> had very little to do with the different economic models, but with the completely different situation of the two countries.

but both germany and japan had great recovery, despite also having lost a lot in the war due to bombings and population deaths.

The difference is the economic system - USSR always felt that they're under threat from western powers, and devoted a lot of work in heavy production (which translates to military production), and very little civilian production. And even technological growth was kept militarily separate - e.g., they actually had computing but did not "give" that tech up for civilian use, after expending the R&D on it.

Mean while, the US's defence spending on R&D does spill over into civilian use (often due to profit seeking motives, but still this produces good results). Like the internet, GPS, etc. The thing is that centrally planned economies means those that aren't "central" to the planner's mind will be forgotten. But everyone in the country is important in reality - so those who get forgotten will decline.

The difference was the the US poured money into (half of) Germany and (all of) Japan and took complete control, up to and including the point of actually writing Japan's constitution.

It wasn’t that much money. It invested about $18 billion inflation adjusted dollars into Japan from 1946 to 1952. By contrast it has invested $145 billion into Afghanistan, a country with half the population Japan had back then.

This comparison probably doesn't make a lot of sense: the US's reconstruction of Japan is backlit by Japan being an industrialized nation with an educated workforce, in a country with basically no domestic conflict in the century prior to WW2. Afghanistan was and is not industrialized to nearly the same degree, has nowhere near the same degree of educational penetration, and has a long history of domestic conflict in the forms of colonialism and sectarian violence.

In other words: $1 in 1945 Japan goes much further in terms of development than $1 in 2000s Afghanistan.

Fair enough, but in a way it's more false comparisons; investing billions into a tribal-agrarian society in the midst of civil and religious war is qualitatively different from investing it into an already industrialized society. And it's not like the absolute $$ investment was the sum total of what the US was doing in Germany and Japan. It came along with a whole package of political-economic moves to restructure investment and regulation, taking advantage of American hegemony in those regions.

> Fair enough, but in a way it's more false comparisons; investing billions into a tribal-agrarian society in the midst of civil and religious war is qualitatively different from investing it into an already industrialized society.

Not necessarily. If you ignore the (in reality rather important) "ongoing war" aspect, investing in more backward region should give you better return on investment, not worse. That's because investment, like anything else, suffers from diminishing returns. In backward regions, there are a lot of low-hanging fruits to pick, and small amount of money can go very long way. That's why all the NGOs are talking about microlending etc: even trivial amounts of capital make a huge difference.

Low floor, low ceiling: microlending can set someone up to put their children through school, but it can't turn subsistence farmers into lawmakers and engineers (at least not overnight).

West Germany had massive amounts of American capital dumped into it in the post-war period as part of the Marshall plan. Japan as well. Again, not comparable.

FWIW I'm no expert on Germany post-war, but from a personal POV my father was born in 1944 and grew up in post-war Germany (Mainz) and my Opa worked for the city in post-war building reconstruction (knew the story of every building in the centre of the city by heart and when I visited told me everything he knew). So I've some interest in the topic.

As for the rest of your points, plenty of valid observations for the period of the 50s, 60s, 70s but we are talking 1948. The war had barely ended.

It's ridiculous to compare a country recently ravaged by brutal total war which lost 26 million people, millions of which were civilians -- to a country which lost just 400,000, almost all in the armed forces (and, again, was a destination for immigration both before and after).

The Marshall Plan was under $150 billion for all of Western Europe (in today’s dollars). The US has spent more than that in civil development in Afghanistan. The effect of the money shouldn’t be overstated.

The Soviets did not spend massively on their military just because of paranoia about the West. They spent a fortune maintaining an empire.

> in 1948 a working class person in the USSR not being able to afford a car had very little to do with the different economic models, but with the completely different situation of the two countries.

> but both germany and japan had great recovery, despite also having lost a lot in the war due to bombings and population deaths.

Japan at least didn't have many cars in 1948. This is a central part of Tokyo in 1946: https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8453/7975138441_b82cdd4372_b.j...

You won't be caught in a traffic jam for sure.

That's Berlin in 1948: https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7m4GWloP444/WMF6AVrgs-I/AAAAAAAAD...

