I think it's relevant to point out that this is not a news article written by a reporter; it is an opinion piece written by someone who has a very specific viewpoint.
This is not ad hominem, I am not claiming anything about the correctness of his claims. However, I think it is important to distinguish this from the other numerous WSJ pieces on the situation of nuclear plants in Japan right now.
>it is an opinion piece written by someone who has a very specific viewpoint.
whether a core melts through the containment vessel or not depends on specific temperature that pool of melted uranium on the floor will develop. That in itself depends on the geometrical shape of the pool, uranium enrichment degree and presence of the neutron moderator material in the pool. That in itself depends on a bunch of other things ...
Maybe he was thinking of querying by values? My (admittedly cursory) examination of this suggests I must know the key and only the key to get a value. To me a database is searchable.
Totalitarian societies have existed for thousands of years in Europe. Socialism seems to be pretty popular in the US (Medicare, SS) and seems to be working out okay in EU.
The article basically says that the Soviet economy was broken by bad bets on two commodities. Very hard to bet the whole country if you don't have a command economy.
Can you back your claims up? In particular, say, the Trans-Siberian railroad? Its construction began in 1891, two decades before the formation of the USSR [1].
While certainly prisoners were used in its construction, saying that it was "built with slave labor" is somewhat disingenuous. Perhaps you are saying that parts of it were built using prisoners, who were not paid for their services? If so, that is certainly the case.
i have personally heard anecdotes (and seen snapshots) from people in school in the late 80s, early 90s, who were regularly herded into the fields to harvest potatoes (czech republic). they too considered it rather fun for whatever reason.
In the 80s, I went on field trips to learn how to plant vegetables. This was hardly slave labor.
In the 90s in the US, I had to spend 40 hours "campaigning" for candidates, if I wanted to graduate highschool. I wouldn't really call that slave labor, but, I certainly learned a lot more by planting sprouts.
I'm 45 and I used to pick potatoes in the autumn in Scotland when I was at school - the holidays in October were known as the "Tattie Holidays" (tattie being Scots dialect for potato).
Are these reports from first hand experience or can you site your sources?
In particular, I'm curious how you'll back up the "but a notable part of it was due to decreasing the number of people as well," considering USSR's population grew during the period you are describing [1].
Partially this is from reading a book by a Soviet ex-patriot (who I'll admit might be lying) and partially from the textbooks from my early Soviet history class in college. I'd give you better references, but my books are at home and I'm not right now.
I should also point out that during the 1920-1940 period the USSR did a lot of territorial expansion into the lands held by the Whites, and then later into the Baltic states and grabbing parts of Finland and Poland.
I'll admit, though, that given that we're talking about the industrialization period in general I shouldn't be talking about a decreasing population since over the whole early industrialization timeframe the population did rise even without considering conquest. I would have done better to day "but a notable part of it was due to keeping population growth down with the use of famines."
If it's the famine in Ukraine [1] that you are talking about, absolutely. But, are you saying that it was done as part of industrialization?
My great grandfather was one of the peasants you describe (his land was taken away). Although the state use of land was inefficient, it was not the continual famine that you imply. Food shortages occurred, but, they occurred under the Tsars as well. The industrialization that occurred pre and post WWII in the USSR seems pretty undeniable though.
Wikipedia says the Great Purges had over a million and a half victims, with close to seven hundred thousand shot.
This was in the 1930s under Stalin. USSR has more history than that; when I lived there, no one I knew was shot, no one was exiled; nor was anyone afraid of being shot or exiled (I can tell you what they were afraid of, though). My great grandmother's generation certainly remembered those times though.
Your statement plays on the perception that I have seen in the US that the USSR was this terrible place and all of its citizens hated it. I don't know if you are from the US, so, I will not make any assumptions. I can tell you that the propaganda machine here in the US is at least as good as it was in the USSR.
Actually, my original statement was based off the reappearing theme in many governments of "shoot the messenger". They're model was wrong and they didn't want to see what the correction was. I actually really had no comment on the populace in general and it seems they had their own disagreements.
For the purpose of the article (and my comment) it really doesn't matter how the populace felt. My second comment had some snark due to your "idiotic statements" comment. But, there is a lot of reported history of purges, removal from film (had an article right here on HN about that), and exile of people whose opinions didn't jive with the current regime.
Saying something very contrary to the establishment always had consequences (and still has, even in the US). Under Stalin, the consequences were lethal. At other times, plenty of people disagreed with the establishment and were just fine. My problem with your original statement was that it was very much a blanket statement. It applied to some parts of USSR's history and less to others.
In USSR, I recall propaganda that said that everyone in the US was racist and that blacks were uniformly mistreated. Of course, the reality is that there was slavery, there was the civil rights movement and that now things are different. Broad statements like that smack of propaganda.
