Long, long ago, in a country far, far away, Nikita Kruschev was the Soviet Premier and he made a very bold claim. He said “We will bury you!” Twenty-five years later a pop star named Sting included that line in a song criticizing mutually assured destruction. Thus proving that Sting is not nearly as smart as he thinks.
Kruschev wasn’t talking about war. He was talking about production. He was asserting that communism as practiced by the Soviet Union was so superior to capitalism that they would surpass the West in terms of standard of living by 1980.
I did say it was a bold claim.
Obviously, it didn’t happen. That goal, the attempt to achieve it and why it failed is the theme of Francis Spufford’s “Red Plenty””.
While that sounds like a good book plot, it isn’t the plot of this book, just the theme. There is no cohesive plot here; it is a story-less story. Instead there are a series of fictional vignettes interspersed with bits of history and Russian folklore that explores the theme. If there is a protagonist, it is the Soviet economy. The writing is wonderful – by turns playful and poignant. In one scene, Zoya flirts with grad students at a bar in a closed city, the dialogue is full of witty repartee. In another vignette, Spufford describes how smoking causes cancer while a computer scientist waits for an appointment that will never be kept.
I love this book. I think it captures the sense of optimism and purpose that many people felt. The Soviet Union had won the war, Stalin was behind them, and they were now part of something bigger than themselves – building a socialist future of plenty. No more hunger, no more cold, and all their material wants satisfied if only they could sacrifice for just a little longer. And yet, that optimism and hope has a backdrop of paranoia and fear. I highly recommend this book and think it ought to be assigned in every Introduction to Macroeconomics class. More erudite commentary can be found here.
Along with “Red Plenty, I also read “Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets” by Svetlana Alexievich, who won the 2015 Nobel prize for literature. It is an oral history of the fall of the Soviet Union. If “Red Plenty” is hope and optimism, then “Secondhand Time is about nostalgia and despair for what was lost and what might have been. It is fascinating, grim, and, at times, horrifying.
The book was written over a period of years. Alexievich interviewed, it seems, hundreds of people. The book covers everything – the protests, the ethnic violence after the fall, life in the camps, falling in love, and losing hope. Through those stories, in people’s own words, you learn what people were hoping for in 1991 and what they actually got. How they feel betrayed and why they long for the certainty of the past, and especially that sense of being part of something special.
You also learn how the lessons of the past are already forgotten. One man explains that his family have always been dissidents. They protested proudly in the 1990s. Now, he laments that his son, who is attending university, is reading Marx and wearing Che t-shirts.
I don’t love this book. Instead, I feel about it the way I feel about Timothy Snyder’s “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin”. It is an important book, by which I mean it is important to read it to understand the events described. But reading it is almost traumatizing. Still, I recommend it.
I can only guess at the appeal of Marx using logic and inferrence.
With the empirical evidence, there’s no good reason to try that crap again.,
Marx is part of the continental Romantic tradition – forget reason and evidence when it comes to understanding. This is religion without god. And the appeal in that is touched on by the word certainty… as in “certainty of the past”. Religion is all about providing certainty in an uncertain world, and that fills a huge void in the human mind.
Marx was right about something being the opioid of the masses, only it wasn’t religion like he claimed, but the pablum based on envy he peddled. Lazy fucking asshat that hated the fact people like him had to work and produce value to get respect and credit. Over 100 million butchered in his evil religion’s name – and have no doubt that the marxist orthodoxy surpasses the crazy of every other fucking religion – and at least a couple of billion made to live in the misery of the cult of envy.
OK ladies, for some reason I posted this comment hear only to have it appear in this AMs post. Some serious session maintenance issues with this crappy iPad’s Safari instance…
I’ll admit i like “Desert Rose”
+ many songs by The Police.
Yeah, I went on a binge the other day. The first couple albums were really solid.
Then Sting decided to crawl up his own asshole and everything went to hell.
We saw him a few years back – wife insisted. It wasn’t quite a disappointment, but Annie Lennox who opened for him, absolutely stole the show.
Given a choice, I’d go with Ms. Lennox.
Who is this beautiful, blonde man with a lovely voice…
I fell asleep at a Sting concert when he came through about 15 years ago.
I really do love the Police and Sting even though sometimes he’s heavy-handed with the politics (but so am I in a couple of my books) (Sheri Tepper told me I could do that and still tell a good story).
*opens player and dials to Sting*
Good review, I’ll put these both on my list of reading.
I can imagine that that would be painful.
Seems appropriate.
That’s one of my all time favorite drinkin’ songs.
My wife grew up in a Communist country. Now our son is a fan of Bernie Sanders, or Barney Sandler as she calls him. There’s a lot of reasons for it. Mommy issues. The lure of free stuff, especially free college. Nevermind that he wouldn’t get into college in a communist country because his grades, though good, weren’t good enough and his parents would be problematic. Heck, I’m not even sure he would have qualified for college in today’s Europe, given how few students are accepted to college (something that gets left out of the conversation for some reason). And the old country looks pretty good these days, so how bad could communism have been, right?
“Nevermind that he wouldn’t get into college in a communist country because his grades, though good, weren’t good enough and his parents would be problematic. Heck, I’m not even sure he would have qualified for college in today’s Europe, given how few students are accepted to college (something that gets left out of the conversation for some reason).”
That’s the shit that drives me craziest about the Bernie Bros. “Europe has free college!!!”
