I think the reliability of economic data from a secretive dictatorship like the USSR is rather doubtful. Plus, the Soviets received a lot of financial and technological assistance from the West in addition to what they stole through worldwide industrial espionage operations, etc. This may be among the factors that account for it.

I don't know what OECD or ECP mean.

Presumably,

OECD = Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

and

ECP = Economic Calculation Problem

Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth

I think it’s fair to have a certain level of skepticism towards the USSR.they did get “help” but again this is just proof that ECP isn’t a good critique

I agree that it may not be a good critique, but the bottom line is that the Soviet system was to a significant degree dependent on the capitalist West and it eventually collapsed after Ronald Reagan stopped US financial and technological assistance in addition to expelling a large number of spies which was followed by other Western countries.

In the final analysis, it failed without capitalist support.

Maoist China would have gone down the same road had it not been for the Rockefellers and other big bankers and industrialists to save the regime with investments and loans from the 1970's onward.

The Soviet Union was propped up by US investments and loans from 1917 to the 1980s. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan found out and stopped all technical and financial assistance to Russia. Russia’s Communist regime collapsed soon after.

In 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, Ford started mass-producing Fordson tractors. Because of the Civil War in Russia, it could only start selling them in 1920 after which it exported tens of thousands of Fordsons to the Soviets. After 1924 Ford licensed the production of tractors and trucks in Russia itself.

From then on, there was a steady transfer of US cash and technology to Russia into the 1980s. The groups involved were the Rockefellers (chief financers of Fabianism) and associates through banking and industrial corporations like Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Bank of America, Morgan Guaranty Trust, Manufacturers Hanover, and Ford Motor Company as well as organizations like the USSR State Committee for Science and Technology (SCST) and the US-USSR Trade and Economic Council (USTEC) which was headed by Rockefeller executives and associates.

David Rockefeller was the leader of the US financial assistance effort to Communist Russia. In the early 1970s he started to overtly finance Russia and China. In 1973 he opened a Chase Manhattan branch in Moscow and visited China to negotiate US-Chinese economic cooperation.

Rockefeller also started to promote a worldwide policy of East-West rapprochement through his close friend and collaborator and US Government adviser Henry Kissinger and through the Rockefeller-funded UN. Rockefeller’s activities saved Communist Russia and China from economic collapse.

Meantime, Ronald Reagan had been studying the Soviets for a long time and he knew that communist economy was not a functional system. When he came to power in 1981, he immediately ordered an investigation into how the Soviets financed themselves and this was when he found out that they were assisted by US finance and technology.

In May 1982 Reagan went public with his plan. Speaking at his alma mater, Eureka College, he predicted that “the march of freedom and democracy … will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”

He directed his top national security team to develop a plan to end the Cold War by winning it. The result was a series of top-secret national security decision directives.

In particular, Reagan adopted a policy of attacking a “strategic triad” of critical resources –financial credits, high technology and natural gas – essential to Soviet economic survival. Author-economist Roger Robinson said the directive was tantamount to “a secret declaration of economic war on the Soviet Union.”

When Reagan increased US military expenditure by 13%, the Soviets barely reacted because they simply could not afford to keep up.

The Soviets whose economy depended on oil exports also went through an oil crisis caused by a fall in oil production and prices.

The Soviets knew that they were finished and just gave up exactly as predicted by Reagan. After seventy years of communism or Fabianism, they were forced to reintroduce capitalism and feed themselves instead of relying on capitalist aid.

To get an idea of the situation, in 1970, the Soviet Union bought 2.16 million tons of grain. By 1985 this had risen to 44.2 million tons (a 20-fold increase). There were similar increases in meat imports and other products. Basically, the Soviet State had become incapable of feeding its own people.

D. Rockefeller, Memoirs

Fordson – Wikipedia

How Ronald Reagan Won the Cold War | The Heritage Foundation

Reagan’s Secret Directive NSDD-75 Federation of American Scientists (FAS)

The Soviet Union never respected human rights (UDHR) and probably didn't follow much rule of law, invading every privacy to ensure "equality". Corruption must likewise have been rife, each taking all they could and avoiding sweat at work. Alongside the high rate of suicides.

