criminal. newdaynews.ru/society/559467.html He was praised in the West because he destroyed geopolitical and economical competition, but for citizens of USSR... He destroyed the country and because of that hundreds of thousands of people died in the (ongoing) (civil) wars between former parts of Soviet Union and millions died because they lost their jobs and homes - from starvation, diseases, cold temperature, etc. Suicides also skyrocketed - people killed themselves 4 times as much. zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5f3e58300a760212465cd5e5/skolko-liudei-pogiblo-izza-raspada-sssr-5f9bef6138725f3ad6497670 - More people died because of Gorbachev's actions than in Stalin's camps. And Gorbachev killed innocent people while camps had innocent people, common criminals, and combatants who fought against communism (if you are ready to kill, be ready to be killed). I bet capitalistic propaganda never told you that.
@@ImperativeGames Go worship your false god elsewhere, Communist. Your system has never worked and your blind faith in it has already destroyed tens of millions of lives.
Whythey did not move the industries from the Urals back to original places? 1. Becaouse of a fear of a next main conflict, a war, in which the West may try to do what happened in 1916. 2. The places were in more under the control, directing, of the secret forces. Hence full industrial and/or military cities were closed places, or not even on the map. 3. Simply to avoid to stretch the bugdet. Hence: scarcity , law quality, 4. After a while people got used to the place, new generations grew. To this: a personal privilage to live in a closed city could be lost by relocating the factory back to normal Russia, Belorus, etc. You simply did not want to lose access to higher rations, better supplies, better reputation.
Thanks for the update on Battlestorm Stalingrad TIK. I have to confess, that battle has been a lifelong obsession of mine for many decades. This video is excellent as usual. I read a book a few years back (shame on me, I don't remember it's name!), That looked in detail at every Soviet leader from Lenin through to Gorbachev. The author made a compelling argument that economically, socially, and even spiritually they never even came close to recovering from the German invasion. He makes a compelling case that the main reason for the fall of the Soviet Union (albeit indirectly), was Operation Barbarossa. How ironic is it that 50 years after his death Hitler finally achieved one of his main objectives!!!
Here is a brief list of the achievements of the two revolutions of 1917: - The peasants were given more land. - The working day is reduced from 10.5 hours to 8 hours. - Improvement of the health care system. - The policy of eliminating illiteracy of the population. - Equality of men and women is presented. - Elimination of class privileges. - Separation of church from state.
There's a big and long story about each production and business in USSR and Russia, but nothing really changed after the soviets came and went away. Specifically for the agriculture - it wasn't the government who managed it in USSR for the most part, the private joint-stock companies that owned land and worked on it -you might heard of it - they were called Kolkhoz. Kolkhoz had shareholders(non-government) and an "elected" top management. These companies were selling the grain to a government trade monopoly and were relying on credits from the Governmental banks. Kolkhoz in fact reproduced the same systems that existed before: - After the wars in 17th-18th century the Russian government had lots of lands in eastern Europe where not many people lived(survived the wars). The government was establishing the administration there and filled it with people from the nearby territories. People didn't owe the land- they were working. This lasted until peasants started demanding the land privatization. - Since the 1840th and 1860th the land was sold to peasants, but in debt from the government bank. But as peasants were illiterate, to pay debt and manage sells, they were organized into communities with a head from the government administration. So in addition to the sells management, the administration and now community head had to deal also with people loans to a bank. Peasants were working and paying debt, until they realized that there's no way to pay debt as government controls the transport, sales price. Then peasants didn't want to pay the debt anymore and as it was a government bank, they wanted to destroy the bank and the Russia itself, and get the land. That turned to a revolt(part of the revolt force) in 1905 and further in 1917. - After Russia was destroyed and USSR was established, the peasants got the land, but then they quickly realized that nobody buys the grain and they need an old community head who manages everything, and reliable buyer. So the Kolkhoz companies were organized, that had the same "elected" heads who sold grain to the same fellows in a "new" government, while the Kolkhoz companies were taking the credits in Govenment banks and were a credit slave, as peasants in the past. Everything came back to where it started. I believe there were lots of famines during the 18th century, as government either didn't control the population numbers and food production, or it just used famine as incentive for people to move and develop new lands(which people didn't owe). In 1940th the western corporations came to USSR and started building factories, cities. I believe they used the famine to get people from the countryside to cities where there was no famine at the same time. This worked - even being the Kolkhoz members they ran to cities, builds and factories. The Kolkhoz heads were the key figures to produce the famine as they knew the production, demand and supply and was controlling the sale and storage. In USSR the agriculture profits were shared among many parties, except the people themselves: Kolkhoz heads, government management. It's not an incident that many of them were already rich people with relative abroad when the union collapsed.
Yeah, sure. "Elected". Just like they "elected" Stalin. Kolhoz leadership was fully controlled by the party. And when party said kolkhoz must deliver shitton of grain even at the expense of famine kolkhoz did. Would actual private company with elected leadership starve to death it's own people?
Are you telling me Kolkohzes were "private enterprises"? Then I have a bridge to sell to you. "The government didn't run it". No, the party did, like in China.
riiight... nice fairytale, probably the ones at holomodor didn't have the right kind of kolhoz private management... yeah, it's not "rEAl coMmuNIsM". This one of the most convoluted and imbecile arguments ever
I'm not an expert. But in my opinion again a very clear, substantiated and supported by many independent sources documentary. Excellent recap of the entire sovjet economy.
Excellent, TIK! This should at last shut the 'Stick to Tanks' party! There's no way one could've made things clearer and better explained so that everybody understood the meaningn and could grasp the view on economics. Even though (it is) stealing, for example, might make some viewers immediately feel uncomfortable or suspicious of anything you say due to not understanding nor willing to understand; by now the terms and expressions you use made even a friend of mine who stood in the tanks-fraction was reformed by this.. Once again - nice work & keep safe. Cheers, KV
Good stuff, really puts into perspective why stats aren't always reliable (looking at you Chinese GDP figures). Makes me equally concerned about the state of affairs in the UK atm, people saying to invest in stocks, to withdraw money from banks, and to prepare for the end of times. I blame the hysteria caused by MSM tbh.
you can't hide trade. China is the biggest exporter on the planet. So if you believe that all chinese data are fake then you shouldn't. Compared to the cold war, the us is fucked...
Ty Tik for a great upload, I knew a polish guy who told me that people would queue up for hours just to buy a single but brand new razor blade. Another who's farther was high in the state had no problems because he could travel to Sweden and buy anything they needed. Thanks again you do a great job.
Just a counterargument to what you said at 25:20 about people not caring about farmers being ready or not : I think it depends on the culture you're talking about, as a Frenchman I know for a fact that harvests are talked about on national news every year, especially the grape harvest to know if this year will be a good year for wines or not. Though I doubt Russians cared about harvests to know if the vodka would be good this year...
To be fair to France and the French though, wine is held is such high regard, and as such a fundamental part of how France is perceived, that it would be almost impossible to talk about France without talking about wine. Sure, it's part of the economy, a major part, but it is also culturally engrained in the perception of France and the quality of its wines around the world. So as an Englishman, I'd certainly give France a huge free pass for talking about the grape harvest - it's as much about the aesthetic beauty and enjoyment of good wine as it is about economics. 🙂
Damn, that was a hard slam on communist and socialist economy and politics, and backed up with facts at that! Keep up the great work, the truth needs to get out to the world :) As somebody coming from the darkest depths of Eastern Europe, many of these things are obvious to me and to my parents and grandparents - to anyone that wasn't "part of the party machine", really. Everybody remembers the shortages, queues for yogurt and bread, waiting 10 years for a car and so on. Here in Bulgaria we used to be known as the unofficial "16th republic". All of this isn't that obvious to many westerners, though, some of it is even unimaginable. They fantasize about "socialism" and "equality" but those of us that have actually suffered it know it's a giant fallacy. Just look at North Korea...
As a born citizen of USSR I confirm this is accurate. To add insult to injury, much of the military equipment (I don't know exactly how much), produced after WW2, that Soviet citizens (largely against their will) sacrificed so much for, was later used in multiple civil wars around the collapsing and then former USSR, including Russia -Ukraine war today.
Yes, USSR did recover from WW2 by 1960s. I have lived under a communist rule from late 1950s. By that time the standard of life exceeded the pre-war level. Then, it was steadily increasing until late 1970s. A decline of a life standard in late 1970s caused a rise of anti-communism opposition, its 1st success in 1980 in Poland, and the beginning of communism collapse in 1988.
2 million Russians died, mostly men.. or laborers.. how da fk could you recover so quickly?? Most of the older Russians in rural areas are nostalgic for the Communist system
@@codyraugh6599 Also of course he ignores the continual expansion of gulags meaning more slaves to support the slightly less enslaved subjects (also his name is eugene, very russian name)
When I was growing up in the 70's and 80's there was always "talk"(military,economists, news media, the guy next door!)about how weak the Soviet economy actually was. Much of it may have been speculation or maybe even wishful thinking on the part of the West. Either way, as it turned out there was some truth to it. With that, I do enjoy your videos!!
Never knew how relaxing it was to watch Tik with some Scotch on the side. Night time, everything's quiet, so i just light my cigarette and listen through my headphones to his authorative voice. Life's good.
I think the biggest issue was the resistance to change. The reason why capitalism works so well is because we keep tweaking it all the time with regulations, de-regulations. there is some central planing, there are some subsidies,, anti-trust laws, breaking of monopoly... etc. USSR was experiencing a constant economic crisis... and they just rolled along with it for decades.
I can recommend 'Red Plenty' by Francis Spufford as an original read on the subject of Soviet economics. Rather than looking at statistics, it explains how the system worked (or didn't work) & the consequences of not having market prices by telling stories. it's a great read...
There was a Russian exchange student whom I was friends with in college who said they couldn't drive fast on the highways as, to paraphrase him, "the peasants" would steal the concrete slabs leaving holes in the road. This was post Soviet Union.
Your reference to bakeries reminded me of a report on them in the devastated Eastern Soviet area. There was a shortage of large bakeries as they had been destroyed in the war and it took years to rebuild them. Sounds strange to say but it was not only rebuilding the ovens etc but involved training the bakers, establishing the supply and distribution networks that went with each one.
The population could still be better off, despite output being down. US average household income is below their 1970s peak, but the equivalent car, tv, phone are all better. Americans aren't living as they were in the 70s. Re starvation. The UK was probably at its wealthiest (relative to the rest of the world) in the 19th century. nevertheless many people struggled to survive in the slums. I would point to that dreaded S word, and/or governments attempts to undermine the attractiveness of it to the people by introducing redistributive policies post war.
Ben, Only one man had to work to get that house, car, tv, etc. You're right, we're living worse, because we're living on borrowed goods, borrowed time, and borrowed money. We weren't back then.
You are comparing Britain to the modern world. How does the 19th century comparison come out if you compare Britain to India, South America, China, or other European countries during the sane time period?
@@dennisweidner288 compare what? Starvation? My point is you can't look at prior time periods and say X failed because Y is solved in the modern world. If the wealthiest nation can't feed itself, you can't use that as an indicator of failure for less wealthy nations with different political systems. It's like criticising North Korea for not having cured cancer.