Dude, in ZOMG EUROPE you don’t get to borrow 150k to haul your 45th percentile SAT scores off to college for an English literature degree. In Europe, you take a big standardized test before our 18th birthday, and if you fall short of threshold, you get tracked to vo-tech school and that’s it.
Yep
Americans are mal-educated idiots and the unions intend to keep it that way.
One of the biggest tricks the Left has for spreading this BS is “study abroad”. Americans spend a few months in Barcelona, or London, or Paris or Venice and stay with some rich family and thinks thats how the whole country lives.
They never get shipped to some post industrial Midlands town to experience English life. The only region of the UK that has the same GDP per capita as America is London. Every other place is below the American average.
We stayed in a dormitory in St. Petersburg, Russia, in the spring of 1992. Interesting times.
I bet the bathrooms and kitchens in the dormitory appeared shocking to Americans.
Furthermore, their college isn’t really free. I’m not talking about the fact that someone still has to pay. I mean that room and board and books aren’t free. Those account for 2/3 of what I pay to send him to a state university in California. In Europe there’s more of an expectation that you will live at home during your college years. Sports? Forget about it. Climbing walls? No way.
It changed recently even more. In the past you could become a perpetual student, changing majors or going for the all elusive PhD, forever, with the tax payers footing the bill. An entire class of these eternal students on the dole was created that not only drained the coolers but produced absolutely nothing of value. That all ended when they put time limits in place and told the slackers they would have to pay it all back if they didn’t finish. And oh yeah, no more major changing without permission from the masters. You should have heard the butthurt.
So yeah, there is “free college” for those that are capable and work that. And free means you have a tenure period after in most cases, if I recall correctly, where you work for the government or some other entity at reduced cost to pay it back.
But most people here In the US think it is one giant and unending party, and nobody corrects that. Believe me that the left has no plan of providing free college. There will be all sorts of strings attached as well as the requisite loyalty test is my guess.
Dammit, Tulip!
I’m never gonna get caught up on my books!
Thanks for the reviews, however. Both sound like terrific reads.
As part of a class project several years ago, my daughter interviewed me about the most profound historical event in my life (other than 9/11). For me it was the fall of the Soviet Union and specifically the Berlin Wall. I couldn’t believe it when it was happening – my whole life I had heard how fucking scary the Russians were and then – poof – it’s all over.
Now, he laments that his son, who is attending university, is reading Marx and wearing Che t-shirts.
A reminder that we are never done fighting the Marxist idiots.
Your assessment of Bloodlands was spot on. Horrifying but really important.
“The Last of the Soviets”
Well, that prediction fell flat. They’ve been spotted lately all over the streets of Murika.
Yeah, Biden won’t “inject you with bleach” but his gang sure will inject the body politic with communism/socialism/fascism.
I have a suspicion that not many of these milquetoast bolshie-LARPers have the stomach for full-scale, bloody bolshevism. At least, not when they’re screaming “oh my God! Call the cops! Call the cops!” when some blood is spilled on their side.
Part of why I read it now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5Wzj6j2krY
I think this sovietwave music captures the kind of optimism you are talking about.
The nostalgia too
?
I love Cold War porn, especially those that focus on East Germany. These look interesting too.
And they too have their Ostalgie – it’s sickening.
I went to an art exhibit with a girl I was trying to uh…befriend that was art of West and East Berlin. It was such a stark contrast.
West Berlin art was colorful, even in its more darker pieces (such as the Jewish shoes laid out from concentration camps).
East Berlin art was all monochromatic and dark and not a positive theme to be seen.
Makes sense. East Germany was depressing and covered in soot.
In the spring of 1990, when I was 13, I went on a school trip to Europe which included a few stops in East Germany. Even at that age, I was struck by how drab and monochromatic it was. There was one picture I took of a bright red Porsche 911 driving in a sea of dull, faded Trabants, because that image of bright color in such an ugly background was so arresting.
A girl in my grade school visited Eastern Europe in the early to mid 80s. Her dad, a local lawyer, somehow set up a tour for the family behind the Iron Curtain.
When they came back, she did a little show and tell of things she brought back from Eastern Europe. The only thing I remember was the toilet paper, which made sandpaper feel soft.
He was asserting that communism as practiced by the Soviet Union was so superior to capitalism that they would surpass the West in terms of standard of living by 1980. – real communism would have succeed
why it failed – because it was stupid
, no more cold, – global warming
what was lost and what might have bee – next time… we have to keep trying
Now the American Left hates Russia and thinks that Putin is the boogey man because they gave up on communism.
He kept the authoritarianism and got rid of the good parts. [Which of course leads to the joke “what were the good parts?”]
Weird how the Reason types were sure that open-trade with Chinese commies would mellow them out, but not the Russians who gave up on communism and just want to make money.
Well the issue with the fall of the USSR was that the KGB guys were all able to grab hold of the assets that did exist. Plus the KGB guys who had served in the West undercover were the only people in the country that knew how a capitalist economy functioned.
Free markets only work to produce social mobility and expand liberty, if the mechanisms for enforcing contracts, and protecting property (in other words the law) exist and are accessible by at least the middle class, and ideally everyone. When the mechanisms for enforcing contracts and protecting property are not accessible you get a full oligarchy/warlord run economy. You can’t just eliminate the current crop of rulers and declare the jubilee as we did when Yeltsin took over, you have to somehow create the sort of institutions that took 500 years to develop in England to the point where the American Revolution could work. The same institutions the left is attacking as structurally racist and patriarchial.
