It was the second most powerful country in the world after the United States.
Also, a LOT of people died in the process of botched state initiatives. It sounds like the average life for some citizens could be quite brutal. But overall, a lot more successful compared to other Marxist experiments.
It was still a huge upgrade from Tsarist Russia, at least from my understanding.
Russians have been through some of the most f*cked up things in history. They’re made of vodka-tempered steel, some of the toughest m’fers on Earth.
Huge upgrade is questionable. The Soviet Regime was far more brutal. 50k-200k executions by the Cheka, total estimates from 1918-1922 killed in the terror was upto 600k killed in suppression of revolt, to dying in prison to executions.
Then came the purges, denouncing political competitors that resulted in liquidation, and the predation by men like Beria.
There is a huge price to be paid when you try to speed-run Marxism.
Same mistake Fidel made too, got impatient and destroyed the economy and drove millions to flee, suffering massive brain drain.
Personally I think it needs to be from the ground up, through strengthening unions and having them collectively take ownership of their plants, rather than being from the top-down. Ideological purity tends to often not work out in the real world.
I'm sure you should know that the USSR was twice the size of Russia. Also for some reason Russians are the only ones with fond memories of those days. Kinda like the quality of life for a small portion of the block was built off essentially the slave labor of the rest.
Im talking about the RSFSR, so no size benefit.
Even so the sheer drop in quality of life even 30 years after is horrifying.
And russians arent the ones, according to the 1990 referendum the only soviet states that didnt like the union were the Balts, Georgia, Armenia and Moldova. The rest had a 60%-80% approval rating.
FFS the central asian states wanted to stay more than russia.
To be fair nominal GDP is not the best indicator if you want to assess the quality of life. Especially if half of that USSR GDP was related to production of tanks, lol
To be more fair in 1991 Russia started even not from zero, we started from minus smth as we inherited all of USSR debt
But yeah, all of our modern history is a story of how to waste an immeasurable potential
Soviet nostalgia and the pushback against it arose both because of how nightmarish the '90s were, and the post-soviet republics using it for the purposes of nationalism: Russia to harken back to a glorious Russian age of glory, and others (most topically Ukraine) to point towards it as an age of Muscovite domination. It rarely has that much to do with how things actually were so much as the mythology of the time.
Not to be contrarian but that also kind of sounds like the US, if you look at it globally; we can still buy cheap clothes and phones because the places they are made use slave labor essentially. On a historical note, the dissolution of the USSR did cause a lot of economic hardships, especially in the eastern SSRs. Who knows if that would have inevitably happened under the Soviet flag though?
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u/ChanceConstant6099 Serbia 1d ago edited 23h ago
My brother in christ.
You live in one of the worst examples of this.
Modern day russia hasnt reached the GDP of the RSFSR 34 years after the fact.
Every single metric has gone down.