Three Lessons from Demise of Soviet Union
Even though the red superpower has demised for more than three decades, there are still leftists fabricating the achievements of the USSR in all aspects. These Western leftists portray an illusional paradise with more advanced technology and better living standard than North America and West Europe. (The other paradise visualised by the leftists is North Korea) No matter how hard these leftist thinkers attempt to prove their delusions employing statistics and numbers, reality always prevails over opinions: the Soviet Union has vanished from the world map. If it had been a paradise like the Western leftists try to portray, why did its people and elites unanimously decide to abolish the communist regime? Why scarcely any people today miss the Soviet years? In such a “country founded for the ordinary people”, Why did ordinary people have to queue for daily necessaries but communist party elites had privileges to buy imported products and foods?
This article is not a mock or attack upon the leftists who are embellishing the Soviet Union and other communist regimes. It is not aimed at logically proving why communism and socialism will lead to poverty and totalitarian governments, either. Living in 2024, we have to review the mistakes of international observers when analysing the USSR, and the intrinsic defects in a political system like the USSR (e.g. China today). As the analysis and discussion on these subjects can easily form a 500-page book, I will only try to provide some concise opinions as hints for further discussions.
Numbers might not tell the truth
Many statistics in the 1970s indicated the Soviet Union would defeat the US plus its allies. This was particularly true regarding the statistics about the scale of industrial production. The logic of economists pro tempore was the same as the experts anticipating China would take on the US plus the EU in the early 2010s: they assessed the comprehensive power of the USSR merely based on its size and scale. The awfully huge industrial production of the USSR let them believe that this red beast could smash West Europe easily in a war.
However, experts are usually unable to analyse the clues hidden inside the ocean of numbers. They are good at neglecting unquantifiable facts and the invisible connections among these facts. Behind the enormous industrial outputs in the USSR, it was the manufacturing technologies originated in the 1930s, when Stalin purchased numerous devices and production lines from Western companies. Since then, until the collapse of the country, the management, operation and technology in all industries had rarely progressed. In the late 1970s and early 80s, for instance, the defence industry had to purchase the latest technologies from the US and its allies via underground deals, as the defence technologies in the Red Army were obsolete and technological innovation were stagnant (read). The level of reliance upon products from the US and its allies could not be accurately investigated or analysed; for the sake of political reputation, no communist regime would put this information on their official statistics. The gigantic scale of industrial production, or GDP, was based on critical supplies from Western companies. This fact could have been more pivotal in the analysis of a nation’s power.
For communist regimes, statistics is a critical part of propaganda. In Maoist China and North Korea today, the communist regimes all fabricated statistics to display how prosperous and powerful the economies were, though millions of people were suffering starvation. Official statistics of the USSR strongly suggested that the economy increased 3% annually on average in the 1980s, given that bread was a scarce treasure even in Moscow. As statistics were propaganda, the numbers made no sense for economic research. Unfortunately, most economists are only capable of reading numbers and doing calculations with equations.
Government commands cannot incentivise technological innovation
A prominent belief among Western leftists is that the USSR accelerated progress in science and technology under the centralised leadership of the Communist Party. The evidence is the achievements of space science and engineering, particularly the first satellite and the first manned spacecraft were launched by the USSR. These achievements have made the Western leftists believe that science and technology would be prosperous if all resources were centralised by a communist government and deployed under despotic commands.
However, reality and truth prevail over arguments and stands, again. Starting from the late 1960s, NASA gradually surpassed the USSR space authority by successfully launching and operating numerous space exploration projects, such as the Voyager I and II. More remarkably, NASA successfully landed astronauts on the Moon. On the contrast to NASA, the USSR space agency saw rare breakthroughs since the late 1960s. Looking away from the scenario of space exploration, most, if not all, modern technologies we are using today were invented in the US, Japan and Western European countries during the Cold War. These obvious facts deny the imaginary power of authoritarian regimes in accelerating innovation.
