Actually it did... they were worked to death as free labor. Who made the factories in the Urals? Who helped farmers as laborers? Political, criminal and war prisoners. It's sad but it's true. Everything Stalin did (apart from the purges) were brutal and cruel but they did help Russia become an industrial power and improved their economy. So they did make progress, just not political progress. Everyone forgets that before Stalin and Lenin Russia was torn apart by civil war, the country being backwards and unable to stay up with the westerns powers. I have to say it, only a fool would claim that they didn't bring progress.
And how much intelligentsia was lost by those actions? How many ideas, concepts and scientific research has been corrupted, surpresed and outright outlawed by the Communist, particularly Stalins party. How many scientists, engineers and other academics ended up in those gulags and labor camps, ending up digging and shoveling, sometimes on totally useless projects, till they died? How many people had to starve or otherwise dealing with economical issues, because somewhere a dam or secret military town for nuclear research had to be build in the shortest time possible? How many accidents, including Tschernobyle, could be traced back to sheer slack when it came to safety? Or because standards had to be ignored, due to unrealistic shedules? All because of the preasure from proving that the socialist ideals would outgrow western capitalism in the shortest time possible. If the US did it in 10 years, the mighty Soviets/Chinese had to do it in 3! And of course, if necessary, trough labour without the necesary machines, tools and engineers that made it happen. Not to mention that a lot of what the Soviets claimed, has been also pure proganda - Alexei Stakhanov: The USSR's superstar miner, and he was by far not the only one.
I won't denny that the Sovietunion saw SOME progress when compared to Zarist Russia. But Zarrist Russia was pretty much the bottom! There was literaly no other way, but up! And the Soviets had some extremly crafty scientists and engineers, but they have been most of the time far behind the west. Military matters locked a bit different, for obvious reasons though, because this is where a lot of their resources ended up.
Again. It would be ludicrous to think that Stalin and the following communists improved the Sovietunion. I am not saying that America, Britain or Germany are the standard here, they made enough mistakes on their own, particularly as a pure profit oriented society has a lot of issues on their own. But regimes, are usually not the best environment when it comes to economics and science. Particularly agricultural research was a totall mess in the Sovietunion, driven by egos, false ideology and a strange adoption of marxist ideals. If you ignore science, you get such situations like missmanagaments leading to mass famines and shortages. Again, a lot, if not all of the issues Russisa had to deal with after the 1990s, can be directly traced back to the 70 years of Communism and their politics.
It's not admirable or good, but keep in mind that Russia became an industrial power in a decade, where others took longer.
Nonsense. Again. They. Had. No. Other. Way. But. Up! The economical power houses of the early and late 20s have been the US, Britain and Germany. Those saw the largest sums of investment and engineering. This changed a lot for the Germans during the Nazi regime, when a lot of scientists left the nation, nuclear reseach has shifted completely to Britain and the US, while engineering was more and more dominated by the Nazi ideology.
Russia as the Sovietunion under Stalin suffered from tremendious issues. Political clansings, bad educations, an old and outdated agrarian economy, regress in military tactics. This almost costed them the victory when fighting the Germans. Stalin was at least intelligent enough to realize that, when he left military planing and strategy to his most skilled officers, while only giving his yes or no to the big decisions. And even here, his ego still costed thousands if not 100 000 of Russian lives! Up till the very end in 1945! Even in the late 30s, they still had not solved most of their issues. And Stalins timed plans for all kinds of branches, made it even worse. Because you can not achieve anything, if you simply lack the necessary workforce. You can not increase production without the required tools and machines and just using uneducated labor alone. And if they don't achieve their goals? Gulag for you! Compare the situation of the Sovietunion in the late 30s with those of Japan, which was in a similar if not even worse situation, but managed in a shorter time to achieve industrialisation. But even they, with all the power and preasure, could not compete with the US. And Japan never achieved a complete modernisation. Which costed them the victory in WW2. Among many other reasons of course.
Just to make this clear though!
I am not the kind of guy that sees everything Soviet/Communist as the absolute evil and I don't see everything from the west, including Germany, as the best standard in the world. All systems are very complex structures, and to think in black and white is totally stupid. For example, the fact that many Socialist ideas, particularly economic theories are largely ignored in western academics, even after the Soviet Union collapsed, is in my opinion, rather problematic. This is more motivated by ideology, than scientific research. Why not taking a look at what the scientists on the other side have done, researched and theorized for the last 60 years? They had a lot of intelligent people after all. Wasted potential in my opinion. However, when you simply look at the last 70 years, it is obvious, which concept managed to win the cold war. The real tragedy is, that we in the west, havn't learnd from our mistakes.
