Soviet
Article
Soviet is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between March 05, 2021 and August 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “class boundaries have been rolled over by Soviet tanks”; “through the long Soviet occupation”; “Soviet growth apparently did not feature technological change”. It most often appears alongside Democrats, Ottomans, Republicans.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: March 05, 2021
- Last seen: August 25, 2023
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Democrats (2 shared issues)
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- Ottomans (2 shared issues)
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- Republicans (2 shared issues)
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- Trump (2 shared issues)
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- World Bank (2 shared issues)
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- 5G (1 shared issues)
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- A Real Dog (1 shared issues)
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- Acemoglu and Robinson (1 shared issues)
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- ACX comments (1 shared issues)
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- Africa (1 shared issues)
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- Alcsutdoboz (1 shared issues)
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- Allied Powers (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
For a Polish post-communist perspective instead, where all class boundaries have been rolled over by Soviet tanks...
Perhaps the most important thing that separates Eastern bloc culture from e.g. British culture is the concept of intelligentsia - a class materially poor but mentally rich, the artists and writers and academics. There is a strong implicit understanding that such a class is the heart of society, responsible for its "spirit" and the safekeeping of its values. Between WW2 and the subsequent Soviet occupation, this class has been essentially gutted, to a large extent physically (see e.g. Katyn massacre). In parallel, the communist effort to separate kulaks from both their holdings and the mortal coil has been successful, and there are no pre-war fortunes whatsoever. Communism falls, and now we have a tabula rasa society.
Our story begins on March 30 1988, when young Viktor Orban founded an extra-curricular society at his college called The Alliance Of Young Democrats (Hungarian abbreviation: FiDeSz). Thirty-seven students met in a college common room and agreed to start a youth organization. Orban's two roommates were there, along with a couple of other guys they knew. Orban gave the pitch: the Soviet Union was crumbling. A potential post-Soviet Hungary would need fresh blood, new politicians who could navigate the democratic environment. They could get in on the ground floor.
Those thirty-six college friends must have seen something in him. They gave him his loyalty, and he gave them their marching orders. The predicted Soviet collapse arrived faster than anybody expected, and after some really fast networking ("did you know I represent the youth, who are the future of this country?") Orban got invited to give a speech at a big ceremony marking the successful revolution, and he knocked it out of the park.
But in their own minds, they are proud steppe nomads. And they keep the language of the steppe nomads alive, a strange non-Indo-European language with lots of SZ's and ZS's. In their own mind, they are an orphan people, Asiatic horselords surrounded on all sides by hostile Europeans who are probably snickering behind their back at their uncouth ways and unpronounceable letter combinations. Sometimes this contempt turned violent; Hungary has been conquered and occupied by Ottomans, Austrians, and Russians. The worst insult was the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, when the victorious Allied Powers stripped away 2/3s of Hungarian territory in retaliation for its WWI loss, the ceded land going primarily to Slovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Hungarians have never forgotten this humiliation, but through the long Soviet occupation there wasn't much to do but let it fester.
AR have such a restrictive definition of sustained growth that it even excludes episodes of this length: South Korea before democratisation (1960-94), the Soviet Union (1930s to 1970s), Argentina (late 19th to early 20th century), and China (1978-?) are all explicitly written off as unsustainable growth under extractive institutions. This is consistent with their theory but rules out what most people would consider key data points.
Soviet growth apparently "did not feature technological change". As an economist I assume they mean that statistical measures of total factor productivity did not grow. But by any ordinary meaning of "technological change" this statement is patently ridiculous: horses were replaced with tractors, employment shifted from agriculture to industry, the production of steel, electricity and machine tools grew exponentially, and city dwellers moved into highrise apartments with radio, TV and refrigerators. (I once travelled a bit in Central Asia and the newly ex-Soviet 'stans felt like developed countries that had fallen on hard times. Nepal didn’t.)
Inline links: total factor productivity