I'm watching this interesting video which basically states that the accelerant for the USSR's downfall was the lower gasoline prices in the '80s. They mention that the USSR subsidized the economy of E. Germany, Poland, and Cuba.

Later in this video, they reiterate that the Soviets were spending money on those economies.

Here are my questions associated with this assertion:

  • If the USSR was subsidizing those nations, then Cuba, E. Germany, and Poland would have wanted and needed the USSR to stay there and hence, would have propped up the USSR. But that was not the case.
  • The USSR was definitely subsidizing the economies of some of their own republics, like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. In February 1991, more than 90% of these people actually wanted to remain in the USSR. So why is it that when the Soviets were subsidizing E. Germany and Poland, they wanted the Soviets OUT, but when the Soviets were subsidizing the Tajiks and Uzbeks, the Central Asian Republics wanted to remain in the USSR? The Soviets had a stronger grip on the Tajiks and the Uzbeks since it was part of the same nation, and also there was a lot of cultural repression on these Central Asians.

  • https://www.jstor.org/stable/2706643

    Interpreting the Soviet subsidization of Eastern Europe — Josef C. Brada (1988) - this is a paper that specifically uses trade-price data across CMEA to show that raw materials from the USSR to Eastern Europe were priced below world-market values, while manufactured goods from Eastern Europe to the USSR were priced above comparable world-market prices. This price difference resulted in a net redistribution of trade gains from USSR

    IMO, this does paint a really clear picture about what trade looked like in the eastern bloc and clears the common misconceptions about the soviet union "draining" the eastern bloc, and the blatantly false correlations between "western imperialism" and "soviet imperialism". Even those who consider the ussr to be "social Imperialist" in its later revisionist periods, sure do know how important it is to make the distinction between western imperialism and ussrs "social Imperialism"

    Note that this does not mean that the USSR wasn't imperialist at all, or that its presence was a net positive for the eastern bloc, this deals with trade-price alone for certain raw materials

    I believe the ussr was social Imperialist especially in the revisionist khrushchevite and brezhnevite eras, and there is evidence that suggests so. The point that I'm trying to convey is that this still was not even close to western colonial and neocolonial extraction (then and now)

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    Brada's broader point isn't the existence of an intra-CMEA trade surplus for Eastern bloc countries - that much has always been understood to be the fact ever since the Marrese & Vaňous study was published in 1983. No serious modern historian disputes that the USSR "subsidised" other Eastern bloc countries through deficit trading - the question is at what cost .

    The idea that Eastern bloc economies were being drained stems from other factors:

    • The immediate Soviet post-war occupation of CEE saw large chunks of industrial capacity dismantled and shipped to the USSR, ostensibly to heal the damage caused by the war. This wasn't restricted to Germany and also included countries that were Soviet allies.
    • The late 1940s and 1950s saw widespread use of penal slave labour in mines and high-risk environments to harness raw materials across the Eastern bloc. Much of it was shipped to the USSR at symbolic prices (f.e. Uranium in Czechoslovakia).
    • Existing light industry was liquidated at the behest of Soviet authorities who wanted to focus on heavy industrial machinery in greater quantities - in part to prop up the armed forces of the whole Eastern bloc.
    • The goods received as part of CMEA trade were often lower quality than agreed upon or defect.
    • Even as net benefeciaries of CMEA trade, Eastern bloc countries were, much like the USSR, still shortage economies, which in part explains OP's question as to why the subsidies weren't publicly regarded as something that made the communist regimes worth it to the common people. Peer development was simply slower.

    All of this is beyond the scope of Brada's essay, which only aims to posit the Marrese & Vaňous study in a new light. He's not alone there with his critique of it - Randall W. Stone did the same in his 1994 book Satellites and Commissars, as did (to a lesser degree) Oscar Sanchez-Sibony in the 2014 book Red Globalization, both of which I recommend taking a look at, I quote parts of them below. Stone effectively concludes that Soviet subsidies didn't achieve any particular goals and that they were more often than not completely chaotic and aimless, usually at the behest of the "receiving" Eastern bloc countries that didn't plan with consumer demand in mind. One possible exception to this would be machine exports to the USSR that may have been planned as a result of these subsidies (considering the USSR chronic deficiency of machine parts throughout its existence and the insistence that this should be a focus in industrial development by Soviet authorities), but it's hard to pinpoint that as an exact cause.

    Stone also compares the spikes and flow in CMEA trade between various contries during times of political upheaval and likewise concludes that the USSR didn't really utilise economic power effectively in political interference operations - but he also notes that the USSR had other methods of doing that - military power and pure political pressure on nominally aligned actors in national governments for start. Hence why a conclusion that this accounts for supposed Soviet non-imperialism is quite far-fetched and not really true - the intensity of it varies depending on the years though.