@@benholroyd5221 I have no idea what you are talking about with Xs and Ys.. The simple fact is that even with the slums and Dicksonian poverty, Britain was better off than any other country except America. The poverty is unacceptable to us in the 21st century, but if you compare Britain to other countries around the world in the 19th century, it comes out very well. Most people have been poor since the dawn of time. It is only in America and Britain in the 19th century that wide spread prosperity began--thanks to the wealth generating engines of capitalism and the industrial revolution.
@@dennisweidner288 X = communism. Y = starvation. In this case. You're restating what I said. Every country had problems feeding it's population. Therefore you can't use that failure to criticise any one ideology.
The next Battlestorm Stalingrad video will be out next Monday!
Hanson’s “The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy: An Economic History of the USSR 1945 - 1991 (The Postwar World).” is a great book on this topic. I come to slightly different conclusions from Hanson, but he’s still a recommended source.
Another great source is Higg’s “Depression, War, and Cold War”, which discusses the USA during the aftermath of WW2, showing why the Great Depression only came to a halt in 1945.
@slovene ball I'll probably cover them at some point, although I'm not sure when. I do want to cover individual units as we move forwards
Hello TIK! I can't see the spanish subtitles I sent you a couple of weeks ago. Could you take a look at it whenever you can, please? It was the video "The Myth and Reality of Joseph Stalin's Order nº 227
You have ruined all of my "what if" ideas with all of your fancy "facts" and "logic". Takes the fun right out of it....lol
@Juan Rafael Cabrero - I've just published them now! I saw your message from a couple weeks ago, liked it and was going to publish them but forgot. Thanks for the reminder, and thank you for doing them!
@@TheImperatorKnight Thanks! I enjoy it, and since we are in quarantine here in Spain, it seems I'll have time to do more subtitles
I grew up in provincial city in USSR in 1980s. Can confirm, the economy sucked. We were lucky in that my grandparents got a flat as WW2 veterans, so we considered it "good" when we had 2 of my grandparents, my parents, my brother and me share a tiny 2 bedroom flat. There was basically no food variety, our TV black and white (bough on black market), and our "vacations" consisted of going to the forests to hunt for mushrooms.
Same for my mom, they did sometimes go to vacations at the black sea tho... Then again, we where one of the decently (but not TOO) well off. Even so she remembers how they never had anything, and unlike the vantinks and their parents who where useless people getting paid for doing nothing, remembers the 90's fondly despite the banditism which got her mother murdered. Plus most of the banditism was caused by said useless people that had nowhere to go because they had no real skills or anything to offer, but felt entitled to stuff because the soviet union no longer provided for them... And they, and the ones well off in the union are the ones remembering it fondly.
The WEF would like the developed world to live like that. 'You'll own nothing and you will be happy'. As well as be limited in how far away from home one can travel.
Except not everyone lived in Soviet(Russia's) cities under heavy surveillance. I visited few Baltics villages long after Soviets collapse and they were pretty much nice places under Soviets as older villagers told me.
Pretty much everyone had barns(even people living in apartment buildings(3 stories max)), animals in barns and never starved or missed a meal.
And being villages they had agrarian cooperatives(AKA collective farms) in every bigger than 500 heads village, dairy/poultry/pig farms(single or couple of those)...
And those oldies lamented how assholes crooks and politicians stole most of resources from villages after their country became independent. They said: yeah, we didn't have newest Western gadgets and we wouldn't give a toss anyway...we had enough what we needed, were happier and healthier.
А у меня бабушка весь СССР бесплатно по профсоюзным путёвкам объездила, и дома всё было
В 1987 купили комп IBM, когда они появляться начали только
Да, наверное, если не работать - будете только за грибами ходить, а в свободное время жаловаться что ничего дома нет XD
@@AKUJIVALDOHow would someone living in an apartment own a barn?
If someone owned a barn why would they pay to live elsewhere?
I can remember a professor from Estonia- before the collapse of the Soviet Union, telling me that a Soviet machine tool was sold to the Japanese. He said this purchase surprised people because it was thought that Japanese machine tools would be far better than something Soviet made. Anyway, they followed up the sale to see why the machine was bought. It turned out, the machine was scrapped- the specialist steels in it were more valuable than its actual purchase price. All the "value added" to make the machine counted for nothing- it was just so many tons of metal. This is what happens where there is no market price mechanism. Generally, when you traded with the Soviet Union, because the rouble was "non-convertible", you indulged in barter and swapped things. On that basis about 1970 Britain sold something to the Soviet Union and in return got a whole load of steel. The government fobbed this steel off on to British Leyland and because of its quality, the company made a large number of cars that rusted badly alienating customers- or alienating them even more than usual.
That's an awesome story. Definitely believable, since there were really some ridiculous things going on in the Soviet Union due to no market system. Another is that Soviet chandeliers often fell from the ceilings because they were made too heavy (the state paid more for heavier chandeliers, so the makers made them heavier)
@@TheImperatorKnight My father's whole working life was wholly Russian orientated and he was a Soviet oil and gas/energy expert as a sideline. I can recall many years ago, that he told me that nearly 20% of their oil was just lost- leaky pipelines etc. One of the Estonians I met at the same time as the professor told me, that where she lived, a huge Red Air Force base had been built. She said that if you dropped a match down a well, the well would explode into flames. She said that so much aviation spirit had leaked into the ground it was in the water table- and thus made its way into the wells! I have so many oddball anecdotes regarding life in the Soviet Union from so many that had to live there and struggle with the endless problems in day-to-day life.
@@TheImperatorKnight another example : buildings. I am just renovating a flat in 1965 apartment block in Poland. Brick one, pre "big block fabrication".
Not a single wall is straight, partition walls are off plumb by 5-6 cm, and that with 3-4 cm of plaster on them. Neither there is any corner 90 degrees.
Reason: workers were given rewards if they laid more bricks than state-sanctioned norm dictated (udarnik/stachanowiec .. 802% of the state norm) . Straightness of the walls was not "on the menu".
Coal quality. Pork quality, similar story. "5th level of freshness" .. and then there were "yellow curtain shops" (so you would not see what party members got available)
On the other hand the *perceived* quality of life actually improved. Actually got into arguments with older members of family over "good ole days" where there was no unemployment, no beggars and no trash lurkers, and they were building building building.. ships that sailed with coal to Russia and somehow never really got back with anything, if at all. ( sunny 70's and credit boom - followed by 80's martial law when there were no things to pay this credit with)
And let's not forget "black gold" oil and gas .. then and now, and how this shaped both late Soviet era and modern Russia.
@@TheImperatorKnight an Austrian Mountain guide, around 1980, showed me a pair of Ice screws (thats basically a tube, about 25 x 3 cms), made out of Titan -a gift from Russian mountaineers, which had them made after hours in some aerospace factory they were working in
@@NickRatnieks just light the well water you draw and it boils itself, no need to put the kettle on.
I don't think he ever said "um" or "like" one time. This man speaks incredibly good. He knows what he wants to say without breaking to think and put it into his sentence. He also seems to thoroughly do his research and fact finding before making a statement or argument. Through the video, I just began to verify and fact find a few things and not once was he wrong on his nonopinipnated facts. His opinion, which I agree with everything he stated in the video, is just that. An opinion. An absolute intellectual. Please keep up you videos. It's hard to find alot of resourceful information today pertaining to the 2nd world war these days. Most of it being the same information and questions over and over. Not on TIKs channel. Everyday is new information.
Incredibly well.
Agreed.
Agree - the best I have found. Addicted to his videos almost regardless of the specific topic.
He writes a script, you can tell because for each line he has references.
I didnt notice, but now that you mention it.. haha
My family lived in USSR, and all you told was true, everyone had money, but shops were empty. However, now they complain about shops being full, but it's hard to get money.
Socialism has been replaced with kleptocracy. Perhaps the oligarchs leave more for goods for the masses and allow prices to float to actual value. In a second-tier world country that can be hard on the masses. I bought a nice custom knife from Russia a couple of years ago and nothing else, ever in 76 years.
"everyone had money, but shops were empty."
partially true. you could buy what you wanted at markets only it cost like 5 times as much.
"now they complain about shops being full, but it's hard to get money."
not true, it was true in the 1990s
I heard one of the bigest surprise refugees from the ussr had in the us was supermarkets. They never had any experience with stores filled with all kinds of food.
@@thunberbolttwo3953 That still happens sometimes to visitors from some countries going into a Super Wal-Mart or the like.
@@floydlooney6837 Interesting i didnt know that. Thank you.
My history teacher in China once told us that back in the 90s a bunch of Chinese merchants would go to the Russian border to sell several boxes of toothpastes and the Russian would give them an airplane or a bunch of army motorcycles, since Russia back then had almost little to no light industry, only heavy industry.
The PepsiCo Navy was a reflection of this too. (Pepsi swapped soft drinks for Soviet navy ships).
I’ve heard similar stuff too. On the northern border of China they traded heavy machinery and vehicles for small stuff like kettles and heat preserving containers
@TEXOCMOTP yeah, holdomir even kulakization weren't intended to murder off masses of people. the sovs were vicious but well intentioned. they considered their vicious qualities as necessary evils forced on them by the material conditions etc etc.
@Ornate Orator Great depression was a cryis of OVERproduction, and people still starved in a same time food was destroyed. It would be "beautiful" show of advantages of capitalism if people would die in significant masses in such crysis. Famine of 1930 happened because of DROUGHT. If You cant see difference in price of management mistake in both situations , it is sad.
famine after famine, massacre after massacre, mass incarceration after mass incarceration, why it's almost as if Marx advocated a Red Terror!
oh wait. HE DID.
I absolutely love that you actually cite from the sources you list. Many channels from what I've noticed, if they even bother putting their sources in, rarely add direct citations.
Yes, I started putting the references in because lots of people were accusing me of "making stuff up" and telling me I should "read the books" that I'd already used and it was them who hadn't read them properly. Doing that stopped those comments instantly. It also allows viewers to check my points if they doubt what I say, and I can even double check if someone questions a point - I can quickly find the page reference and provide further info or quotes. Time consuming in the editing process but worth it.
That is how it ought to be done. Imagine designing a bridge as the chief engineer, but refusing to put in where you got your calculations from and whose material; science studies you used. Instead tell people "trust me" that the bridge will not collapse.
@@TheImperatorKnightThe cited sources are amazing
"State educated Marxist romancers," I like that, this phrase has been taxed for use by the collective.
Commissar: Half thug, half gramophone.
Ww1. revolution. flu. civil war. ww2
And Stalin
Surprised anyone survived
And the great depression
Neon Noir, actually that’s a very good point. Apart from the two world wars which weren’t the Americans responsibility. Japan’s involvement I think could be put in America’s lap possibly!
I’d be interested in your opinion and as I alluded the Great Depression and Spanish flu certainly can be placed at America’s door!
“The Russian state has the advantage over others that it is governed directly by God Himself. Otherwise it is impossible to explain how it exists ... "
(с) General Burkhard Christoph von Münnich ( 1683-1767 )
@Neon Noir Several American companies cooperating with hitler doesn't make all of American companies compicient in this cooperation nor it makes American people hitler's accomplices.
And now Russia has HIV. The fun never ends!
I have a Russian friend, when he was young (born in 1996), he lived with his grandparents in rural Russia.
