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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
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No, there'd be a road shortage even if we didn't have automotive plant at all for anything smaller than a bus or truck. Because delivery vehicles wouldn't be able to get from Point A to Point B. Because intercity buses are breaking down in potholes on the way from Village A to Town B in situations where there's never going to be a railroad spur connecting the two but people still need to move between them. Because, say, a plumber wouldn't be able to efficiently move himself and his 200 kg of tools and fittings from his workplace to a job site 10 kilometers away.
That's not how car-centricity works. Car-centricity arises from a systemic policy decision to have nothing but cars, and we have already embraced bus, rail, and metro systems in nearly every part of the Soviet Union compatible with them being used at any remotely reasonable price point.
The problem is that these systems don't and can't serve every part of the USSR at a remotely reasonable price point, and the bus systems in particular, which are incredibly valuable, themselves rely on roads being functional.
The proletariat are also increasingly owning cars and sick of the traffic. Soviet standards of living have long since reached a level where very normal working-class people can reasonably afford to own some complex piece of machinery such as a piano or a car.
(Pianos are fucking expensive)
The political class are something like 1-3% of the population; there literally are not enough of them for their cars to be the ones causing all the traffic jams unless a much larger and much more proletarian slice of the population has them too. It's an "everyone" problem.
The only way to present this as a case of bourgeois traitors being to blame is by pulling the same two-step Stalin did with the 'kulaks' and calling any member of the proletariat who has any personal belongings more complex or expensive than a pair of trousers "suspiciously bourgeois." It was wrong when Stalin tried to do it to the peasant farmers and it's even more wrong when we try to do it to the industrial and service workers.
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Comrade oilshock will save us from capitalist modes of transport. Any day now...
It will actually be Comrade Saddam Hussein, he will liberate the middle east from the western backed oppressors (the Saudi's), causing the oil shock and as such we must donate as much military material to him as possible. With our help Iraq will rise just as the Neo-Assyrian empire of old and establish a new order.
I believe you are viewing things in an American perspective. Car centricity can occur even with having good public transport due to how the roads themselves are designed. If we just start building roads without thinking about how pedestrians, cyclists, buses and trams use them and whether they feel it is safe then we will definitely head towards car centricity.
And yet this only became an issue when the political elite got sick of the traffic jams. We have not had one protest by the people about traffic. It shows where this push is coming from.
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That... pretty much is a systematic policy decision to have nothing but cars? It's not something that happens just becuase urban planners are innocent smol beans and remembering to build pedestrian bridges and bus stops is hard.
The problem here is that cars and light trucks are a fairly important modality of transport for living in an industrialized society. They serve practical purposes that have nothing to do with whether the workers, the state, or the capitalists control the means of production. For the lifestyle of the average citizen to be anywhere near what it could be, the infrastructure has to somehow accommodate some reasonable proportion of individual motorized vehicles. And just trying to pretend that they don't or shouldn't exist isn't a viable option.
The USSR is not a democracy and it takes extremely high thresholds to get people to protest things on a large scale because no one's actually sure the government won't just go all Tiananmen Square on them.
Meanwhile, if there were protests about the traffic then because of the way the narrative works we might not even notice unless they were absolutely gigantic and/or literally surrounding MNKh headquarters so no one could get in or out.
Your problem isn't with "cars are a bourgeois affectation of the class-traitor political elite and the only reason anyone wants us to build roads and parking garages is because the political elite are class traitors!"
Your problem is with "the USSR has never in its entire history held free and fair elections among the general public to determine who would get to be in charge, or to hold politicians accountable for satisfactory or unsatisfactory policies, and it will not be doing so at any point in the foreseeable future."
Traffic jams are more or less by definition a problem for the proletariat as well as for the elite, and in a country where only the nomenklatura get to make decisions at all, the criticism "we're only being pressured to do something about the traffic jams because the elite noticed" rings rather hollow. ALL our problems only get solved when the elite notice. That's part of our overarching political problem.
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I don't want to stop you because your commentary is incisive, cogent, and an all around good read, but I think he is doing a schtick, RPing a extreme anti-road position for amusement. I very much appreciate your analysis of ITL USSR political structure though.
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- Mid-Atlantic
I hope not. It would be very tiresome.
I thought great USSR has become woke?
"Back in my day, if you dared to complain about the glorious state-approved bread, you'd be sent straight to Siberia! You young ones are too soft, like undercooked borscht!"
