Post WWII Reconstruction of the USSR - COLD WAR DOCUMENTARY 

I have always wondered how the USSR was able to recover and grow from indescribable levels of destruction and human cost, whilst the British Empire, which was comparatively unscathed by the war, went into terminal decline.

The program is awesome, just stop with the side camera pls

It amaze me how Russia managed to survived and rebuilt itself after 36 years of wars and starvation

I wonder how much of the failure of communism should actually be blamed on WWI and WWII. Both wars were much worse in eastern Europe then in the west.

The Soviet Union lost more than the current population of New Zealand And Australia combined

ahh yiess, just in time for my weekly cold war fix! :)

Wait a actual history channel not being super western bias ,God I never knew I'd see the day

Make Chile in the Cold War we got the first elected by popular vote communist and first dictator that leave by vote!

I never knew the Soviet monetary system went onto a gold standard - post ww2. Very interesting information, MORE please? A lot more this is a big peice to me research. . .

6:00 "Worlds first hydrogen bomb"? The first hydrogen bomb was Ivy Mike on November 1st 1952.

USSR got positively _decimated_ in WWII, still defeated Germany, had to rebuild most of their country, and STILL beat USA to space.

What could of possible played a factor in the 1946-47 famine? I don't know maybe losing those 37 million hectares of farmable land might of had something to do with it.

I heard Katysha playing in the background! GREAT video.

"Oppress the bell button..." I love it.

"none of the nations lost as much as the USSR" *laughs in Chinese

Excellent episode! I love the history. Great job covering the topics

Oof to all these politicised comments. At least the video is fantastically objective!

Love the channel but one small thing. At ~6 mins, Soviet Union detonated THEIR first thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb in 1953, but the WORLD'S first was detonated by the US in 1952. Just something that stuck out to me and made me go double check to be sure. Love the video though!

It’s extraordinary that Russia managed to recover at all from the world war, my hats off to Russia 🇷🇺 love from 🇨🇦

In Soviet Russia, dark humor is like food. -not everyone gets it.

Had no idea that the Soviet Reconstruction was so mis-managed. Scary. My compliments to those who made this video a reality.

Pretty sure Poland had the highest population loss per capita.

By no means would l defend the USSR or communism, but you got to admire the country's commitment. More than 10 000(!) cities destroyed and they kept on fighting. Some countries don't even have 10000 cities or the population of 20+ million. That's like killing off most of Australia/Canada or the whole of Romania. That's insane! No country today would have the stomach or manpower to recover after a loss of that magnitude. One tiny drone attack and everybody is scared shitless. People have become soft. This was total war in every sense of the word.

Enjoying this, but the first Hydrogen bomb was the Ivy Mike test in 1952.

Was the slaughter of the kulaks (sp?) Mentioned as contributing to the famine or did I miss it?

9:19 Truly, humans pave paradise to put up a parking lot

Worlds first hydrogen bomb was at Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands tested by the USA 1952.

Great video guys, they get better and better

The first five minutes of the video were more or less objective. But after that... With each next second my disappointment only grew. Also, the list of sources used to create this video looks very strange. 4:58 - "as well as the eight to nine million prisoners of the GULAG"? Are you serious? 8 to 9 kk? Really? And there were no prisoners in the GULag... none. GULag is an abbreviation for the General Directorate of Camps (G - Glavnoe/General; U - Upravlenie/Directorate; Lag - Lagerei/of Camps). It's just a building in Moscow. The prisoners were in various labour camps, not in GULag. By the way, english speakers often make another very funny mistake. They use the plural for this term - GULags. GULag has no plural. And yes, for many of you it will be a revelation, but prisoners of labor camps were paid wages. Really, i don't understand this. This information is well known. At least in russian historiography. Author repeats several times that collective farms were ineffective, that the planned economy was unbalanced and inefficient. But, again, that wasn't confirmed by post-war reality. The Soviet Union canceled the food cards before the UK, although no soldiers of the Third Reich landed on the Islands. The economy skyrocketed. And it isn't surprising that the priority in development was made in favor of heavy industry. Before industrialization, Russia was an agrarian country. The goal of industrialization was to create a powerful industrial state. And the basis of any independent industry is machine-tool construction. Only after that it was possible to create a self-sufficient economy. Moreover, artels (analogue of joint stock companies in capitalism) - non-state collective companies - were a significant part of the economy of the USSR until Stalin's death. Artels produced a wide range of consumer goods: from clothing and food to furniture and home electronics. Artels were different: a small tailor shop, factory or even research Institute - they all could be in the form of artel. Kolkhozes were non-state collective farm (Kol - kollektivnoe/collective; Khoz - khoziaistvo/farmhold). Yes, kolkhoz was also a form of artel. And collective farmers WERE interested in their work, because the more they produce, the more they will be able to sell, and therefore the greater will be the profit. If you didn't know, during the Great Patriotic War kolkhozes and separate farmers bought tanks and planes for army. There was also the term kolkhoz-millionaire. On their own kolkhozes built schools, theaters, etc. in their villages and towns. As for the monetary reform of 1947, the author is still partially right. Yes, immediately after the reform, the people lost part of their savings, but the results and consequences of that reform were much more important. It was thanks to this reform that the post-war shortage of goods was overcome, and until Stalin's death, annual planned price reductions were carried out. As a result, people's wealth only increased. The deficit appeared much later, when the principles of the planned economy were violated as a result of incompetent reforms. But this is a completely separate, large and complex topic.

