The year was 1966 and the experts in the USSR were keen to please the heavily armed and notoriously humorless leaders of that “republic.” The current leader was Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev and he was no exception to the humorless requirement.
Leonid knew if you are going to make all decisions on policy for a huge swath of the world’s population you need lots of “experts” to tell you what the problems are and how to fix them. Those experts also have to be willing to cover for the boss in case anything goes wrong with the policies they recommend. They understand the challenges of accidentally disappearing into a gulag if the “дерьмо Хиты он фанат.”
(Definition and translation can be found below in pictorial form.)
As it often turns out the problems and the solutions are misidentified by experts. No objections are usually noted though, in a country without an inquisitive press who would nevertheless be discouraged from asking questions or objecting. Unless, of course, a fully paid trip to the above mentioned gulag was in their vacation plans.
At least a few of those experts seem to have identified the problem as “very little trade occurring.” Unfortunately, they connected it with a lack of advertising. Therefore, they concluded that if you just provided more advertising the problem would be resolved.
This kind of expert advice was common back then and unfortunately is also common today. You can also find it whenever or wherever a small group of folks make all the decisions for everyone else. That policy is sometimes called, “one size fits none.”
I’ll resist the obvious temptation to pontificate on that point.
The problem actually started back with “Uncle Joe” Stalin when he decided after WWII that the Russian people needed to buy more cars. One of the problems was that they had a tough time buying them because only 6,000 were produced in 1946 and a mere 10,000 in 1947, so the wait was up to 6 years. New 6 yr old cars don’t sell too well, I guess.
Anyway, back to the year 1966 and the experts’ notion that all that was needed is more advertising. Brezhnev agreed with his experts. Thus, the USSR mandated that every company start spending at least 1% of revenue on ads for products. Turns out though, that most of those products did not exist or that people could not afford them if they did. *
The problem didn’t seem obvious to the experts in 1966.
So here we are in 2022 and it may seem obvious to many of you non-experts like me, that similarities exist in the current situation in this country.
American car manufacturers are running ads like crazy for cars that do not exist on their dealers’ lots. But as the dealers like to point out, they would be delighted to sell you a “pre-owned” car if you don’t mind paying as much as a new one cost just a short time ago.
We can’t blame this inane practice wholly on Stalin since he is no longer able to screw things up. He took leave of the world. And not a moment too soon for hungry people in the USSR who were subject to similar polices in the agricultural arena.
But not to worry. Plenty of power hungry ignoramuses lined up to take his place and they achieved the same results using somewhat different means in lots of places around the world.
So, allowing for some different details and locations, history does seem to repeat. Particularly bad history.
* A tad like poor people here in the US being advised to buy electric cars if they can’t afford to pay insane gas prices.