No, still, communism and socialism are failures.

As an intro to this discussion, the novel Red Plenty by Francis Spufford is good - it's also a great novel.

I hadn't heard about the extent of US trade/support to Russia and China, so thanks for that.

From what I've picked up from economics and economic history - from the economic base the inherited from the Tsarist regime, the different kinds of command economies the bolsheviks adopted up until about the 1960s were effective at developing the GDP of the USSR. The records of this may be somewhat inaccurate, but it's undeniable their economy did expand rapidly. They got in to problems, I have heard, when they attempted to continue with the same 5-year-plan, production-focused, centralised model as the economy became more complex. There are those who argue that if they had had access to modern computer power, they would have been more successful (than they were - may still have collapsed).

One thing which Red Plenty makes clear is that corruption - at least as we understand it as mainly a financial phenomenon - was very low in the USSR. This is because, internally, their economy made very little use of money. If you have to do all your chicanry with goods in kind, running a black market is very hard. I don't mean to say there wasn't lots of nepotism, bad and misleading bookkeeping, plus obviously immense human rights violations - there obviously were.

Socialism is not obviously a failure - many societies have socialistic elements, particularly in europe and asia, which work well. What level of socialism can be achieved is an open question, and obviously these states exist with a capitalist world order. Communism may not be possible, but then there are also lots of possible systems which qualify as communist, of which the eastern block displayed a few authoritarian examples. You need to show all of these are both impossible AND undesireable, and the same for socialism, to defend capitalism.

Even then, this doesn't obviously defend capitalism. This world system is currently failing to sustain a sustainable world for humanity in general. If it collapses - which I think is likely - then we will be left with things similar to feudal and hunter gather societies. Many of the latter actually have alot to support them - the most egalitarian, peaceable societies that have ever existed are hunter gatherer ones. Of course, we have to go through a holocaust and a mass extinction event to get to them.

Basically, we have no good options - but we maybe have some which are less worse than others.

The USSR had the second-fastest growing economy at the time - If a libertarian ever says ECP to you say dog problem. — Oppyfan

First huge step is to believe USSR statistics. A country where honest statisticians or economists reporting the actual data are silenced by putting them into mental asylums, I wouldn't have high hopes on the accuracy of the statistics.

Second huge step is to think that the totally different economic system and accounting wouldn't matter in getting comparable statistics (I guess this is the ECP argument or something). When prices are administrative decisions and amortization isn't taken into record as in "capitalist" accounting, you have problems. And finally, let's not forget that a very huge segment of that "economic growth" went into armaments, weapons and the maintaining a Superpower armed forces. Compared to the US, the defence spending was a greater percent of the whole economy. Building tanks and nuclear weapons don't make the people more prosperous. When you look at the Soviet economy from that perspective, for example the Leningrad area was one huge military-industrial complex. Military expenditure was basically half of the government expenditure.

As Diana Negroponte points out when Gorbachev took over the system:

The economic structure required that 60% of capital investment support the production of fuel and raw materials with a further 20% dedicated to the military, leaving only 20% to invest in manufacturing industries and the consumer sector. Citizens found employment in one of the 300,000 construction projects, far more than was needed, but reducing that number by two-thirds presented a real danger of mass unemployment. The ruble had only paper value, with Soviet citizens holding overall 400-450 billion rubles, but they had nothing to spend it on; store shelves carried few consumer goods.

(Where that economic growth went into. An abandoned tank repair shop in Ukraine:)

I think the reliability of economic data from a secretive dictatorship like the USSR is rather doubtful. Plus, the Soviets received a lot of financial and technological assistance from the West in addition to what they stole through worldwide industrial espionage operations, etc. This may be among the factors that account for it. — Apollodorus

Obviously the Russians are incapable of normal thought, and their entire economy is based on thieving, pilfering and fraud. Their economic miracle can be fully explained by huge aid monies and technological injections by the USA, which is clearly the world leader in honesty, technology, shitting, and economics. And in superior knowledge of god and the scriptures, far surpassing even the Vatican, child's play, really.

