I can find only one good thing about the soviet union, but it is a good one. They crushed nazism. The war against nazism had been won mainly on the eastern front and so the soviet union was by far the main contributor to the victory.
Discussion
Not only in wartime. The USSR, when led by their WW2 generation, constructed the second-largest period of sustained economic growth by any nation ever.
In the 50s and early 60s under Khruschev, innovation and risk-taking were rewarded, and the Soviet economy grew by double-digit percentages every year, going from a 3rd-world hellhole to the world's second-largest economy by 1970. Despite the glaring disadvantage of being a largely non-market economy, requiring significant expenditures of effort to gather data by non-market means.
Then the Soviet Boomers came of age, the cultural wheels fell off, and the USSR became the bureaucratic, risk-averse, gerontocratic, ethnic-quota-led, empty-shelved, everything-is-politics percursor to the modern EU/UK/AU that we love to mock.
Culture is upstream of both politics and economics - the right culture can make even State Capitalism ("Communism") work to some extent. Respect to those 50s and 60s Soviet citizens.
State Capitalism's failure modes are horrific, however...
Thay was a very nice comment.
Fuck Stal8n anyway 😀
Thank you; and yes, I trust he's boiling in a pit somewhere.
Stalin had extraordinary taste in architecture ("Seven Sisters"), and he was an unexpectedly benevolent and involved father to his daughter, but he was an absolute monster in every other particular...
Very, very true. Definetely an achievement to be remembered forever.