I don’ think the position that neoliberals (WTFTA) started the fire has much traction, and I don’t see much of MQ’s efforts being devoted to that. The claim that they exacerbated it by misconceived rescue efforts (and a modicum of hubris) has much more traction and deserves more scrutiny.

As an aside, it’s worth pondering why the most plausible answer is “I don’t know”.

Other than that the various authorities can’t even agree on the basic numbers (another game I don’t have a ball in), we simply don’t have that many Soviet Unions lying around that we can collapse and test the newest economic theories on for comparison.

Probably the one who thinks someone else’s mind is going to be changed here…

Hmm.

And screw you too buddy. I’m using PWT data which is very respectable. The 40% to 50% drop is consistent with what I said when added up over all the relevant years. But the majority of the decline takes place 1990-1993.

Here’s Russian GDP per capita data:

199012314.6898
199110731.44122
19929822.60983
19939489.138766
19948893.726814
19958461.583773
19967934.389688
19978339.782697
19988130.870191
19998532.885342
20009263.459629
200110048.81328
200210877.14261
200311794.72644

And the corresponding growth rates:

-0.137614978
-0.088491011
-0.034538997
-0.064801681
-0.049809812
-0.064329926
0.049830723
-0.025369208
0.04825961
0.082150026
0.081376957
0.079209033
0.08098894

(since we can’t preview our comments anymore I dont know if the formatting isn’t gonna get screwed up).

“There is an excellent argument that the 1991-1998 period in Russia was the largest, most devastating peacetime industrial depression in modern economic history”

“This economic catastrophe is consistent with Russian Census statistics, eyewitness accounts, and numerous other sources. There is no evidence of any economic contraction of anything like this size any time over post-WWII Soviet history”

No one’s disputing this. That’s what happens when a rotten system collapses.

“Yet here we have someone who presumably thinks he knows something about economics who seems to be completely ignorant of it”

If you can show where I deny that the period 91-98 was a catastrophe in Russia then show it. If not, well, then, screw you too buddy. Obviously the argument is about the causes.

“As for the rest of the Soviet Union, the entire Soviet system was dependent on centralized direction from Russia, one cannot separate out a small republic here or there.”

…which suggests that it wasn’t the neoliberal reforms but the political collapse of the system, yes?

“But Gorbachev also was getting terrible transition advice from Western economists, which he was acting on. ”

Oh yeah? And what was that? Come on the whole thing was coming down on its own regardless of what Gorby did. If anything his actions postponed the inevitable for a few years.

“But as abb1 points out, the bulk of the killings ascribed to Stalin are excess deaths due to changes in life expectancy resulting from agricultural collectivization and the subsequent famines.”

First, the “bulk of killings” – there was so much killing that shifting a couple million deaths from intentional to by-product doesn’t change the balance much. Second, under Stalin the policy was DESIGNED to cause massive famine as part of a political strategy to suppress certain anti-soviet groups (nationalist Ukrainians, kulaks, independent peasants etc.).

“The whole point here is that the collapse of the political system was aided and abetted by neoliberal advisors”

See, this is where the crazy talk comes in. Sure, the whole collapse of communism was a nefarious neoliberal plot. Right.

See, that’s a perfectly reasonable position (I did say my analogy was crazy like the other ones – i.e. exaggerated). But the key words in your comment are “helped” and “delayed”. In other words while the effect of the reforms might be “Idk” in those terms, it’s pretty clear that they didn’t “begin” or “cause” the collapse, which is what MQ (and plenty of other folks) seems to be arguing.

As an aside, it’s worth pondering why the most plausible answer is “I don’t know”. I mean, all the data are in and it’s unlikely that there will any new relevant information forthcoming. The problem here is that you have a situation with so many variables and so many things going on at once. The reforms were multi faceted, the political situation was chaotic, and the initial starting point was a mess. Quite likely it’s probably the case that some reforms helped (freeing up the prices, legalizing what previously was black market activity), some might have hurt (bungled privatizations) and some were simply inevitable (lots of privatization happened before any laws were actually passed).

I think we’re mostly in agreement but I don’t believe that the advisors played any major role in the collapse of the SU. Was it Soros who said that Gorbachev made the mistake of trying to open the door just a little after it was tightly shut for 70+ years? The fundamental notion that if you just create the markets the democratic institutions that support it will emerge automatically (the “natural phenomenon” theory if you will) took a big hit in post-SU Russia, with grave consequences. But I’m not all too convinced that, starting after the collapse, we’re not comparing the events against an idealized counterfactual. Iow, I find the “we had the right answer” triumphalism both annoying and unsupportable, but I also find the response that “you had the wrong answer when there was a right answer out there” weak as well. (China might prove me wrong, but in large part they’re only postponing the hard decisions.) Once the SU had collapsed, the only available choices were bad ones.

ummm, see, this is not luck.

Possibly, but with low world prices for their natural resources they couldn’t even do that.

ummm, see, this is not luck. Natural resource revenues now flow to the state through high rates of taxation, and are spent to do stuff in Russia. In the 90s under privatization, natural resource revenues went to the oligarchs who stole them and took them out of the country.