Russia's double-digit increase in industrial output as you rightly say, can be explain by their being unscrupulous lying bastards, mother lovers and child abusers. They eat little kittens for breakfast, and cute puppies for dinner. They also reject the kingdom of Jesus Christ, the Savior. They say their economic output is nearing the level of Jesus. Satan often visits Russia, and he is the guest of the state -- his chair is right next to Putin's right during gladiator sports, when Christians are fed to lions in an arena, strictly supervised by international soccer referees. They are on a point system there.

?

Social commentary on Apollodorus's mind. I tried to be ironic, but I guess I failed. I was too rational and realistic in the views of other respondents to this OP, so you people took my post at face value. At least I figure that's why you asked.

Meantime, Ronald Reagan had been studying the Soviets for a long time and he knew.... — Apollodorus

Interesting post. But I find the idea that Reagan "knew" much of anything bordering on preposterous. At best a kind of hose nozzle controlled and directed by others. But he neither hose nor water nor garden nor gardener.

Well, he may well have been someone’s hose nozzle as most politicians are. After all, politics is about power and power is where the money is.

However, he was already an anti-communist in the 1940’s when most people had some knowledge of the communist world and he simply expanded the existing anti-communist “rollback doctrine". Plus he was informed by the intelligence agencies once in office. So, he probably knew a bit more than the regular guy in the street.

You need to show all of these are both impossible AND undesireable, and the same for socialism, to defend capitalism. — RolandTyme

I'm not saying capitalism is perfect so I don't need to defend it. The onus is on socialists to show that socialism is better than capitalism. And that is exactly what they have failed to do from the 1800's to the present.

IMHO, the real failure is a failure of liberalism as (mis-)represented by monopolistic capitalism on one side and totalitarian socialism on the other. And what they both seem to have in common is materialism.

I thought it was sarcasm, but today you never know.

Yeah, it was 30 years ago so for many it's ancient history. Yet some have this romantic yearning for a failed totalitarian system as, well, it isn't at all politically incorrect. Yes, it did put the first man in space and defeated the Third Reich, but still, it simply sucked. Even more than western capitalism at it's worst.

That there are as many Russians now as there were in the year 1900 or so simply tells how horrific it all was.

The Soviets may have put the first man in space, but we must no forget how they got there. Aside from being provided with technological know-how by thousands of Western sympathizers (or useful idiots) and a worldwide industrial espionage network, most of the relevant technology was stolen from the Germans:

"Operation Osoaviakhim was a Soviet operation which took place on 22 October 1946, when MVD (previously NKVD) and Soviet Army units removed more than 2,200 German specialists – a total of more than 6,000 people including family members – from the Soviet occupation zone of post-World War II Germany for employment in the Soviet Union. Much related equipment was also moved, the aim being to literally transplant research and production research centers such as the relocated V-2 rocket center at Mittelwerk Nordhausen, from Germany to the Soviet Union, and collect as much material as possible from test centers such as the Luftwaffe's central military aviation test center at Erprobungstelle Rechlin, taken by the Red Army on 2 May 1945. "

Operation Osoaviakhim - Wikipedia

And with Operation Paperclip the US got 1600 German scientist to the US, very important guys that without the US wouldn't have gotten anybody to the moon in 1969. And British also used German scientists, btw.

Yet you simply cannot deny the genius of Sergei Koroljov, who designed the R-7 and other rockets that the modern variants carried a year or two ago American astronauts to the ISS. Koroljov's rockets were far more advanced than the Germans had on the drawing board to strike mainland US, hence not all technology in the Soviet Union was copied from the west. That simply is false.

The Soviet Union was capable to design state-of-the-art weapons and for example in it's air defence missile designs were better than the US (simply out of necessity). Yet that is where it all went. What it totally lacked was to create anything truly new, to innovate new industries. A centrally planned system based on large corporations simply cannot compete in new ideas with the hippies from the silicon valley.