From his description, nothing has changed since the start of the 20th century. (
no electricity, no running water etc ...)
He couldn't get out at night because of wolves. WOLVES.
In the 60s, there were still places in Italy with no electricity or running water, where people would live in single room dwelling with their animals.
My dad recently told me when he was a kid in the 60s in West Germany, sometimes neighbors would come to their house and pay my grandfather to use their phones. And the people at the end of the street had to carry all the water to their house in buckets. And we're not even from a remote region of Germany.
Crazy how recently many modern standards were still not fully established even in the richest countries in the world.
Yep, as a Russian I can confirm that life here isn't easy... Wolves aren't so bad by the way. At least you can hide from wolves in the house. Bears, on the other hand...
@@ImperativeGames Jeez! As an American I say just shoot the fucking bears and wolves. Problem solved!
@@jim7297 Great Idea. In Germany we killed all the Bears and almost all of the Wolves. Since then we have to put in greater efforts by the year to hunt down deers, which, unchecked by predators, have grown out of control doing massive damage to the forests and crops.
@@ringowunderlich2241 I was just wondering how many people have been killed by deers?
This guy really needs his own documentary tv series, he is very good
TV doesn't deserve him
Too good for TV tho. They see their viewers as dumb animals who want stupid special effects, unfitting music and everything getting repeated at least 3 times.
TIK is hands down one of the best channels on YT. TV is dead anyways, 95% of todays movies suck.
He's too factual for woke BBC.
They'll never let tik on TV he's way too accurate
not watched a TV for many years...surprised people still have them to be honest.. thought they went out with the ark
A very close friend of mine,grew up in the Soviet Union,he always says the worst thing about living in England is the number of people who refuse to accept that their revered Soviet Union was not only an economic basket case but also a social hellscape deliberately inflicted on the population by the Party as a further means of social control.
thats in the US as well not just GB, the schools are where those types are here, where are those types focused in GB? id imagine parliament right?
@@30cal23 There, media and especially academia.After the Soviet Union collapsed, former Party officials ( whose names and positions were known) came to the London School of Economics to lecture on the utter failure of communism in precise details.Even though resident academics knew exactly who the former officials were , the academics denounced them as American "plants" so thoroughly indoctrinated into the leftist cult were they.
You’ll see a couple of those kids too in some American universities. UC Berkeley, UCLA, other very liberal schools like that
@@Ryandeanchickenpeen I recently saw footage from a Jim Lindsey visit to a liberal arts college describing how Mao used his Red Guards ( Antifa ) to eliminate his political enemies and how he subsequently used the army to eliminate the Red Guards.The footage she's the brainwashed goons ( "students") not only cheering for Mao but proclaiming their own willingness to die as revolutionary cannon fodder.I used to feel pity for the victims of brainwashing but today's examples are worthy only of contemt.
I visited Severmorsk (the military city next to Murmanske) in 1995 in a Canadian warship to mark the 50th Anniversary of Victory in Europe. Russian sailors were jamming hotdogs in their pockets to take home when we hosted a BBQ on our jetty after a ball hockey game with them. We brought up a lot more food from our fridges for them after we saw this.
Ball hockey...the true sport of the north, strong and free...if ever given a choice, always be Ken Dryden 😊.
I dont know what drives you to do this but this stuff is the only thing keeping me sane at home
Keep up the amazing work
"but this stuff is the only thing keeping me sane at home"
Do you work from home, or have you been quarantined?
@@TheImperatorKnight, I don't think he'd become insane if he already worked at home.
@@TheImperatorKnight yeah self-quarantine for the past week thanks again
@@TheImperatorKnight a whole country have been quarantined xD
Young @TIK provides a great service of entertainment. But I would argue that in these lonely times of self quarantine, the mind is provided If the necessary informational substance to maintain itself.
In other words, I would go mad from Netflix without his information video service.
Perhaps we should appreciate him for that. What do you think?
I worked with an engineer who had fled during Cold War. He spoke of how hard it was to design products since all plans had to be submitted with plans of how to switch back to military products within 24 hours.
What kinds of products did he design? What kind of engineer was he?
Spent a couple months in Far East Russia (Siberia, just above China) in 1996 in a city of 300,000 or 600,000 people. (I forget) Everything was exotic and foreign so it took me a while to notice the almost total absence of old men. I only realized I hadn't been seeing any when I was walking down a city street and saw a white haired gentleman and was almost stopped in tracks. Took me a while to figure out why I was so struck by him. It was that, despite being in a very crowded, large city where I came in daily contact with hundreds or thousands of people, I hadn't seen an old man for weeks. TONS of old women, they were everywhere but all the old men had been killed in one fashion or another long before.
Vodka
Yep, and still a problem in the Russian population today. Which is why you see so many Russian women in the west making a better life for themselves, and so few Russian men. Their life expectancy is in the high 60s years, due to war, typhoid in the prison system, and vodka abuse. The few Russian men you see in the west are the intelligent ones who can see the writing's on the wall under Putin.
Yes life expectancy plummeted in Russia following the collapse of soviet socialism. Take from that what you will
@@jaggmeeler2039 change is always painful, helps when you transition with wealth often "appropriated" from others within the state it is less painful - but when you exhaust those resources and need to transition again, there is no piggy bank to alleviate some more pressures. That's my take on it anyways.
@@4h844 another thing about the collapse is the speed and way it happened. When the economy is built off massive inefficient large industries that relied on central command, it becomes especially painful when such command disappeared overnight. Literally the majority of the economy is gone instantly. Comparing to what China did, which is to allow smaller businesses first and do it regionally, only slowly privatizing large key industries over decades.
Ronald Reagan was reportedly surprised and shocked in January 1981 when getting his first briefing on the Soviets and the Soviet economy and remarked “I had no idea they were doing so badly”. This of course 10 years before the collapse.
And who do you think gave the USSR that final push down the stairs? Ronald Reagan did. He conspired with the Saudis to keep oil prices down, and then tricked the Soviet military establishment into trying to keep up with the "Star Wars" defense system hype, bankrupting the Soviet government.
A 70 year old Slovakian man I know remembers the occasional communist police raids on his house looking for illegal hidden wealth. I recall a reporter in 1970’s Moscow telling about shortages and how people would get in any queue that was forming even without knowing what it was for - also the reaction of a Russian visiting the US in 1980 and first hearing about grain sales to his country: “That’s impossible the USSR feeds the world!”.
There's a famous photo of Yeltsin standing in an American supermarket laden with foodstuffs... he's just flummoxed at what he's seeing. Reports were that he was majorly depressed afterward asking, "my God, what have they (communists) done to our country!?"
@@farmalmta thats funny because Yeltsin pretty much outdid the communists and destroyed his country.
@@quan-uo5wsThe user You responded had mistaken Yeltsin for Gorbachev , it was Gorbachev who visited the supermarket .
@@quan-uo5ws By the time Yeltsin was in power it was already destroyed. It was ruined beyond repair before Gorbachev. Yeltsin was the one that pulled down the curtain and he got all the flack for it. The problem is the system that preceded the one Yeltsin wanted to implement didn't manage to create any effective bureaucratic talent. It's the reason why Russia even today is in the gutters. They somehow managed to fix this problem a little by privatization and allowing certain key people total control over certain resources who we call oligarchs in the western media. I think it's a mistake to call them that. We should just call them for what they really are---- robber barons.
@@marktwain8121 No, there was an arranged diplomatic visit by Gorbachev to a supermarket but Yeltsin took a quick look during a different trip. Both visited supermarkets but at different times.
Hi TiK, just to support this, while studying Soviet Cold War politics I read a few accounts (including Khrushchev, though he is about as reliable as a German General) which stated that by the early 60s the leadership recognised that they were economically trapped: on one hand the population could see the lack of consumer goods and they needed to start producing them; on the other their industry (and reading between the lines their strategic self-concept) was not capable of producing them, and there was no capacity to do so without taking production away from elsewhere.
That's awesome! It fits with what the Austrian School is saying about economics. Do you know where I can find the accounts where Khrushchev said that?
@@TheImperatorKnight It was a long time ago as an undergrad. The only source I remember by name was Khrushchev's memoirs, because I was very excited to find a copy in the library, and shortly after very disappointed by the contents. If you plan on looking it up, the reference came around the early 60's.
@@TheImperatorKnight It's in Khrushchev's autobiography. You really ought to read it. It's a macabre Alice-in-Wonderland tome. One passage has Khrushchev being dispatched to a truck tire factory to figure out why Soviet truck tires kept blowing out. He arrives and inspects the factory, watches the tires being made and immediately sees the problem: the workers are winding the reinforcing cords to loosely, so that as soon as big loads are put on the truck, they just give way and pop. Khrushchev the magnificent troubleshooter instructs the workers how to do their job properly and the tire problem is solved.
In fact, Khrushchev was Stalin's heavy who went around solving problems at workplaces by threatening to shoot the managers and one out of 10 workers as saboteurs and wreckers. He genuinely enjoyed the role of being a brutal thug threatening dire consequences if performance didn't improve.
Here's the thing: the workers and managers pretended not to know quality was lacking, and Khrushchev pretended to believe them. But his bloody threats were usually enough to get a factory to cut out the on-the-job drinking, absenteeism, carelessness, and poor workmanship for at least a little while.
Comparing Khrushchev to Stalin and you act as if there is equalance..? Things changed and you didn't notice..
It took 100 years for the last places in the southern United States to recover from the US Civil War and they didn't get essentially wiped off the map like swaths of Soviet territory did. It is very possible that the Soviet Union hadn't recovered yet 20 years later.
Imagine if blacks had been sent back to Africa the way Lincoln envisioned.
@Doctor Detroit Don't forget that Russia is nearly unique in the world in that they have almost no national debt. No one would ever loan them any money so they are not as beholden as the rest of the world.
I lived in the South during the '80's and can attest to this fact. Partly it's just a regressive, complacent culture but the Civil War really didn't do them any favors.
and the Carthaginian Empire never recovered from its wars with the Roman Republic ... . Try comparing apples with apples. Anyone can go hundreds or thousands of years into the past and make spurious comparisons. Tell me, when you want to make a point about the 1% do you compare yourself to ca. 12th Century landlords or do you actually make a point of finding more contemporary individuals when it suites hmm...? How was West Germany doing in 1950? How about Italy or France? How about Japan?
WW II was a tad more than "20 years" ago. You mean 1945 -1965?
I can remember in the 70's the US was using grain shipments to get concessions in arms talks from the Soviets. And the Soviets made concessions.
As a kid, I thought it strange that we were selling (giving?) wheat to "The Bad Guys".
Best 2 ops card
I remember we were making wheat available for sale, etc., to them in the seventies.
@@MrNPC the Germans thought that they weren’t going to have enough food to feed themselves, let alone giving food to the Soviets.
Yeah, and we sold that grain to them at very reduced cost.
Another factor is the inherent inefficiency of centrally planned economy. The incentives for factory directors are different than in a capitalist economy. It resulted in factories hoarding everything: machinery, input materials, even extra workers to deal with spikes in demand. They would also prefer to make machine parts, etc. in-house, since outside supply was unreliable. Overall this resulted in USSR using about 3 times as much energy as USA per unit of goods. The planners lamented that their country had everything, from natural resources to great mathematicians and engineers, but the economy just didn't work.