Which really means – give the fuck up on liberalizing the whole world. Deal with what exists, not what you dream of.
Two interesting recommendations, they have recorded. I will jump on the the “Bloodlands” bandwagon. It is an important, but deeply depressing read.
I would add “It Never Happened and it Way a Long Time Ago” to the CCCP reading list. This slim volume is how current Russia struggles with remembering the wholesale murders of the Soviet era. Since the killers still live among them (and many were highly decorated) they see danger in looking back. but millions want to know what happened to family members.
There’s an interview with a man who talks about his potential future father-in-law confessing to him. He leaves and never sees any of them again. Breaks up with his fiancee by mail. It’s one of the horrifying sections.
The man recalling it cannot forget. He’s horrified and haunted by what that man did (potential fil), the fact he’s still here and unpunished.
Added your recommendations to my book list
There’s a similar dynamic in China, though in China it’s ongoing. People just disappear sometimes. You don’t ask about them, you don’t talk about them, and you do your best to pretend they never existed.
My kids still don’t understand, no matter how I try to explain what Soviet Russia meant in my lifetime; the CCCP was gone by the time they were born – and we (US and Russia) were definitely gonna be friends now!! I remember watching it on TV in complete disbelief… Like, WTF just happened, Man?
I always wondered how long it was before the Soviet People realized they’d been had. I mean, how many decades of bread lines do you have to endure before reality intrudes? How much oppression is necessary before you stop lying to yourself? *Looks around facebook during lockdowns* Evidently quite a bit.
the Soviet People were not an unified block. given all the jokes they had many knew they been had fro the start. others were true believers to the end and after.
This
There are plenty of Russians who yearn for a return to the glory of the Soviet Union. They still believe.
Putin plays on that desire heavily.
Yes, he very skillfully straddles the line between the Soviets and 21st century Russia.
The glory of the USSR? You mean a massive military of inept conscripts and crappy hardware?
everyone had a job and a bowl of borscht
When I was in Moscow in the 1997 there were still people in front of the Kremlin in favor of communism holding large portraits of Stalin. In the Kremlin wall where the heroes are buried, the grave with the most flowers belonged to Gagarin. The grave with the second most flowers belonged to Stalin. To be fair, I can kind of understand why a pensioner might long for the old days after seeing his savings and pension inflated away.
Neither are the American people, Pie.
so?
Just an observation. Your comment made me think of the U.S. right now by comparison. Do you have any sense of the percentages? I’m just wondering how many nitwits there have to be for the tide to turn and suddenly you’ve got full-blown socialism, with the associated purges and the whole 9 yards.
I have no idea of the tipping point. But not many were needed in Russia in 1919… In Romania there were not enough but communism here was imposed by the Soviets it would not have reached power without them.
US 2020 is very different probably the % needed for socialism is much higher and not there. This is why they do salami tactics slice by slice bit by bit.
In the 1980’s it sure seemed like the Soviets would continue on for many more decades. They were still cunning, technologically advanced, and a huge military power. I wonder if the fast advances in personal computers, technology, and communications in the 1980’s pushed their leadership to question if the Soviets could compete anymore?
The USSR must have been struggling to keep it all together. They not only had to ensure the USSR remained whole, but the entire Warsaw pact countries as well. The US had two of it’s former enemies growing so fast that they were becoming economic super powers without much help other than security (GER/Japan).
Remember when we were told that all Soviet Women looked like Babushkas, boy were we lied to.
Our military build-up and economic growth during the 80’s put them at an impossible disadvantage. It exposed how weak they were and Reagan and Thatcher finished them off.
Years ago I read a recap of how we were lied to by our intelligence agencies, who vastly exaggerated the Soviet Union from top to bottom – economy, military, etc.
They were never going to last long. They bet on an empire they couldn’t afford, and fell into the trap of all empires – constant expansion was the only way to drag it out for a few more years. But a bigger empire is just a bigger drain.
Its interesting – one of my favorite professors in college was an out Marxist, although he was still intellectually honest. Great guy, got along with him back in the days when you could disagree and not be disagreeable. His take on the Soviets was what juris says – the Soviets were just more damn Russian autocrats, firmly in line with traditional Russian autocracy.
Well, they lasted seven decades. Seven decades of misery.
As far as your professor, the Marxists always have an excuse for why such and such isn’t “real” communism. Was your professor a Trotskyite? I remember that being the most popular excuse in academia back in the day.
I disagree that the Soviets were just more aristocrats. In fact, I find that argument just a flavor of “we just need the right people in charge”. Also Khrushchev and I think Brezhnev started as peasants/or close to it. In any other country, I think Khrushchev would be a Horatio Algers tale.
No, it really is the system that caused the fall. That’s the point Red Plenty makes. It could never work. Red Plenty lays it out so beautifully. There’s a vignette where the economists want to calculate prices instead of quantities, and the party leadership refuses. They know the current system isn’t working, but they also understand how it fails and what the impacts are. A party man points out that it fails because everybody lies and switching to calculated prices won’t fix that, but they don’t know how the impacts will change. So they reject it.
Note, calculated prices, not market prices.
I disagree that the Soviets were just more aristocrats.
Same here. I do think the case is pretty good that they were autocrats very similar to Russian autocrats for centuries. Much as the CCP is quite in line with traditional Chinese tyranny.
Also keep in mind that Chinese dynasties tend to be measured by centuries, not decades.