Central planning kills radical innovations. That is fact that many socialism lovers simply forget.

Well, Koroljov was part of a Soviet team dispatched to Germany to recover rocket technology in September 1945, a whole year before Operation Osoaviakhim. And the R-7 took about ten years to develop with massive government backing.

But I agree that central planning does not seem to work especially within a system where the leadership's primary concern is to stay in power at all costs.

China's communists seem to have learned a lesson or two from the Russian failure, and even they have benefited from substantial technology and cash transfer from the West, started by David Rockefeller in the 1970's

Capitalism works ok as long it has some rules. Healthcare is something we all should pool our resources for. There should be a living minimum wage.

In the Chinese example you had the Chinese understanding after Mao's death that strict central planning under Marxist guidelines simply doesn't work and chose a de facto economic model of what could be defined as fascism: state lead capitalism. Let's remember that their change happened after the abysmal Cultural revolution and the "Great Leap". Unlike the USSR, they opened up for the West yet otherwise kept the communist system. Still, the Chinese leaders still talk of it being true 21st Century Marxism, not some orthodox ideological following of Marx. Some leftists here arrogantly dismiss this, but I do believe that the Chinese leadership truly believes what they say (as that is typical for elites in power) and their recent actions in my view show this.

The big difference is that Gorbachev didn't go for the Chinese strategy and also with "Perestroika" had the idea of "Glasnost", openness. Gorbachev was a Marxist-Leninist who wanted reform within. The policy of Glasnost also really shook the power of the Communist party as opening up a totalitarian system for free speech is a huge deal. Then the privatization of the soviet economy was intended to be this transfer of assets to the ordinary people. It didn't go like that: the class of the oligarchs was created usually with the industry heads taken then the role of being owners. This created the kleptocracy of modern Russia with the new elite not investing in Russia, but buying yachts and football teams in the West.

With China the US thought that capitalism and investment would change the country also ideologically. Not so. The Chinese Communist Party can only show that they truly have done a historical leap in the last thirty years. With the USSR as the old Russian empire collapse (had been held together only by the marxist-leninist totalitarian state) the US decided that Russia was past and put it hopes on Yeltsin. Well, Yeltsin then picked his FSB chief as a replacement and the rest is history.

Yet with the example of China you can see what historical economic growth is. With the USSR you only needed to go to the countryside or to smaller cities and see just how much actually of the homes people lived in was still from the days of Imperial Russia. Just visiting Russia even today makes one really suspect just how awesome that economic growth actually was as Oppyfan thinks.

The Rockefellers and their associates from banking and industry had been dealing with the Soviets from inception, from the early years of the revolution. They were aware of the economic problems the Russians and the Chinese were facing. In the early 1970’s the Rockefellers were taking advantage of the oil crisis (partly caused by their own policies) and the weaknesses of communist economies in order to expand their petroleum and banking empire. Hence they promoted a policy of East-West rapprochement and David founded his Trilateral Commission, an association of multinational banking and industrial corporations, for the purpose.

When David Rockefeller and his representative Kissinger visited Beijing, the Chinese decided to open up to the West because they saw that they had no choice. Rockefeller reached out to Russia as well, even opening a Chase Manhattan branch in Moscow in 1973, the same year he was in China. But Russia was different, it was an empire with connections throughout the world and with a long and proud history in its dealings with the West. So the Russians opted for getting involved in projects like Afghanistan, and after that Reagan’s anti-communist initiative sealed their fate.

But I think in Russia’s defense it may be argued that there was no precedent for a totalitarian system of planned economy like that of the Soviet Union to transition to capitalism.

The oligarchs were only part of the problem. Privatization of state-owned assets was not simply state-appointed company directors taking over. Reintroducing capitalism required the creation of capital and this was possible only by selling state assets to foreign buyers who actually had the capital.

It was a matter of accessing international investment and credit. As the Russians had zero knowledge or experience, they were advised by the Rockefellers and their associates, i.e., Chase Manhattan, City Bank, Bank of America, J P Morgan, and Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

By 1993 more than 40% of Russian enterprises were owned by Western interests and a large part of the rest were co-owned by the same interests and their Russian associates.