I see this dilema in some semi-nationalised developing world countries to. Public sector hoards to the level where other industries die out while everyone laments the "huge resources"
As a Finn, my dad always remembers fondly the time the Soviet Union was our neighbour instead of modern Russia. After the war, trade between Finland and the Soviet Union was really beneficial for Finland. We would trade them by Western standards mediocre heavy industry goods which for the Soviets was a major source of foreign technology. After the Soviet collapse, there was no good market for Finnish goods that were only okay by say Swedish or German standards which created a pretty heavy shock for our economy. I always found my dad's opinion about the matter fairly odd, given how the Soviet Union was the biggest threat for our independence and existence.
And we remember Siege of Leningrad.
Smola
I am a cultural Finn or sentimnetal towards Finland. Here in Michigan USA we have many Finnish descendents.
I dated a beautiful girl years ago named Keikkonen.sorry for slelling is been 30 yrs.
Post Covid i need a vacation.
Finland is on my list.
6 million people died all over the former USSR as a result of the fall of communism, could be more. At least 3 million in both Russia and Ukraine.
Professor Maltsev passed away in January 2023. I'm pleased to have met him when he visited South Africa in 2017, and smiled at hearing his name mentioned here. What a character he was; bought and sold 80 automobiles in his first ten years of living in the US upon defecting. Most of them lemons, but he just loved the ability to acquire and dispose of entire cars on his whim, something only senior soviet politicians could do.
Interesting, as a child living in the USSR from anecdotal evidence I think there was an increase in living standards, at least for some people, in the cities. There was a lot of housing built under Khrushchev and many people got private apartments as opposed to communal apartments. A lot of families had a small dacha with a land plot of typically 600m^2 in the country where they would grow their own food (working there on the weekends), I have fond memories working on our plot. I assume these harvests were never officially counted. As a child I don't recall ever being hungry. There were a lot of activities for children, free of charge, sport clubs, various technical clubs and even computer classes in the 80s.
Under the Soviets about 3.5-6 million Ukrainians were starved through confiscation of grains. A similar amount of Russians also starved in the 1930s. . This was due to the war against small farmers with 8-20 employees called Kulacks and forced collecovisation which produced and continued to produced poor crop yields. This was lead by communist ideology which had a noticeable jiewish tinge coming out of a range or grievances such as the non virtually existent pogroms (which killed no one) and Jackob Schiffs financing of the Bolschevicks. (It's no surprise they were handed over to German Ensatzgroupen). By 1950 the cosmopolitans seems to have been purged. Eventually the Soviets showed a recovery from these ideological idiocies.
Yeah, but you understand, if it does not generate profit, it does not count as wealth for TIK.
@@WilliamJones-Halibut-vq1fs
1. The myth of the Jewish revolution was created by the right-wing Russian emigration after the civil war.
2. Jacob Schiff did not finance the Bolsheviks because he was against socialism - he supported the February revolution.
@@johnbovay8353 Khazar ') ews'. Rothschilds. Goes back to Cromwell.
In the early '70s I met a man in Yugoslavia, a Dalmatian, who served in the Austro-Hungarian army in WW1. He spent part of his time in the army on the Bosphorus counting the grain ships exiting the Black Sea. He said it was a constant parade. "And now how many?" he said. "The grain ships are going the other way now!"
How exactly were Russian ships getting through the Bosphorus?
@@panzerofthelake506
Lol. Moving on the surfacd of the water with engines?
Man, Bosphorus is open for any ships during peace time according to international treaties.
@@piotrzielonka1987 : You’re missing the point. If it was during the Dalmatian guy’s A-H army service, the question is who was producing the grain on the ships exiting the Black Sea? A-H was an ally of the Ottoman Empire, so it’s plausible that he was stationed there at the time, and able to observe the traffic. But where was the traffic originating? Russia and the Ottoman Empire were at war, so how would Russian grain travel unmolested through the Bosporus? The second question is, if it was during some time spent by the Dalmatian in the post-WW1 Yugoslavian (Royal) army, or even the post-WW2 Yugoslavian (Socialist Republic) army, the question would be how would the Dalmatian be deployed on the Bosporus, as a Yugoslav army member, when the Yugoslavia doesn’t even border the Bosporus, and Republican Turkey was never an ally of Royalist or Republican Yugoslavia? Do you get it now? That whole story told by the Dalmatian dude is jumbled up, and sounds either garbled in being relayed to us, or possibly just a tall tale to begin with.
@@samy7013Bulgaria, Sinop.
@@samy7013Romania, the breadbasket of Europe behind Ukraine. Or Bulgaria.
I was born in ex yugoslavia and I remember USSR citizens trying to smuggle stuff and buy anything, they payed in gold, US dollars or german marks. ;)
@TIK I'm 58 years old. I remember being a teenager and seeing news stories on US TV about the plight of the Soviet population and how they had to queue up for everything, bread, meat, etc. It was disturbing because having no knowledge or the capacity to understand what I was seeing and hearing on TV, I felt badly for the population and wondered why they allowed such things to happen to them.
I can definitely tell you that Soviet demographics never recovered from WWII. Russia's population today is permanently smaller thanks to losing 1/6th of its entire population (and a substantially higher amount of child-rearing aged men and women) in WWII and the purges/famines that preceded it.
Some (commi)boos are still thinkin russia is one of the most populated country ...
The USSR had a large population not Russia.
@@Crashed131963 before and immediately after WW2 Russians had a much larger share in USSR's population, than at the eve of it's fall.
There was an upward demographic trend in the USSR. the population grew.
The restoration of capitalism killed millions of people. Russia is now dying out (like all post-socialistic countries of Eastern Europe)
@@Augustus-os8vt 'The restoration of capitalism killed millions of people'
Source?
My grandmother was born in 1942 in South Africa. She remembers they had rationing well into the 1950's as a result of the war's deprivations. TBH It'd be interesting to investigate the relatively autarkic economy of South Africa post-1961.
Hmm this is an interesting point. However in SA there were clearly defined classes/races from which extraction can be done. This kept the wealth centered in the hands of whites and a bit of Indians and extracted from the blacks. This is somewhat similar to what Hitler might have aimed through WW2 I guess
@@murahasfunstuff7618 Despite that there was still tens of thousands of Whites who were poor. Almost like apartheid nor BEE can't make anyone rich by itself.
Essentially, thinking you can centrally plan every interaction and aspect of an economy is like thinking you can do a better job of consciously regulating every homeostatic process in your body than having your body systems do them automatically, sort of like how every individual interacts autonomously in an economy.
In terms of population, no.
Edit, removed the “I guess” because no, the USSR and the now independent republics have not recovered.
there's no guessing to it. The baby bust. The grandbaby bust. The great grandbaby bust.
@Gipsy Danger especially when it's more like 40 million. You must also take into account Holodomir and post-war starvation, and civilians including those "internally deported" to gulags.
@@QuizmasterLaw where you get 40 million number from?
@Plamen Stoev 'The now free east European republics became pray for the west economies.'
Or rather the EU....Don't blame the failure of centrality and bureaucracy of the EU on the USA or rather more 'capitalistic' countries like China, South Korea & Japan.
@Plamen Stoev 'The thing the the Ameirkan army has bases in east Europe. Not somebody else. The politicians there got to visit Washington so guess who is the big boss'
Well, Germany and the USA are competitors in high-quality manufacturing. The way the USA won the cold war was by providing countries with trade security and world markets in exchange for an alliance. So, no there are differences, and your conspiracy theories are bogus.
Speaking of recovery, David Glantz's wife is recovering from several serious infections. She is recovering, but thoughts and prayers are never wasted. :)
I don't know who you talking about
But I pray for her well being
I hope when I writing this she is already recover
@@birgaripadam7112 he is a legendary ww2 historian.
Dude, the Soviet economy was at the core, a wartime economy that was unable to transition to anything apart from what Stalin's blueprint, had prioritized. We all need to understand that WW2 had seriously traumatized and shaped the Soviet psyche. They refused to be caught unprepared, by a western block that appeared poised to strike it. Military goods received the highest priority. People were expected to cope with economic hardship. The economy since the Bolshevik Revolution was always geared toward empowering the state and weakening the family.
The Soviet State had the people gripped up in a nation-wide Stockholm syndrome.
They did this, on the back of the modern equivalent of 10s of trillions of dollars in damages caused by the Axis.
Imagine if the entire United States from Florida to New York or so, and as deep as Pennsylvania, was leveled/burned/bombed/destroyed, and around 15% of the population of the United States died in the process.
Do we think the US would EVER fully recover from that? How long would it take?
That's what happened to the USSR in WW2.
No, they never recovered, they were forced into an arms race by Truman, and somehow, they managed to stay afloat until the 1990s, and they even took the lead in the space race briefly.
That is INSANE.
@@mercb3astSuch an argument might be plausible if one completely ignores Germany, which not only recovered from an equal destruction but grew to thrive.
@@mercb3ast Your shoulda, coulda, woulda mentality is unique. No candy and nuts at Christmas for you.
That was strong, I'd say, mind-blowing. My parents are soviet people, and the information I received from them and the media, and school didn't seem to be providing a complete picture. I knew that something crucial was missing, but I couldn't figure out what that was. Your content is awesome, and this video is ... wow.
It covers so much more than promised in the title.
With all that is happening now (China's screwup with the coronavirus, constitutional changes in Russia, just to name the few), it gives you some sort of closure. History is indeed not just about dates and names
I only really scratched the surface here. I'd really recommend Hanson's book, and some of the Mises articles, especially from the Soviet medical minister I quoted from in the video. There's a reason I'm now favouring Austrian School economics rather than the mainstream Keynesian/Socialist 'economics' because they're providing a narrative that not only fills the gaps, but also makes a lot more sense. They also predicted the current recession we're now in (which is why I'm prepared for it) while most of the mainstream were completed taken by surprise
@@TheImperatorKnight Economics does not prepare one for disease. Particularly when it's new and highly contagious.
@@SamuelJamesNary
The disease didn't cause the pending recession, but it was one of the tipping factors. Other factors include near zero interest rates, inflated stock prices compared to value, encouragement to borrow rather than save, and the dick measuring contest between Russia and Saudi Arabia. Plus more that I can't think of right now.
The term Kulak was used broadly to label anyone who went against Lenin's collectivzation policy. It initially included anyone who owned 8 acres of land, but was used to include anyone who happened to have more than their neighbor.
@@alphana7055 In 1928, one year before Stalin started mass forced collectivization, only 1% of arable land was collectivized in the Soviet Union.
@@alphana7055 'Stalin: Paradoxes of Power' by Stephen Kotkin
@@alphana7055 Wikipedia lists the percentage of homesteads collectivized as 1.7% in 1928
I grew up during the Cold War. We were told that we were fight a near peer that was close to our economy. After the Berlin Wall fell, we found out the economy they were closest to was Belgium.
One should point out that the British economy also did not recover from WW II until way into the 1960's.
