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[mainiac]

So the west is to blame for these livings standards because, what, they invented time travel and traveled back into the 70s and told the Soviets to fuck up their economy?

Post-Soviet industries were making products who's market value was below the cost of their inputs.  So great was the inefficiency that even if the capital and labor were free these industries wouldn't have been viable.  It was a bubble except instead of it being a bubble driven by capitalist speculation it was a bubble driven by government directive to keep having more and more heavy industry without care to whether it was actually needed or not.  Somewhere in the 70s they hit the point where they just dont need this stuff but they keep making it anyway because it was a successful strategy in the past.  Even after a sharp collapse in the industrial workforce the Russian economy still was leading the OECD in percentage of workforce in industry.

Oh but hey let's just kneejerk blame the foreigners.  It's worked elsewhere.  In China they blamed the Great Famine on the Soviets.  It wasn't that the Great Leap Forward created a collapse in agricultural output, no it was that the damn perfidious Soviets took all the money.  Always easier to just blame the foreigners.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

You are trying to explain that to the guy who thinks that Heavy industry is the only way to bring prosperity to a nation and loves his dictator for keeping that old and inefficient industry working in Belarus

[Sergarr]

I was like that some time before.

Then I realized that heavy machinery requires ridiculous logistics chains that reduce it's ability to modernize by about 9001% percent because it employs so many people and hosts so many bloodsucker bureaucrats.

New industry should not require huge-ass logistical chains if it wants to avoid these problems.

[mainiac]

There's something to be said for unified supply chains and economies of scale.  You just need to have a need to justify all the expense.

[Sergarr]

Well, we do have one potential need which can necessitate much expenses and can potentially bring many, many benefits to Russia.

That is, developing Siberia. And not in "throw prisoners at it" way. The technological way. It would require building arcologies, cheap air transportation vehicles and so on... but it would be so much worth it.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

But Russia spends that money on nearly useless stuff like Olympic Games or annexing Crimea

[Sergarr]

The current government isn't very interested in actually developing the country, since they get most of the profits from exporting crude oil and gas.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

That is the main problem of Russia.... But I would rephrase it: There are no active nation to force current government to spend money in effective manner

You said that there are no democracy because Russian can't trust politicians... I have a directly opposite opinion. Democracy is possible only when enough citizens believe that every politician is a bastard and must be forced to behave in a proper way.

[Sergarr]

That only works when the politicians can be forced to do something.

It doesn't work out in dictatures. At all. In a proper dictature a la China the Maidan would be crushed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989

Hell, the Chinese protesters even used burning vehicles to set up barricades, just like Ukrainian protesters used burning tires for the same purpose!

The only reason why the Maidan against Yanuk succeded was because he was (and still is) an incredibly incompetent coward who compromised all the time without actually sticking with everything, changing his sides every single year and being as corrupt as one can get.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

Do you think that if Yanuk would go full Tiananmen with not hundred but thousands dead Ukrainians would simply shut up and forget the whole thing?

BTW, I suspect that Yanuk gave order to bring in tanks  but that order was ignored by the army. Then he hastily ran away.

[Sergarr]

The Chinese didn't have mass revolts after Tiananmen Square, they just shut up and forgot about it ("Youth in China are generally unaware of the events that took place, the symbols such as tank man,[213] or even the date June 4 itself."). Probably because they didn't want to die at the hands of military.

What makes you think Ukrainians are different?

[Sheb]

For starter, most Chinese didn't hear about Tiananmen, the Communist party controlled information in a way that Yanukovitch simply couldn't emulate.

[mainiac]

Also Tiananmen was a quasi-middle class revolt that was shut down by a military recruited from poor rural areas.  Ukraine doesn't have a supply of hundreds of millions of illiterate peasant farmers like that.

[Sheb]

Well, you had a similar class elements here, with Maidan supporters being more middle-class, and their opponents being industrial workers from the East.

Remember the Donbass miners that fought with Orange protesters?

[mainiac]

That's a pretty small potatoes division compared to the gulf at Tienanmen.