So, Russia was on the road to becoming a third-world banana republic controlled by international banking and industry in collaboration with local oligarchs and corrupt politicians. "President" Yeltsin was suffering from heart disease and alcoholism. In 1999 Putin was brought in to restore Russian control of the economy and of the country.

In the early 1970’s the Rockefellers were taking advantage of the oil crisis (partly caused by their own policies) and the weaknesses of communist economies in order to expand their petroleum and banking empire. Hence they promoted a policy of East-West rapprochement and David founded his Trilateral Commission, an association of multinational banking and industrial corporations, for the purpose. — Apollodorus

East-West rapprochement has a long history where some bankers weren't the only ones promoting this. The détente process was very important in part of the Cold War. Let's not forget that if after the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets the Cold War got colder, it was at the end of Reagan's administration that huge gains were got in disarmament. A major issue was the formation of OSCE, which is is the world's largest security-oriented intergovernmental organization (if you don't count the UN as such). And historians also note that the development that started from the CSCE Helsinki summit (that from was formed OSCE) were part of why the Soviet Empire collapsed. At the time for the Soviet Union the rapprochement / détente process looked like a fine strategy. Not so when the Communist bloc and Soviet empire collapsed and a lot of those agreements in the Helsinki accords backfired for the Soviet Union.

By 1993 more than 40% of Russian enterprises were owned by Western interests and a large part of the rest were co-owned by the same interests and their Russian associates. — Apollodorus

This sounds quite large. Do you have a reference where this stat is from?

I'll have to look up the exact reference. I think The Shadow Party by Horowitz and Poe has quite a bit on what went on with Russia’s privatization.

But you are right, it does sound like a high percentage. That’s because from the start the privatization program was dominated by foreign players from advisors to government with links to the State Property Committee that was in charge of the program to international institutions like the IMF, International Finance Corporation (IFC), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and American and European banks.

The first sale of Russian bonds in 1996 was done through J P Morgan and SBC Warburg which gives some idea of who was involved.

But foreign investors often acquired their stakes through Russian intermediaries and of course there was little regulation and a lot of corruption with rigged auctions, etc., which is why Russians called the program “grabification”. Yeltsin was forced to implement some cosmetic regulation and Putin had to renationalize key companies soon after coming to power.

In any case, the oligarchs or “kleptocrats” were only part of the problem. China's communists were much more in control at least on the surface, though it's hard to know what exactly went on. With the Communists still in power, there is much less info on China than on Russia. But my feeling is that a lot of China's billionaire "capitalists" have very close links to the Party, so that a lot of Chinese "capitalism" is more apparent than factual. The leadership has never forgotten Mao's dissimulation tactics ....

That’s because from the start the privatization program was dominated by foreign players from advisors to government with links to the State Property Committee that was in charge of the program to international institutions like the IMF, International Finance Corporation (IFC), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and American and European banks. — Apollodorus

Yes, interesting. Yet I'm not so sure how successful these were and how much did actually go through. I remember that various Western oil companies were eager to get their share of Siberian oil, but they were stalled and later left. Basically Russia needed desperately technological know-how and from the West to improve their infrastructure, but state security was over everything else.

Yeltsin was forced to implement some cosmetic regulation and Putin had to renationalize key companies soon after coming to power. - In any case, the oligarchs or “kleptocrats” were only part of the problem. — Apollodorus

The sick old Yeltsin needed the oligarchs money to hold on to power and (avoid the communists taking power) and this increased their power and lead some to think that they could have also political power. This was an absolute no-no, just in like China. Only in the US can the super-rich grab political power and use it. In Russia (or that matter in China) if the oligarchs show desire for political power, they are jailed or are exiled. To survive and hold on to their billions they simply have to be obedient yes-men.

The real tragedy that this has left Russia in a state were crucial investments have not happened. Who of the billionaires would dare to extensively invest in Russia when all can disappear in a moment with the government confiscating your wealth?