— Old Soviet babushka probably
Anyways, I am pretty sure our politicians are held accountable just not by the people but by other politicians instead. We have chosen to go all in on the space race for some reason, now if we fail to land on the moon before the Americans we are probably going to get fired.
And the issue I was stating is that why are our politicians noticing it now?
1.They are getting affected by it because they are all corrupt and are getting stuck in traffic in their personal cars on the way to work.
2.Lots of workers are complaining about it to them.
I'd say 1. is more likely than 2.
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I think our USSR does allow protests now since Voznesensky's downfall but they need a permit like OTL France
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- Location
- Poland
Yeah I think there might be some minor geographic differences between "Singapore" and "the Soviet Union" that could also affect how transport infrastructure is done.
- Location
- Fort Worth, TX
Speaking of Demographics, Do we have any idea on the population of the USSR and it's various members? Have we reached replacement level or have we dipped below it?
If the demographics of this USSR is anything like the OTL one, then till the collapse of the USSR itself, the birthrates were still above replacement levels I believe. There are some differences between the two of course, so it's hard to say for sure, especially as one gets the information filtered through the ministry. But what can be said for sure, is that so far at least no one in the ministry has ever mentioned the demographics reaching an unfavorable negative trend.
So for now I'd presume it is still in the positive and has a fair chance of remaining so till at least the early 90s.
But perhaps some one knows some thing more definite?
So for now I'd presume it is still in the positive and has a fair chance of remaining so till at least the early 90s.
But perhaps some one knows some thing more definite?
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Not just the different course of WWII. The agricultural collectivization never happened. Instead peasants were reclassified as rural proletariat and semi-volunarily transformed along a similar rural model as Israel which is not known for its low birth rate. The rural population is larger, more "fruitful", and expanding into virgin lands. Population growth probably hasn't slowed at nearly the rate of OTL.
The population has been pretty thoroughly urbanized, there's not much actual rural rural population left. We're at 350+ million people in the USSR and still growing I believe, I think there is a slow demographic transition going on with us getting further from peak Boomer birth years but we'll probably clear 400 or 450 before things fully settle down.
Thats not the long term results that were being thrown around in the thread when the agricultural plan was finalized.
Lets not panic we are still flying half a China.
Yeah well that's just the bullshit we spouted to get Stalin off our ass about it and the peasants to fall in line. In practice we needed the labor in cities and it almost all got moved to cities, just through softer methods than chekists (such as the threat of chekists
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Also ruining their livelihoods through price controls at cost to the state!(such as the threat of chekists
The 30s were less bad than OTL, but by no means did we avoid collectivization and do good. We just did a softer version of it, that killed less people and was less of a stab in the foot.
If we had picked Theodorovich in the first plan, that may not have been the case, but we'd have other problems am sure. We'd have to engage in purge politics to make it not happen regardless.
Anyway, our USSR is significantly more urbanized, and richer. Both are things that drop the birth rates down, so its definitely lower than 1979 Soviet ones, though to what extent am not sure. Don't think we are below replacement rates though. We are not that rich.
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No? we stopped encouraging women to join the workforce so we could absorb the millions of men that were no longer in the army back into the economy and when we passed that period we started once again to advertise and encourage woman once again to join the workforce.
Based on analysis of discord lore from Blackstar back then, this was said.Yeah well that's just the bullshit we spouted to get Stalin off our ass about it and the peasants to fall in line. In practice we needed the labor in cities and it almost all got moved to cities, just through softer methods than chekists (such as the threat of chekists
Between the two options, the one that would keep a notable rural population was chosen. I'm not claiming that we aren't vastly more urban than rural, just that we still have that notable rural population in the background, quitely breeding and expanding both our population and lands under cultivation thanks to agricultural subsidies.
Both of those ultimately end the same way, is the thing. It has been generations since then. The simple fact is that no highly developed nation really needs more than a couple percent of the population directly performing agriculture, nor can it economically sustain it.
The farmer communes and the new socialist towns still exist, I'm sure, but with every passing year they need and have fewer and fewer people. If it hasn't already leveled out. The fact that we no longer get Ag focus tells me it probably has. Not to mention the age of that era's rural construction efforts. We have not seen a project like that since the housing expansion in 1960 or the plan-level rural modernization in 1965.
The farmer communes and the new socialist towns still exist, I'm sure, but with every passing year they need and have fewer and fewer people. If it hasn't already leveled out. The fact that we no longer get Ag focus tells me it probably has. Not to mention the age of that era's rural construction efforts. We have not seen a project like that since the housing expansion in 1960 or the plan-level rural modernization in 1965.