• OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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    14 days ago

    Its why they defeated the nazis, who had a 50-100 year industrialization lead when the USSR started doing a command economy. The USSR also ended up liberalizing, especially in its last decade, creating the circumstances for a coup that resulted in balkanization and massively decreased living standards.

    And all Eastern European countries experience explosive growth post communism?

    This is counterfactual

    • Tja@programming.dev
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      14 days ago

      I thought a massive international effort defeated the nazis, including strategic bombing, embargos and lend-lease. Weird.

      • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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        14 days ago

        The USSR killed 80-ish percent of the nazi troops, and suffered 26 million casualties, mostly civilians exterminated by the nazis. They were mainly responsible for the victory and suffered the heaviest losses, including a lot of the lower level communist organization whose absence lead to the bureaucratic centralization (that Stalin opposed heavily before his death) that let corruption gradually take over the project.

        • Tja@programming.dev
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          14 days ago

          Yeah, when you organize your army based on politics and not on, you know, military capability, you end up sucking at war and need to make it up in numbers. You ignore intelligence of imminent invasion you let hundreds of thousands of troops get encircled and begging the Yankees for resources.

    • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      They defeated the Nazis by throwing conscripts into a meat grinder regardless of whether they even had a weapon, and by threatening to shoot them if they tried to retreat.

      That’s the nature of Authoritarian regimes. Not very working class of them.

      • SSJMarx@lemm.ee
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        13 days ago

        They defeated the Nazis by throwing conscripts into a meat grinder regardless of whether they even had a weapon, and by threatening to shoot them if they tried to retreat.

        Enemy at the Gates is not a documentary, it’s a propaganda film. In true fact while the Soviets did have a large number of conscripts and did suffer supply issues early in the war, at no point were they sending under-equipped battalions into the front line to die for no reason, and the thing about shooting those who retreated only applied to officers who ordered a retreat without proper cause (you’ll find that every other army in World War 2 had a similar protocol).