Depending on the products. Some things are cheaper to ship by rail, some by ship. And to ship via rail from Moscow to Paris you have to clear customs in Poland, Germany, and France. Not exactly efficient.
So it must be inefficient to have shipped goods from say....Italy to West Germany via France or Switzerland or Austria in 1949 rather than shipping them straight to West Germany from the USA or China right?
Except why then was the EEC formed instead of individual economic unions between the USA and European countries?
In any case your point here ignores the fact that in the 1970s it might well have been possible that shipping via rail from Moscow to Paris (dependent on the goods in question I imagine) would have seen customs paid only once; at the inner-German border. The EEC had begun a customs union in 1958 and even in the 1970s Comecon had what was effectively a customs union (as seen on the
first page of this
1978 paper).
There is also the possibility of shipping directly from say Odessa to Marseilles or from Leningrad to Brest.
I doubt Russia was in a place where it could step in and immediately compete with the Japanese on advanced electronics. Simple electronics is just packaging. Not much more difficult than operating a sewing machine.
It seems here that you are unaware of the strong grounding that the USSR had in physics. So there's not much point discussing this further.
Have you ever seen a container ship?
Hmmm...if you aren't able to discuss a topic maturely, I won't waste my time in the future on your posts.
They are too big for canals and major rivers.
The Panama Canal and Suez Canal regularly take cargo ships and the
Volga is Europe's largest river in terms of discharge of water.
Anyways, you have clearly overlooked or don't seem to know about Baku (which has a port from which containers ship do business. How? Well they must pass through the Volga-Don Canal if they don't intend to just make a short hop up the Caspian to Astrakhan to offload cargo onto rail). There are even
companies who design ships which are capable of transiting the Volga from the Caspian.
You need a deep harbor for those. The more you load and unload at transport hubs the more time you waste and the less cost competitive you are.
So then how do global
trans-shipping hubs like Singapore even do business? Surely according to your logic here, it is a waste of time to use a smaller ship to transport goods (destined for Rome) to Singapore for them to be loaded onto a larger ship which just happens to be going to the same destination as those original goods then.
Assuming if USSR opens up to the west, then so does the rest of the eastern bloc. East Germans arent exactly going to be happy being excluded from West German markets while the Russians are exporting there.
You still have me confused.
Okay, maybe you're confusing 1970s Poland and the USSR with the 1990s Poland and Russia. Because if the USSR opens up to the west economically during Detente (which remember saw the end of American involvement in Vietnam, SALT, The Helsinki Accords and the normalization of relations between the Germanies and their accession to the UN) then you would still have Comecon and massive Soviet influence politically within the Eastern Bloc. In essence the rest of the Eastern Bloc would have been an economic extension of the USSR, not jealous competitors.
Even if Kosygin were to turn the USSR into the
economic equivalent of 1970s Yugoslavia (as Jello Biafra indicated) it would essentially put an end to the ideological struggle that was the Cold War. Yugoslavia had cooperation agreements with the EEC going back to 1970 and as this
1980s article demonstrates, economically the West and Yugoslavia in the 1970s were on fairly good terms. If that were applied to the Eastern Bloc as a whole then Comecon as a whole would be seen as a low(er) wage area with a fairly well educated population in the context of thawing political and military tensions.
You misquoted me by saying transportation costs.
My mistake. Though transportation would hardly be an issue.
I said other costs. Other costs include time to transport,
It's quicker to transport goods across the Atlantic than it is across the Pacific. It is also quicker to transport goods from Leningrad to Rotterdam than from Shanghai to Rotterdam. It's
even faster to transport goods via rail (22 days) from China to the Netherlands than it is to do it via ship (38 days) - and this is with a fully functioning Suez Canal. In the early 1970s the Suez Canal was still closed (until June 1975). Between Onkel Willie's POD (the 1969 assassination attempt on Brezhnev) and 1975 that would have been 6 years in which it would have taken even longer by sea than by rail.
quality control issues, cost of holding additional inventory. It is not just the cost of putting it on a train. Those costs add up. Particularly in a country like the Soviet Union where the infrastructure is set up to meet the needs of a communist central government rather than a market driven economy.
And here again the OTL system of central government is being transposed onto an ATL situation. The OP refers to "pulling a China" and Jello Biafra refers to "Yugoslavia". In 1970s Yugoslavia you had contract and arbitration law which allowed foreign parties doing business in Yugoslavia to choose (within limits) which nation's laws would apply to their dealings. You also had laws permitting foreign investment in the form of joint ventures. Economically, Yugoslavia and the PRC were quite different from the USSR. And without Yugoslavia's political troubles in finding a single replacement for Tito (which in turn screwed them up and kept them from continuing to make the necessary reforms to keep pace with the changing economic climate - Yugoslavia essentially became politically grid-locked after Tito which helped them to crash and burn economically which in turn helped to fuel the political meltdown in the 1990s), it might even be possible that a Yugoslav type economic system in the USSR might survive and evolve into a full market driven system. And if the USSR did "pull a China" (before China did) then it would have become in essence a market driven economy. That's what this thread is supposed to be discussing. So if you can't differentiate the political system in China from the economic system in China and see how that might have worked (or not) in an alt-USSR then there is little point in any further discussion.
