QUORA: How did the USSR exist for as long as it did, considering how inefficient and wasteful its economic model was?
--answered by Dima Vorobiev, Former Propaganda Executive at Soviet Union (1980–1991), July 28

SHORT ANSWER
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Two main sources of Soviet durability:
Infinite access to human and natural resources because of the size of the country and its natural resources—up to a point. “Gravitation is your friend—until it’s not.”
“Production of the means of power” (Prof. Mark Harrison) being the comparative advantage of Russia in the international division of labor. This immensely helped the Communists to mobilize the nation and get much support abroad around the idea of the
USSR as the global Red Caliphate.

LONGER ANSWER
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To survive in the world of economic competition, you must either increase your productivity or maximize the input to get a better output.

Marxism went for maximizing the input, full throttle.

It’s in the books
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Socialism, as a theory, doesn’t recognize constraints. “There are no fortresses that the Communists can’t take,” said Stalin. The Triangle of Constraints would be a figment of a blinkered bourgeois mind, unable to take a leap of creativity.

The only constraint the Marxists know is private ownership of the means of production and Capitalist exploitation. Once these are removed, the entire human potential will be set free and transcend all known constraints.

Labor is king
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Also, the economic teaching of Marx posits labor as the true measure of value/utility of whatever is created by people. You must subscribe to the “labor theory of value,” or you’ll be a lousy Marxist. You’ll be forever a prisoner of the bourgeois
fallacy where individual economic actors together establish the value of things through supply balancing the demand.

In practical terms, in the Marxist universe, the more human resources you throw at the task, the more you create. Plants, trains, cars, stocks, cattle—the things bourgeoisie calls “Capital”—are just enablers of labor-driven value creation.

It doesn’t matter what you build, tanks, schools, or railroads to nowhere, if the Marxists say it’s what needs to be made, it’s valuable.

Together, all this makes Real Socialism a very wasteful project. It’s hardwired in the mantra we kept repeating in my time in the USSR: “All for man, everything for man’s well-being.” Profit is bunk, capital accumulation is the slow death of your
soul, and money is the source of all evil.

Quest for the magic fountain
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Soviet history can be described as three chapters of finding a magic fountain of inputs for the Marxist project.

1917–1934. Expropriating the assets of the Russian Empire. Nationalizing Russian and foreign businesses. Robbing the peasants and the entrepreneurial class of NEP. Confiscating gold and jewelry from individuals during the purges and vacuuming their
stashes through the Torgsin system.

1939–1945. Nationalizing the assets in the annexed territories of Eastern Europe. The “Schmeisser Industrialization”: transfer of German and Japanese industries, equipment, and technologies to the USSR.

1965-1991. Discovery of huge petroleum reserves in West Sibiria. Oil and gas exports as the new foundation of Soviet economic might.

American wickedness
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From this perspective, it only makes sense that the Soviet project expired as soon as the Americans managed to crash our petroleum-driven model. The system was calibrated for a steady input of billions of petrodollars. Once the flow dwindled to a trickle,
the system was too slow to adjust. After a few years, it collapsed under snowballing political disorganization triggered by the empty till.

Below, a poster from the first years of Stalin’s collectivization of the Soviet countryside. The text says: “Not a single acre of unsown field!”
[poster]

Maximizing the inputs, no matter the cost, was a Soviet answer to everything. In this case, the local managers were expected to ignore the quality of idle fields in question, the capacity of the collective farms to work it, the availability of seeds, and
suchlike.

At the next job appraisal, the managers risked being confronted with stern questions. “Why did you allow so much land to be unused?” “Why haven’t you found the needed resources?” “Why haven’t you mobilized your peasant workers to find out
hidden reserves?”

For a Soviet manager, it was much less risky to plow everything, throw in the soil whatever they had, and hope for the best. At least, they had the alibi of wasting all they had for the cause of the last Party directive.

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