Does anyone know if the Profs in the USSR generaly supported communism/socialism/the soviet govt? Does anyone have any knowledge of soviet propagandist economist, and what they preached? Does anyone know what current academia in Russia feels about socialism/communism/USSR/free market?
If they didnt they would have been imprisoned or executed
Look up Yuri Maltsev. He’s an Austrian economist who writes the odd front page article for this site - he grew up in and eventually worked as an economist in the Soviet state.
Have you ever listened to his lectures? While he is very funny , I can’t do it, the accent is to thick for me.
I havn’t heard any lectures yet, but I’ve read his articles here and always found them very interesting. Better go hunt down his lectures now! 
Here is a video on Soviet and communist propaganda.
It’s not specific to economics, but it is very insightful into how business is done by an authoritarian state.
People didn’t go into social sciencies unless they were “belivers” or had family who were priviliged nomenclatura. That’s why natural sciences (and sports) were so very popular in the Soviet. It was politically neutral. Only there was it possible be rewarded for true effort and talent, and to use an honest thought process.
I wonder what Soviet “economists” were really studying, and what their “academics” wrote about? Was it all about logistic planning and other non-market engineering-like calculation techniques? Did they even call the subject “economics”, or was it just considered to be a branch of engineering?
Accounting must of course have been abundant in Soviet! That subject has no relation to the study of the market, or to market activites, but is instead a purely law/legal-subject (how to say that in English?) and activity, based only on rules issued from the top of the political hierarchy in power. I’ve never understood why accounting traditionally “belongs” to the faculty of economics instead of the faculty of law, in universities. There would be no reason for communists to change accounting laws after pulling through a revolution. The accountants are actually very likely to be at the core a the communist movement.
As objectivly as possible, how could there academia pushing “social sciences” be compared to how the US or Europe does it?
As long Stalin lived, yes. But since the 1960s the Soviet was actually much softer. There was no Gulag anymore. One should avoid discrediting criticism of the Soviets by talking about it as if Stalin ruled all the time. The late Soviet was not at all that bloody. I think that maybe US cold war propaganda has somewhat misrepresented life in the late Soviet, since it was so easy to refer to Stalin’s obvious hell.
An academic who criticized socialism would’ve destroyed the career opportunity of himself and his/her family, and wouldn’t have been able to buy a car or a washing machine or get a permit to go on a sunny vacation by the Black Sea. He might have gotten his phone listened to, microphones secretly installed in the walls of his home and even called in for interrogation. Imprisoned, hardly, unless military treason was involved. Even the famous dissident Solzhenitsyn fared no worse in the end, than being forced to leave Soviet in 1974! (He was exonerated when Stalin died).
When we talk about the return to socialism, it is a version of the “soft Soviet” which is refered to. That’s the kind of society which for example Roosevelt was going for. He really didn’t have the paranoia to murder millions of imagined domestic enemies. Sarkozy and Gordon Brown and Putin of today also aim for the “soft Soviet” of Brezjnev, rather than the random mass murders of Lenin and Stalin. Just like the USAF doesn’t carpet bomb Bagdhad, as they did Dresden, but actually try somewhat to avoid civilian casualties.
Wow, awsome stuff liberty student. Dressing like a socialit hippie to escape socialist USSR is a stroke of genius. I laghed hard when I heard that. Does anyone have any links to any American academia/news journalists/etc advocating the benefit of the USSR from 1967-the fall of the USSR?
It is awesome. I tried to share it around, but not many people have watched it I think. I found it very illuminating with regards to destabilizing and undermining public intellectuals in order to collapse a society.
Highly recommended, if anyone is curious.
Utterly amazing. Principles are so vastly significant in each individual life that I am truly at a pinnacle of recognition at this moment after watching that video. WOW! Thank you libertystudent. Thank you mises site! I have had such an amazing time here on this site meeting individuals. There are many others around in the internet community as well and out and about in the streets and woods in which I live. It is more and more obvious to me, and I can’t say it has changed my perspective but only enhanced my perspective on the importance of morals. A moral compass is needed for each man and woman and what does that mean? It means think for yourself in freedom!
