Somewhat overloaded by the flood of media puff about the G20 – what did it ever achieve? I thought to myself – what glory days of the USSR?
Fair enough chasing the Wehrmacht back to Berlin in 1945 qualifies as glory days but then Allied armies deliberately stopped which left Berlin to the USSR. And hey lets not mention the Allies failing to push north from Italy in late 1943.
OK – back to glory days of the USSR – now here we have this group of technocrats and party apparatchiks in charge of one of the large populations on earth plus about a sixth of the planets landmass and untold resources. The population is so obedient they tolerate mass murder by famine – they tolerate the gulag of forced labour camps home to millions – they tolerate the charming secret police apparatus that can efficiently disappear any dissenter – they tolerate the system that keeps them decades behind western consumer progress – I could go on.
The truly amazing thing is that by the 1960’s or 70’s no leadership group emerged that could even half efficiently administer the place and see that production of goods let their people progress. They could do large rockets and large armies. All they had to add was to copy the production of a range of western consumer items – copy what the west was doing – not so hard you might think. When they wanted a western car – they turned to Fiat.
The USSR has to be the greatest bar none economic failure of the last 8,000 years – IMHO talk of “glory days” is wishful thinking.