Autocratic market economies do well (Singapore). The problem still isn’t autocrats, it’s the system.
Some do well. Some don’t. The particular flavor of Russian autocracy tended not to do well. The Chinese have a deeper mercantile tradition (much of which splashed on Singapore), which means they have done better, IMO.
My point being, the Marxism/Communism is a combination marketing wrap/rationalization for doing what any tyrant emerging from those cultures would do.
The agencies lied to themselves.
Probably the single, most monumental failure of the CIA was to not see the fall of the Soviet Union coming. The Soviets were their entire justification for existence at the time and they were completely blind to reality.
The CIA should have been dismantled at that point, having proven their uselessness beyond a shade of a doubt.
Another good point. The CIA was so concerned about preventing expansion, they never seemed to notice the fragile state at the heart of the Soviet union.
If the Soviet Union went the way of the China with capitalism with Soviet features in 1980’s they might have slowed the decay.
The CIA has never been anything other than a jobs program for Ivy League nitwits. They got duped by the Limeys into installing the Shah, then failed to predict the 1979 revolution. IIRC, while US forces were concentrating on nabbing NAZI rocket scientists, the Sovs were working just as hard at nabbing Abwehr officers to build up intelligence capabilities of the USSR.
Is the CIA famous for anything but failure?
As a Marine in the late 80s, we were completely focused on fighting the Soviets. The Chinese were an afterthought and used the basic equipment and tactics anyhow. To the point that in Infantry School we learned about a hand-to-hand move their paratroopers were supposedly taught that would result in a broken neck. We had a counter-move drilled into our heads until it was automatic.
Then we got to the Gulf War facing a big army using Soviet equipment, and ran through them like a harvester.
Wars are fought by human beings. Soviets had no long service professional enlisted men or NCOs. It was all conscripts. That might have worked at Borodino, but it was dead even in WWII. One of the little known secrets of the Eastern Front was the American maintenance battalions. They did nothing but follow the Soviet armies and repair every broken down truck that was abandoned by the Soviet troops. Because none of them could fix them. They treated trucks like horses. Drive them till they die, then shove them off the side of the road and throw the cargo or troops on other trucks.
It takes at least six months to take a recruit and turn him into even a competent infantrymen. A tanker? An artilleryman? Air defense trooper? Longer than that. By the time you have them trained, they’re done with their term.
You have a source documenting US deployments into Russia? I have a little trouble swallowing that, particularly for any time prior to our war declarations.
Are you including the US forces sent into Vladivostok between 1918-1920?
It was in some WWII book I read. I’m trying to Google and I can’t find anything. Now, maybe the author of that book was totally full of shit. Certainly possible he just made the whole thing up.
Ozy – WWII specifically.
Viking – I would really need to see proof, because as fucking paranoid as Stalin was, I can’t imagine he would’ve accepted a bunch of Americans gallivanting around his country. Plus you have the difficulty of the materiel we shipped prior to our entry to the war. Just seems hard to believe we had loggies/maintainers to spare.
The Iraqis weren’t much different with their gear. They left stuff all over the desert.
When it came time to send our Kuwaiti interpreters home, we found a decent looking abandoned pickup truck. Our Motor T guys spent a day fixing it up and got it running great, and off they went.
From a technological perspective, the Soviets had plenty of brainpower, but none of the capabilities to produce. Silicon Valley and Texas buried them under a mountain of chips.
After the state fell, I knew a couple of people who flew across the entirety of Russia in a single prop airplane. The engineers and scientists came out of the woodwork to marvel at the commercial avionics of the early 90’s as they had nothing close to it, even in their military. The pilots got personal tours of the Soviet space program training facilities. The wiring throughout the buildings was still knob and tube.
In short, they had all of the potential, but none of the wherewithal to compete anymore.
That was my take as well. I had seen some of the semiconductor factories from the former Soviet Union. The most advanced ones were still 2 wafer generations behind the rest of the world in the mid 1990’s.
There is a reason you can still buy new vacuum tubes from former Soviet countries, they still needed them.
A guy who graduated from my engineering program a couple of years before me made a fortune on the fall of the Eastern Bloc.
He devised and patented a drop in replacement switching board for the hundreds of thousands of telephone switching facilities spread across Eastern Europe that increased the line handling capacity by tenfold.
AT&T bought his patent and designs for $800M.
The Russians to this day have better technical glass blowers than the US does. (High voltage tubes, relays). Their triggered vacuum switch from about 20-30 years ago is a thing of beauty. Painted in a shade of pink that was popular then with Russian HV devices.
Frankly, as long as the US has trashed our economy with the debt and self-inflicted wounds, I think we should invest in US semiconductor manufacture and a little share for technical glass blowing
I’m sick of being beholden to ChiComms and Russian oligarchs for what the US needs.
It’s a HUGE issue, and Trump’s focus on China is exactly right.
You need to find where all the technical glass blowers went to in the US. I have seen many talented ones making “tobacco” water pipes.
In all seriousness I remember taking a lab class with our college’s resident glass blower. It was so much an art, but he still needed precision and reproduce with consistency. He was 50 years old at the time, I wonder if they replaced him?
They’re scattered across various university programs.
I’m aware of some in Raleigh and at UVA. They make specialized helium targets for the particle accelerator at Jefferson Labs.
US semiconductor manufacture – I blame a certain glib for this
Fun note for 6 string enthusiasts: you can get variety packs of 12AX7 and variants from Russia, including old used, new-old stock, and new.
