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Comment by RugnirViking | Hacker News Reader

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

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USSR spent most of it's GDP on military plus central planing is unworkable system especially with all the idiotic soviet KPI's on top of it.

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).

Soviet imported a lot - both food and technology. They bought IBM computers through Europe etc. Oil paid for a lot of that.

Yeah, just 100k+ of wasted lives on single project only, but engineering worth it, right? https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1980-2/bam/

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.

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