Compare East vs West Germany. North vs South Korea. Postwar Britain vs postwar West Germany.

Places that the US (reasonably!) dumped money on, in most cases to highlight and contrast a US-supported domestic system with the Soviet one.

In other words: the GP is saying that the Soviets didn't have the money or human resources to do the things the US did, and you're responding with "look at all the things the US did with its money and human resources." It's true, but not really a response.

> The Soviets didn't have the money or human resources to do the things the US did

SK is one of the biggest economies in the world, NK is literally starving to death right now. I don't think some US intervention decades ago really explains why NK isn't able to build much of anything, or why their allies still can't help them even manage to feed themselves.

NK doesn't have that many excuses in 2023, but that wasn't really the point (or even claimed) anywhere in the comment.

The claim is much simpler: if you're looking to compare the US and USSR during the postwar period, you need to consider the raw resources they had available. The US triumphed, and achieved a wide range of humanitarian successes in the process, but the why of that boils down to an intact workforce and a roaring industrial base, not some definitive dustup between Communism (tm) and Capitalism (tm).

Indeed this was my original point way above, though I would postfix it by saying, as I did also, above, that the Soviet planning system was a failure and Stalin a tyrant. The original claim of TFA was just pure nonsense. You can't explain a Russian's lack of a car in the rubble of 1948 Stalingrad based on "Soviet communism bad, American capitalism good"

You can probably make that claim in 1975, though. Unfortunately people are not reading that far down into my comment to get the distinction.

The US dumped a lot less Marshall Plan money on West Germany than Britain, less than half.

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

And yet the German Miracle happened in West Germany, not Britain.

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

And West Germany was practically leveled in WW2, unlike Britain.

Your own links explain this: the German Economic Miracle is defined with respect to the fact that West Germany was leveled. Britain was not leveled, and exited the war in debt to its allies and colonies (debts that primed the ~15 years of austerity and decolonialization that followed).

In other words: a decent chunk of the Marshall Plan money that the US dropped on Britain was in effect cover for existing debts, meaning that it not directly applied to industrial production or reconstruction in the ways that boosted West Germany (and France, Greece, etc.).

Perhaps you don't realize the scope of the catastrophe in Germany. The cities were all bombed and burned flat. Industry was destroyed, anything left of the industry was looted. The dams were broken. A generation of German men was wiped out.

And yet W Germany rose to the most dominant economy in Europe by 1970. Britain was not and did not. The key difference was Germany embraced free markets, and Britain turned away from free markets.

How about Japan? Bombed, burned, and nuked to the ground. An island nation with no natural resources. By the 1970s it rebounded to be the leading industrial powerhouse behind the US.

Have any communist countries achieved such success? Any socialist ones?

This is ahistorical to a fault: the UK introduced postwar social reforms that were already present in continental European nations. Britain's industrial decline can be traced to long before the Marshall Plan, and even the war: it's tied inextricably to the UK's "colonial prestige" politics, including the desire to run a massive and expensive empire long after its extractive value had been maximized.

> Have any communist countries achieved such success? Any socialist ones?

I don't know why you're fixated on this. Again: nobody in this thread has made this claim. The only thing under discussion is whether it's reasonable to naively treat postwar Europe's recovery as a triumph of capitalism, which it isn't.

I've heard the litany of endless excuses why implementations of communism all failed, and endless rationales for why free markets succeed.

Why is it that nobody can point to a successful communist society, now or historically? At some point, one just runs out of excuses. Meanwhile, free markets undergo prosperity again and again and again.

You're reading this as an apologetic for Soviet communism, when it isn't.

Here is the totality of the argument: comparing the immediate postwar economic outcomes of the US and USSR is intellectually embarrassing, because everybody here understands that they aren't comparable. If your goal is to demonstrate that capitalism produces prosperity, you can point to literally any other period after the postwar one.

Isn't it interesting that the free market countries flourished after WW2, and the unfree ones didn't? How many explanations and excuses are needed for that?

My god, you have this hammer, and you're really searching to find a nail for it...

What kind of lunatic distorted world view does one have to have to put postwar Britain in the same bucket as North Korea or the DDR?

