Matt Yglesias

The Soviet Union Was a Real Empire, And Really Bad Too

Warsaw Pact invasion of Prague, 1968

I’ve been trying to stay out of the Sarah Palin blogging. But though there’s a lot to be said about her, the really important thing is that for a prospective national leader she has terrifyingly little grasp of public policy issues. For example, take this curious remark from a softball interview with National Review:

“The term I used to describe the panel making these decisions should not be taken literally,” says Palin. The phrase is “a lot like when President Reagan used to refer to the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire.’ He got his point across. He got people thinking and researching what he was talking about. It was quite effective. Same thing with the ‘death panels.’ I would characterize them like that again, in a heartbeat.”

This is a reminder that faced with anything other than a bending-over-backwards-to-not-embarrass-her interview, Palin can’t get through the easiest questions without humiliating herself. Dave Weigel suggests the obvious followup: “Which part of ‘evil empire’ was not literal?”

The Soviet Union was an honest-to-god literal empire and Reagan was calling it evil. Not metaphorically evil. Evil. That was the point. To show that he wasn’t going to let the practicalities of détente stop him from calling it like it is. And this isn’t just a random point of history, it’s relevant to an ongoing political and policy controversy about the merits of putting “moral clarity” at the center of your approach to dealing with autocratic regimes.

Soviet GDP in the 1970s

Last night I was reading Gregory Feiler’s very interesting book The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan (short summary: conquering Afghanistan is hard and expensive) and read the following bit of potted history:

After the Czechoslovakian reform movement knows as “socialism with a human face” was crushed along with the Prague Spring in 1968, Brezhnev’s renure developed into what became known as zastoi—the stagnation. The economy, beset by massive inefficiencies from central planning and institutions such as Stalin’s agricultural collectivization, declined more or less consistently, and was further dragged down by a ballooning military-industrial complex overseen by Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov.

My previous understanding of this had been that zastoi referred to political and cultural developments, not economic ones, and that actually the 1970s were a pretty good era in economic terms. After all, the Soviet Union, like today’s Russia, was a major oil and gas producer and tended (like today’s Russia) to do well whenever oil was expensive. That appears to be the story told by actual Russian GDP statistics:

You can see that the Soviet Union was, in fact, pretty dysfunctional by the fact that when the oil boom ended it pretty much flatlined. But for the bulk of the Brezhnev era, the economy seems to have been in okay shape. I note that there’s a certain amount of post-1991 revisionism on this general subject. The whole reason the Cold War happened was that the Soviet Union was not just morally awful (North Korea’s morally awful too) but also reasonably formidable. Its economy performed a lot worse than America’s but better than a lot of other countries. They had a giant military, an impressive space station, etc., to go along with the political repression and brutal domination of foreign countries. That’s what was scary about the whole thing. More recently we’ve taken to letting ourselves be frightened by really puny countries (Iran, Venezuela, etc.) and to some extent people seem to be projecting that backwards onto a much more substantial past adversary.

Socialized Medicine

Here’s some historical data on female life expectancy in Russia:

My understanding is that the post-Soviet collapse had more to do with lifestyle factors (vodka got cheaper) than problems in the health care system. But the point, broadly speaking, would be that the dread U.S.S.R. actually did a perfectly decent job of providing the sort of goods—health care, basic education, subways, nuclear missiles, vast prison camps, satellite launch vehicles—that in most democracies are provided by the state. It did a bad job of providing things like appealing clothing, consumer electronics, popular entertainments, cars, etc. that are generally provided by the private sector. In Cuba everyone’s dirt poor and generally leave crappy lives with few goods, but the literacy rate is high and the state of public health is excellent considering the poor overall economic situation. And even in the United States, about half of health care is financed by the state—a free market approach to senior citizens would be a disaster.