I think that the massive fortune that Putin has personally stolen has far more to do with the concentration of power than wealth hoarding. To rule over other oligarchs, you have to have also more wealth than they do I guess. I remember on Russian opposition politician observing that just the expensive watch Putin wears is far more than the "official" wealth that Putin tells publicly he has.

Of course, everything is owned by the state when you are de facto the state...

Putin's mansion, officially state owned:

I'm not sure mansions are a particularly big problem. If Michael Jackson and Jeffrey Epstein can have one, why not Putin?

But I agree that something went horribly wrong somewhere and it is not that easy to piece it all together.

In any case, the key privatized assets that were of interest to foreign corporations were in industry, energy, and finance. And it was US industrial, energy, and banking giants (and some European ones) that played key roles in the project by providing loans to companies, etc.

First, "spontaneous privatization” was already underway by mid-1990.

Second, Russia in 1992 was “advised” by the (Rockefeller-founded) World Bank to privatize as much and as fast as possible. Rockefellers and associates represented by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Chase Manhattan, City Bank, J P Morgan and Bank of America in collaboration with economic experts from Rockefeller-controlled institutions like Harvard University, told the Russians how to do it, and the IMF under G-7 (i.e. US-Rockefeller) pressure gave the Russian state a few billions in loans to encourage (or bribe) them to do it.

Third, the Russian state converted state-owned enterprises (SOEs) into shareholder corporations.

Fourth, the state gave control of companies to workers and managers.

Fifth, Russian businessmen and speculators, who had made huge profits in the 1980’s by buying cheap raw materials and selling them abroad for dollars, bought control of companies from the workers and managers.

Sixth, the new owners or controllers had a choice between (1) investing in their companies to make them more profitable, (2) transfer profits to off-shore companies, and (3) selling them for hard currency to foreign buyers or otherwise acting as middlemen for them.

Obviously, option (1) was not the most attractive to people whose main interest was quick profit.

Big foreign investors were lining up to enter the takeover game, advancing money to Russian partners to gain full or partial control of privatized companies. As Andrew Balgarnie of Morgan Stanley who had earlier opened their Moscow office put it in 1994, "There's more money that wants to come to Russia than there are quality places to put it."

Exactly what those big foreign banks did in Russia is not entirely clear. However, only a few years after the start of the program, in 1997, Russia’s Central Bank announced that it would no longer do business with 11 American and European banks: Chase Manhattan, J. P. Morgan, Bank of New York, Banque Nationale de Paris, Credit Suisse First Boston, two subsidiaries of the Deutsche Morgan Grenfell unit of Deutsche Bank, Credit Agricole Indosuez, Societe Generale of Paris, Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS)'s London operation and Salomon Brothers.

Russia Punishes 11 Financial Concerns – New York Times

So, how much money foreign investors actually made is hard to tell. The downside for Russia was that there was a massive cashflow out of the country that went to off-shore companies, many owned or co-owned by Russians. The economy was fast going downhill, and in 1998, the Russian currency collapsed and the country was basically bankrupt.

“From about 1991 to 1998 Russia lost nearly 40% of its real gross domestic product (GDP), and suffered numerous bouts of inflation”:

The Post-Soviet Union Russian Economy – Investopedia

According to Horowitz and Poe, the privatization resulted in a loss of USD100 billion to the Russian economy.

In any case, some Western corporations did get their hands on Russian assets at least in joint-ventures in the energy sector, for example, TNK-BP, and the aluminium giant Rusal. I think this was the overarching plan that was stopped in its tracks by Putin.

The pressure that the West is now putting on Russia must logically have the same object, to open Russia up to Western capitalist investment and, ultimately, control. Monopolism seems to be capitalism's biggest problem. We can't really blame China for trying to copy our own monopolistic tendencies.

Of course, the oligarchs did have their share of blame. Boris Berezovsky’s story is quite instructive in this regard.

Berezovsky was a prominent businessman and former deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, who had close connections to Yeltsin. He was the head of the movement to build “oligarchic capitalism” around his gas company Gazprom and five to six other giant corporations.