SMH

I didn't. It's just that Britain had much less of a free market than postwar Germany, and didn't recover as well.

Eastern Europe before and after communism fell.

>This isn't entirely fair and is actually pretty flippant and tone-deaf given the situation of the time after the war.

[...]

>The Soviet Union on the other hand bore the brunt of losses in WWII. It suffered massive deaths in the war, especially among its young men of working age. It was invaded by NAZI Germany, and some of its largest cities occupied or put under siege. Its agricultural and industrial lands were ravaged by war, its people by wartime famine.

All that and not a word about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, of course. When two criminals fall out with each other after a joint robbery and murder, one ordinarily does not overly mourn the one whom the other killed in a dispute over the spoils.

Not a word -- because it's irrelevant to the discussion of the comparison of the economic situation of the two countries in 1948. How or why the war happened, or what parties were to blame matters little when discussing the material circumstances.

Oh, come now. You wrote:

>The Soviet Union on the other hand bore the brunt of losses in WWII. It suffered massive deaths in the war, especially among its young men of working age. It was invaded by NAZI Germany, and some of its largest cities occupied or put under siege. Its agricultural and industrial lands were ravaged by war, its people by wartime famine.

"bore the brunt of losses"

"suffered massive deaths"

"invaded by NAZI Germany"

"ravaged by war"

"wartime famine"

I.e., "Soviet Union = victim", as opposed to "Soviet Union = one of two criminals that together committed a crime, was attacked by the other criminal, and barely survived and killed the attacker with the help of others"

the op is stating the facts. Every single of the 5 points you just quoted from them is an indisputable fact. They tie these facts to another fact that a ravaged country with 30 million corpses literally scattered all over cannot produce luxuries such as cars. What point you are trying to argue, is unclear.

>What point you are trying to argue, is unclear.

Let me repeat:

>When two criminals fall out with each other after a joint robbery and murder, one ordinarily does not overly mourn the one whom the other killed in a dispute over the spoils.

wtf does that have to do with car production, the topic at hand? also, for example me saying that the Germans (yes, the Germans) suffered unimaginable losses of 6 million people, which is a fact, in what twisted mind does stating this fact become "overly mourning"?

You talk about a whole country like it's a single, morally culpable, person? And those 26 million dead, they all should suffer because Stalin signed the pact with Hitler?

So you can wave away massive death -- justified? And all conversation about the matter must be redirected to this allocation of blame. "Mommy, Johnny hit me first."

I think you need to give your head a shake. The way you're talking about war and death, it's like you don't really grasp the level of tragedy at all.

>And those 26 million dead, they all should suffer because Stalin signed the pact with Hitler?

Those 26 million dead suffered because Stalin signed the pact with Hitler.

>So you can wave away massive death -- justified?

Not at all, and I have never given any indication that I think so.

Those 26 million dead also shouldn't ever be cited by Soviets, or apologists for same, as some sort of hard-earned virtue or proof of nobility, yet they have been used for precisely such purposes for 80 years and counting. To return to my earlier analogy, that'd be like the criminal who survives the attack by his coplotter now calling himself a hero for having killed the attacker.

It didn't help that the USSR kept devoting up to 25% of their economy to the military. Improving the standards of living just wasn't a priority, the planning system was set to "just enough to avoid riots" and failed at even that.

The USSR's economy grew massively and quickly after WWII. It's a country that went from literal feudalism to modernity in one generation, becoming one of the two superpowers largely dictating world politics.

"Massively and quickly" seems optimistic. USSR grew at or below the rate of most European economies post war:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Soviet_U...

A bit hyperbolic, but this is a thread claiming that the USSR grew far more slowly than the rate of capitalist Europe post war.

It went from feudalism to more technologically advanced feudalism, and remains there today.

Devoting 25% of their economy to the military was how they stuck around to begin with. You need a pretty big military to keep half of Europe under your thumb for half a century. Operation Danube involved about half a million men at its peak.

Half a million is just the tip of the iceberg. Their workforce was around 100 million, the estimates were that >25 million were working for the military, including 83% of all research scientists/engineers.

