I'm not advocating communism, but if you look at the Soviet Union as a process, it did manage to turn an agrarian society (feudal, actually) into an industrialized one in 70 years. It's quite a feat, even more so if you consider the destruction they suffered in WWII.
First, I'm not quite sure you appreciate the cost of that industrialization. The USSR achieved fast extensive growth in its early years by forcing a very high savings rate. What does that mean? They exported lots of grain to buy machinery. Where did the grain come from? The peasants. What did the peasants do after their grain was taken? They starved. The general attitude during this time (which helped the Party consolidate power) was not so much of withholding food from dissidents, but rather withholding food from anyone who couldn't make a convincing case for how they were benefiting the party or the state. So most of the progress in bring up the USSR industrial capacity per person was due to increasing industrial capacity, but a notable part of it was due to decreasing the number of people as well.
Second, forced savings is a good strategy for playing catchup industrially when there are lots of obvious ways you can invest the savings (called extensive growth). Its possible to mess this up (see the Great Leap Forward) but if the beaurocrats are competent its possible. But when you've urbanized and need to start specializing more to keep growing the economy finding efficient ways to do so becomes harder (you're in intensive growth). Its here that government directed industrial policies tend to fail (or at least work more slowly than less directed solutions) due to coordination problems.
Also let's not forget labor camps. Some big industrial projects (especially in Siberia) such as dams, the Trans-Siberian railroad, factories, power lines etc., were built with slave labor.
I am not sure of the %, I imagine it is not terribly large, but it is still there.
Other projects were built with student labor. University students were encouraged to provide volunteer work on such projects. They got on a train and traveled some place wherever help was needed. My father said it was quite fun. He spent a summer in Khazakstan, then another in Siberia.
Can you back your claims up? In particular, say, the Trans-Siberian railroad? Its construction began in 1891, two decades before the formation of the USSR [1].
While certainly prisoners were used in its construction, saying that it was "built with slave labor" is somewhat disingenuous. Perhaps you are saying that parts of it were built using prisoners, who were not paid for their services? If so, that is certainly the case.
i have personally heard anecdotes (and seen snapshots) from people in school in the late 80s, early 90s, who were regularly herded into the fields to harvest potatoes (czech republic). they too considered it rather fun for whatever reason.
In the 80s, I went on field trips to learn how to plant vegetables. This was hardly slave labor.
In the 90s in the US, I had to spend 40 hours "campaigning" for candidates, if I wanted to graduate highschool. I wouldn't really call that slave labor, but, I certainly learned a lot more by planting sprouts.
I'm 45 and I used to pick potatoes in the autumn in Scotland when I was at school - the holidays in October were known as the "Tattie Holidays" (tattie being Scots dialect for potato).
Are these reports from first hand experience or can you site your sources?
In particular, I'm curious how you'll back up the "but a notable part of it was due to decreasing the number of people as well," considering USSR's population grew during the period you are describing [1].
Partially this is from reading a book by a Soviet ex-patriot (who I'll admit might be lying) and partially from the textbooks from my early Soviet history class in college. I'd give you better references, but my books are at home and I'm not right now.
I should also point out that during the 1920-1940 period the USSR did a lot of territorial expansion into the lands held by the Whites, and then later into the Baltic states and grabbing parts of Finland and Poland.
I'll admit, though, that given that we're talking about the industrialization period in general I shouldn't be talking about a decreasing population since over the whole early industrialization timeframe the population did rise even without considering conquest. I would have done better to day "but a notable part of it was due to keeping population growth down with the use of famines."
If it's the famine in Ukraine [1] that you are talking about, absolutely. But, are you saying that it was done as part of industrialization?
My great grandfather was one of the peasants you describe (his land was taken away). Although the state use of land was inefficient, it was not the continual famine that you imply. Food shortages occurred, but, they occurred under the Tsars as well. The industrialization that occurred pre and post WWII in the USSR seems pretty undeniable though.
Impressively, Nazi Germany was able to invent and field ballistic missiles, and to launch them at a rate never seen since, all while under constant bombardment.
Just don't ask where they got their factory workers.