They all have “personalities” which even change as they age. Very different from solid state, but enjoyable to nerd musicians, or for nerd wives of musicians.
Thanks. I have a Traynor Mark 3 that needs a rebuild.
Nice! Be careful of stored energy and high voltage.
The Soviet Union sat on some of the worlds greatest natural resources- oil, natural gas, gold, diamonds, rare metals, and so on – but could never monitize any of it because their focus was on making more shitty tanks and other equipment. Sure, they told everyone it was to protect them, but they always worked to establish the necessary numerical superiority to actually be aggressors. Heck, these fucks knew their agricultural system was hamstrung by the communist shit, and that they could have plenty of food if they just let farmers profit from their work, but chose to starve their people, year after year, as well as expend fortunes they didn’t really have, because they couldn’t effectively industrialize and take advantage of their resources, Buying grain rather than let a new Kulak class come into being and threaten the party’s grip on power.
Fucking evil.
Yeah, the Russians were smart folks. They had great scientists and (thus) great technology, but not the implementation for it (in a lot of cases). Russian military aviation is famous for things like making fantastic engines – amazing power (thrust/weight), operate at higher altitudes than ours – BUT, no thought to ergonomics: i.e. how the human being/operator could best operate said equipment. Even the later MiGs were known for requiring tons of “head down” time because it was an incredibly complex aircraft with amazing systems, but only a single-seater. Just flat-out too much tasking for one dude.
“In mother russia, plane take you for fly.”
I got to sit in a MiG at Oshkosh one year. It was insanely crude. A couple weeks before it I had flown in a WWII T-6 Texan that seemed like the picture of refinement in comparison.
Pretty cool planes nonetheless.
The company that I worked for in the 90s had software development in Moscow. The CEO said, I can get a bunch of cheap developers in Bangalore, but in Moscow I get actual rocket scientists.
Their theoretical knowledge was amazing. I had a Soviet professor as my engineering adviser. The guy was intense and demanding beyond belief.
Having useful idiots like Stafford Cripps on their side didn’t hurt
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Nene
+ 1 Antonov
When it came to aircraft, they kept their pilots from training both because of cost and the fear they would fly off with the plane to a western country and offer it as payment for a defection. Same applied to their navy craft, including their subs. Their military had lots of equipment of low quality (quantity was its own quality was a common saying) but their real Achilles heel was the fact that their conscripts amounted to a poorly trained rabble while their officers were promoted for political reliability.
+1 Marko Ramius
Remember when we were told that all Soviet Women looked like Babushkas, boy were we lied to.
I know.
Soviet Fashion Show: https://youtu.be/FpypTXccG2I
I’m so glad that this got worked into the conversation. That was an absolutely iconic commercial of the time. My dad and I laughed our asses off at the time – “SWIM-Vear” still gets cackles if it can be worked into a conversation.
I was firmly in my Chuck Norris/Rambo phase at that time.
In other words, I thought that was fantastic.
definitely gonna be friends now!
This is what infuriates me with my fellow Americans – just how goddam dumb they can be. The Soviets often did things not because of [shudder] communism [/shudder] – but because they reflected long traditions/ambitions of Russia. The same is true of most every other country out there. But do we ever think about that? No, we just think they are all supposed to be like us and do what we want. Howcomenot???
Looking back, the thing that still amazes me is how fast it happened. April 1989, Hungary turned off the current to the electric fence with Austria. November 9, Berliners are streaming through the wall.
I was a sophomore in college watching it on TV. I had just been in East Germany two years prior.
I was dumbfounded.
I was in Bad Toelz, West Germany in a Special Forces unit during that period. Nobody knew what was going on.
In the summer the first Trabants showed up on the Autobahn with the first D and R cut off the nation ovals. They were absolutely loaded down. That November they broke into regular AFN programming to show the people on the wall and people with sledgehammers trying to open it. About an hour later we got alerted and started drawing all our arms and ammo for an emergency deployment. About 24 hrs later we got the stand down, turned in our stuff and returned home.
The last DDR spy arrested near Bad Toelz was in February 1990. Even after the wall was down the commies didn’t realize they had lost and fold up their tents.
Makes me want to re-watch Good-bye Lenin
It was amazing. And happened so quickly. And the police/guards didn’t just machine gun the escapees and later the wall destroyers either, like a European version of Tiananmen.
No more hunger, no more cold, and all their material wants satisfied if only they could sacrifice for just a little longer.
That conjured up an image of England in the ’60s, for me. We’re almost there. Labor harder!
Tulip, you being the economist can correct me, but wasn’t a large part of the problem with the USSR that they ended up consuming large portions of their capital stock?
it was general misallocation of resource and capital. Plus incompetence and power hunger. Plus a whole lot of other shit…
Central planning should work, yo. The central plans over here says so!
No, not really. Remember, Stalin actually took that country from wooden plows to the space age. It really was a remarkable transformation, and WWII also destroyed a lot of capital (also in Germany and Europe as a whole.) They still came a long way back mostly through sheer will. But, they had perverse incentives – basing goals on weight, or other quantities. And, you’ll never get it right without prices.
If you read Midnight in Chernobyl, you see examples, as well
Not all Russia was wooden plows and the space age was very limited relative to the country resources
it was still an incredible transformation.
meh. for me it is incredible if done organically without genocide and while respecting rights. If you throw massive resources, lives and human misery at a problem and get some solution, it is not impressive. the point is to do it without almost slavery.
