This shit is deranged on so many levels, I love it
An educated Marxist-Leninist such as Putin accepted that there had been more than 100 million victims of communism, an acceptable price to pay to remodel the world. He accepted the purges that Lenin and Stalin used to cement their rule, the forced famines that eliminated enemies of the state, the forced labor camps in Siberia, the tight control of all media. Putin studied the techniques of agitation and propaganda, applying them in his KGB assignment in Dresden in East Germany during the Cold War.
https://archive.is/4nZkS
https://twitter.com/NRO/status/1533851215624298497
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It's a country that lost tens of millions people and much of it's factories to ww2. And they where still able to keep pace with completely untouched capitalist America.
That's how strong a nationalized planned communist economy and country can be compared to capitalism.
I wouldn't say they kept pace. They exceeded it in certain areas (early space race being a prime example) but US Imperialism allowed them to overmatch the Soviets in lots of areas. The reality is that the Soviets were on the back foot almost the entirety of the cold war. Case: The whole "missile gap" bullshit about how the Soviets had more nukes. They had less the entire time the "missile gap" was being debated in the Eisenhower/Kennedy debates.
Capitalist propaganda always made the Soviets out to be bigger than they actually were as a means of painting them as aggressors-in-waiting, when the Soviets, having lost 22-27 million people in WWII, were actually insanely reluctant to start another war, especially a nuclear war. Reddit jerks itself off every few years remembering that time that WWIII was prevented by a Soviet radar officer who wasn't willing to give the call to launch the nukes based on his data alone. They were desperate to avoid another giant war. The much maligned Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a bid to prevent or at least delay another war after the disastrous Winter War against Finland. Stalin sent entreaties to the British etc to align against the Nazis but they were rebuffed. The Soviets knew they couldn't fight the Nazis by themselves, and they didn't. The beds of thousands of American trucks and millions of cans of tinned beef enabled the Red Army to eventually stop and later stomp the fascists.
But to credit your post, the fact that the Soviets, having lost so much they still had to keep up rationing until the mid 1950s (iirc) and then managed to doggedly keep up in second place to the Capitalists says a lot about the strength of a planned economy.
Ah shit yeah it's been a while since I've thought something through in full liberal-mode, but this situation goes from "whoa that's pretty wild, close call there" to that x5 in lib mode like "yeah his superiors wanted any excuse to engage in nuclear war, and he was probably shot after this incident or something. this one guy alone literally saved the world all on his own"
To say it was a problem is to overstate it. Stalin was born in the 1800s and you are comparing it is Jim crow America. The soviet union would be in what you would call a pre-woke period. For all that they were still better than the US in most areas and if we didn't do a coup there every sign indicated they would have gone on to be fully progressivized beyond our american imagining.
From what soviet books and movies I have seen the soul of the people seemed to have internalized the hopeful optimisim of the revolution. A coupple generations and it could have been a wonder to see.