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>Actually if you look at where they started and where they got, they did a pretty good job in raising the very poorest our of poverty, electrifying the country, and really eliminating a lot of the abject poverty that was most of the country at the time of the revolution.

That's the funny part about it. USSR was basically an engineered society with eliminated "overhead" of debating, negotiating, marketing, private risk-taking, etc. It worked extremely well while the goals to achieve were basic and everyone agreed on them. If you're living in a glorified mud hut in the 20th century, it's a no-brainer that the goal #1 is to build industry, powerlines, etc.

Except once the common needs were satisfied, the system ran into stagnation. How this would be resolved in the West is a risk-taking individual starting a company, organically growing it into a bigger business, eventually creating workplaces, and in some cases - entire industries. Planned economy can't have that - the only way to create something new would be through getting state funding, i.e. being in good terms with the inner party circle. It's the same reason why big corporations often can't quickly adapt to changes lose to lean startups despite unimaginable resources available to them. Except when your entire country is one inefficient corporation, you're really fucked.

IMO, Russia is still greatly suffering from the lack of the "overhead" removed by the USSR. The majority of people expect someone else to plan and decide for them, they don't get the concept of watching for your own interests, they alienate and despise hustling and blame others for their misfortune. I really hope that's not the way U.S. is heading, because I'm not sure there is an easy way out of this kind of a trap.

If you make the argument the USSR removed that overhead, it might be good to keep in mind, the tsars and the kosacks where busy removing it long before.

How?

Tsar Russia was a very centralised society. A large portion of the population were not allowed to make any decisions for themselves, because they were slaves.

Another large portion were peasants, but they reported to a master.

And the Tsar himself was bogged down in decision making about minutiae to the degree that he had little time for strategic thinking.

> Except once the common needs were satisfied, the system ran into stagnation.

You are vastly understating the magnitude of the USSR's problems.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921–22 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932–33 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1946–47

I don't understand why you say "it's unlikely the Menshevik republicans would have pulled that off". It's what "Menshevik republicans" i.e. social democrats were doing in much of Western Europe (together with other democratic parties), and look at the results and compare them to what USSR ended up by 1991.

Of course, starting from 1917, it was not that hard to achieve progress, because the starting point was so low. NEP (the New Economic Policy of 1920's) was very efficient - but it was unorthodox in Stalin's theories, so a lot of people ended up dead or in the camps.

It puzzles me why socialists all over the world last year celebrated the October revolution (start of a new tyranny) but not the February revolution (end of old tyranny). I suppose it is because of romantic sentiments, and not knowing what actually happened.

They were successful by the late 30s (after lots of misery), but the Russian economy had been growing for a long time. I'm not sure the imperials or republicans couldn't have pulled it off, Russia had lots of natural advantages, especially after winning WW2.

GNP:

    Country 	1890 	1900 	1913 	1925 	1938
    Russia/USSR 21 180 	32 000 	52 420 	32 600 	75 964
    Germany 	26 454 	35 800 	49 760 	45 002 	77 178
    Britain 	29 441 	36 273 	44 074 	43 700 	56 103
    France 	19 758 	23 500 	27 401 	36 262 	39 284

They went from the second smallest economy in 1890 to the biggest in 1913 (imperials). The economy crashed after the revolution and bad economic experiments and then rebounded. Russia was late to the industrial revolution so a lot of that growth was just it kicking in, along with the Soviets removing anyone that got in the way. Hard to say how much can be attributed to either.

They were holding their own late into WWI and actually had an agreement to obtain Istanbul, which the Bolsheviks revoked (hard to fault them) along with all that they gave up in the separate treaty with the Germans. Imagine them sticking it out to 1918 with gains from being on the allies and the revolution averted. They would have been as well positioned as anyone in Europe.

  The economy crashed after the revolution

The loss of the war with Japan didn't help, either.

Source?

I can’t find any evidence that there was any economic significance to that war aside from loss of the fleet and human life. Bruised imperial egos for sure and likely contributing to an image of a week government, but I’m hard pressed to see how it could have had any impact on the industrial output of the country.

You could surely say that the war with Japan didn't help.

Well-known events like the Potemkin mutiny may be dismissed as not impacting industrial output, but there was a large-scale general strike which actually lead to "1905 revolution" [0]. The loss to Japan was of course only a partial factor, with bigger contributor being the overall economic downturn of early 1900's.

There were some direct impacts from this revolution. There was large-scale unrest in Kingdom of Poland (the Russian-held part of partitioned Poland). Finland (then a Grand Duchy in the Russian empire) abolished Diet of Finland in favour of a new Parliament of Finland, with universal suffrage for both men and women. And in mainland Russia, the absolute monarchy was abolished in favour of a parliamentary monarchy.

However, this was too late for the Russian empire to recover.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905_Russian_Revolution

Sergei witte basically saved Russia’s ass in the peace negotiations. He was one of at least two very good ministers fired by the tsar in a time when Russia really needed one.

> They went from the second smallest economy in 1890 to the biggest in 1913 (imperials).

What does it matter, if 90% of the population lived in near complete destitution?

> Russia had lots of natural advantages, especially after winning WW2

What? How is having all your industrial infrastructure destroyed and 20 million of young, able-bodied males killed an advantage?

I believe GP is referring to natural resources (oil, gas, etc...) rather than the human cost of war.

> Actually if you look at where they started and where they got, they did a pretty good job in raising the very poorest our of poverty

Depends on in what column you put the ~10% of the population they murdered.

I would think of them as "not raised out of poverty".

I believe America had it's own similar human liquidation program leading up to industrialization as well.

I presume you're referring to the ab original inhabitants? Sadly, quite effective.

That was pre-industrialization, though, and mostly due to things like smallpox for which indigenous population had no resistance, even before actual immigration from Europe.

its own

I fail to see what the ugly part of the American past has to do with the current thread. Your comment feels a lot like Whataboutism[0] to me.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Can someone explain to me the downvotes?

I can only derive from them that someone thinks that what I wrote is wrong. Maybe I am missing something and I just do not know.

It appears a number of people use downvote to mean "I disagree". I suppose they think HN is Facebook.

Also of course some people use it correctly, which confounds the data.

  they did a pretty good job in raising the very poorest our of poverty

Those who weren't outright killed during or in the wake of the revolution and pogroms, anyway. But many who DID survive did so only because of famine relief from the USA and Europe as farm collectivization went sideways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_and_famines_in_Russia...

Pogroms were definitely not a Soviet phenomenon. Many of the party leaders were Jewish. In that article, it shows that since 1947 no famines. I think the original post is making the argument that they started making progress later. 1950-1970 they really did make progress in almost every concretely measurable thing. USSR went tits up in the way that maybe a chilled out company (albeit with a weird corporate culture) would not compete well against a sweatshop with a culture of work hard, make money. The latter would just have more output, innovate quicker and maybe make a better product. But maybe also be better at cutting corners, or marketing or growing for the sake of growth like a cancer. I’m all over the place bc it’s a huge topic, but there is a reason why a lot of people miss the Soviet Union - and it’s not only because it was their youth.

Pogrom, meaning specifically persecution of Jewish communities, was not a Soviet phenomenon. Otherwise, there were a number of ethnic persecution campaigns in the USSR, with the Holodomor being the largest, but there were also many others. There were lots of people killed.