The same fallacious logic is still popular among experts observing the achievements of China. While the governments have centralised all resources to plan technological innovation in the past decade, critical technology sustaining its economy is still up to the supply from the US and its allies (which forms the reason why the US can put sanctions on China to crack down its strategical industries). The governmental investments in developing the Chinese chips have produced no effective results except a bunch of corrupted bureaucrats.
Why do regimes similar to the USSR fail in scientific and technological advancement? The expositions might lie in their surveillance in thinking. In the USSR and China, independent thinking was institutionally forbidden. The suppression of dissenting voices easily expanded into the suppression of unique views in scientific subjects: questioning the authoritative opinions and figures was condemned as an purposeful offence against official values. In terms of the management of research institutes, communist regimes deployed communist secretaries to be in charge. This policy was aimed to monitor the human resource development by assessing the thoughts of the researchers and engineers. Only the staff who were absolutely loyal to the party would be promoted or funded to continue their careers. Where unique personalities and thoughts are banned, there is no breakthrough created. Only applications of existing technologies will take place in this country.
(This lesson should be particularly adopted by the US and its Western allies today. Requirements to tune scientific research into political correctness, such as Black Lives Matter, Anti-imperialism, Decolonisation and pro-LGBTQ, will stifle impactful research, preventing scientists from publishing pivotal findings)
Another reason to explain the hindrance of innovation among communist regimes is the frequent changes of trends. The change of the latest trend in market and science always surmounts the change of governmental policies and actions. Scientists and entrepreneurs are facing the tides in the frontiers; they are instinctively sensitive to cutting-edge knowledge in scientific research and market conditions and can swiftly adjust their actions. On the contrary, a government centralising all resources for dogmatic five-year plans will appear idle and awkward when the fashion of technology is disrupted by new inventions. That was exactly what the USSR had to tackle when the IT industry was disrupting the traditional heavy industry in the late 1970s. No matter how much money the communist government could have poured in the electronic and information industries, the USSR would never have its own IBM or Microsoft.
Education should foster humans, not functionaries
Higher education in the USSR and other communist countries was commanded by the communist party to foster engineers. In the doctrine of communism, “development” is all about producing more industrial and agricultural products. Social sciences and arts should be “modified” to serve industrial and agricultural production. As such, in the higher education sector, the task of Soviet universities was to foster engineers who were supposed to identify as the tools of the communist regime, fitting themselves into collectivism.
This educational model once drove the educators and policymakers in the US into panic, because the students there, compared to their peers in the Soviet Union, were indulging themselves with individualism and academical inadequacy. This anxiety about the laziness and incapability of the American students lasted over seven decades until today. But, as we have seen, these idle and wasted youths have never hindered commercial or technological breakthroughs. It was juxtaposed by the stagnation of innovations in the USSR. So, what is the problem with the rigorous higher education and the competent graduates in the USSR?
An exposition based in socioeconomic theory is that fostering more technicians and engineers will not accelerate industrial production and technological innovation. To explain this point, we probably need an individual discussion in the future. From an educational standpoint, creativity and independence of thought are important parts of us as human beings; as such, innovation and creativity will happen only if the education respects the diversity of personalities and talents in different students. Engineering, for example, is a family of subjects which requires more mentality of disciplines and obedience of established rules than (boasted) creativity in problem solving. The progress of engineering and technology is often attributed to inspirations from non-technical fields, such as visual arts, abstract design and music, which are more aligned to the nature of humanity. On the contrary to engineering subjects, however, subjects in humanities can be taught only when students are settled in a physically and mentally inclusive environment.
When discussing how rigorous STEM education in the USSR perniciously discouraged technological innovation, I had the STEM hype in the US and UK in my mind. Encouraging those who are not apt for or passionate about mathematics and science to study STEM courses will produce more failures instead of more innovations. One talented scientist can create more knowledge than ten reluctant scientific workers. Of course, this point deserves another individual discussion in detail.
As someone who is not a social scientist, the three lessons are what I could extract from the collapse of the USSR. Successful countries today must not take it for a visual demonstration of evil communist or socialist regimes. Conclusions as such are too subjective and over simplified. Researchers and policymakers should learn the substantial causes of its demise in various aspects.