Talk:History of the Soviet Union/Archive 4

Great article. I feel like I know why Soviet history developed the way it did.

172, Where exactly did you get the figures from about the "success" of the five year plans. everyone knows that the official production figures were plucked out of thin air, and bore little relation to reality. Also isn't it worth mentioning that a lot of the output from these new industries created during the five year plans was of very poor quality. I feel that this article needs to be a little more sceptical. G-Man

- G-Man:

I recommend that you read the material of the historians and economists cited in the article. Considering the scope of your intersts, you'd really enjoy the material.

I wouldn't it state it so bluntly in the article, but the Soviet Union&#8217;s planned economy was a long-run victim of the fact that it was able to work in a short run (at the cost of prison labor, deplorable working conditions, and the emphasis on quantity over quality). Russia went from being a country of peasants to a highly urbanized, highly advanced, highly industrialized superpower in the brief period from 1929 (when the Administrative Command System (ACS) was established) to Stalin&#8217;s death in 1953, but this would explain the later failures of the ACS. The economy simply grew too large, advanced, and complex (because of Stalin&#8217;s ruthless harnessing of labor and capital resources) for it to be planned, and the population could no longer tolerate shortages of shoddy goods because of ever-improving living standards in a country going from the pre-industrial era to the industrial era.

Now about the other question you raised. Inefficiency, supply shortages, and poor quality are important topics, but these systemic problems are far greater problems once more attention is paid to consumer goods in the post-Stalin years. But the article does tie these problems to the Stalin era. If you read the article beyond Stalin you&#8217;d see that the article is stressing that the Stalin years laid the groundwork for systemic problems that would become pronounced well after Stalin&#8217;s death and indeed even today.

The article might not be written in the prose of Robert Conquest with which many readers are familiar, but it by no means calling the Stalinist administrative command system a &#8220;success&#8221;, which you accused it of stating.

Perhaps you&#8217;d get a greater sense of the logical flow if of the article if you read the rest of the article.

172

I have no quarrel with the content, for the most part, but it really needs lot of editorial work -- wordy, florid prose that can easily be cut; less common words used where common ones suffice, sentences with little context (e.g. "In the mean time, the Party, still dominated by pragmatists, took constructive steps to offset the crisis," doesn't flow well, when there has not yet been any discussion at all of "pragmatists" in the party"  -- frankly, it reads like a well-researched but precocious college research paper.

The historiography if the Soviet Union is about as contentious as the actual history of the Soviet Union, but I suggest that before arguing over Stalinist, Trotskyist, Anarchist, or Capitalist bias in the text, we first work on making it a little clearer. Slrubenstein

-- &#8220;Well-researched but precocious&#8221;? Now what does that mean? &#8220;Well-researched but highly intelligent research paper&#8221;? &#8220;Well-researched but gifted research paper&#8221;?


 * hmmmm. That isn't what I meant by precocious.

See, it&#8217;s easy to make mistakes. I&#8217;d appreciate it if you chose not to degrade me for one or two awkward sentences that you picked out.


 * 172 -- I didn't think I was degrading you at all. I am commenting on the article, on the text, not the authors.  Indeed, I am sure that some of my changes are to portions of the article written before you joined Wikipedia.  But now that you are here, please join the Wikipedia spirit -- none of these articles belong to anybody.  Please do not take my comments personally -- I am faulting the text, not any person (although here is one comment you can take personally: I appreciate a lot of the content you have added to the article; good job)

The reference to &#8220;pragmatists&#8221;, however, is not one that requires rewording. The article already names the Bukharinites the &#8220;pragmatists&#8221;. When teaching, I found that calling certain party factions &#8220;right&#8221; or &#8220;left&#8221; tends to confuse students since Communists are all supposed to be &#8220;leftists&#8221;. It&#8217;s easier to understand the divide, however, between hard-liners (left Trotskyites) or (right Bukharinites) pragmatists.


 * I disagree. First, it is important to educate people that words like "right" and "left" mean different things in different contexts.  Soviet communists used the words "right" and "left" themselves; the article must include this, and explain what people meant at the time.  By the way, I often think it does a good job of this (I am not arguing with the article here, just taking issue with one of your comments on the talk page).  Also, I have problems with "pragmatist."  Like it or not, it is just as meaning-laden, and prone to misuse, as "right" or "left."  Do you mean prqgmatsist a la Dewey or Peirce?  Do you mean "realist?"  What is pragmatic, anyway?  The word is used rhetorically; most people (in the US) think "pragmatist" = good; in fact, many "pragmatists" just do not admit to their own dogmas, and many people accused of being idealists or dogmatac truly think they are being realistic and pragmatic.  I have no objection to introducing the term in this article IF it is a word that the communists themselves used, and if the meaning, in its context, is explained.  Which is what we have been trying to do for "left" and "right"

I&#8217;d also like to remind you that the section on factional infighting in the party under the NEP was not entirely my work. The quality of that section is inferior to others because I was weaving together the content that was already there with my own. I admit that this can disrupt the flow, but it is always preferable to salvage preexisting content.


 * I never said it was, and I never addressed any comments sepcifically to you. Please do not get defensive when I am not attacking you.

However, I&#8217;m not coming back to this article until I get an apology for that comment.


 * Which comment? Slrubenstein

172
 * I personally think that Slrubenstein's point is astute: this article could be made more concise and reworded to be clearer. When I have some spare time, I'll see what I can do to help the article. 172, this is a collaborative project. Try not to feel "ownership" for the article; no contributor really owns these articles. Along that line of thinking, please do not be offended of criticisms of articles you've worked on; it's all in the spirit of improvement.
 * --cprompt

-- cprompt:

You&#8217;re taking my comments out of context. I wasn&#8217;t objecting to the criticism, but the nature and tone of the criticism. I was also objecting to being blamed for all of the article&#8217;s shortcomings. If it&#8217;s not concise, I shouldn&#8217;t be faulted since I was weaving new content with content that was already there. Some redundancy is inevitable whenever new content is being combined with old content. And it&#8217;s usually corrected over time.

It would&#8217;ve been better to reword some sentences rather than making a blanket criticism of my writing style, research quality, and quality of analysis (which is pretty much reflective of the consensus of most Soviet specialists). It was also problematic that only content pertaining to the NEP was criticized as a basis for an offhand criticism of the entire article. As you can see, the article is much improved after I began making substantial contributions to it, being really the first to write a detailed chronicle and analysis of the ACS system and its fall (critical of any understanding of Soviet history). So why should my contributions be faulted as sub par?

It&#8217;s also quite evident in the talk pages that I was despertaly begging for collaboration from the beginning. I haven&#8217;t really been able to find it. I&#8217;ve just been encountering blanket critisms for problems for which I&#8217;m not really responsible. How about collaboration in editing and adding content, not just in the form of criticism? 172

I'd also like people to edit and add content to all the pages on Brazilian history to which I've been contributing lately. ---