The fall of communism in the former Eastern Bloc has been an unmitigated disaster for the people living there

I was looking up economic data on the former Eastern Bloc and came across this table on the Statista website. Let’s unpack this a bit, shall we?

This chart compares GDP per capita of various Eastern Bloc countries versus the European Union at three different points: 1950, 1989, and 2000. GDP is an incredibly flawed metric for measuring an economy. It is tailor-made to make capitalist, imperialist economies look better and to make exploited and socialist economies look worse; so already, by comparing GDP figures we are spotting the capitalist countries a bunch of points. For more information on the flaws of GDP, check out John Smith’s Imperialism in the 21st Century. And of course, GDP per capita completely ignores how income and wealth are distributed within a country. In a more equal country (like the USSR), the median person will have a much higher standard of living than the median person in a country with the same GDP per capita but is much more unequal (like the USA). GDP per capita doesn’t mean much if a small number of people hold all the wealth.

I’m not sure how much useful information we can take away from comparing the changes from 1950 to 1989. Some of the communist countries improve versus the EU, some do worse, and some (USSR) basically tread water. Given how much larger the Soviet economy was compared to the others, I’ll make a couple notes here. The period 1950-1989 means you have only about 6 years of the more “Stalinist” economy and then 33 years of the economy after Khrushchev’s “reforms”. So this data says, despite the economic problems that occurred under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the USSR still held their own against the EU. Further, the 1989 end point feels a bit like cheating. At that point Gorbachev’s death drive was in full swing. I suspect if you chose say 1985 or even 1986, the USSR comparison point might actually have been higher than in 1989, again despite all the problems that were going on in the Soviet economy. But then again, the 1989 data point only further reinforces how bad things would get. According to Growth Crystal, GDP growth from 1956-1991 was still 4.9%.

The comparison between 1989 and 2000 is truly staggering to wrap your head around. Every country except Poland sees a massive decline in GDP per capita relative to the EU (and not like things really improve much in Poland, they more or less hold steady). In the span of just 11 years, for the USSR this comparison goes from 49% to 24%! And remember, that 49% is already a little “deflated” in that it includes a lot of Gorby’s fuck ups. This incredible drop in GDP also does not show the incredible amount of human suffering tied to that drop - over a million lives lost, countless others broken and destroyed.

Now, a liberal who’s going through this may say sure, the 90s were rough. But that was just some necessary structural adjustment in the transition from inefficient socialism to efficient capitalism. And sure, 2000 was now 24 years ago and that is a lot of time. But also according to Growth Crystal (ibid), economic growth in Russia since 1999 has been 3.8% per year. That’s… fine. But not exactly world-beating. Importantly, when comparing “what might have been”, you have to take into account the economic collapse of the 90s that was entirely due to capitalism. I did some very rough math, and the total average annual rate of economic growth in the USSR (using the Russian Federation as a proxy post-1991) since the fall of the USSR has been around 1%. That’s about as bad as a country can possibly be over a sustained period of time.

I think this last point is very important. Libs will compare the present-day situation in the former Eastern Bloc to what it was in 1991, as if they would be frozen in time from that point on. But that is far from what could be reasonably expected had the USSR not collapsed. Yes, even before Gorbachev, the USSR had some serious problems in the economy. You know who also has problems in their economy? Literally every country. There’s no economy out there that just runs perfect - capitalist, socialist, and everything in between. The US has problems. The EU has problems. Even China has problems.

What those countries don’t always have is leadership (hey, let’s not pin all of this on Gorbachev alone) that through some combination of incompetency, corruption, and misguided ideals that takes dramatic steps to wreck their own economy. So let’s come up with a very conservative, plausible alternate path for the USSR post-1985 or so.

Really, we just have to assume Gorby doesn’t get a chance to screw things up. But let’s assume instead, Soviet leadership in the late 80s just does some very basic course correcting. Like, a lot of the problems can still be not totally addressed. But assume leadership does get some of the “low-hanging fruit” like accomplishing some anti-corruption initiatives and adopting some tech-driven solutions to economic planning. Just enough to stabilize things a bit.

In this scenario, all that the Soviet Union has to do is beat that ~1% economic growth figure, and then the people of the former USSR are better off today if the USSR never collapsed. This is such a low bar to clear, I don’t see how the USSR doesn’t achieve this. It’s frankly sandbagging to assume a socialist country that achieved solid economic growth for decades even in bad times couldn’t see 2-3% growth over 30-35 years. Even if you’re a lib and think a socialist economy is fundamentally flawed, you can’t reasonably think this scenario would not likely be achieved. Personally, I think had the USSR survived, they would have eventually stabilized by following a more Dengist path or going all-in on cybernetic central planning once the power of computing was fully realized. Either way, the Soviet economy eventually stabilizes.

And it bears repeating, we’re just talking about per capita GDP. Even if alternate universe USSR only saw 1% growth and overall the economies of the two Russias were the same, communist Russia will have a much more equal distribution of wealth, meaning the average worker is much better off under socialism even under the same aggregate outcome.

Of course, it’s not just about economic growth. Had the USSR not been murdered, all the human suffering that occurred in the 90s could have been avoided. None of this had to happen. Even if you think socialism is flawed and even if the USSR didn’t fix all of their problems, the present world is a worse world than if socialism in the Eastern Bloc was not murdered (and it most definitely did not die of natural causes, it was murdered).