This movie or documentary on the Soviet union is very biased the leaves out the massive GDP growth in distributive income amongst the Soviet Citizens and economics in trading with nations like recently made independent India this is something that this documentary never puts into perspective how to mention a massive scientific and technological advancements the Soviet union made without any form of help

The soviets didn’t make the first hydrogen bomb

If anyone wonders whats the background music at ~9 min or ~10 min, it is "Katyusha", famous WW2 song.

I grew up at the end of the cold war.love thisprogram

They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.

8:35 - remnants of war

I like it. would love a few statistics and numbers here and there though! keep it up!

Great Work! You Guys are killing it!

Wasn't the first Hydrogen Bomb made by the Americans in 1952?

So interesting, thanks for the info! :D

"New industry - hydroelectric power" Dnieper Hydroelectric Station: am i a joke to you?

The populations of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia have never recovered from the second world war.

Okay. This time I think you have lost all sense of objectivity. God, as much as I praised you for your analysing of the opposing ideologies of the Cold War, I guess I have to deconstruct every thing that you say: 1) As I mentioned earlier, the Soviet penal system was not retributive, it was rehabilitative in intent. The maximum prison sentence that could be awarded to anyone convicted of a crime was 10 years. Only those who had committed serious crimes like treason or those who were deemed impossible to reform through the penal system were subject to capital punishment. Also, the gulag population had reached its height in 1939 at 2 million. After the war began in 1941, all the resources were diverted from maintaining penal and other kinds of non-essential services towards the war effort. Imagine, when the free Soviet citizen suffered horribly due to the lack of basic amenities during the duration of the War, how would the population in the gulag would survive when all the resources required to maintain this population was devoted towards driving the Nazis out? As a result, the mortality shot up from 2% to 5% (in 1939) to 10 to 15% (by 1945-46, when the War ended and peace-time production re-commenced). As a result, by the 1950s there could not be "millions" languishing in the gulags due to the sheer number of material deprivation these imprisoned people had to go through. Again, it is factually wrong to state that the gulag population was "not paid" for being made to put in reconstruction work. Of course since the folks in the gulag were imprisoned out of being convicted for crimes committed by them, they were certainly "forced" into service (as you mention) but they were definitely paid. A gulag inmate had to work for ten hours (as opposed to the eight hour work-day of free Soviet citizens) and they were paid the half of what a free Soviet worker was paid; this was changed in 1952, when the pay of a gulag inmate was made equal to that of a free worker. Quaint, how you are talking upon Soviet reconstruction efforts but you aren't relying upon actual practices in the USSR and consciously decide to choose anti-communist narratives. Where is objectivity in that? 2) You have yourself mentioned the human and material losses that the Soviets had to suffer in the War. About a third of its wealth was either destroyed or looted by the invading Nazis. In fact, you have failed to mention what the Nazis intended to do with Eastern Europe and the USSR under the Generalplan Ost. Therefore what the Nazis did was not an unconscious act of callous destruction. It was a very deliberate campaign to cripple and dismantle Soviet power and this was fuelled by their rabid anti-communism, anti-Semitism and their racial ideology which saw the Slavs - especially those living in the USSR - as subhuman. Therefore when the USSR stripped Germany off of its assets and used it to fuel its own reconstruction efforts, how dare can some call it "looting"? If India had won her independence from Britain, would it be considered "looting" if the Indians demanded monetary and material indemnities for about 2 centuries of colonial rule? By not mentioning the whys and wherefores of Nazis destroying Soviet industries and settlements, you are now showing the USSR in a criminal light for doing what they needed to do? 3) As if liberal democracies don't practice political repression? Seriously, who are these people you talk about who wanted these "political reforms"? People like counter-revolutionary scum who had managed to hide within the Party or opportunists who had been blinded by the ill-gotten wealth of the West (like Nikita Krushchev)? Again, as I said earlier, the nations of the West created their wealth through imperialist plunder and colonialist brutality on the third world while the USSR - before 1949, the world's first socialist state - could not rely upon the exploitation of foreign raw materials and the labour of foreign peoples to create its wealth. Also the West had a leading start of about 200 years in terms of developing its economy (and that too, leeching upon the resources of colonized nations) while the Soviets had ten to fifteen years before the War to reach the same level of technological development. You can't compress centuries of development into a period of a decade or two, which causes relative backwardness with regards to the West. So if liberal "democracies" can exercise political repression and get away with it, I don't see why is it suddenly proper to criminalize the Soviets for doing what a state in the Marxist sense is supposed to do: suppress an overthrown class by the class that has seized political and state power? 4) Lastly, I am afraid you don't know how economic planning works. It is not inherently inefficient or slow because "everything is planned from the centre". No. How could you imagine a country as big as the USSR solely rely on planning everything from the centre and not allowing some form of decentralization? Does it not occur to you while researching for this video that the economic centre can do absolutely nothing without consulting local economic units? Anyway, in a planned economy the centre creates a general plan for the entire country based upon the estimated rates of production and distribution by local economic units. After this plan is finalized and passed the centre consults the local economic units in order to determine how much of a something can actually be produced and distributed, upon which targets and objectives of the plan are either re-adjusted or revised. Is it a relatively slow system compared to the free-market? Yes. But is it inefficient? If GDP is indicative of economic growth then sure it is inefficient, except GDP is not the true measure of a country's economic development. Seriously, I thought you would be better than the dominant anti-communist drivel that is passed off as "history" on RU-vid (and elsewhere). Alas, this is not to be.

