Bhaskar Sunkara

I say this kind of coolly, but we know in practice what that meant.

You know, forced collectivization was a disaster.

I mean, first of all, I think it was built on the faulty premise that scale always equals more productivity when in fact, especially in agriculture, but in any field, it's a little bit more complicated than that.

And it led to millions of deaths.

You know, it led to a famine.

It led to a host of other problems.

Industrialization in the way that it happened under Stalin also kind of unbalanced the Soviet economy to lean too heavy towards heavy industry, not enough for medium or light industry.

But this did mean, especially the five-year plan and industrialization, did

managed to put Russia on a different developmental trajectory.

So by the time the post-war period came, one, it might have gave them the ability to survive the Nazi invasion to begin with.

That's a complicated question.

And then by the time the post-war period came, Russia had kind of jumped ahead of its developmental trajectory in a way that

a lot of other countries didn't do.

There are a few examples, like Japan is one to manage to.

If you kind of ran a scenario of where Japan would be in the 1870s, 1880s, and ran it 100 times, the Japan of the post-war period is kind of one of the best outcomes, right?

And I think that you could say that about Russian economic development, its ability to catch up at a certain level to the West.

And then after that, of course...

later on, as economies got more complex, as they kind of moved beyond regular heavy industry and as the main stable of the economy, the Russian economy and its command system was unable to adapt and cope and ended up falling back behind the West again by the 1970s.

So all this is a very long story to say that

A lot went wrong in Russia.