The soviets made a pretty good go of turning a theistic feudal monarchy largely with an economy focused on agriculture into the second biggest industrial power in the world for almost a hundred years. Certainly not perfect, and horrible to live in in many ways, but better at building an economy than a lot of other similarly sized places.
That's pretty bold statement considering USSR collapse was caused by economic weakness. It never was "second biggest industrial power " outside of it's own propaganda.
That's true. I feel like there is a bit of both here. Around the 1950s to 1970s, they were capable of some pretty impressive projects, civillian and millitary. Things like mass rollout of power infrastructure, road networks, city construction, the space race, etc. their GDP is today estimated to have been around half that of the US had at the time. Their growth in production numbers for tanks/planes etc
throughout ww2 was extrodinary as well. However they hit a real period of stagnation in the 1970s which just got worse and worse over time, i'm not an expert as to exactly why but my guess would be they developed a culture of corruption that continues to plague russia to this day
Is that true? I would be interested to see the numbers on that. I would have expected their spending to be on a similar-ish level to the US at the time (which while high, probably never crossed the 50% mark)
It's more you have to realise that the way things were structured there was never an honest count. As an anecdotal example my father in-law was chief eng. at Kharkov factory that was producing Nuclear Missile guidance systems and other high end mil. parts. Factory had 10,000 employees yet officially it was producing electric razors and things like this were the norm.
I can believe that. They certainly had a lot of corruption and behind-the-scenes lying to make things fit, especially towards the end. However it seems to me that there must have been at least some growth there underpinning things for some time, else they would have collapsed much easiler, right? They also seemed to have an outsized economic impact abroad compared to other places with similar population that started the 20th century in a similar economic place (india, china, south america).
You are engaging in severely bad faith. I never mentioned that project, and certainly never said 100k lives were a worthwhile cost. That is not how we do things here on hacker news.
Did I ever say they were/are saints? The OP was commenting on their poor "country building" which I interpret largely as economy building. It was a horrible place to be
Yes hunger was problem in the civil war to world war 2 era with some really horrible famines but famine was also a regular occurrence in Tsarist Russia to begin with.
Now there is the discussion to be had of whether they were "man-made" or not and that is indeed a important discussion but that also needs to be contextualized: Historically capitalist countries going through industrialization have also seen famines.
In an alternative universe where the October Revolution did not succeed, can we honestly assume that there would have not been any famines? No, so there is not a direct causality. (Again, note that I purposefully not talking about specific events and responsibilities but instead showing that these question are not relevant for the big picture discussion.)
It is a common mistake in the study of history to confuse structure and specific events. Was hunger a structural, common occurrence in socialist countries? Absolutely not.
'second biggest industrial power' assume this is a joke. Poor quality: anything that was made was so bad, this habit is still alive and even russians hate their own products.
Stealing: ancient car designs and engineering is good example. And as you know it never improved.
Millions of lives were taken to achieve nonsense goals, people were starved, frozen, deprevated from food. What kind of human you have to be justify that? Well, but it didn't touch you or your family, so it's fine. Lets continue glorifying crazy stuff, we're just engineers, right?
I have a Soviet camera lens built for the domestic market (so worse quality) from the 80s and its build and optical quality is fine. It doesn’t compare to similar vintage lenses from Japan but was much cheaper new at the time.
Japan in the 60's and early 70ś produced the same crap or worse than the Soviets, similar to Chinese clones for hardware today. Later in the 70's and the 80's they produced amazing hardware.
Soviet products might not have been very pretty, but they were made with durability and, indeed, quality in mind. The electrical components from the Soviet era are still working. Any mechanical/metallic stuff is very solid.
Yeah, designs were utilitarian. And they had to make a million of everything. But there was no good reason to aim for low quality.
Counter that with any product of capitalism, huh: buy a shiny thing and wait for it to break in 2 years.
Not trying to glorify communism, but what you said in your comment is complete bullshit mixed with questionable sentiment.