Agreed about the excellence and the side camera

From where do you have the videos which you are using in this clip?

I can't wait to see the Korean War episode!!!

3:42 Do you mean Moldova?

I love these informative videos

nice video, I have 2 notes I think they would have been important to mentioned in the video (sorry for not mentioning a source, I am sure it is not hard for you to double check): 1. Stalin had hate against the farmers as he saw them kind of soldiers of capitalists as they are cheap to buy their opinion and make them follow you. He liked factory workers more. This had an effect on how the policy was conducted during Stalin time and therefore farmers took a huge hit. 2. the view of heavy industry in Moscow was that it is sign of modern economy, so the USSR as advanced country had to have heavy industry. They were aware of the importance of other industries but they way they did it was supporting developing countries to have that small industry to grow their economy, this allowed developing countries to buy heavy machinery from Soviet Union and pay for it from the income of small industry. if they did not do that, most developing countries would have been free to buy products from the western countries (also without that system some countries would not have got some modernization, those countries owe to that system and USSR a favor :)... )

Great work!

Germans in 1945: Our country is completely fucked Russians: Holy my vodka

It was before the Cold War but how about a video about the Ukrainian Holomodor in the early 1930’s.

So not focusing on light industry and consumer goods, ruined the economy? Or did it just have a rough start?

7:39 what music?

The sound capturing could be better, but great episode.

Why not have a proper playlist in chronological order

Have you got a podcast?

The concept of the Soviet's nationalized banks just perplexes me.

Now make a video on the reconstruction of Allies that are not part of the Marshall plan.

i wish this episode was much longer.

i thought the USSR just gained industrial capacity during the war, after the initial transport to the ural mountains

Conclusion of the video, the improve of urss becoming the second largest economy in the world being in 1890s one of the more ineficient (feudalism) is because of magic . Not because stalin did a great job or socialism.

Chinese subtitle added. Please review, thanks!

Thank you Indy Nidell, very cool.

5:03 - Gulag prisoners WERE being paid, a pretty decent wage by average USSR standards - their punishment was not the lack of pay. They could not choose where to work, when to work and to choose a job. It doesn't make it OK of course, but there's no need to make one side more evil than it really was - the whole series lose validity. Not sure if POWs were paid, need to check on that. I must say that this series is really interesting, but bias is strong with this one. Could be because of bias in the source material, or personal bias. Probably a bit of both.

Wile still overall unbiased and interesting view, you should definitely check/provide your sources. 5:00 - 8-9 million of Gulag prisoners looks like some Gargantuan exaggeration. It is like 5% of total population. Please recheck with other numbers: qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-08df6a26cd206643837d56287727a081 Also the interesting story is omitted about how Marshall's plan was purposed for the USSR and how it was rejected.

9:25 promise you won’t cry Me: yes Ok here Me: cry’s

"Construction complete"

What happened to all those dead bodies?

Would you say the USSR/Stalin is partially responsible for its own devastation since a non-aggression pact was signed with the Nazis?

