What actually caused the economic inefficiencies (shortages, stagnation, lines, etc.) of the late USSR and Warsaw Pact? (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 1 month ago by fire86743@lemmygrad.ml to c/genzhou@lemmygrad.ml

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I understand that there was still much good about the Soviet/Eastern Bloc system and shortages and all didn't always happen and revisionism would eventually cause all sorts of issues. However, I'm looking for a detailed answer (feel free to send links too) to what actually caused the infamous economic struggles that many people faced (which apparently isn't just completely bourgeois propaganda) in the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations (particularly in their later years).

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[-] fire86743@lemmygrad.ml 9 points 1 month ago

Asking out of curiosity: how much would OGAS have been able to resolve or minimize these issues?

[-] starkillerfish@lemmygrad.ml 12 points 1 month ago

We will never know. To speculate, I would say that it would have resolved the issue of economic complexity, but it leaves a lot of questions on implementation. How resistant is the system to tampering? How is the economy modeled? How centralized is the system?

A proper implementation of OGAS would probably have taken a decade or two to test and debug so it could run reliably on a national scale. Considering that the USSR has a great shortage of computing power (due to sanctions mostly) I’m not sure it wouldve been possible to complete OGAS.

And then, you still have labour shortage and party organisation issues that OGAS does not solve.

this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025

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