Absolutely. And who did they elect in 1945? SOCIALISTS. Compare that to the German Economic Miracle. www.histclo.com/country/ger/chron/20/pw/dec/1950/gem.html
British never fought that war. They were already gone. 😂
@@Diwana71 You may not like the British, but they played a key role in the War. Much of NAZI industry was geared toward waging the war in the West rather than giving the Ostheer the support needed to win. As a result of the war in the West, the great bulk of the Ostheer entered the Soviet Union on foot with horse-drawn carts. www.histclo.com/essay/war/ww2/air/eur/sbc/eco/sbc-gie.html
The Kingdom died with the Land Lease
@@dennisweidner288 The bulk of the ostheer entered the war on foot and horse, and remained on foot and horse throughout the war because of a fundamental shortage of oil before the war, and critical shortages late in the war.
The western fronts, until maybe the US landings in Italy, had marginal impacts on the German waging of war.
There's a channel called Ushanka Show that talks about growing up in the late 70s and 80s in the Soviet Union. It's pretty fascinating to hear some of his stories. He moved to the US in the 90s so he has a pretty unique perspective from both sides.
I'm from Poland, born last year of the communist regime. The shortages and queues are so infamous here, we have a board game about it, called "Queue". Great export of the Soviets: economic collapse through export of central planning.
Many seen to have forgotten those terrible times, sadly. There's plenty of people in my parents' age group who look back at communism with childish nostalgia. They also only think in terms of propaganda taught to them in schools.
Is It true that rural Poles are more nostalgic of the communist period perhaps? I once read something of the sort.
Central planning is really good for crisis'. It's not good for anything else.
All the major powers in WW2 used a command/centrally planned economy in WW2. It's good at coordinating macro economics, and for correcting bad trends. It's terrible for driving an economy that needs to be agile to react to innovation and consumer shifts.
@@mercb3ast probably so. However these days with the development of computers the Soviets would be better off perhaps
A better question is whether Germany (and indeed everyone else), ever did recover from WW1.
I think the middle class today live better than a millionaire's of 1912.
@@Crashed131963 Albert Speer said in his book, that they never managed to produce as much steel as germany in WW1
Yes?
İt's not true Albert Speer wasn't said a shit like that.You probably mean iron ore which İmperial Germany had tons of thanks to Alsace Lorraine.Lets look at:
İn 1939 Greater Germany's population which including Austria,Sudetenland and Bohemia was almost 87 million which including 80 million German speaking peoples against 68 million of İmperial Germany's population in 1914.
İn 1939 German steel production was some 23.7 million tons against 17.6 million tons of İmperial Germany in 1913.
İn 1939 Germany produced 204 million tons of black and bituminous coal and 211 million tons of brown coal against İmperial Germany produced 277 million tons of coal in all types in 1913.
İn 1913 Germany generated 8 billion kwh/h of electricity while in 1939 Germany generated 66.3 billion kw/h.
Areas like steel,coal and electricity production Germany was just 2nd largest country after USA.
Yes,in some areas Germany did never recovered like shipbuilding industry and iron ore mining which İmperial Germany was second largest in the World in 1910s.
Also Wehrmacht was not so dominant in 1939 unlike İmperial German Army in 1914 which had more heavy artillery pieces and machine guns than rest of Entente combined.
So in overall Germany actually recovered from WW1.
Sources:
books.google.com.tr/books?id=ksK_tW1qYRQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=book+war+economy+in+third+reich&hl=tr&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiVrYqN5JzoAhUF5aYKHQEFCpUQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=steel&f=false
books.google.com.tr/books?id=EfEdkyz_D0AC&printsec=frontcover&dq=united+states+strategic+bombing+survey+reports&hl=tr&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjWnKXZ5pzoAhXBy6YKHcEFD4kQ6AEIRjAD#v=onepage&q=united%20states%20strategic%20bombing%20survey%20reports&f=false
books.google.com.tr/books?id=LcHkCZxfGpwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=nazi+economic+recovery+1932-1938&hl=tr&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiMidbIlaToAhWktXEKHcm3BgwQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=nazi%20economic%20recovery%201932-1938&f=false
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_Germany
France certainly never did.
Russian parents of school friends in the 1970s told me about their fixation with preserves, mostly vegetables, stored in 2 litre glass jars that were hung outside apartment kitchen windows - most of the year round it was cold enough ! Pickled this, pickled that seemed to be their first priority. Also even tiny plots had gardens for vegetables or fruit that were mostly stored.
It's a very complicated question, with more than 1 answer.
Yes, Soviet manpower was impaired.
Yes, the Soviet sphere of influence was too large to effectively manage.
Yes, maintaining the balance of power with NATO used massive resources.
But, comparing the pre WW2 Soviet economy to the post WW2 economy shows that the post WW2 economy was much stronger.
However by Western standards, the economy was very weak, as the bulk of the Soviet GDP was absorbed by the military and modernization projects.
This is also seen in pre and post war China, one could successfully argue that China didn't recover from WW2 until the 1990's.
So, this really just sums up the difference between the newly emerging communist vs the established democratic systems.
@Dwarov 1 So you didn't listen to this but saw the title and started typing?
@@billosby9997 He's comparing apples to oranges and yes i watched the video. But it's a very complex question and has more than one correct answer.
Things like "not my idea of a workers paradise" needs to be tempered by what came before the revolution.
The "fudged" numbers, they all lied, they had to, so they didn't get shot or sent to a gulag for failing. The leadership believed one set of numbers and in reality they were completely wrong. Which could explain why the Soviets suffered famines.
Capitalism and communism, one's an apple, one's an orange. The goals of one is not necessarily the goals of the other.
Communism's goal was to advance the nation, not the people.
@Dwarov 1 I meant in a consumerism view.
@Erich Kirk Finland had a population of 80,000 during the early Middle Ages, and grew slowly but surely into empire. However, the last famine was 80 years before the Soviet famine.
@Erich Kirk If the Tsar had lived, perhaps the last famine would have occurred in 1920s. Obviously in the Siberian climate, some people die anyway.
The USSR didn't recover from the collectivisation of agriculture in the 1930s. They were importing grain in large amounts by the 1970s.
@Dwarov 1 That's a load of horseshit. There's no way that the Soviet Union produced more food than the rest of the Allies combined. One, food was one of the most important items the Soviets requested via lend lease. Two, half of their best agricultural land was occupied by the Nazis for at least 2 of the four years that the Soviet Union participated in the war. 3 their agricultural ministry was listening to crackpot scientists who said that Soviet peasants could make plants grow in poor climates and soil by sheer willpower. And four, the other Allies owned over half of the rest of the world's landmass and could count the majority of the entire world's population as their citizens/subjects.
@Doctor Detroit Spam accounted for 600 000 tons over 4 years. Good luck feeding millions of soldiers with that.
For the entire period of the war, the Allies delivered 4.5 million tons of food to USSR. For comparison - the volume of grain harvest in the USSR was:
1941 - 55.9 million tons.
1942 - 29.7 million tons.
1943 - 29.4 million tons.
1944 - 49.1 million tons.
1945 - 47.3 million tons.
Total - 211.4 million tons. Thus, a direct percentage of allied assistance is 2.2% of the volume of the soviet harvest.
@@СергейРублев-т7я Interesting numbers. However you do not mention the original reason of the food shipments. USSR needed to get through the winter of 1941-1942. I assume a big percentage of 1941's harvest grain was left in the occupied territories. You also didn't mention the phenomenal losses in merchant shipping from the arctic route. A lot of tons ended up in the bottom of the north sea.
@@datboi7893 Yes, you are right. But I have no statistics on the losses of the soviet harvest from the occupation.
I met a Ukrainian man who left Ukrain somewhere in the 80s or early 90s. He said that a major road - basically a freeway - was still diverting around a shell crater in the road that was never fixed. Dirt track instead of fixing a hole. That's communism.
I live in the United States of America today. My school district cannot afford to employ teachers full time, so the school week is 4 days a week.
That's capitalism.
I didn't live in the Soviet period but I always assumed it wasn't this bad purely through seeing the leftovers of the era all around me as I grew up: old Soviet furniture, old electronics, old gas stoves, old apartment blocks and cars on the street etc. So in my logic if you can afford a flat with a bed, table and a TV: life ain't bad... Now that I am older I am so sure TBH... Up until you realise that woodgrain TV cost a 2 day trip and 5 months of wages, I later heard of cars being just money sinks (hence the stupendous price of 5 and a half grand for a car they could have reasonably sold for a grand) and how the government made good chunks of the currency unusable: TWICE.
But if anything it just shows how shyte the 90s government was with everything folding in on itself left right and centre which kinda explains the love communism has: it's not what was, it's in comparison to what immediately followed.
Pretty much this and same here. Ecspecially when talking to my mother and grandparents have told me. It wasnt nowhere bad as westeners want it to be potrayed.
I lived in USSR. Now I live in the west for the past 22 years. Let me tell you: With all the problems we had in the USSR, no other country doesn't even come close to it and never will. We had education that wasn't based on stupid tests, that boosted our creative and problem solving capacities 10 fold and routinely we call the westerners "retarded" because of that. We had family values and no gay parades. We had a country that cared about its citizens as it could. It wasn't the richest country but it was rich enough.
There are 2 Capitalisms - For G7-and the Billionaires and for Colonies - the slaves. They say Capitalism, but they should have said G7-Capitalism or Slave-Capitalism. Russia got the 2nd one... And now the G7 population is getting a 2nd one as well. Because we can't afford to own a house anymore. So we are have-nots. Yes we live, work, rent and dye. That's it. The only people who can afford a higher quality of life are legal-criminals: Stock market traders, prostitution rings, medical workers and members of parliament. For them 1st-Capitalism works great. For everybody else - you are just a slave to the system who doesn't even have a right to reproduce, make a family, because the laws are so bad against you and women demand so much that nobody can deliver and nobody wants to make a family anymore...
Well, it's not that bad or dramatic, but trust me, it's not getting better at all...
I miss USSR, I believe it was brutally murdered by Gorbachev and Yeltsin who just sold their soul to the west and given up everything their own parents fought for. They should have allowed private property and investments - that's it! Instead they just dismembered a living organism and now we have civil wars. Well, Never Trust The West...
As I've just replied to you elsewhere Dan -
Which countries are Capitalist? Please let me know so I can move there. Remember, Capitalism is when there's no forceful coercion of money (e.g. taxation) and no monopoly (e.g. multiple court systems rather than just the State's one), since Capitalism is the Private (individual) control of the means of production.
The former Soviet block never had Capitalism and doesn't now. Giant hierarchies of society that dominate a region and the economy cannot be classed as an individual (Private) and therefore not Capitalist. Again, see my Public vs Private video ruclips.net/video/ksAqr4lLA_Y/видео.html which will provide you with the correct historical definitions of the terms.
@@TheImperatorKnight Then Real Capitalism™ is as meaningless as Real Communism™ is. Like for all this pontification about the supposed superiority of the free market I don't see any Bioshock style underwater cities being founded, your definitions are laughable. You described "Corporations" to be a state for whatever reason (if your color coding is to be considered). Which is in line with the silly lolbert nonsense around "corporations bad" and "corporations are made by states", is Mars Inc. (the confectionery company) also a collective or state? Real Capitalism never existed nor will it ever exist (because the standards set for it are impossible in reality, the moment the private home owners association does something that isn't 100% in agreement it's tyranny). This "not real capitalism" nonsense is as stupid as "not real communism" to deflect and respond to criticisms of the system in practice. No system operates ideally. Ever.