"My problem with your original statement was that it was very much a blanket statement. It applied to some parts of USSR's history and less to others."
I am pretty sure the statement applied to the whole run of the USSR. Maybe more in parts and less in others, but they ignored the reality of their situation.
You seem to be trying to add things to what I said that have nothing to do with the statement and truly I am never happy with the "well your just as bad/worse" argument. It really doesn't have anything to do with what I said or prove me wrong. For example, the whole second paragraph of the above post has nothing to do with what I said.
Built between 1931 and 1933, the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal was the first massive construction project of the Gulag. Over 100,000 prisoners dug a 141-mile canal with few tools other than simple pickaxes, shovels, and makeshift wheelbarrows in just 20 months. Initially viewed as a great success and celebrated in a volume published both in the Soviet Union and the United States, the canal turned out to be too narrow and too shallow to carry most sea vessels. Many prisoners died during construction.
Vorkuta, a city built by gulag labor in the tundra 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow and 100 miles above the Arctic Circle, is slowly dying - and those who remain in many cases cannot afford to leave.
A Soviet-era sign that remains atop a central building exhorts people to mine more coal, the resource that first attracted the gulag's architects in the 1930's and resulted in forced labor by two million prisoners before the camps shut down in 1950's.
And are those all of the things that were built, created in the USSR at the time? To the extent that it allows you to claim that "The Soviet Union was quite literally built on slave labor?" Were they even a fraction of a percent?
You seem to be pointing out that the GULAGs existed and are providing sources for this fact. I'm not really disputing the existence of the labor camps. Let me ask you this, do you know anyone who lived in the USSR, who worked in the USSR and who was not a convict in a labor camp? I know lots. Are you saying that they do not count?
The Soviet Union shot you and your family if you tried to leave? Huh, that didn't happen to me or my family. Or any other person I know. I guess it's popular to spout bullshit like that though.
Soon after the formation of the Soviet Union, emigration restrictions were put in place to keep citizens from leaving the various countries of the Soviet Socialist Republics,[1] though some defections still occurred. During and after World War II, similar restrictions were put in place in non-Soviet countries of the Eastern Bloc,[2] which consisted of the Communist states of Eastern Europe.[3][4]
Most in the group were pessimistic about their chances — but none more than Mr. Mendelevich. He felt sure they would get caught, but to his mind, a group suicide was preferable to a life of waiting for an exit visa that would never arrive. Even a botched attempt, he figured, would at least attract the eyes of the world.
Early the next day, as the plotters walked onto the tarmac, they were, indeed, caught. The K.G.B. had known of their plan for months. And the two leaders were later sentenced to death.
But Mr. Mendelevich was also right that their desperate act would make their demand for free emigration impossible to ignore. Now largely forgotten, this planned hijacking, and the Soviet government’s overreaction to it, opened the first significant rip in the Iron Curtain, one through which hundreds of thousands would eventually flee. With great drama, it undermined Communist orthodoxy. After all, if the Bolsheviks had built the perfect society, why would any well-adjusted citizens want to leave, let alone risk their lives to do so?
The essential weakness of the Soviet Union was exposed: to survive, the regime had to imprison its own population. This would be the beginning of the end.
Jews were understandably at the forefront of the emigration battle. Even as they were forbidden to exercise any kind of Jewish identity, they also had no option to assimilate in Soviet society. Their internal passports were stamped “Jew,” a word that three generations after the 1917 revolution signified little more than their status as outsiders. Many had come to feel that their existence inside the Soviet Union was untenable, that the only way to escape this paradox was to move away. But the doors were firmly shut; those who requested permission to leave were refused and then ostracized.
The push to emigrate, which had begun in the early 1960s as an underground movement, had grown by 1970 into an open campaign. Letters to the United Nations were signed by hundreds of Soviet Jews. Only a few months before the hijacking attempt, the Kremlin had called for a public relations counteroffensive that would paint Zionism as “a vanguard of imperialism.” A large press conference was arranged with “acceptable” Jews, including the prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya and the comedian Arkady Raikin, vowing loyalty to the Soviet Union and denouncing Zionism as expressing “the chauvinistic views and racist ravings of the Jewish bourgeoisie.”
Heh, I've heard that argument before, my family and everyone I knew was "elite" somehow. No, we were certainly not. Or are you saying my problem is being Jewish?
Sergei Brin, who you mention, was his family also shot? If you applied for the paperwork properly you were allowed to leave.
This is not ad hominem, I am not claiming anything about the correctness of his claims. However, I think it is important to distinguish this from the other numerous WSJ pieces on the situation of nuclear plants in Japan right now.