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Comment by waihtis | Hacker News Reader

Now have a think how different things would look if Russia would've been an more liberal europeanesque superpower instead of a communist kleptocracy.

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Russia was not accepted to integrate with EU. The position of EU pretty much being "you stay here and sell us oil while we integrate all your new neighbours".

There's a famous long read about it (you can use machine translation) https://sputnikipogrom.com/politics/30301/story-of-faded-lov...

Exactly. Half of those achievements are space related and the guy responsible for them (Korolev) spent 6 years in the Stalin's gulag that he barely survived, his life was cut short at 59 probably as the result of the traumas he received there and who knows how much more he could have achieved if not for that.

Yeah, half of those achievements are just rocket science. Seethe and cope harder.

I'm not downplaying the achievements, I'm saying they could've been a lot greater if the system didn't try to mutilate and murder it's author.

You're right it could've been a lot greater however you should apply the same analysis towards the USA as well.

If you're black you're all but barred from participating in the space program. This was only recently acknowledged in a Hollywood feel good movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures

The space program was bootstrapped by Nazis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

I'm saying they achievements could've been a lot greater if the system didn't try to mutilate and murder it's subjects: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history/40-years-human-exp...

That is a travesty and a loss for everyone, but you cannot compare those two things in good conscience.

>All the while they were actively preventing 399 men from receiving the same treatments.

And:

>The emergent consensus among scholars is that, of the 14 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag camps and the 4 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag colonies from 1930 to 1953, roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million prisoners perished there or they died soon after they were released.[

I just picked one egregious example to compare to Korolev and other researchers that suffered. If you want to compare systemic examples like the Gulags then the Jim Crow system that effectively instituted slavery [1] and likely killed way more than 1.7 million people. Alabama alone imprisoned 200,000 blacks as effectively slaves[2].

Again I am not trying to dismiss the crimes of the Soviet Union but I almost never see the same analysis applied to the US.

[1] https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploit...

[2] https://www.newsweek.com/book-american-slavery-continued-unt...

USSR achieved around a century of advancement under capitalism in the west a few decades after USSR was formed. Despite US having vastly more resources than USSR, the Soviets were able to keep ahead of US in many technological advancements. Maybe you yourself should think of what the west could've achieved if it wasn't run by oligarch kleptocrats.

Indeed. That's the point here. Russia was high up on the axis of overall innovation. But by adopting the bolshevist/communistic terror system, the direction of progress was permanently set into a downward direction. It is a loss for all of humanity at 100% certainty.

Every single of the innovations the OP listed was attained under "the bolshevist/communistic terror system". Prior to the 1917 Revolution, Imperial Russia was an Agricultural backwater that was widely derided as the least industrialized part of Europe.

Honest question: Don't they teach history in school these days? The level of ignorance displayed in some of the comments in this thread is staggering.

Hilarious. Are you advocating the Soviet Union was a progressive nation?

I understand. You literally don't know what else to say, so you have to at least attempt to say something that you think might sound witty. A real pity.

And yes, compared to Imperial Russia that was a Near-Absolute Monarchy with an Hereditary Emperor whose imperial style/form of address was "Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias" the Soviet Union was a beacon of progressiveness.

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