@@DanOneOne did you have enough to eat or not?
Tik,
I travelled to Russia in 1993; even though we were on a tour, the amount of food we received was pretty small, and of mediocre quality. When my wife and I stopped off at a bistro to grab something to supplement our meal, there was hardly anything to be found.
People - mostly older/elderly, we're on every street corner, trying to sell their personal belongings, like stainless steel silverware, etc.
So things were tough in the 90s as well.
More evidence of this poverty comes from a story Raisa Gorbachev liked to tell, of when she and Mikael drove about 2 hours south outside of Moscow, and she saw villages of farm families living in small log/lumber cabins, some without electricity. Apparently she just cried, incredulous that a supposed super-power could still have such lack of opportunity for the working citizen.
The UK economy in 1945 was also geared to wartime production, particularly in heavy industry and armaments production (like the Soviet Union), but by 1950 (with some rationing still in place, like petrol rationing) was largely changed over to a pre-war type consumer economy. Surprisingly, despite the wartime destruction there, exactly the same thing (with more emphasis on trade exports), had occurred in West Germany. A consumer economy never seemed to properly develop behind the Iron Curtain; it was geared towards a perpetual war time economy. Russia, to a certain extent, is still in this mode today.
Well it certainly is now!
West Germany also got millions of dollars from the United States to rebuild after World War 2. The Soviets (and their Eastern European allies) didn't, so they had to rebuild for themselves.
@@benbaselet2026 Except it's not. They lack the industrial capacity due to corruption and lack of investment that follows from that. Hence them importing such basic and simple to fabricate military hardware such as drones from a relatively industrially backward state like Iran. Speaks everything you need to know about modern Russian military capacity. Embarrassing in the extreme. And all due to Putin's systemic corruption.
because the USSR was...at war? I mean cold war.
If Khruschev accuses Stalin of anything it is only because he was personally doing exactly that himself. And he was in charge of Ukraine during "Holodomor", when dispatched food resources from Moscow were stupidly mismanaged.
They did it on purpose, same with "Besserabia" after WW2, magic famine.
@@user_____M really?
Too many unfounded claims and speculations on the tragedies... Neglected by blowing out of proportions
That's exactly it, though. Deaths during the Holomodor weren't due to genocidal policies (which some people still say even in light of all of the evidence opposing it), it was due to terrible mismanagement and going overboard with class warfare against the Kulaks. But once you start drinking the Alternate History Hub Kool-Aid, the truth begins to get warped.
@Deanimator there is plenty of documentation that backs up the holocaust. the reason why "holocaust" isnt mentioned in nazi documents is because its a post war term that was created to explain the entire period of nazi anti jewish racism. in nazi terminology the operations that made up the holocaust -aktion reinhard, aktion 14f3, sonderaktion 1005 to name a few, are backed up by documentation. this is despite the fact the nazis made a largely successful effort to destroy all records in regards to their genocidal plans.
A Finn told me his country knew they needed to keep good relations with the Soviet Union so they sold things to the soviets . But there was nothing they could buy with Roubles ..so they bought the only thing they could from the Soviets, Military equipment. This is why about 1/3 of their military used Soviet equipment.
And was some of that gold from Spain?
So, even in the '50s, it's been quite obvious, that economical integration&trade - is the way to cooperate and create new connections and strengthen older ones, weak they are or strong - we don't discuss that now. And that it, integration, decreases the chances of war. But, according to the modern state of things, this obvious phenomenon of the past is now not so obvious as it's been just a few decades prior. What a wonderful time we have the ability to live in.
The Soviets would not have allowed them to buy Western military equipment in quantity.
I used to work for an import company out of W. Germany as a sales/warehouse manager. Yes, before reunification. We had an exclusive arrangement with E. Germany for certain products. Musical instruments, knick knacks and a few other products. They would send a half dozen representatives over every 6 months. They each would carry 3 suitcases. 1 half filled, the other 2 empty. The first thing they wanted to do when they got of the plane? Disney! They would stand among the thousands of people, and saw Disney is only for the rich people! My boss got tired of it one visit and just waved his arm and said "yes, look at all the rich people"! The next thing they did was fill their suitcases with shopping. Sometimes leaving the garbage they brought behind.
Yes, War is costly indeed. The British Empire also didnt recover from it after all...
Whilst food might have been unexciting in the 50s and 60s there wasn’t starvation in U.K. Milk Meat potatoes and bread were the staples of my youth but we had enough to eat.
E Fig. Roosevelt made certain of that:)
Looking back it was no bad thing. The days of empire were long gone.
In fact as far as I understand the finance of empire meant that it cost more to upkeep than it returned even before WW2.
However without the legacy of empire would U.K. have had the manpower to hold the Axis in North Africa? Personally I doubt it! At that point Britain was the only country who was able to take the war to the Axis powers.
If they hadn’t then we may well of been looking at a very different world. With the Persian oil fields in the hands of the Italians or Germans and the Suez Canal taken.
If that had been the case I believe Britain would have negotiated a peace in Europe and possibly joined in the invasion of Russia. Without British and American support Barbarossa would have been successful and Germany would have made war on America whithout a doubt.
Who knows the results of that piece of fantasy.
One of the few advantages that remain of empire is I can make myself understood in most places in the world.
So all said not the worst ending to empire.
Well you're writing in English and arguing in it, so it's quite alive in a different way. Hell, the code for the machine you're using and this website is based on English
m square, if you were replying to me then that’s pretty much what I said if not I beg your pardon:)
Actually it was not so much the War--it was the Socialists they elected at the end of the War, Notice how German and other Western European countries recovered very rapidy after the War. www.histclo.com/country/ger/chron/20/pw/dec/1950/gem.html
I lived in Italy for about four years, starting in 1969, to 1973. My Dad was stationed at Aviano AFB for these four years, and we lived nearby in Budoia, Italy. I noticed a lot of road construction, in major cities, that later I figured out, was not just simple road maintenance, but rather they were still rebuilding bomb damage from WW2. So, they were still in the process of fixing up cities as late as 1969, from the massive war damage!
Purple Pussy
In Aarhus in Denmark permanent new buildings were not built until late 1990’ties after this bombing (bombed by nazis on food and by car)
blog.dengamleby.dk/aarhusogandenverdenskrig/2016/02/22/februar-1945-raedselsnatten-i-guldsmedgade/
So what? The Frauenkirche in Dresden wasn't rebuild before the late 1990s, mostly because East Germany didn't bother to do it.
You will still see weird housing in citys where the allied bombing almost destroyed the entire city.
"But the Soviets were producing way more Coal, Steal, and Cotton!"
Producing Coal is bad for the environment. Steel is even worse. And they had to drain the Aral Sea to grow the Cotton in Uzbekistan. The Soviet Union was a walking environmental catastrophe.
for some reasons Aral Sea is disappearing even now, lol. After Soviet union 30 years dead)
@@ЕгорШель-ъ6м Its the reverse now.The aral sea is geting biger now slowly.
Same happened in the American South. The scars cotton production left on the land are still visible today. It is the cotton plant's need for water that damages the land. So, yeah the Aral Sea is gone, and so are chunks of the topsoil in the American South which is still poorer than the Northern states today. So, the lesson I learn from that is humans don't always learn from history, and whatever the system human stupidity is intractable.
To begin with, Soviet Union barely recovered from its own inception - Bolshevik revolution... especially in terms of population and _agriculture_, not to mention few other necessities. Today's Russia GDP per capita is laughable - comparable to Polish. And it is not that strange, as many people in SU mentioned that they first eaten fully during Brhrezniev era.... also: controlled socialists economies actually had FASTER recovery during first few years after wars, but lost to West in the long run - for obvious reasons.
To be fair they did start to industrialise after being founded (that the right term?) and did improve production. Some retarded communists believe that's due to communism instead of people being replaced by machines, but still.
Yes, and I cover this stuff in the video
by 1941 they had recovered enough to hold back the world's greatest war machine
@@mickeymegabyte lol not really they can say thanks to every one fighting the nazy before they did cuz before that the (world greatest war machine )could not finish the job with uk .before that ussr was just a collaboraters regime
@@mickeymegabyte
It was a tad bit more complicated...
The US has seen massive economic growth over the last 20 years.
But the average American has seen a decline in their wealth, and a decline in stability.
Economic growth, doesn't always mean more wealth for everyone in society. In the USSR, there was economic growth, but only the government itself and the management class who ran it, saw the benefits of said growth, the people didn't.
The US government is also becoming more socialist every year
'' ... but the average American has seen a decline in their wealth, and a decline in stability ...'', so, lessons learned. Don't be average, Be exceptional.
I don't think the question is "Did the Soviet Union ever recover from WW2 ?" but instead "Did the Soviet Union ever recover from WW1?" The answer is "NO!" The horrific crimes of Lenin and his Bolshevik murderers began when WW1 ended. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin magnified the brutal oppression, the genocide, the ruthless and cruel enslavement of the Russian people. Victory in 1945 might have won some decades of peace, but in 2022 we're back at Square One again. All these decades later, Russia is once again controlled by another ruthless, cruel, murdering Bolshevik Commissar named Vladimir Putin. Putin has turned the clock back 100 years to Lenin's era, with his idol Stalin as his mentor and inspiration. God help us all.
World War 2 seriously damaged the Soviets. But Stalin’s pre-war purges gave Hitler a fantastic head start. As TIK says, if Hitler had supported the Russian peasants they’d have happily helped him destroy the Red Army. They absolutely hated Stalin for his purges and famines.
Just catching up on your channel and came across this video. In college, I did a course on post-war Japan and I recall reading that it took Japan until 1960 to return to its 1937 GDP. I can easily believe that the Soviet economy took much longer to recover.
There was even a joke:
,,Why did the Soviet Union start importing grain in the 1980s?
Because the last of the Tsars left the stocks "only" for 70 years."
The cia spread the fungus "rust"in the wheat feilds ...
@@markbecker71 Or, they dropping a potato beetle from planes.
@trainbomb Lithuanians say that Poles are Russians who think they are French. And unfortunately, there is a lot of truth in that.
I think it was an attempt to increase the amount of meat available to the population.
Best ending ever!
"Comrade, the economy doesn't provide for us!"
"Well comrade, it's sticks to tanks."
Haha glad you liked the ending ;)
"Comrade, we are all starving now!"
"Yes, we are all equal. Isn't Real Socialism glorious?"
Just pretend the " tanks torrets" are Taco's enjoy them..Uhm...
@@TheImperatorKnight They did do just that - stick to tanks and lots of them. Many types built in the thousands or tens of thousands.
@@dariuszrutkowski420 Its in regatds to TiK looking at and destroying both political parties during and after the war
Good video. I think it’s common knowledge that they never recovered in a demographic sense, but I never heard about the economics of it
I lived in the FSU in the mid- to late 1990s. There were buildings in the center of this large city that looked exactly like pictures of buildings you might see from World War 2. About 40% of the city lived in wooden homes with no running water or indoor plumbing. The best I can say is that life in the FSU at this point was hard and existence was spartan. Friends told me that things bottomed out in 1991 to 1993. I was there in 1993 and it was tough. Things actually looked a bit better in 1995 from my perspective, but things got tougher again when Russia default on a portion of their debt in 1998. It wasn't bad for us as our income was in dollars so all Russian goods were much less expensive though there were some major problems accessing our funds which were in banks outside the FSU.