My impression is that Eastern Russia was modernizing economically (by early 20th centure standards) when WWI and the Soviets showed up. To some extent, the Soviets boarded a train that was already leaving the station.
Most countries that became commie were like that. The trend continued differently. But the trend was there. And healthier development in the long run. And I see little reason to believe communism din anything particularly positive.
Yeah and the tankie apologism is “Well Stalin had a war to fight, so thats why civilian living standards lagged.”
But of course, the war was fought by Soviet men using an absolutely enormous quantity of Anglo materiel, supported by Anglo trucks and locomotives. We’re talking things like a third to a half of the trucks, locomotives, and aircraft used by the Soviets being American. Not to mention little things like 5 million tons of food, or moving an entire tire plant from Michigan to Russia.
“Lend-Lease tanks constituted 30 to 40 percent of heavy and medium tank strength before Moscow at the beginning of December 1941.[66][67]”
Communism means “If we sacrifice the civilians to cold and hunger, we can produce just enough T-34s to have a fighting chance coupled with Lend-Lease”
Capitalism means “We made the worlds largest navy, the worlds largest air force, massively expanded our own army, built an entire merchant marine to ship it all overseas, and also picked up the slack of all our allies on both fronts.”
Sure, I want a market economy, it is clearly superior, not least because it doesn’t require conscripts. I abhor communism, but let’s be clear about what was happening and why many would be optimistic for the future in the 1950s and 1960s. There were people that truly believed it was going to work.
There were people that truly believed it was going to work. – no one questions this. there still are – tankies
My grandma told me this story. After WWII my grandparents ended up in Estonia. My grandpa was an officer in the military, so they were the occupiers. They rented an apartment or a room from a local lady who was quiet outspoken about her displeasure with the Soviet occupation. She kept saying that one day a white steamer (белый пароход) would arrive and liberate them. The white steamer meant America. One day she saw a military vehicle arriving in front of her house. She got truly scared that she would be arrested and ran to the bathroom. Turns out my grandpa had to get home in the middle of the day and got a lift. It never occurred to my grandparents to denounce her.
God damn that’s a sad story.
Americans are coming to help was also a thing in Romania, often among peasant post collectivization hoping to get their land back
I’m sorry. After the White Russians collapsed, I don’t think that was ever really on the table.
I imagine this is what being a lady glib is like
Lol. There is truth to that. Even as the Boss, I surprise my young male engineers with my engineering knowledge and experience.
Sometimes being underestimated gives me the tactical advantage of surprise though, so I turn it to my benefit.
That’s just what being a glib is like.
Glibsplaining ignores all genders.
Everything I needed to know about politics was elite-splained to be by Joe Biden: “If you don’t vote for me, then you ain’t black!”
That’s very much what being a woman economist is like. I have had a man attempt to explain inflation indices to me. Inflation indices I helped revise. But I’m not bitter.
Reading these is going to break my black Russian heart.
Thanks for the reviews.
Russian Autumn Heart.
I always figured being Russian was similar to being Appalachian. There’s a certain fatalistic attribute to both personalities.
Definitely. Russians are quite comfortable and familiar with disappointment and suffering. They are suspicious of anything that seems too good to be true.
If you have a realistic (some would say “negative”) view of the world, then anything good is a bonus.
So now I’m going to mentally picture you as Susan Ivanova. Similar love of military hardware, at least…
Ochi chernye! ?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oQEjwKs_hpg
Off to pick up my hyper-expensive progressive lenses.
Getting old ain’t cheap.
Progressive??
He’s a witch! Burn him!
It may be expensive, but it beats the alternative…
They make everything you see look like racism.
I give it the full A+ for how quickly it was up there in reply.
I went with different glasses instead of progressive lenses.
I had bifocals when I was a kid and hated them.
Switching glasses doesn’t bother me. Losing track of which glasses is which on the other hand is a pain. Like the time I drove to Providence while wearing my computer glasses thinking they were my distance glasses.
I can’t fucking stand mine. For whatever reason, they were designed to be impossible to use at my computer desk without either pushing my chair back into the middle of the living room or tilting my head up so my eyes are pointed ten feet above my desk.
So I use my old glasses instead, and I have to perch them on the tip of my nose.
I wish I could have contacts, but my eyes are so bad (trifocal progressives) and I do so much computer work that I would have to have rx reading glasses. I would wear my contacts to the water park and suddenly found out what it was like to be far-sighted and unable to read anything because my arms were too short. That was surreal.
Obviously, it didn’t happen. That goal, the attempt to achieve it and why it failed is the theme of Francis Spufford’s “Red Plenty””.
I’ve read “Red Plenty”. I liked it for the same reasons you mention.
I’ll put “Secondhand Time” on my “to-buy” list.
I read “Bloodlands”. That was a depressing book, but something everyone should read.
got to mow the lawn this afternoon, but I bought some Milkshake Malt Porter to try later this evening.
good luck, watch out for bears
I miss the Kruschev type communists. They’d threaten to bury you, sure, and pound their shoe on the podium but at least they were rational.
Instead we get the Maoist/Khmer Rogue type that want to own your thoughts, not just have you tow the lion.
https://twitter.com/joshscampbell/status/1300823490396786689
Talking point alert:
It looks another point has been sent out. Be prepared to see many media heads talking about how the Riots aren’t real, and antifa isn’t real because it’s not happening everywhere in portland.
That’s the guy who was reporting from Lazienki Park in Warsaw while they were clearing out the ghettoes.
