These pro-capitalist zombie drones believe all of the Cold War propaganda that was fed them through the media and Hollywood. The USSR was the second-largest economy in the world. It was in a state of war since its birth in 1917. It was invaded by the United States, Britain, France, and 10 other countries immediately after WW1, in 1918. The socialist Red Army had to fight over a quarter million enemy combatants of the "White Army"
(i.e. pro-capitalist/tsarist forces) and over 200K foreign invaders from 12 countries. By 1939, thanks to Stalin's five-year economic plans
(a series of centrally planned development projects), Soviet Russia had become an industrial juggernaut, rivaling the United States. Its agriculture was more mechanized and modern than in the US and Western Europe.
The Soviets turned an under-industrialized, agrarian society with a 60% illiteracy rate into a nation that was literate, well-educated, and growing leaps and bounds economically, technologically, socially..etc. It was then invaded in 1941 by four million Nazi Germans, in Operation Barbarossa. Seven out of every ten Germans were fighting in Soviet Russia resulting in the death of approximately 28 million Soviets, of which 19 million were civilians. The Soviet Union won the war, but lost 14% of its population, with much of its national infrastructure destroyed. Soviet Russia was in ruins after WW2, unlike the US which lost 460 thousand of its citizens and came out of the war unscathed, thanks to being surrounded by two vast oceans
(Atlantic & Pacific).
Despite the losses of the USSR in WW2, under Stalin's leadership and plenty of socialism, it became a nuclear superpower, in less than twelve years after the devastation of the Nazi invasion. They were launching satellites and cosmonauts into space, before the United States. Unlike Western Europe and Japan the USSR didn't have Uncle Sam's assistance
("The Marshal Plan"), after WW2, it had to pick itself up by its bootstraps and rebuild on its own.
A few years after the death of Stalin in the late 1950s, certain elements within the Soviet government, due to the Cold War, and ideological differences with Stalin's strict socialism, decided to placate and pander to Western powers, in an attempt to improve relations and maybe end the Cold War. They began to move towards reforming the Soviet political and economic system, making it more palatable to the United States and its allies. That's what eventually led to its demise in the early 1990s.
It took several decades for the anti-Stalin revisionists to have their way, and by the mid-1980s, they were able to fully apply "Perestroika" and "Glasnost" reforms, which led to massive shortages, breadlines, and the collapse of the Soviet economy. The US and Saudi Arabia also engineered a drop in oil prices, which hurt the USSR. The USSR essentially committed suicide, it dissolved itself. If the Soviets had remained Stalinists, they would by now be colonizing space and mining the asteroid belts. Soviet production would be fully automated and computerized, with artificial intelligence and every other technology available to make manufacturing as efficient as possible. The standard of living in Russia would be higher than in the US.
In the above "age-restricted video", we get a glimpse of life in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. Imagine the USSR today with all of the technology we have available when it comes to the automation of production, intelligent robotics, artificial intelligence, powerful computers..etc. Soviet citizens would now in 2023 have a much higher standard of living than Russians have today under market capitalism. They would be extremely advanced.
What we see in Russia, except the younger generation highly influenced by Western media and values, is that most Russians who lived in the USSR, miss it. They know the situation today isn't necessarily better than how it was back then, even in the 1980s, at the height of "Perestroika" reforms, and all of the problems it created. These people miss the USSR. Americans have a completely skewed idea of Soviet Russia and its economic system, because the American wealthy elites did everything possible to demonize it in the eyes of their employees. The American working-class was fed a regular diet of anti-Soviet propaganda (i.e. bullshit). Most of what we heard about the USSR through our Western media and Hollywood, was an exaggeration, if not false.
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