Comparison Of The United States And The Soviet Union

Comparison of the United States and the Soviet Union

Cody Swartz

The Soviet Union was a country that took a different approach at governing its people than the United States, instead of taking up Democracy as most modern countries have the Soviets installed a Totalitarian system. A Totalitarian form of government is at the other end of the spectrum compared to Democracy. In the Soviet Union, the market was controlled by the government, there was no mass media, and a massive amount corruption within the government. We don’t hear much about these kinds of countries anymore, because most of them failed. The only two countries that remain that are even close to the Soviet Union would be China and North Korea. China has become successful

In the United States, there is a free market; companies can make what they want and whatever amount they decide. The country follows the rules of supply and demand, if people want more of a product (demand) then the company will increase their supply. The Soviet Union controlled every aspect of the market. They controlled how much of an item was produced and where it was sent, there was a constant shortage of every product imaginable. Citizens were given ration cards to buy food from the store, but they weren’t guaranteed that there would be any food in the store. (Arndt Pg. 7) In the United States we go to the store and buy what we want, because the company that produces it knows roughly how much of the product to make based on the sales. The Soviet Union displayed the exact problems with a control economy; there is no way to accurately produce the goods that are needed. As with every government they are slow to do anything, nothing can be done in a timely manner. Every decision that had to be made needed to be cleared by someone, and by the time that decision was made the information supplied was no longer accurate. The people in the SU weren’t very happy that they were starving because their government had to control every aspect of their lives. When comparing these two countries it’s important to remember that we were in a war of ideologies. Both countries thought that their way of governing was the best

In the United States, we have a constitutional right to having mass media. If someone chooses to be well informed they have multiple choices to get their facts from, they even have options to check what they’ve been told. For us this is normal stuff, so much that some people don’t even pay attention to what’s happening around the country, we take it for granted. In the Soviet Union, they didn’t have mass media, mostly because the primary means of news was the radio as most people in the country didn’t have a television. The news that they did receive through the radio or the newspaper was controlled by their government. (Stafford Pg. 7) They had no idea of what was happening in the world around them, there was no outside news source that they could read or listen to. In the States, we had several newspapers for each town or city, and several radio stations. In no way were we limited to what news we could and couldn’t read. For a totalitarian government to rule they must have a complete media blackout. The people in that country can’t know that life is better outside of their own, they must be told that other countries are worse off. The media situation in the Union could be compared to that of North Korea, where the people have no contact outside of their country. When one of our leaders in the US screws up or makes a mistake, we know about usually within the same day, and of that