One term I will remember from that video that strikes at the core of the non-thinking for yourself propaganda and thus non-critical thinkers that knee-jerkingly respond and dispose of evidence, law, and goodness for some purely hopeful intentions that have not shown a basis in real-time reality and even use crime to climb the ladder to some supposed utopia is this: useful idiot
That man in that video used that word a lot and it was such an eye opener. What was interesting was he actually mentioned Kissinger once as a useful idiot, laughable and true, and also how people would just the word of the Soviet government without critical thinking such as foreign journalists, writers, and government officials. Yet, he said they don’t listen to what the people of the Soviet say. I found that interesting cause I’ve been reading novels from Russia dating from the 1800’s by Fyodor Dostoevsky. He really has been able to capture the Russian individual in ways that I never looked into before. He also shows how the government official (being one of his characters in the book called “Notes from the Underground”) was getting braver and braver to stand up to certain people in society, yet, meanwhile the government official was all a fashion show. Tried to look important, dress expensively, but really owed lots of people money (was in debt), had a dirty lodge to live in, and was a bully that could not tenderly keep a woman. Yet, deep down he mentioned the beautiful and sublime, which Fyodor noted was a vastly different way of looking at life than the European perspective (he discusses this point in same novel I mentioned), meaning, he saw that the Russian perspective took notice of what was beautiful. On what was sublime in life which he said Europeans at that time seemed to overlook these deeper qualities of people. He was talking about the subconscious, the thoughts, the heart, that Europeans were lacking in their mainstream awareness due to social norms, which as many might know led to Freud, Jung, and other psychologists and writers (such as James Joyce in “A Portrait of a Young Artist as a Young Man”) that noticed the downfall of ignoring individual inclinations for social norms. (Also the man in the video mentioned at the end that the U.S. is a beautiful boat. He didn’t use beautiful haphazardly. He was using beautiful, it would seem, in a way that is a deeply common Russian way of perceiving the world, if only they were able to in the Soviet Union was probably the deep desire of most Russians from how the man in video describes it, as in the days of Fyodor was able to experience beauty. So that last comment was significant for it was showing a Russian heart that had been suppressed and apparently in the U.S. could resurface and be exposed to the light of day without fear of reprisal and death by the hand of the State.) Thus with people like these reaching into a tone that was surfacing in the world at the time, a madness and insanity, due to individuals ignoring the individual inclinations which is the real source of control in situations. But as individuals give up responsiblity and control, then they therefore feel less control in their lives. Life takes on a sense of being ‘out of control’ and so in a perverted way individuals therefore want more control but give it to all the wrong places, mainly to the State. Yet what why the sense of "out of control’ is occurring is the individual has given up his or her control aka freedom to others, blindly thinking the control will come from outside themselves. And this all, historically, led up to World War One which is seen as the ultimate pinnacle of depending on social national honor rather than embracing and taking to task intellectual pursuits even when all the warning signs where on the path decades before it happened.
Thanks again libertystudent for that link! As you can see it opened up a door of inspiration in me.[:D]
Very cool. Happy you enjoyed it.
What is amazing about the video is how relevant it still is. When talking about statist propaganda techniques and the apeal to “progressive” intellectuals. I have had a strong desire to research Societ apologists latley as a usuful tool to compare to todays progressives. The man being interviewed is amazing as well, very strong words and a very decent sese of humour. A truly profound video on many different levels, I can’t recomend it enough.
sorry among my many mis spellings I meant “Soviet apologists”.
I really enjoy the Russian sense of irony and humour.
What I like most about that video is how it explains exactly how and why public intellectuals get compromised, not just for marxism, but I imagine similar tactics are used to promote zionism, enviro-fascism etc. I felt it was a big eye opener for me.
I wonder is there a reason fabianism goes so well with socialism? Is there something inherent in Fabian tactics that goes better with the left, or have they simply been more effective with it?
Great!
Now I’ve seen it to the end. The part maybe most relevant to our days, is the end (beginning about 1:07:20 if you’re short on time), after the overhead projector is turned off. There the propaganda subversion of the US is explained in four stages. Maybe the US is now in stage three?
Although things haven’t worked out as hoped for by the Soviet elite, because their domestic economy collapsed, they (the Putinists and FSB) are certainly still drawing on their international subversive network. That is the part of the Soviet Union which has remained completely intact. It is also striking how socialists are supportingPutin’s Russia, though it has no claim to be socialistic anymore. This is as true for webforums, as it is for South American dictators who invite Russian nuclear bomber planes to its airbases. Communism disappeared, the power struggle continues!
Ideology never had anything to do with the Soviet Union (other than as a tool for creating useful idiots abroad). Their leadership was always only in it for the money and power, just like Putin with friends are today. This structure doesn’t go away that easily. It will remain a source of wealth and power for the most skilled psychopats in it.
Ideology is the just as important for American fascism as it was for Soviet communism. Rothbard explains that without consent, the rich could not rule. And consent by and large is accomplished with ideology, not violence.
That was an amazing video, thanks for sharing it Liberty Student. I think we can all see where useful idiots like Michael Moore fit into this picture. When seeing today’s “liberal” idealist socialist atheist politically correct individual this makes perfect sense.