Well, that's the personnel involved in the operation, and you need supporting personnel as well, and of course you need to be able to run these operations should anybody else get the same idea as the Czechs and the Hungarians...

Maintaining an empire ain't cheap.

Well maybe, if they didn't devote 25% of everything to keeping everybody under their thumb, they could maintain their living standards high enough for people to not want out?

If they didn't devote 25% of everything keeping everybody under their thumb, that would have shrunk their economy considerably if anyone actually escaped.

Which we eventually witnessed.

That's not exactly accurate, Stalin's famine and economic contraction happened in the 30s. Turns out that shooting people is not the long run solution that induces businesses to sell below their cost.

Most statistics I could find showed the USSR had modest economic growth during the interwar period. The famine was seemingly intentionally inflicted to speed industrialization which makes it evil rather than incompetence. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/soviet-economy-1917-1991-its-...

I mean you send millions of farmers to factories and yes farm output declines, these things are related.

I don't see anything in your link to claim that the famine was intentionally inflicted.

For a country trying to rapidly industrialize, redirecting available labour from farming to factories and hoping that your productivity increases will make up for the reduced labour supply seems like it could be a good faith best effort to uplift the lives of as many people as possible as quickly as possible. Sitting back and letting the economy continue to be agrarian means passively killing many people through lack of access to medicines etc..

Nothing good can come from getting into this conversation. I'm pretty sure there are one or two countries that would imprison you just for posting this.

This wasn’t redirecting available labor, it was forcing people off farms without any offsetting attempt to increase efficiency.

Not fair to whom? The Soviet apparatchiks who enabled Stalin's purges and banned the movie to avoid hard questions?

I remember getting a ride as in the back of my great-uncle's Volga and my uncle's Zhiguli. They lived in Moscow while we were in a suburban town (akademgorodok) where a Zaporozhets was a luxury that less than 10% of households could get. The reason I remember is the ride was a yearly treat. This was during perestroika. A few years later glasnost allowed people to see enough movies to conclude that the system was unworkable.

The Soviet Union was an evil empire start to end, built on the bones of its "brother nations" as much as their own citizens. Its troubles can't be explained away by WWII.

Off-topic. We're talking about a specific place and time. 1948, not 1970s, 1980s USSR.

The fact that the situation had not improved after 40 years of peace is about as on topic as can be.

There weren't 40 years of peace between 1945 and 1948.

Or, for the USSR, between 1945 and 1985, either.

Right. After 1945, the Soviet Union didn't suffer war on its territory - it exported it abroad instead, from Korea to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Vietnam and Afghanistan. Proletariat of all countries, unite!

Meanwhile, the economic conditions in 1985 were just as broken as in 1945. I know because I was there, as a brainwashed oktyabryonok, being sent to stand in a bread line with a talon (a rationing ticket for bread). In Moscow Oblast, the most prosperous in the country.

The level of naivete and pedantry in this whole discussion is amazing to me, on so many levels.

> It suffered massive deaths in the war, especially among its young men of working age.

Largely because Stalin refused to listen to anyone and didn't defend his western borders and wouldn't admit the Germans were invading until they were practically half way to Moscow, and the Soviet system didn't allow for any other path of action.

> It was invaded by NAZI Germany

Who Stalin foolishly allied with, knowing at the time that Hitler would betray him.

> Its agricultural and industrial lands were ravaged by war

Was that before or after collectivization caused a famine and the purges wrecked all of the engineering talent?

It is a fair comparison because Soviet propaganda explicitly said the opposite: that the Soviet system was superior to the West, and that people in the Soviet Union were better off than in the West.

I think the economic gap between the US and USSR in the late 1940s had more to do with the czars and distance from northwestern Europe than the Nazis or Communists. Russia was very far behind the industrial countries before the revolution, and remained so thereafter.

If anything, the Soviet modernization efforts accelerated what would have been possible under the czars. Because of Soviet growth during the Great Depression, communism was seen by many in the industrial world as a viable alternative during the 1930s.

Command economies are great at catching up (just ask Park Chung-hee) and terrible at expanding the economic frontier. Not a fan of command economies by any means, but history is more nuanced.