The Soviet Union was quite literally built on slave labor (http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/work.php). Arguably, the Gulag system of slavery was even more brutal than that of the American South. And like the South, they ultimately fell behind technologically and industrially to a free society.
What is forgotten today is that there were men who contemporaneously made the connection between communism and slavery while advocating for it, including George Fitzhugh:
Sociology for the South, or, the Failure of Free Society (1855) was George Fitzhugh's most powerful attack on the philosophical foundations of free society. In it, he took on not only Adam Smith, the foundational thinker of capitalism, but also John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and the entire liberal tradition. He argued that free labor and free markets enriched the strong while crushing the weak. What society needed, he wrote, was slavery, not just for blacks, but for whites as well. "Slavery," he wrote, "is a form, and the very best form, of socialism."
Built between 1931 and 1933, the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal was the first massive construction project of the Gulag. Over 100,000 prisoners dug a 141-mile canal with few tools other than simple pickaxes, shovels, and makeshift wheelbarrows in just 20 months. Initially viewed as a great success and celebrated in a volume published both in the Soviet Union and the United States, the canal turned out to be too narrow and too shallow to carry most sea vessels. Many prisoners died during construction.
Vorkuta, a city built by gulag labor in the tundra 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow and 100 miles above the Arctic Circle, is slowly dying - and those who remain in many cases cannot afford to leave.
A Soviet-era sign that remains atop a central building exhorts people to mine more coal, the resource that first attracted the gulag's architects in the 1930's and resulted in forced labor by two million prisoners before the camps shut down in 1950's.
And are those all of the things that were built, created in the USSR at the time? To the extent that it allows you to claim that "The Soviet Union was quite literally built on slave labor?" Were they even a fraction of a percent?
You seem to be pointing out that the GULAGs existed and are providing sources for this fact. I'm not really disputing the existence of the labor camps. Let me ask you this, do you know anyone who lived in the USSR, who worked in the USSR and who was not a convict in a labor camp? I know lots. Are you saying that they do not count?
Compare that to the rapid developments of post-war Germany, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, then post-1990: Poland, Hungary, The Czech Republic etc. We have to look at opportunity costs, not just raw improvements.
None of those situations (which I have any knowledge about) are even remotely comparable to that of Russia at the time of revolution. Germany and Japan had been fully industrialized. Singapore basically grew by attracting capital as a tax haven.
Russia in 1917 was about as developed as Germany or Japan in 1850 - or Britain in 1750.
The funny thing is that this fact means the revolution totally contradicted Marxist doctrine, which predicts communism as a natural remedy to the excesses of capitalism. Russia hadn't even entered the captitalist "phase" yet - it was literally the least appropriate country in Europe to stage a communist revolution in.
While I see your point against those examples it's worth noting that Japan in the mid 19th century was a feudal society with hundreds of thousands of samurai, and by WWII they were fielding a massive navy with aircraft carriers capable of striking the USA. And the difference between the wealth of Americans at the beginning of the 20th century compared to the end is also larger in many ways. However, the difference between starving and a full belly is certainly something which people will pay more attention to rather than the difference between being well fed and then acquiring large houses, refrigeration, washing machines, one or two cars, mobile phones, radio, television, landing a couple of guys on the moon and getting them back, computers and the Internet. The scope of western capitalist development in the 20th century is simply staggering compared to any pissant planned economy, and it was done without the most horrific mass murders of the 20th century that we see under the communist regimes.
Also, Lenin's modification of Marxist theory is somewhat irrelevant, the Marxist foundation was entirely wrong on a number of massive points: one more wasn't going to make a difference.
IMO, the funny thing is the United states (1950 - 1980) is probably the closest example of the Marxist ideal you can find. After industrialization you had violent conflict between workers and factory owners that resulted in places like GM being gutted by their workers who kept the fruits of their labors. Arguably by the end of the cold war it was more a question of how you organize a communist country than would you create one.
PS: Of course with automation and computing many of the old assumptions stopped applying but it’s hard to complain when someone only sees 75 - 100 and not 150 years into the future.