Housing was probably better in the early 60s and 80s than it had been in the 30s and 40s. More people had modern apartments though they were tiny by our standards. Staple food items were generally available because everyone had a small farm plot and grew a great deal of food. But consumer goods were rare, expensive and very poor quality.
I always thought that it was tough to believe the Soviets won based on the shape of their cities and economy in 1995.
I visited the Soviet Bloc in 1980, which of course was hard to do at that time. I saw many buildings that still had war damage. I was a little bit surprised. Also they seemed to have a lack of heavy equipment. For example, I would see crews of 50 workman to pick up a train rail, rather than machinery.
How did you see people's spirits? Gloomy or moderately content?
Comparing the USSR economy in 1920 to the USSR economy in 1970 isn't really possible; not merely for accounting reasons but also because of trade policy and scientific progress. Lots of things were invented from 1930-1970 and many of them were consumer items.
In terms of housing stock for population the USSR housing crisis ended by the 1960s. Which is as good as you can get for a measure because it's comparing the electronic age to the steam age. No steam trains in 1970! Diesels instead! Comparable? Not really.
USSR economy was dysfunctional but not That dysfunction after Khruschev. It could have tottered on indefinitely without Reagan .
Another reason it's incomparable is that all of Eastern Europe wasn't occupied by the USSR in 1920 unlike the USSR in 1970.
It's like comparing apples with pears.
Even Reagan's CIA admitted that Reagan's foreign policy had negligible effects on the Soviet economy.
@@josephahner3031 yeah? Well that's a lie.
That's also true for every other country.
And the USSR was still a shithole country compared to every western country.
Soviet economy was first and foremost destroyes by Gorbachev lol. It wasn't good before either, of course.
The only thing more ridiculous than the Soviet economy is the level of devotion it still receives on western university campuses.
And even modern Russia...
You should do a video about same with Germany's recovery after WW1 or WW2.Great video btw!
The Soviets never recovered from getting into the driver's seat, after killing the chauffer and mechanic, and smashing the car, maiming the family travelling with them,........ out in the sticks, ........with no ambulance service.
Hello Tik i would like to add some materials to your point.
1. Some officers of GSFG were complaining about supplying german people with more food then their familes in USSR could get. Back at home they were on a brink of famine. Of course those officers were repressed.
2. Provision shortage was so severe that state allowed distribution of qwasy-private land for growing food. It was 600 sq meaters of land so you couldn't grow too much food and sell it. This strip of land helped my family to sirvive in 50s and 90s.
3. When you talked about pulling money from people i remembered that this was one of the reasons why soviets start to bild Light automobiles industry in late 60s. With forein aid of course. Goverment was swarmed with letters from people who yarn to buy their OWN car. So money flow from people and they were HAPPY. Car worth like 4 year income of worker who prodused it.
4. Since there scarce of everything and no private property people started to steal. Everything. There were sayings like "Everything is common, everything is mine", "Take from factory every nail, you own this plase your not a guest". When USSR collapsed it spreads so wild that theivery almoust loose negative connotation. You couldn't buy, you have to get it somewhere, somehow.
The 'loss' is always the opportunity cost of what you could have done.
liking video before even watching. as an economist now i only watch WW2 through economics not battles. Also as an economist i can say that TIK videos are amazing!. i am glad with small monthly donation that i am part of this great channel.
"liking video before even watching"
A dangerous move, but thank you :)
"as an economist now i only watch WW2 through economics not battles. lso as an economist i can say that TIK videos are amazing!"
Interesting! A lot of viewers think I shouldn't make these types of videos and that I don't know much about economics. I'll admit I have gotten some things wrong (probably in this video too) but I'm not completely ignorant as some claim.
"i am glad with small monthly donation that i am part of this great channel."
Thank you! I have put the Patron list in alphabetical order, which might make it easier for you to see your name/username
@@TheImperatorKnight thx for reply. also when someone ask me about WW2 and what was ww2 about, and could it end differently --- i just point to your video - OIL. Oil is difference why Italian army was crap and why soviet army was amazing from 1942 -1945(L&L) ,and why rest of Europe with huge population and industrial potential that was under German control --- was mostly liability to Germans -- without oil rest of Europe and factories and fields in France Belgium, Hungary where useless.
@@TheImperatorKnight i love the videos about economics :3. Thaks for your amazing work ( how much is the cost of patreon ? )
"Oil is difference why Italian army was crap and why soviet army was amazing from 1942"
I need to do more on the Italians in WW2, because yes, the Italian navy was basically trapped in port for half the war due to the oil shortage.
"( how much is the cost of patreon ? )"
It's as little as $1 (you get your name in the video for this), although there are tiers for more ($5 for Q&A questions). Check out the links in the description
So, the old graphic of a T-34 tank up on end with caption, "this tank farm in Ukraine is a classic example of land misuse", wasn't far off the mark reflecting the chart you showed and its discussion.
Very interesting video! I wonder if the USSR would have fallen sooner without WW2? Even if their economy was stagnating or falling they gained a lot of territory they could exploit in the war. And a lot of lend-lease equipment.
But was this mainly a problem with socialism or with Russia? Tsarist Russia did not develop a free market economy either. They abolished serfdom in the 1860ies, but they did not get free farmers except for pockets here and there, and it has been said that Russia was the only country where factories were run by nobles and serfs, as opposed to factory owners and laborers, in the late 19th century. An exaggeration, I am sure, but it does seem to have some hold to it. Russia was entering the age of industrialization still partially stuck in feudalism and merkantilism in so many ways.
Russia was always behind the west no matter under the Tsarist Russia or under USSR. But poor economic performance is a common thread of socialist countries. Even China recognized it does not work and so allowed the private running of some companies with the caveat they can control that company at anytime if they feel there is an issue or if they simple want to. China is still very much socialist and very much control of the means of production but in a more loose way allowing profits thereby allowing people to care more and hence produce more. China only did this when they saw the USSR collapse due to its terrible economic situation, they knew that was their fate unless they did something fast.
So the answer is both.
Both Tsarist Russia and Socialism is the problem.
@Nuclear Confusion But the freedom to sell your labor and engage in free contracts protected by an independent judiciary (neither wich is allowed under serfdom), was considered a very important prerequisite for a free market by 19th century scholars?
@Nuclear Confusion Also there is the question about how free the markets of the western and central powers realy were. Britain and France had waste colonial empires, with protected trade and little democratic control. While Germany and Austria-Hungary had industrial cartels and a huge land owning nobility with a hand on the steering wheel of government.
@@janetd4970 What's sad is that many contemporaries saw Russia at the turn of the century as on the verge of an economic breakthrough. I dont think they where anywhere near achiving that by1914.
07:07: "statisticians not daring to challenge ....."; the census statisticians under Stalin did actually get it (literally) in the neck, when they produced a census that indicated that the population had dropped as a result of the famines. They weren't just told to come back again with acceptable figures - they were shot.
Stop repeating silly Cold War propaganda. In your picture of the world everyone in USSR was shot. By this logic it's because Stalin declared that famines are good and can't lead to food shortage? And communists believed him (you say that they shot those traitorous statisticians)? Brainwashed idiot, that's who you are.
@@ImperativeGames WTF are you talking about, you moron - what are you, some kind of sad Soviet apologist? And what is all the incomprehensible dross about Stalin. You obviously don't know very much about Soviet history - I do, and I've also been there and talked to the people that lived through that shit. So go try your crap on someone else, not on me.
@@Maelli535 I'm not apologizing real crimes Stalin committed - he wasn't a nice guy, no, he believed in "lesser evil" principle. But I'll try to open you to reality.
"I know someone who doesn't like Stalin" doesn't mean anything scientifically (statistically).
You can discover a super-cure for cancer but pharmaceutical companies making billions on various drugs and treatments will hate you... and some will want to kill you. In other words, you always have enemies.
So, individual opinions doesn't matter.
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51% of Russians admire Stalin and only 14 have negative feelings toward him www.levada.ru/2019/04/16/uroven-odobreniya-stalina-rossiyanami-pobil-istoricheskij-rekord/
Even more, 70% think that Stalin had positive influence on the country overall (although most people hat Stalin's camps and Gulags - he won The War, saving everyone from Plan Ost).
But wait' there is more.
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On the other hand, people *really* hate Gorbachev: 47% think that he did *nothing* good for the country, and 34% neutral, which leaves us with 19% who have good opinion about him.
24% thinks that Gorbachev is a criminal.
newdaynews.ru/society/559467.html
He was praised in the West because he destroyed geopolitical and economical competition, but for citizens of USSR...
He destroyed the country and because of that hundreds of thousands of people died in the (ongoing) (civil) wars between former parts of Soviet Union and millions died because they lost their jobs and homes - from starvation, diseases, cold temperature, etc. Suicides also skyrocketed - people killed themselves 4 times as much.
zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5f3e58300a760212465cd5e5/skolko-liudei-pogiblo-izza-raspada-sssr-5f9bef6138725f3ad6497670
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More people died because of Gorbachev's actions than in Stalin's camps. And Gorbachev killed innocent people while camps had innocent people, common criminals, and combatants who fought against communism (if you are ready to kill, be ready to be killed).
I bet capitalistic propaganda never told you that.
@@ImperativeGames Go worship your false god elsewhere, Communist. Your system has never worked and your blind faith in it has already destroyed tens of millions of lives.
@@Maelli535 Oh so you met the guy who saw Stalin shoot the census taker, I see. Well then I believe you
The Soviet Union did "stick to tanks". It never switched away from a war economy and this was ultimately its undoing.
Whythey did not move the industries from the Urals back to original places?
1. Becaouse of a fear of a next main conflict, a war, in which the West may try to do what happened in 1916.
2. The places were in more under the control, directing, of the secret forces. Hence full industrial and/or military cities were closed places, or not even on the map.
3. Simply to avoid to stretch the bugdet. Hence: scarcity , law quality,
4. After a while people got used to the place, new generations grew. To this: a personal privilage to live in a closed city could be lost by relocating the factory back to normal Russia, Belorus, etc. You simply did not want to lose access to higher rations, better supplies, better reputation.
Thanks for the update on Battlestorm Stalingrad TIK. I have to confess, that battle has been a lifelong obsession of mine for many decades. This video is excellent as usual. I read a book a few years back (shame on me, I don't remember it's name!), That looked in detail at every Soviet leader from Lenin through to Gorbachev. The author made a compelling argument that economically, socially, and even spiritually they never even came close to recovering from the German invasion. He makes a compelling case that the main reason for the fall of the Soviet Union (albeit indirectly), was Operation Barbarossa. How ironic is it that 50 years after his death Hitler finally achieved one of his main objectives!!!
Here is a brief list of the achievements of the two revolutions of 1917:
- The peasants were given more land.
- The working day is reduced from 10.5 hours to 8 hours.
- Improvement of the health care system.
- The policy of eliminating illiteracy of the population.
- Equality of men and women is presented.
- Elimination of class privileges.
- Separation of church from state.