The riots are night-time affairs. I suggest he try noshing on a burrito at 11pm outside one of the contested police stations.
There have been a bunch of these. I’ve seen snarky media twits about DC and NYC with the same kind of comments.
“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”
To be fair, the riots probably happen in a relatively small area and don’t affect most of the city, at least in the short term.
I was in Portland a couple of years ago for the National Homebrew Conference.
At the airport on the way home, I bumped into a federal agent who had spent the previous few days protecting some federal building from “mostly peaceful protesters”.
But I think it is far worse now.
This is true in NYC. I don’t see any of the chaos that is reported in the news every day. But I live in a decent neighborhood. And I haven’t entered Manhattan in eight months.
I don’t doubt that they chaos is limited to certain areas. The idea then that is the case means we are all overreacting is silly. Riots are not a status quo, so the fact that they are happening at all is newsworthy and worrisome.
White Supremacist!!! Bigot!!!
I can go to plenty of places in the worst parts of Detroit and photograph serene scenes all day long but just because that can be done doesn’t mean there isn’t a hell of a problem there. The same can be said of Portland and they’re transparently full of shit and they know it.
“I also ate my breakfast burrito outside today and so far haven’t been attacked by shadowy gangs of Antifa commandos.”
Put on a Patriot Prayer hat at 9 PM, and slowly walk past the federal courthouse. If you come back unscathed, I’ll vote for Joe Biden.
LOL
I mean seriously, these people literally executed a man in cold blood because they didn’t like his hat.
Put on a Black Lives Matter shirt and a MAGA hat, and go to a Trump rally. Then do the same thing at a BLM protest. See which group reacts violently to the combination.
So unless it’s intense house to house, block by block fighting 24 hours a day, there are no riots. Ok….
The bit above about Soviet women reminded me of the old Wendy’s Soviet fashion show commercials.
I think Jaime beat you above by a few minutes.
Ah, so he did. They were funny enough to watch twice!
I often wonder what kind of parallels we can draw between the formation of the CCCP and the current socialist uprisings here. Russia was never generally prosperous before the Soviets came along. We have been generally prosperous for our entire existence, even going back to Medieval Europe and the rise of the merchant class.
Gives me hope that the socialists won’t be successful here, but then again, we’ve had creeping socialism for a goodly amount of time.
the will certainly not succeed in the same fashion
Tough call but extinction.
https://twitter.com/ArchRose90/status/1300767887536328705
First will start by extincting the socialists.
There is a lot of projection happening when it comes to looking at Russia from the west. We assume they want to be a western democracy – they seem perfectly happy with some degree of democracy along with a Czar. Lefties think they want all the cultural stuff they want – importing strangers from far away lands and all their wokeness – Russians seem to have to no interest in that nonsense. In other words, they like being Russian.
It is clear many, for better or worse, don’t want to be a western democracy certainly not in the current iteration. Just like many Asians don’t
*Looks at 20 month long Presidential campaigns, the blatant violation of our Constitution by every government elected for my lifetime and many decades before my birth, the endless, relentless propaganda that we call a press, and polemic we call science, the ever repeating waves of emotionally driven kangaroo courts (and ridiculous acquittals when emotions go the other way) that pass for a system of justice.
Why on Earth would anyone not want this?
Why on Earth would anyone not want this?- depends on the alternative
Looting of the economy by globalists, subversion by big tech millionaires and whatever Soros is, wholesale sell-outs to China for a a few bucks…
they like being Russian – many do some don’t. but this is part propaganda, part not knowing much of the rest of the world,part tradition etc…
I remember how much all my friends and I loved Red Dawn when it was new and we were kids. We used to play “Wolverines” in the woods all the time with our toy plastic rifles, but no one ever wanted to be a Rooskie so we just imagined them. Between Red Dawn, Rocky IV, and reading The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising, I was quite the rabid little Cold Warrior.
I wish I could remember the name of the survivalist/mercenary catalogs I got back then. It was all guns, boobs, and mail-ins for your own copy of The Anarchist Cookbook.
It was probably all a front for the FBI now that I think about it.
Do they still publish Soldier of Fortune? That was good stuff – guys telling real or made up stories about fighting in the Congo Wars.
Pretty sure it’s still around, although I think they dropped the infamous classified ads after they were sued when someone hired a hitman thru them back in the 90’s.
Paladin Press (RIP) was one.
The Third World War, By Gen.? David Hackworth, that was the ’80s for me
I read his biography – good stuff although I didn’t agree with all of his opinions.
I read that as well as Steel My Solders’ Hearts which was specifically about Vietnam. Hackworth was his own man, that’s for sure.
Colonel – he was way to far out there in terms of thinking and politics to get a star.
Your saying he was black?
British
He cared more about his men and trying to win in Vietnam than he did his career.
It’s like ya’ll don’t even read the morning links.
That was a really long time ago!
“The Third World War” was by a Brit. MajGen Sir John Hackett, who also was a commander during Operation Market Garden.
My bad, That’s the Book I meant
Read that one too – accurate for the early 80’s. By the late 80’s we would have ripped them to shreds before they got 150 miles into West Germany.
Went to the grocery store a while ago. Was asked (and did) to put a mask on by an employee. Yes, I will comply with your voodoo ritual if asked, because I wouldn’t want to get 86ed from the grocery store. “Buying groceries is a privilege, not a right” as some Great American Thought Leader has said.