However, Berezovsky was not the only one. There were rival political and economic factions competing for power. In addition to the general economic and political situation, this was a destabilizing and dangerous development.

Essentially, Putin’s task was to restore order and stability. When he came to power, he announced that he wanted to liquidate the oligarchs as a class. But he realized that some oligarchs could be useful in running the economy and the country. So, the oligarchs were told that from now on they have to play by the new rules. One wrong step and they would go straight to jail for fraud, tax evasion and other illegal activities.

There were about 36 of them. Berezovsky and two or three others didn’t like Putin’s suggestion and, unwisely, started organizing opposition. They soon realized that this was a bad move and fled to England. Berezovsky was later found dead by his wife in his London home.

In the meantime, the foreign corporations were going about their usual business. A number of them formed strategic alliances with Russian corporations to bid for Russian firms. In 1997 Royal Dutch/Shell teamed up with Gazprom (Berezowsky’s company) and Lukoil, and BP teamed up with Cidanco/Oneximbank in a bid for Rosneft, Russia’s largest state-owned oil company. The bid apparently failed but Shell later made other deals with Rosneft (or with Putin) and in 2017 Putin’s friend Gerhard Schröder was appointed chairman of Rosneft.

So, Schröder was Germany’s Chancellor until 2005. In 2006 he was hired by the Anglo-French firm Rothschild & Co (co-owners of Shell) as adviser and representative for their European and Russian operations. He also became a director of Anglo-Russian energy company BP-TNK, a post he held until 2011. After leaving Rothschild in 2016, he was hired by Rosneft of which the Rothschilds are shareholders ….

Gerhard Schröder – Rosneft

Obviously, foreign billions were invested in top Russian companies in exchange for shares and some form of control. The close collaboration with select foreign corporations has helped the Russian leadership to rebuild the economy and keep key sectors under control, and has simultaneously enabled the multinational corporations to advance their long-term objective of expanding their global control over resources and markets.

My guess is that the multinationals will win in the end. The final battle will be between them and China.

I explicitly stated that the eastern bloc was one version of authoritarian communism. Given that most attempts at communism have followed that model, and failed, that doesn't mean that doesn't, in itself, show that any form of communism won't work. Also, I, perhaps unsuccessfully, tried to indicate a distinction between communism and socialism (say "market socialism", to be clearer). There are countries which at least lean in this direction, which work. You haven't addressed this at all. You've just talked about the Eastern Bloc and China. Furthermore, as much as I don't want this, Cuba has not collapsed, and is communist. If you say "it hasn't worked" - well on my metric, capitalism hasn't worked, given world inequality and poverty - and as capitalism is a global economic system, this is an acceptable move to make. Anyone who thinks this level of human suffering is an acceptable outcome of an economic system is obviously wrong. Better to just say that life stinks and we have no defendable options, get on with our lives, and give up arguing, if that is our only option.

Second, Russia in 1992 was “advised” by the (Rockefeller-founded) World Bank to privatize as much and as fast as possible. — Apollodorus

Yes. After the Soviet Union collapsed, there was truly a historical opening for Russia to integrate to West. Then Russians were truly open for the West. But that brief opening was wasted. It ended with the Kosovo war and the NATO attack against Yugoslavia (Serbia). Yet you would had to have truly larger than life politicians on both the West and in Russia. But you had just average politicians. The Americans thought of Russia being past and didn't think of it much. Hence when a director of the FSB and a career KGB spy was chosen to the position of the Russian President, the opening had surely past.

Also, I, perhaps unsuccessfully, tried to indicate a distinction between communism and socialism (say "market socialism", to be clearer). There are countries which at least lean in this direction, which work. — RolandTyme

Yes.

There is a very successful political ideology called social democracy. It's so successful, that most who call themselves socialist absolutely hate it.

And the countries? They are capitalist societies with usually a large public sector. Yet they are just fine with a private sector, the market mechanism, free enterprise and so on. If you talk about countries like Sweden, Norway or my country, just to give examples.