The whole point here is that the collapse of the political system was aided and abetted by neoliberal advisors, who were basically saying that the biggest priority was freeing up and privatizing the economy rather than maintaining the capacities of the central state. Once Putin/Primakov started reestablishing state authority and doing incremental economic reforms within the framework of a stronger centralized state then stuff rapidly started improving.

The difference is that the Stalinist has a ball in the game and I don’t.

I was just pointing out antecedents to the “hey, maybe a million people died, but we don’t know if it worked yet—you can’t make an omelet, etc.” type of argument. Also, I wasn’t taking the Stalinist’s word for it, we now know that objectively Russian industry did great from 1940-1970 (maybe not in comparison with more recent rapid industrializers like China, but certainly great by comparison with Russia’s past history).

Inverse Goodwin’s Law? The difference is that the Stalinist has a ball in the game and I don’t. Usually if someone with a vested interest in a certain explanation starts equivocating everybody else already knows the explanation is dead wrong—like Aznar’s government after the Madrid bombings. The other difference is that the Stalinists were uneqivocally in power in 1939, so they could try and explain away the extent of the failure, but there was no question who had to take the blame. Unlike in the SU>RUS transition, where you have four main actors and any number of subactors, all of whom try to take credit and shift blame.

Why didn’t China or Vietnam just “generally disintegrate” under a state controlled economy in transition to a market-oriented one?

Neither Vietnam or China had a transition of power to go with the economic transition. One of the problems with Russia is that it still has no institutionalized mechanism for transition of power, and the prospects that they be able to implement one in the near future are pretty dim. Russia is lucky right now that they’re ruled by a popular dictatorship, and that high oil and gas prices prop up the economy. It’s anyone’s guess what will happen if macroeconomic conditions turn bad and they have to claw to stay in power.

I think the question is something like this: to what extent the socio-economic calamity was a result of sudden collapse of the political system (ala notsneaky) and to what extent the whole thing was a result of deliberate cold-blooded experimentation.

The collapse of Gorbi’s government seems like a garden variety power struggle, but I think it’s pretty clear that the second political crisis there (Yeltsin shelling the parliament ) was already a consequence and manifestation of Yeltsin’s clique deliberately choosing the path of privatization. That’s what – 1993?

Just on the face of it, when you see nations like Vietnam and China moving from command to market-oriented economies, and see them do so without a tragic collapse of economic well-being, and furthermore see them do so incrementally without the influence of “shock therapy”, it at least suggests that your statement:

“it wasn’t neoliberal policies but just a general disentegration of the economy which began in the 1980’s Soviet Union under communism”

requires some explaining. Why didn’t China or Vietnam just “generally disintegrate” under a state controlled economy in transition to a market-oriented one?

This is just what a Stalinist would have said in 1939 about agricultural collectivization. Collectivization and famine was justified as necessary for industrialization. After 1939, we can see that Russian industry first outproduced Nazi Germany during WWII, and then from 1945-1970 produced rapid growth in living standards for the Russian people (this is supported not just by GDP figures but by biometric and other measures). So you know, maybe it sort of worked. But we don’t forget the cost.

Russia’s economic turnaround quite clearly begins in 1998-99, after the financial crisis, around the time that Primakov and Putin took power. Western reformers are now claiming all of the post-1998 economic growth as the result of “foundations laid” during the 1991-1998 period, followed up by “liberalizations” of the economy under Putin. A more skeptical observer could point out that the 1998-99 period was just when the influence of “shock therapy” advocates waned and Russia began to chart its own course. Now, it’s still true that post-1998 there have been plenty of economic reforms that a Western economist would approve of.

As I said above, this is just factually false. The World Bank figures show the fastest GDP contraction occuring in 1992, 1993, and 1994, with negative growth 7 out of 8 years between 1991 and 1998.

Also, as a note, the 47 percent decline I noted above is in equivalent U.S. dollars—the World Bank PPP series shows a smaller 35 percent decline over 1991-98, with some moderate decline beginning in 1989. Since there was also massive inflation over this period, it’s going to be hard to get the right currency comparison.

But didn’t the sources of the post-Communist economic collapse lie in Gorbachev’s bungled attempts at economic reform conducted with disregard for basic criteria of macroeconomic stability, did these tip the balance from stagnation to economic collapse?

Sure, it’s certainly seems that it may have started under Gorbachev. But Gorbachev also was getting terrible transition advice from Western economists, which he was acting on. Things got even worse and the decline accelerated as Western economists got even more influence.

it’s … I dunno, “In bad taste” (if not colossally stupid) to compare deaths under Stalin to “excess deaths” due to changes in life expectancy in 90’s Russia.

To Stalin’s outright killings, sure, I’m not comparing those. But as abb1 points out, the bulk of the killings ascribed to Stalin are excess deaths due to changes in life expectancy resulting from agricultural collectivization and the subsequent famines.