The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR 

As a person born and grown up in Soviet Union I would say - very good analysis done here by this young man. Its very rare anybody try to do such a research without some ideological blinkers and this man managed it. Good job

Thank you for uploading and sharing.

Guy sort of looks like bill gates

38:45 Interesting take on the effect of the cultural revolution

Massive investment conducted by Gorbachev administration in mid 1980s is indeed overlooked by modern society. The full name of Gorbachev's program of 1985 was called "Uskorenie and Perestrojka" - speeding up and rebuilding. Enormous amount of resources was purred into industry (robotic lines purchased to rust in broken yard of old factories), new farm equipment purchased, residential housing was built. All was wasted/stolen by soviet economy.

To make the black market more attractive for food buying would prices not have to be lower than buying from the State so how could there be more profits for those selling in it if prices were higher? Were all the collectives and food outlets privatised? Were there no State owned food stores demanding foods at prices that could be sold at State prices and was the tax so high that farmers and black marketers could both still make higher profits? It's hard to see how the State could watch its revenue from farms fall but see production remain the same or increase and not see what was happening. Massive Western investment we know flooded into China while in Russia we read that massive profits from former State owned public services were transferred to the West leaving the State short of much needed capital to fund social welfare and other programmes. The need to print money must have been dire indeed and when that's what subsequently occurred in the developed Japan and the West are we to also experience what the Soviet Union had to endure economically?

This didn't age well

Innovation in Soviet Union was actually enormous compared to most Western economies, furthermore whilst being sanctioned and artificially shut out from supplies by the West. I am struggling to think what innovation Australia came up with in the 20th C other than some of the university research which has nothing to do with markets, but nothing close to the innovation under the Soviet system. Most of the innovation in USA was likewise from the State sector (silicon chip design, Algol and C langages, just about every internet protocol, GPS, almost everything you find in your mobile phone had the difficult early innovative work conducted not in the private sector but the State sector). Soviet Union were in space ten years before the US could even imagine it being possible, etc. It is true that there were waits for products - so demand response latency was weakness, and could be solved - but there also was not the same ludicrous overproduction and energy placed towards marketing that we are presently trapped with.

23FE17...My goodness, you didn't have the speaker very well mic'd. Bye!!

For China to reorient to a domestic consumer-market led economy from an export led high investment, high productivity growth model, they need strong unions, and a strong political voice for workers and households in the government. Which they can't have, paradoxically enough, since the Communist party has changed itself from a nominal party of and for workers and peasants into a party of and for business interests and the hypothetical "classless" national interest. Workers simply have to start getting a larger share of national income and pay has to grow as a cost within business accounts. There is no instrument for satisfaction of workers to register as an incentive through in the absence of democracy and freedom of assembly and freedm of workplace organisation. So the party leadership can contemplate extending public services, like universal healthcare, which China doesn't yet have despite 70 years of Marxist control, which would boost the population's household incomes and happiness, but they would get no reward through the system for doing so, unlike in democracies where increasing people's average pay one way or another yields the dividend of electoral success and national populairity. The rewards They do gain rewards by continuing heavy infrastructure investment instead, which they cream off in direct and indirect corruption, and just status for initiation of and participation in big projects. Heavy investment appears like absorbing the Chinese economy's excessive savings rate (excessive profits), but in fact it exacerbates the problem by increasing productivity and adding more means of production, while reducing the numbers of relatively high paying jobs through making production more capital intensive. And all the while, excessive saving creates rentierism, speculation and corruption, like everywhere else, which creates increased risk of coups within the elite as the economy and political apparatus displays more characteristics of feudalism, which is what rentierism is and recreates. And the outcome is actually slowing growth as the excessive profits fly out of the country in illegal savings into western banks and specualtive schemes, and gathering stagnation in the Chinese economy evidenced by brand new empty cities where workers cannot afford to purchase homes and where the planned urban economy of shopping, restaurants and going to shows cannot happen for lack of disposable incomes.

Soviet union was a superpower during its existense. Second economic in the world.

The Soviet Union didn't collapse. Gorbachev just didn't have the will to clean the trash, i.e. Yeltsin and his fellow criminals.

Can the passengers of a ship determine the course of the vessel taking into account only the direction of the winds, sea currents and the height of the waves? Disregarding the captain and his will? - The answer is clear. Likewise, historians can not explain past and present events properly, ignoring the existence of God and His will. The founder of the state, Lenin hated God, persecuted Christians. This fact condemned his work to failure. Throughout the existence of the Soviets, atheism prevailed in the country, often it was a militant atheism, from which all the calamities of people - terror, hunger, GULAG, murders, bloody wars, occurred. And what was worse - several generations were deprived of the vital Word of God. However, according to the Bible, God cannot be mocked. He elevates kings, He removes kings. The collapse of the USSR, no doubt, was a perfect Act of God. Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and others only did the will of the Lord.

The Soviet Union didn't collapse. Gorbachev just didn't have the will to clean the trash, i.e. Yeltsin and his fellow criminals.

The Soviet Union didn't collapse. Gorbachev just didn't have the will to clean the trash, i.e. Yeltsin and his fellow criminals.