Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "Did the Soviet Union EVER Recover from WW2?" video.

The UK economy in 1945 was also geared to wartime production, particularly in heavy industry and armaments production (like the Soviet Union), but by 1950 (with some rationing still in place, like petrol rationing) was largely changed over to a pre-war type consumer economy. Surprisingly, despite the wartime destruction there, exactly the same thing (with more emphasis on trade exports), had occurred in West Germany. A consumer economy never seemed to properly develop behind the Iron Curtain; it was geared towards a perpetual war time economy. Russia, to a certain extent, is still in this mode today.
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George Orwell understood the politically manipulated economies of communist countries by publishing Animal Farm
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Living standards in the 2 decades after WW2 only recovered in Western capitalist countries, e.g United States, UK, France, during the 1960s. These 3 countries continued to spend significantly into their industrial-military complex (although not at total war levels) because of the Cold War and decolonisation (which did not go well for either Britain or France). However, not at the expense of bringing back the pre-war consumer market, although this was slower to recover in Western Europe (and Australia), than the United States. For example, petrol rationing continued into the early1950s in the UK, and ended in Australia only by 1950. Furthermore, meat rationing in the UK continued until 1954. This was a sign of not a fully recovered consumer market, in capitalist countries, as a result of the total war military economy from 1939-1945. The socialist-totalitarian Soviet Union did not even get anywhere near as, say Western Europe, in establishing a proper consumer goods market by 1960. Consumer goods were always scarce in the Soviet Union, including in the economically better times of Krushchev. I agree with Tic, socialism (in any guise) fails miserably at economics.
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Propaganda (including distortion or obfuscation of facts), directed at the actual economy leads to economic shocks, where the shock is not publicised (the same thing, dare I say, happens when you direct propaganda and oppression to disease control). I met a lady who emigrated from Latvia in the 1980s, which verifies your analysis of a socialist economy. She used to sit and watch people in the supermarket buy goods for hours, as she said, this didn't ever happen in socialist Latvia.
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