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    Alr appreciate the clarification, my initial response was a bit too blunt, and I should've addressed the social Imperialism aspect better, and what specifically the paper encapsulates and what it doesn't

    I meant to convey it didn't in any way resemble western colonial and neocolonial imperialism

    the post war dismantling is one of the strongest points against the ussr, but lemme clarify post war dismantling is not equivalent to permanent economic extraction (like the west), it refers to a short chaotic reparations regime imposed from 1944-48. This was immediately after ww2, that cost the soviet union more than 20 million soldiers mind you, and it's bound to be chaotic, it wasn't a market oriented, profit seeking mechanism. The ussr, post ww2 had lost 1/3rd of its productive capacity - tens of thousands of factories ruined; railways, power plants, housing devastated. The ussr was poorer in 1945 than it was in 1928. Western allies on the other hand retained colonial extraction, and rebuilt via the Marshall plan. The ussr had no access to foreign capital or colonies, therefore it had to rely on reparations and internal mobilization

    The 1944-46 phase perhaps was the most abusive, legal frameworks based on allied agreements allowed reparations in cash and kind. Germany was the main target but not the only one (hungary, romania, poland, czechoslovakia, etc). Pre-war Czechoslovakia was one of Europe's most industrialized states with advanced metallurgy and a strong machine-tool sector. During the war, nazi germany heavily integrated the Czech industry into its militarised war time economy. Post war, most of the German assets were seized as reparations, and czechoslovakia as a whole faced limited dismantling as compared to the other states. It did not experience a deindustrialisation as a result, it quickly recovered by the 50s after which became one of the most advanced economies in the eastern bloc

    The 1946-48 phase saw the creation of many joint ventures between romania, hungary, etc with the ussr. These seemed imperial because not only did they control strategic sectors, but also often diverted output to the USSR, but were temporary nonetheless, not permanent profit seeking extraction

    From 1948 onwards, the transitional extraction was replaced by integration, and that's when the eastern bloc became net recipients, capital goods flowed from the ussr to the rest of the satellite states, this again can be considered social imperialism since it involves the export of capital (but not draining in the long run)

    It was hegemonic, coercive (often inefficient), and militarised often, but not imperial extraction in the Capitalist sense

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    Once again, while these countries were under Soviet imperialism, they stagnated. Once they threw out the occupiers and got their freedom, they prospered.

    And what happened to Russia once it stopped subsidizing the colonized countries and once it stopped importing their supposedly overpriced manufactured goods? It's economy collapsed.

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  • Not sure that Cuba wanted Soviets out. As for the others, decisions made in 1991 were mostly nationalistic and emotional rather than economic.

    Germany wanted to unite and Poland just switched sugar daddies, they are now the biggest recipients of EU money.

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    Not just nationalistic and emotional. Economically, they were taking the collapse harsh. They had not developped a national banking industry for ideological reasons (contrary to China) and had no ways to borrow nationally.

    The switch towards a bloc that's far more economically stable was also rational and the middle and long term right decision.

    It's important to remember that the crisis hit harder in and earlier in the 80's in the eastern satellites than in the USSR, where economic problems were delayed longer. And similarly, the effects of privatization were far, far worse in the former USSR than in many of these eastern european countries. Especially when former members of the local Communist Parties were not in charge of it.

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  •  Cuba, E. Germany, and Poland would have wanted and needed the USSR to stay there and hence, would have propped up the USSR

    Cuba needed the USSR to stay for sure. Moreover, even when the USSR spent quite a lot on Cuba, Cuba wanted even more money. Which even the Brezhnev administration considered too much and politely tried to avoid.

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  • Prety simple. "Country" want to stay not when you subsidise its economy, but when you bribe its leadership.

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  • The USSR forced these countries to adopt an inefficient economic system and to forego trading with other advanced countries. They sold them cheap oil and gas, and bought their manufactured goods, also cheaply.

    They subsidized them. In the same way as slave owners subsidized their slaves by giving them free food and lodging.

    Just look at the Baltics or Poland. As soon as they became free, they started growing and became prosperous.

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    Cuba was not forced by the USSR

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  • The short answer is that people don't understand the world in purely economic terms and the suppression of dissent by force in both East Germany and Poland didn't leave a good mark on the country. With that being said, the ruling class of both Poland and the GDR was very much in favour of the USSR. East Germany had especially profited off their posed peer status to West Germany and received consumer goods priority in some regards. Central Asia also had a different backstory to their association with the USSR compared to the satellites in Europe, but there's more detail to this - in short:

    • Central Asia had taken its biggest strides in economic development (compared to the rest of the world) under Soviet rule (including large-scale urbanisation) - this was notably not the case in Poland and the GDR, where peer comparison to non-socialist european countries yielded a far worse comparative outlook. The communist regimes in those countries also came to power as a result of Soviet military presence in the country and were largely regarded by the people as an extension of Russian imperial ambition - which didn't strike the best connotations considering both Poland and Germany had a history of being in conflict with Russia (and in the case of Poland, having a history of attempted cultural eradication at times).
    • East Germany was an artificially divided country and certain segments of the population wished for a reunification that was never regarded as feasible under Soviet rule.
    • Both Poland and East Germany had a history of dissident and worker protests that were crushed either internally by the communist regime, or by the Soviet army and this was obviously not regarded well by the population.
    • Economic mismanagement in Poland had almost caused a famine in the 1970s/1980s and resulted in the reinstating of rationing and a rise in malnutrition, rendering the point of economic development moot in Poland's case to a large degree.
    • Where a country wasn't on the brink of famine, it was most certainly a shortage economy - even the GDR, which I mentioned already as becoming a part of the Eastern bloc at a time when it already had a developed industrialised civic society that necessitates more consumer goods. See here for an anecdotal English-subtitled video of shortages in Czechoslovakia, produced by contemporary state TV.
    • Regarding the immediate 1991 referendum itself, note that a significant part of the urban population in both Uzbekistan and Tajikistan was ethnically Russian, with an obvious vested interest in staying within the union.

