User talk:G-Man

Hi there, and welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you enjoy contributing to the encyclopedia and decide to stick around. There are always lots of enthusiastic volunteers working on the project, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask them at the village pump. Enchanter

Nice way to unwhitewash the Stalin article, G-Man ~~ Usually people just hack away without actually adding anything :) 豎眩

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So why the separate ship canal article, when canal covers the same subject matter? Why not just add to it? I would never look for an article under "ship canal".

--jaknouse

Because Ship canals are a special category of canal. Any way if someone was trying to look up information specificaly about ship canals, it is better to have a article separately. Although you might have a point about the adding the info to the canal article, I might copy and paste and do that as well. User:G-Man

Hi there. I've fixed the formatting on Ship canal. You might want to take a look at the wiki-text source -- there's several things you've been doing the long way round! ;-) -- Tarquin 15:50 Mar 9, 2003 (UTC)

How do you mean exactly G-Man

stuff like [[Canals|canal]] -- write [[canal]]s instead. saves on typing :-) and use # to make auto-numbered lists, * for bullter lists. -- Tarquin 16:14 Mar 9, 2003 (UTC)

Oh thanks, I live and learn G-Man[?]

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From your edits to the Black Country article, it looks like you're fairly local, so I thought I'd say hello! --Sam

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I recommend that you read the material of the historians and economists cited in the article. Considering the scope of your intersts, you'd really enjoy the material. I wouldn’t it state it so bluntly in the article, but the Soviet Union’s planned economy was a long-run victim of the fact that it was able to work in a short run (at the cost of prison labor, deplorable working conditions, and the emphasis on quantity over quality). Russia went from being a country of peasants to a highly urbanized, highly advanced, highly industrialized superpower in the brief period from 1929 (when the Administrative Command System (ACS) was established) to Stalin’s death in 1953, but this would explain the later failures of the ACS. The economy simply grew too large, advanced, and complex (because of Stalin’s ruthless harnessing of labor and capital resources) for it to be planned, and the population could no longer tolerate shortages of shoddy goods because of ever-improving living standards in a country going from the pre-industrial era to the industrial era.

Now about the other question you raised. Inefficiency, supply shortages, and poor quality are important topics, but these systemic problems are far greater problems once more attention is paid to consumer goods in the post-Stalin years. But the article does tie these problems to the Stalin era. If you read the article beyond Stalin you’d see that the article is stressing that the Stalin years laid the groundwork for systemic problems that would become pronounced well after Stalin’s death and indeed even today.

The article might not be written in the prose of Robert Conquest with which many readers are familiar, but it by no means calling the Stalinist administrative command system a “success”, which you accused it of stating.

Perhaps you’d get a greater sense of the logical flow if of the article if you read on past the Stalin years.

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Since you are at a univerity I'm sure that you library will have one of the seven edittions of Russian & Soviet Economic Performance & Structure by economists Paul Gregory and Robert Stuart. They're probably the best experts on the ACS economy and they have a great understanding of its historical context and its role in Russian history. Historian Stephen Lee (an expert on single-party states) is also a great source on Soviet history prior to 1953 and economist Marshall Goldman is a great source on the ensuing years. 172

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I'm glad that your adding content to the history of the Soviet Union page, but perhaps you should focus on something else that really isn't covered well in the article, like the Great Purges. Titular nationalities, ethnonationalism, institutional change, the Cold War, the Sino-Soviet Split, the origins of the Cold War, the Kosygin reforms of 1965, power struggles, de-Stalinization, arts and culture, the causes of the Bolshevik Revolution, Perestroika and Glasnost, the Andropov and Chernenko interludes, foreign trade, the Warsaw Pact, Soviet subsides to foreign regimes like Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam, the military-industrial complex in the post-Stalin years, the Cuban Missile Crisis, youth organizations, the Virgin Lands, Afghanistan, and the judiciary are among the many issues that come to mind.

In other words, the Great Purges were well-covered even before I added content to that section. Before you add more on the Great Purges some of the issues that I listed need to be addressed first.

The article already is quite long. Perhaps it would be best to shorten the content on World War II and the Stalin years so that we can add more content pertaining to the Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev years. 172

I think that history of the Stalin and WW2 years are too important a part of history to be shortened. The Stalin years are the bit I'm most knowledgable about, although I could try and do some research on other parts of the USSR's history.

Perhaps the article could do with splitting into two parts with a history of the USSR part 1 covering the 1917-1953 period and Part 2 covering the 1953-1991 period, how does that sound.

I like most of what you've written. Have you read Russia, The Tsarist and Soviet legacy by Edward Acton, that is my main history book on the USSR. G-Man 20/4/03

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Thanks for your complements!

I really like your idea of splitting the article. Until now, I was worried that I was focusing too much on the prewar years. I was ready to delete a good portion of my content to make room for the post-war years. I look forward to working on that project with you.

I'm familiar with that text by Acton incidentally. I have to admit that I'm biased toward some aspects of Acton's approach, such as viewing the rise of the Soviet Union in its late imperial Czarist context while assessing Russia's international setting (its geography, that old problem of the lack of access to the sea, and dependency prior to the Revolution). He does a great job of illuminating why the Communist revolution occurred in Russia, and not in a more developed industrial power with a larger working class. And his linkage of Yeltsin's super-presidentialism to Russia's longstanding political culture is persuasive, although I'd be a bit more inclined to argue that the nature of the "shock therapy" reforms contributed to this new authoritarianism just like other misguided economic policies in the past, like collectivization and the general abandonment of the NEP.

Let's expound on the post-Stalin years and then split the article into two sections, one on 1917-1953 and the other on 1953-1991.

172

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Please see the comments on the Stalin talk page. 172

Hi, there is an edit-war on Communist state. Unfortunately your NPOVing occured after a large block of POV material that already exists in another article was pasted in again by the person who has doing this consistently. In reverting his stuff, your NPOVing was lost. When I get a chance, I will go through your changes and see which bits apply to the surviving text and make corrections. Apologies in any case. As you can see, there is an 'agenda'-based war going on there and all efforts to produce an NPOV are constantly being frustrated by the pasted in POV stuff of a small minority. Trying to make this article NPOV is proving a nightmare because of the actions of one person. ÉÍREman 23:42 May 10, 2003 (UTC)

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Congratulations, you have just been made a sysop! You have volunteered for boring housekeeping activities which normal users sadly cannot participate in. Sysops basically can't do anything: They cannot delete pages arbitarily (only obvious junk like "jklasdfl,öasdf JOSH IS GAY"), they cannot protect pages in an edit war they are involved in, they cannot ban signed in users. What they can do is delete junk as it appears, ban anonymous vandals, remove pages that have been listed on Votes for deletion for more than a week, protect pages when asked to by other members, and help keep the few protected pages there are, among them the precious Main Page, up to date.

Note that almost everything you can do can be undone, so don't be too worried about making mistakes. You will find more information at Wikipedia:Administrators, please take a look before experimenting with your new powers. Drop me a message if there are any questions or if you want to stop being a sysop (could it be?). Have fun! --Eloquence 19:17 21 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Thankyou I'll be careful not to let my new found power go to my head G-Man 13:26 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

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Thanks for the message. I've just been busy for a period of about a month. It's good to be back on this site. Always feel free to suggest articles that require work; maybe we can collaborate on some projects. 172

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Hi G-Man. Nice article on the Settle and Carlisle - I've no quibbles about the data, but I've tidied up the article a bit, merged some sentences and fixed a few typos. Cheers! -- Arwel 11:46 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)