this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Say what you will about the USSR, but it took a bunch of peasant farmers under exploitative monarchy and literally rocketed them into a global superpower in, what, 2 generations? While weathering the immediate tangible effects of two world wars, and staying competitive against the capitalistic world power that remained virtually untouched in both wars and casually claimed industrial supremacy by virtue of that fact.
How great can capitalism be if the capitalists had a multi-century head start, better natural resources, advantageous geography, a bigger population, and it was still close?
Russia was a superpower to begin with. The communists took over the Russian empire and it nearly lost them ww2 (in the beginning). What are you talking about?
Edit: clarity about losing the war.
I don't think you can really compare pre and post industrial superpowers, especially measured specifically against the ridiculously advantageous position of the mid century USA (perhaps I should have said nuclear superpower, or space-faring). And pretty much everyone in the hemisphere "nearly" lost WW2
I reread my comment and it was ambiguous. I meant nearly lost the war in the beginning due to lack of leadership which they basically executed early in the revolution.
You're right, nearly all of Europe lost in that war. The only two winners were USA and USSR
A puzzling juxtaposition, that.
What would you call the siedge of Moscow if not nearly losing?
History is rife with "nearly"s. The USSR had to content with y'know, actually being in the middle of both world wars and suffering the material consequences. And then went on to go toe-to-toe with the golden child of capitalism (safely nestled on its distant continent, far from the material consequences of war, with all the post-war industrial economic advantages that wrought).
The US had a freakish advantage, no one should have gotten even close. And the USSR got smacked down bad through both wars. And yet, they were stiff competition. It's like gloating that your thoroughbred greyhound barely beat out a half-blind, 3-legged street dog in a race. The fact that it was close should be your sign.
That's a very narrow view of what happened after the second world war. URSS occupied half of the European continent. It basically was the last empire in Europe with all the resources and human capital at its disposal to do anything it wanted. Not to mention war reparations.
And it lost. The ideology wasn't working. It took 40 years for that empire to collapse, but collapse it did because it was built on the wrong principles.
I'm sure famine, sanctions, and concentrated international sabotage had nothing to do with it.
There was no famine in URSS post world war 2. What are you talking about?
Last I checked, 1946-1947 comes after 1945, double-check my math though.
And let's circle back around to the far more important concentrated international sabotage if you please.
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1990 because of the famine in 47?
International sabotage? Do you have evidence of sanctions against USSR and their allies which weren't matched back by USSR & their allies?
Someone else already linked 'Killing Hope' by William Blum. I recommend perusing it.
That doesn't answer the question. At most, it just shows that KGB were more incompetent or not endowed with literary talent.
What?
I asked for examples of international sanctions which USSR & their allies couldn't match. That book is about CIA and US crappy foreign policy. If you say that CIA actions where themselves sanctions against USSR, then surely KGB should have solved the issue.
The book is very clearly focused on US intervention directly against the USSR and other socialist regimes. Did you even glance through the table of contents?
Are you suggesting that we ignore this significant, direct interference from an abnormally advantaged superpower as a contributing factor to the USSR's downfall? That's simply illiterate.
No, I've already dismissed the narrative that poor little USSR had a disadvantage against the big bad US when I pointed out that they abusively occupied half of Europe at the end of WW2 and had influence over a lot more of it. If you're bringing up secret services and you're saying that the US one was better at its job, then you're simply pointing out that the USSR one was incompetent.
In one corner, an uninterrupted economy bolstered on the global scale by not being a smoldering pile of ashes. In the other, the ruins of post-war Europe, juggling reconstruction and revolution.
Your analysis is either deliberately disingenuous, or feeble-mindedly impotent. I'm not interested in either. Read a book.
Oh spare me of that song played on the world's smallest violin. That's the stupidest take an the whole situation that I've ever seen. "Read a book"... yeah, the poor little witch being burned alive by Hansel and Gretel... Is that how you view that story too?
I don't debate children.
But the poor witch was so hungry... What could she do?
Exploit the global poor and extrajudicially unseat duly elected leaders around the world to subvert the democratic will of foreign citizens and maintain capitalist hegemony? Who did your daddy tell you the hungry witch was?
You're telling me it was the USSR. Poor thing, alone in the woods with nothing to eat... Those kids were so unfair to her
That was you, but your reading comprehension is not surprising. Maybe try some sources besides right wing propaganda. Good luck in life, you'll need it.
You too. Have fun making excuses for poor witches
I hope you figure out you're not doing anything different.
It was WWI, not WWII. And the war was lost under the monarchy.
And Russia wasn't a superpower back then, it was barely a Great Power.
The leadership of the USSR was a genocidal imperialistic regime, but it did in fact get Russia specifically from snowsleds to space shuttles.
In the meantime it caused irreparable harm to most of Eastern Europe.
They did lose WW1 because of the revolution, that's true, or rather stepped out of it, but that's not what I was talking about. I meant the beginning of the WW2 and the Russian invasion which was a huge disaster overall. They managed to come out of it on top, but the cost was ridiculous. (Edited my original comment for clarification).
I'm calling them a superpower even if they were not on par with UK, France and Prussia, they were a bigger power than the Austro-Hungarian empire or the Ottoman empire at the time.
I'm not praising tzarist Rusia. It was a shit place, a reminesscence of feudalism after the industrial revolution. I'm simply trying to argue the fact that it was communism which allowed them the progress. They started from pretty high up to begin with. In fact, the two major examples, China and Rusia, while in some sort of identity crisis when they switched to communism, were historical powerhouses to begin with.
Other, no power houses who went communist didn't fare so well. Cuba, North Korea, countries in the Balkans ...