    On topic of the subsidies themselves, note that especially in the early post-war era, the USSR took a very agressive stance to prop up its own economy through widespread pillaging of the occupied territories (including their own allies). As Oscar Sanchez-Sibony puts it in Red Globalization:

    They did this in three ways: the bluntest was to simply uproot whole factories and replant them on Soviet soil; they also forced countries to sell resources to the Soviet Union at very low prices; and they took a 50 percent stake on many large firms throughout Eastern Europe. It is difficult to measure the extent to which the Soviet Union benefited from these arrangements. Poland famously provided the Soviet Union with coal at prices well below world market prices, but the Soviet Union, in turn, also supplied goods at prices lower than those in the world market. This practice would become endemic in Communist-Bloc trade; arbitrary pricing was one of its hallmarks. However, at least two ministers of foreign trade, in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, were executed for bargaining too hard with the Soviet Union, and it is fair to say that the benefits accrued to the Soviet Union of the postwar reparations were significant.

    And the matter of raw materials was also problematic - the produce often didn't hold up to standards:

    Although much of this problematic production involved industrial manufactures, even the low quality of basic Soviet raw materials was exposed. In 1959, Western importers of timber, coal, and chromium rejected Soviet deliveries after finding the timber unseasoned and the coal and chromium riddled with too many impurities. This situation continued into the 1960s, and became a particular concern for officials, especially in times of tight market conditions. Such conditions were in effect in the spring of 1962, when the Ministry of Foreign Trade found itself with tons of unsalable chromium from Kazakhstan at a time when more supply of chromium existed than there was demand for it. The Kazakh chromium, neither assorted nor enriched, was being rejected by French and British companies in favor of the competition’s; internationally competitive chromium would require the construction of a completely new factory, the Kazakh Council of Ministers reported. Two years later, however, the problem persisted, and Gosplan was still pushing to improve its quality in order to export it to proven potential clients. Perhaps inevitably, complaints from Eastern European countries about the low quality of the products the Soviets were bartering with them did not seem to elicit the same degree of alarm. The reports on such complaints were invariably limited to noting the problem, with no prescriptive policy appended, and certainly no suggestion of any further investments to improve the situation. And so 1962 complaints by Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Cuba about the quality of the Soviet oil delivered to them, which had high levels of salt – up to 100 mg per liter – were not further qualified. In cases such as these, solutions could be simple. When the Czech deputy minister of heavy industry went to Gosplan’s headquarters in Moscow to complain about the quality of Soviet iron ore, particularly the ore from Tul’skii – which had an iron content of 43.13 percent rather than the 46.5 percent minimum stipulated in the trade agreement – he asked that the Soviets give them higher-grade ore from a different region. The deputy head of Gosplan turned the request down without further discussion, alleging simply that it was “quite impossible at the moment.”

    Finally, as seen in this excerpt from Randall W. Stone's Satellites and Commissars, Soviet barter aid didn't really alleviate the effects of economic mismanagement that socialist regimes in Eastern Europe caused, to at least perceptively "make up for it", seen here on the case of Poland:

    Poland was in the depths of economic crisis in April 1983, and Jaruzelski's letter to Andropov took a pleading tone. "Allow me to express to you personally, and to the leadership of the party and government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, sincere thanks for your many forms of aid and support," he wrote. "I ask you once again, Honorable Comrade Andropov, to sell to our country an additional 500,000 tons of grain." The list of requests included gasoline, cotton, and the extension of the Kobryn-Brest natural gas pipeline. Andropov responded coolly, promising 350,000 instead of the requested 500,000 tons of wheat, failing to acknowledge the request for gasoline, and reaffirming the agreement reached earlier in April to substitute a meager increase in assorted fibers for Poland's request for 10,000 tons of cotton. The letter reaffirmed that the issue of the gas pipeline would have to be dealt with through the appropriate channels. Whereas the Jaruzelski letter ended extravagantly, "I beg you to accept expressions of deep respect and the most sincere good wishes," Andropov signed his simply, "With a communist greeting".

    I especially recommend reading Stone's book on the topic if you're interested further. A common denominator for Soviet subisidies/barter aid is the aimlessness in its distribution and allocation to individual satellite countries in Eastern Europe - a contributor to the negative perpception of Soviet dominance over these countries in general by the people.

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