Thanks for the lecture. I feel as though my horizons and knowledge of history have been expanded beyond my wildest dreams. Thanks again.
Totally agree. I was talking about the book I read, not my personal opinion. Read the post.
@@СергейРублев-т7я The peasants were not given more land. Instead they were stripped off what little they had, and without compensation.
@@tmkontka The peasants received more personal land in the period 1917-1928. Since 1929, the land has passed into collective ownership.
There's a big and long story about each production and business in USSR and Russia, but nothing really changed after the soviets came and went away.
Specifically for the agriculture - it wasn't the government who managed it in USSR for the most part, the private joint-stock companies that owned land and worked on it -you might heard of it - they were called Kolkhoz.
Kolkhoz had shareholders(non-government) and an "elected" top management. These companies were selling the grain to a government trade monopoly and were relying on credits from the Governmental banks.
Kolkhoz in fact reproduced the same systems that existed before:
- After the wars in 17th-18th century the Russian government had lots of lands in eastern Europe where not many people lived(survived the wars). The government was establishing the administration there and filled it with people from the nearby territories. People didn't owe the land- they were working. This lasted until peasants started demanding the land privatization.
- Since the 1840th and 1860th the land was sold to peasants, but in debt from the government bank. But as peasants were illiterate, to pay debt and manage sells, they were organized into communities with a head from the government administration. So in addition to the sells management, the administration and now community head had to deal also with people loans to a bank.
Peasants were working and paying debt, until they realized that there's no way to pay debt as government controls the transport, sales price. Then peasants didn't want to pay the debt anymore and as it was a government bank, they wanted to destroy the bank and the Russia itself, and get the land. That turned to a revolt(part of the revolt force) in 1905 and further in 1917.
- After Russia was destroyed and USSR was established, the peasants got the land, but then they quickly realized that nobody buys the grain and they need an old community head who manages everything, and reliable buyer.
So the Kolkhoz companies were organized, that had the same "elected" heads who sold grain to the same fellows in a "new" government, while the Kolkhoz companies were taking the credits in Govenment banks and were a credit slave, as peasants in the past. Everything came back to where it started.
I believe there were lots of famines during the 18th century, as government either didn't control the population numbers and food production, or it just used famine as incentive for people to move and develop new lands(which people didn't owe).
In 1940th the western corporations came to USSR and started building factories, cities. I believe they used the famine to get people from the countryside to cities where there was no famine at the same time. This worked - even being the Kolkhoz members they ran to cities, builds and factories. The Kolkhoz heads were the key figures to produce the famine as they knew the production, demand and supply and was controlling the sale and storage.
In USSR the agriculture profits were shared among many parties, except the people themselves: Kolkhoz heads, government management. It's not an incident that many of them were already rich people with relative abroad when the union collapsed.
Yeah, sure. "Elected". Just like they "elected" Stalin.
Kolhoz leadership was fully controlled by the party. And when party said kolkhoz must deliver shitton of grain even at the expense of famine kolkhoz did. Would actual private company with elected leadership starve to death it's own people?
Are you telling me Kolkohzes were "private enterprises"? Then I have a bridge to sell to you.
"The government didn't run it". No, the party did, like in China.
riiight... nice fairytale, probably the ones at holomodor didn't have the right kind of kolhoz private management... yeah, it's not "rEAl coMmuNIsM". This one of the most convoluted and imbecile arguments ever
I'm not an expert. But in my opinion again a very clear, substantiated and supported by many independent sources documentary. Excellent recap of the entire sovjet economy.
Excellent, TIK! This should at last shut the 'Stick to Tanks' party! There's no way one could've made things clearer and better explained so that everybody understood the meaningn and could grasp the view on economics. Even though (it is) stealing, for example, might make some viewers immediately feel uncomfortable or suspicious of anything you say due to not understanding nor willing to understand; by now the terms and expressions you use made even a friend of mine who stood in the tanks-fraction was reformed by this..
Once again - nice work & keep safe. Cheers,
KV
Good stuff, really puts into perspective why stats aren't always reliable (looking at you Chinese GDP figures).
Makes me equally concerned about the state of affairs in the UK atm, people saying to invest in stocks, to withdraw money from banks, and to prepare for the end of times. I blame the hysteria caused by MSM tbh.
@Joseph Sosa Hmmm, sounds a lot like the USSR...
I thought you were going to say Chinese coronavirus numbers. But GDP was a better fit.
@@aidantawney4776 Haha well both are incredibly unreliable.
@@m2heavyindustries378 Okay?? Still from the UK...
you can't hide trade. China is the biggest exporter on the planet. So if you believe that all chinese data are fake then you shouldn't. Compared to the cold war, the us is fucked...
Ty Tik for a great upload, I knew a polish guy who told me that people would queue up for hours just to buy a single but brand new razor blade. Another who's farther was high in the state had no problems because he could travel to Sweden and buy anything they needed. Thanks again you do a great job.
Just a counterargument to what you said at 25:20 about people not caring about farmers being ready or not : I think it depends on the culture you're talking about, as a Frenchman I know for a fact that harvests are talked about on national news every year, especially the grape harvest to know if this year will be a good year for wines or not. Though I doubt Russians cared about harvests to know if the vodka would be good this year...
To be fair to France and the French though, wine is held is such high regard, and as such a fundamental part of how France is perceived, that it would be almost impossible to talk about France without talking about wine. Sure, it's part of the economy, a major part, but it is also culturally engrained in the perception of France and the quality of its wines around the world. So as an Englishman, I'd certainly give France a huge free pass for talking about the grape harvest - it's as much about the aesthetic beauty and enjoyment of good wine as it is about economics. 🙂
Damn, that was a hard slam on communist and socialist economy and politics, and backed up with facts at that! Keep up the great work, the truth needs to get out to the world :) As somebody coming from the darkest depths of Eastern Europe, many of these things are obvious to me and to my parents and grandparents - to anyone that wasn't "part of the party machine", really. Everybody remembers the shortages, queues for yogurt and bread, waiting 10 years for a car and so on. Here in Bulgaria we used to be known as the unofficial "16th republic". All of this isn't that obvious to many westerners, though, some of it is even unimaginable. They fantasize about "socialism" and "equality" but those of us that have actually suffered it know it's a giant fallacy. Just look at North Korea...
As a born citizen of USSR I confirm this is accurate. To add insult to injury, much of the military equipment (I don't know exactly how much), produced after WW2, that Soviet citizens (largely against their will) sacrificed so much for, was later used in multiple civil wars around the collapsing and then former USSR, including Russia -Ukraine war today.
It is still nothing compared to the scale of Korean war, probably
Yes, USSR did recover from WW2 by 1960s.
I have lived under a communist rule from late 1950s. By that time the standard of life exceeded the pre-war level. Then, it was steadily increasing until late 1970s. A decline of a life standard in late 1970s caused a rise of anti-communism opposition, its 1st success in 1980 in Poland, and the beginning of communism collapse in 1988.
A single personal story from decades ago means nothing on its own
Population issues?
2 million Russians died, mostly men.. or laborers.. how da fk could you recover so quickly??
Most of the older Russians in rural areas are nostalgic for the Communist system
@@m2heavyindustries378 a single personal story, from someone who was likely in diapers at the time or are we talking to a 90 year old?
@@codyraugh6599 Also of course he ignores the continual expansion of gulags meaning more slaves to support the slightly less enslaved subjects (also his name is eugene, very russian name)
Damn, that cocky look in the end! TIK is proud of himself, as he should be)
'Tank' you for the video TIK.
Hopefully, you stay healthy and can keep providing these informative, enjoyable videos. :)
When I was growing up in the 70's and 80's there was always "talk"(military,economists, news media, the guy next door!)about how weak the Soviet economy actually was. Much of it may have been speculation or maybe even wishful thinking on the part of the West. Either way, as it turned out there was some truth to it. With that, I do enjoy your videos!!
If you consider the immense resources of this country it achieved pour results.
Never knew how relaxing it was to watch Tik with some Scotch on the side. Night time, everything's quiet, so i just light my cigarette and listen through my headphones to his authorative voice. Life's good.
I think the biggest issue was the resistance to change.
The reason why capitalism works so well is because we keep tweaking it all the time with regulations, de-regulations. there is some central planing, there are some subsidies,, anti-trust laws, breaking of monopoly... etc.
USSR was experiencing a constant economic crisis... and they just rolled along with it for decades.
I can recommend 'Red Plenty' by Francis Spufford as an original read on the subject of Soviet economics. Rather than looking at statistics, it explains how the system worked (or didn't work) & the consequences of not having market prices by telling stories. it's a great read...
There was a Russian exchange student whom I was friends with in college who said they couldn't drive fast on the highways as, to paraphrase him, "the peasants" would steal the concrete slabs leaving holes in the road. This was post Soviet Union.
Not concrete but ashphalt
@@LOL-zu1zr No, concrete - Germany and the USSR both used concrete slab construction in their autobahns.
Yes, the Soviet Union increased cotton production in the 1960's, they increased it so much that they killed the Aral Sea.
The slogan will no longer be "stick to tanks".
Instead, now it is "stick to Tankies"
Stick to tank-tops...
Your reference to bakeries reminded me of a report on them in the devastated Eastern Soviet area. There was a shortage of large bakeries as they had been destroyed in the war and it took years to rebuild them. Sounds strange to say but it was not only rebuilding the ovens etc but involved training the bakers, establishing the supply and distribution networks that went with each one.
Ive been waiting for this precise video for at least the last few years ever since I saw a population graph of USSR before, during and after the war.
The population could still be better off, despite output being down.
US average household income is below their 1970s peak, but the equivalent car, tv, phone are all better. Americans aren't living as they were in the 70s.
Re starvation. The UK was probably at its wealthiest (relative to the rest of the world) in the 19th century. nevertheless many people struggled to survive in the slums. I would point to that dreaded S word, and/or governments attempts to undermine the attractiveness of it to the people by introducing redistributive policies post war.
Ben,
Only one man had to work to get that house, car, tv, etc.
You're right, we're living worse, because we're living on borrowed goods, borrowed time, and borrowed money. We weren't back then.
You are comparing Britain to the modern world. How does the 19th century comparison come out if you compare Britain to India, South America, China, or other European countries during the sane time period?
@@dennisweidner288 compare what? Starvation?
My point is you can't look at prior time periods and say X failed because Y is solved in the modern world. If the wealthiest nation can't feed itself, you can't use that as an indicator of failure for less wealthy nations with different political systems.
It's like criticising North Korea for not having cured cancer.
@@benholroyd5221 I have no idea what you are talking about with Xs and Ys.. The simple fact is that even with the slums and Dicksonian poverty, Britain was better off than any other country except America. The poverty is unacceptable to us in the 21st century, but if you compare Britain to other countries around the world in the 19th century, it comes out very well. Most people have been poor since the dawn of time. It is only in America and Britain in the 19th century that wide spread prosperity began--thanks to the wealth generating engines of capitalism and the industrial revolution.
@@dennisweidner288 X = communism. Y = starvation. In this case.
You're restating what I said. Every country had problems feeding it's population. Therefore you can't use that failure to criticise any one ideology.
In 2090 TIKs grandson will be making a holotube entitled "how capitalism saved us from CV19"