*this particular employee really benefits from the mask rule, because it covers up the nasty skank fish hook in her nose
Question for those who have more experience in this than me (which would be anyone who has experience in it). I’m thinking of selling my Springfield 911 9mm and potentially picking up a H&K P30SK instead. The big local gun shop has a bad habit of lowballing any potential trade ins, and I was thinking of trying one of the online options. Anyone ever use gunbroker or one of the similar sites to sell firearms?
Don’t sell any of your guns, unless you *really* don’t like it. That’s my advice.
The main reason for getting rid of it is that we already have a similar, but much better, version of the same thing (Sig P938), and this one just duplicates a very niche option. Between the the HK and my new Jeep, the wife is starting to get a bit grumbly about my expenditures, especially when she wants to get a new appliances for the house. So the idea that I could make up some of the cost of the new one would save some of the disapproving glances.
Invest heavily in chocolates.
Take her shoe shopping.
Y’all really don’t know my wife – for her birthday one year she asked for an air compressor and a nail gun…
Doesn’t mean she dislikes shoe shopping.
Which gun is hers?
The Sig. She got it when she went out shooting with one of her coworkers. She says she’d let me take it out, but I never seem to find a time when she doesn’t have it with her…
So you have a different gun that’s yours?
*Still not understanding the concept of selling a gun
Sometimes you’ll have a gun that you don’t like anymore, and you want to trade it for a gun you’ll like better. It does happen.
Several. Currently carrying a XD-E in .45, but wanted a carry option in 9mm as well (it’s rather hard stocking multiple different calibers, and we have a nice supply of 9mm). Have the Sig for her carry, and a full size XD in 9mm for the house. I’d hold on to the XD-E, but would be getting a replacement carry pistol in 9mm. The 911 is just a bit too small for my tastes.
I hated my Ruger 22/45, but love the MkIV Hunter I traded it in on.
How much do you want for it? I am interested.
Hell, I don’t know. Sell new for about $500-550 from what I’ve seen. But it being used (gently – about 500-600 rounds), and it going to a Glib, $400? I have 1 6-round magazine and 4 7-round magazines that would go with it.
ok
email me at
carraig1014
at
yahoo
Email sent…
Glib gunrunning confirmed.
?
not seeing it yet.
try
kinnath
at
ballymacosker
.com
Ok, tried the second one. If that doesn’t work I can be reached at:
shedendblue
(at)
gmail
(dot)
com
received
I use GunBroker all the time, buying and selling. It’s fine.
I do too. Never had a problem. Helps to know your FFL guy, some of them will rip you off on fees.
My FFL is my pops. He promises that he’ll burn his bound books before the commies invade.
That should help ensure reasonable transfer fees.
God bless him.
The ATF’s digitization project of illegally held records seriously pisses me off.
Here’s the latest from those superpatriots of the Democratic Party. Spoiler alert – hope you weren’t terribly attached to the Washington Monument.
But they had a committee and shit!
Let’s save some time and money by nuking the whole city.
DT needs to keep spreading the Dems own words. They speak more to what they desire than anything he can say.
Then during Joe’s lucid moments during the debates, make him defend this shit. (Use lots of numbers since other Glibs have pointed out that Joe stumbles over numbers.)
speaking of former communist places, maybe Pie could start a kickstarter to pick it up:
https://www.buzznicked.com/draculas-castle-for-sale/
It worked for Peter Brimelow.
I think we should all kick in and start our own country of Glibertopia.
Glibertopia – where the men are men and the pants are optional.
Pants are NOT optional.
See? Even Glibertopia will be repressive!
Okay, fine. Pants are forbidden, then.
I don’t mind wearing skirts
Kilts it is then!
Skirts and Kilts for all!
Do the chaps go on under or over the kilt? Surely there will be chainsaw work to do.
Heh, see how easily we worked that out, as long as we avoid discussing pizza, it’ll be fine.
HA! I have yet to wear pants during the zoom happy hours.
Holy shit……THIS was Biden’s Pittsburgh speech location? He was flown to another city to give a speech in an empty warehouse and then whisked back to the basement?
It’s beyond parody.
Well, at least we have our answer to what was with the chicken wire.
What the heck are the four seat people? Boys on one side, girls on the other, one of them wearing what appears to be a head scarf?
They’ve put all their eggs into the “election fraud” basket.
That is amazing.
The heckling was kind of funny
https://youtu.be/hkT5i_Zm-vM
But now his campaign can claim Biden is out on the campaign trail campaigning.
That didn’t take long: Joe Rogan censored:
https://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/ikclgl/spotify_has_censored_joe_rogan_already_and_its/
A bunch of episodes went poof Into the aether on the transfer to Spotify. Did he sell out or did he get screwed I wonder?
Safe…because if you’re not careful, you could DIE from reading a Reddit thread!
I missed that, I think it was removed when I posted it but I’m not sure. The sub threads have the info too and I just skipped to them.
Yeah, thats a way to treat the guy you paid a bazillion dollars to get onto your platform.
Give him a hundred mil and then delete the controversial (aka interesting) guests. Seems stupid but what do I know?
Started reading Bloodlands, and couldn’t make it past the first chapter. Also in the same line as that one and It was a long time ago, is Nothing to Envy. As with the first one, haven’t read either of those.
The only bright part of Bloodlands is when the first crop of commie murderous thugs falls out of favor and gets liquidated by the new crop of commies. A tiny shred of karma shining through the horror.