USSR was quite sustainable - after all, noone seriously thought it would actually fall when it did. It had socialised education and healthcare, robust production chains, and on referendum wherever it should or should not be kept overwhelming majority voted to keep it.
There was plenty of space for gradual change rather then "revolutionary" style USSR dissolution.
Stalin created and honed the self-reinforcing system which was killing people continuously. At first, this was about killing direct political opponents or depowering them by killing people loyal to them. Then when the pool of direct political opponents depleted, it grew to be about killing / suppressing potential political opponents. Eventually it came to killing whoever was killing the previous wave of the undesirables (plus a lot of others, of course, but that's what made the system self-reinforcing) -- because being able to kill others gives you power, and with enough time this power grows enough so that you yourself start becoming a threat (as far as Stalin is concerned) -- at which point the system closed onto itself and became an essentially eternal machine of terror. Stalin was there all the time, creating this monstrosity at every step. He was a sick idiot who managed to take an entire country hostage to his sick, idiotic, paranoidal strives for power. You are talking like it wasn't Stalin, that there were a lot of people involved, but it was Stalin, blunt and square - he allowed that to be, and in fact he engineered it and he was commanding the system to turn and bend and morph into the next phase (eg, he was the one deciding when it's time to start killing the next wave of previous killers).
That his regime managed to turn the country industrial (at what cost and how good was that?) and win the war (at what cost again?) is there, too. Yes, Stalin was at the helm when that happened, and yes, he was directing the big industrialization plans, bla bla bla. Whether this was good or not, we can talk. But everything is overshadowed by the massive terror that he brought.
I have a lot of words to say about corruption and everything else, but let's take one thing at a time.
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It was not sustainable, it had to compete with the West militarily, but the centrally planned economy was very inefficient compared to the market economy of the West, so the USSR was fighting a losing battle and in the end managed to lose it.
Choose one of the two:
1) Stalin was retarded weak idiot who didn't know about massive political repressions, Gulag, Dekulakization, ineffective kolkhozes, deportations from Baltic and Caucasus Republics and so on
2) Stalin did all of those things on purpose.
The first one means he was incompetent and shouldn't have ruled, the second - that he was outright insane and shouldn't have ruled.
Also nice whataboutism about corruption, you forgot to mention black people lynchings.
Some people believed populists that claimed "market reforms" would magically fix all country's woes (while keeping all existing benefits intact), and that the rest of the country was holding them back. People can get delusional anywhere (as we're seeing with Trump).
Ukraine was prime example of such thinking - they had all the high-tech industry and highly educated population, surely they are poised to become great once independent! ...They are now literally poorest country in the Europe.
It was far more efficient then fractured, crisis-ridden mess that resulted from it's dissolution. Dissolution also produced plenty of military conflicts between new states.
Gradual transition would work much better, but some people on top were believers in "shock therapy" and rapid transition based on Polish example... example that noone intended to repeat for USSR itself.
He didn't have mercy to enemies of his ideology, that's it. Be it for political or self-interested reasons.
Once "no mercy" was established, people followed that even slightest misstep could result in "highest measure of societal protection" (that is, death). Or labour camp.
He didn't do "all those things on purpose" - they flowed naturally from basic principles. "You got subversive elements? Agitators against government, people sabotaging production and hiding their harvests from taxation? It is okay to just shoot them or uproot them from society that supports them".
Some people got overzealous with enforcement; then some people were shot for that kind of sabotage as well.
Last edited by Shalcker; 2019-04-18 at 10:02 AM.
Did you know him personally, that you making such bold words on him? And did you been there in that time and watch it personally, if you claim that its Stalin made every step of building USSR as it was and there was no other people (persons) who did something else.
And i repeat, if you able to argue objectively and critically you must understand that every movement in your life or in others life have a price. And if you think that leadership of USSR just executed all thoughts and Stalin's orders in 30's and they didn't knew that Capitalism rulers specially brought Hitler to power and pumped up Germany by resources in circumvention of sanctions which were inflicted on Germany after the 1st World War and they didn't understood that they need to do that industrial reform in USSR as much faster as possible because of coming War again, then its you sick idiot, blunt and square.
That's like saying that US situation is not sustainable and US downfall is inevitable nowdays. You certainly could cherry-pick statistics to prove that.
But i think "inevitable" is post-hoc rationalization - rationalization by those who destroyed it. "It happened because it was inevitable, nothing we could do, it was better to destroy it fast".
No, far from inevitable. Some factors aligned, one side proven to be more decisive and certain of being right (while definitely being wrong) while another was plagued by indecision and doubts.
Was this decisiveness of those who are wrong and indecisiveness of those with big picture inevitable? Perhaps due to negative selection in USSR top ranks it did.
It could have played a thousand different ways though, not necessarily with "downfall".
Stalin looks at the reports of found "spies and saboteurs", goes "that's just too small a number, can it be that there are saboteurs among your own people, maybe, tovarisch X? I would think there are like 10,000 more spies in the area you are responsible for, it's close to the border, isn't it?".
Tovarisch X gets all white and reports "I suppose you are right, tovarisch Stalin, we'll work better! may I go now?"
Next month, tovarisch X brings a report with 20,000 more spies and saboteurs found *and* with 500 saboteurs found among his saboteur-finders as well, just to be safe. (This doesn't save him for long, obviously.)
A little hard not to get overzealous with a system like that. This overzealousness is just designed into the system.
Rather we have too much self-criticism that when tested by actual archival/historical data proves to be utter bullshit, and then people often swing to other side - "if that's wrong then everything else is wrong as well, they are all liars".
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There are plenty of Stalin's works and correspondence around on internet, could you put up direct quote?
I thought we had a system of reasoning about what happened before us or in places where we have not been based on documents, no? Seriously, your question is so strange, I am not sure what its point is. No, I wasn't there with Stalin when he was doing his thing. I am not sure what this changes in what I said.
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https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1...81%D0%BA%D0%B8
Many of the lists signed by Stalin are downloadable. Some of them contained quotes that he confirmed, with or without adjustments. Some of them contained quotes that he set.