ABSTRACT
Twentieth-century Soviet Communism proved a relatively effective political system for fighting high-tempo industrial warfare or for rebuilding a physically shattered state, but for complex reasons largely related to changes in the wider global economy, it proved steadily less effective at increasing group prosperity under prolonged peacetime conditions. Here the long shadow of the Second World War cannot be ignored: the wiping out of over a decade’s worth of industrial investment, combined with the demographic blow inflicted by the demise of 28 million Soviet citizens (with an accompanying estimated shortfall in births of 11 million) carried painful longer-term consequences, which arguably did not become fully apparent until the 1980s. Having against tremendous odds nonetheless succeeded spectacularly in the immediate post-war years in again providing full employment, modern housing, raised living standards and universal general health care, Marxism-Leninism then found it lacked the critical levers of pressure available to capitalism (state-sector lay-offs, reduced social welfare spending, internal competition and corporate takeovers) on the scale increasingly required to ensure competitiveness within a more and more globally structured peacetime consumer economy.