It's like he doesn't know what to do with his hands

Thank you. Purchase power fade

It’s Moldova not Moldavia

When is the 1946 Iran Crisis vid coming?

Sounded robotic

I thought the aral sea dried up because of the virgin lands campaign started by kruschev in the early 60s

Why invest so much heavy industries

Is this made by the same people at The Great War?

1:54-1:57 WATCH FACTORY. The soviets had a habit of all watch factory workers wearing white and mainly women for the assembly because they have finer motor skills. Notice the eyepieces (10× magnification) and what thry are working on is the guts of the watch. Putting the cogs in and bridges that hold them along with the ton of screws. I collect soviet watches.

5:00 in Gulag people were paid, depending on what job they were doing and how hard or dangerous this particular job was, sometimes they were paid monthly or receive % from what they have earned. After prisoners were leaving work camps they were paid the rest of the money they have earned, they were allow to stay in near by city ( the one they have constructed ). Gulag system is highly discriminated by Soviet Liberals and othere political criminals, just like in america the liberals want power and wealth without doing any actual work, they complain and steal, then blame everyone for they crimes ( Solzhenitsyn was one of them, according to his prison mates: he never lift a shovel or hammer or done any work, but always had food and was paid like everyone ells ) Today you see all kinds of wierd people who want socialism or communism, these so called "communists" ( liberals ) HATE TO WORK! In communism everyone must do they job for good of everyone. "От каждого по способности, каждому по труду" - From every person by his capability, every person gets what he/she earned.

Efficiency and socialism don't go together. Imagine that

Subtitles in spanish please

German used to fight in eastern Front and have a picnic and Western Front according to one German soldier diary

Hi. Great video. Will you make one about Forest Brothers of Lithuania who bravely fought soviet regime and prevented russian colonisation?

Ivy mike

Ivy Mike pre dates your claim

I miss the Cold War. It was so simple.

Very good video and I love the channel. I just have some problems when you describe the Soviet Union as "totalitarian". First, the word has a very loose definition that could be prescribed to any revolutionary government. Second, I'm not sure if you've read the 1936 Soviet Constitution, but it pretty clearly lays out how the Supreme Soviet is the main authority and Governing body of the Soviet Union, and it itself was a democratically elected institution. It is possible that the Soviets didn't follow this constitution, and had some other secret constitution that they followed, however, I find this to be very unlikely. Yes, it is true that Stalin was General Secretary of the Communist Party for a very long time, but after the War, he was used more just as a propaganda piece, rather than an actual leading figure. Thats not to mention that The General Secretary of the Party wasn't even the head of state of The Soviet Union, the presidium ( a group of 20 deputies elected by the Supreme Soviet). Besides that though, love the video. Keep up the great work! Soviet 1936 Constitution: www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/12/05.htm

1:11 I'm curious to know roughly how much of that was destroyed by the Russians themselves as part of their Scorched Earth tactic.

Stalin was the worst thing that happened to the USSR ever ...

moldova not moldavia

Do you seriously have no apprehensions about hanging a photo of Stalin behind you while filming? It's not like Truman ordered hundreds thousands of deaths :S

Yugoslavia:Am i a joke to you?

9:20 isn't it ironic? The food shortage stopped when rationing stopped... Why dont people ever learn? This is why Resource-Based economy or venus project is so dangerous.

an incredible feat by the USSR

Tankiddies seething in the comment section

Well, Russia won the war, but for the Russian people it's as if they lost. Lost more people than everyone else. People starved and staid in poverty. Brutal political measures and fear of gulag. Yes, they have nukes and their pride is intact but otherwise German people despite losing the war is better off.

what if America attacked russia right after the war....

Slava Stalinu!

The official statistics of the Ussr are to be taken with a grain of salt, to say the least. When they say that all the objectives were met in advance, I'd like to double check the data. That centralized system was deeply corrupted, because corruption is often the only solution to get things done with an inefficient bureaucracy. Moreover, the use of statistics to set up objectives creates very bad incentives. Workers, factory directors and supervisors are forced to cheat by the system itself. They don't really need to satisfy customers, but, instead, they just have to meet their objectives formally. For instance, if the plan says 50 tons of wheat, they manage to provide 50 tons of wheat, no matter the quality, even if it is wet. You can imagine the disaster! This is a real example of the absurdity of the plan in Ussr. In the Ussr and the other communist countries, it's relatively safe to assume that the books are cooked. The corrupting effect of the system is so deep that it touches all the levels of the population. Ordinary citizen get used to the black market and the like. The bad habits remain long after the regime changes.

Great content and representation of culture, thank goodness Communism fell, I really like the soundtrack you use!