How did they become a super-powerful land force from 1941 to, say, 1970, while before and after they are dogshit? What happened? And no, land--lease did not do it. No amount of supply can fix dedovscina, corruption, obsolete doctrines and officer purges.
>>62889824>How did they become a super-powerful land force from 1941 to, say, 1970, They really didn't start being a land force with meaningful offensive capability until 1943>while before and after they are dogshit? They always had strategic depth, manpower and that counts for a lot.>What happened?Lend-lease alowed them to win WW2 and kept their industry afloat.But it turns out a command economy can't actually compete with a growing free-market economy, so it slowly stagnated and failed over the followeing three to four decades.
>>62889824They stole the nukes and everybody was too afraid of them ever since.
>>62889824>super-powerfulAll they ever did was to indiscriminately throw bodies at the problem. There's a simple counter to that and it's called economic & technological superiority. That's what happened some long time ago.
>>62889824they just used other countries' that were under their rule
>>62890135Only correct answer. By the late 1980s they were relying on muh nukes already because they had figured out they couldn't win a conventional war against NATO due to losing the technological edge.And this is talking about the USSR, Russia is an impotent husk of it.
they were simply never goodPOLAND defeated them in 1920, ww2 was with western assistance
>>62889824Lend lease didn't fix dedovshchina, corruption, obsolete doctinres and officer purges, rather dedovshchina, corruption, obsolete doctrines and officer purges laid waste to the army lend lease helped build.
>>62890135I think the command economy was good and was the correct decision for the time... until it wasn't. It was very simple, you use agricultural surplus for investment in heavy industry, and industrial production is then reinvented in more industry, while you also inject huge amounts of surplus peasant labor from labor-intensive agriculture into the factories as you mechanize agriculture.However, those planning models started to fail by the 1970s and 1980s. The Soviet economy was also structurally militarized, military production and upkeep was prioritized but from a purely economic view that came at the expense of investment in other types of heavy industry, which the USSR clearly needed. The surplus manpower started to run out (and the losses from WWII didn't help). This author also identified several other problems in the 1970s. The first thing is they preferred to retool and maintain old industry when the production of new modern industry would have been more efficient, and secondly, Donbass coal production peaked in 1976, after which the Soviets were forced to invest in brown coal in Krasnoiarsk (in Siberia), which was much more expensive and less productive. Brown coal is not very efficient and the costs of operating in a vast desolate area as central Siberia are high, so that productivity of capital invested plummeted. Much the same applied to oil. Only natural gas production was something of a success story. He also compares the USSR to Japan, which had much fewer natural resources after WWII, but greatly expanded its industrial production by importing raw materials. Drops in transport costs after the war made this profitably possible. The USSR was also wrecking its natural environment, had poor cost accounting and saving practices, which was not a problem in the 1930s, but had to become one in the 1970s. The Soviet political system at that time was not very well-suited to adapt to this and it played a large part in the fall of this system.
>>62889824>How did they become a super-powerful land force from 1941 to, say, 1970, while before and after they are dogshit?they werent dogshit though they were the dominant land power in coalition wars of 1700s-1800s
>>62889824>How did they become a super-powerful land force from 1941 to, say, 1970,Mostly because their primary rivals had exhausted themselves in the 1910s, then just fought major wars that further pushed them back. Instituting and keeping conscription, massive investment in heavy industry and the military (which absolutely did not come back to bite them in the ass after three decades), being able to have such a large a standing army and equip it meant that they were a superpower by default.
>>62889824>land--leaselend lease transferred lots of know how on manufacturing and tooling after war they also captured lots of scientists working for Nazis - also Russia was transferring lots of resources and wealth from newly acquired vassals due to slave labour by imprisoned political dissidents. when those impulses faded and then disappeared in following decades their science and economy imploded
>>62889824>What happened?Well, the Soviet Union imploded and the economy contracted horrifically. What Russia nowadays practices is a kind of authoritarian corporatism. It's not a planned economy like during socialism but an economic model in which wealth is based on political connections to the state which controls the productive assets created during the Soviet Union, and can provide (or lift) a "roof" over your head which determines whether you (let's say you're a Russian businessman) gets thrown out of a window or not.Putin does get support from important constituencies (state employees, babushka pensioners), but a huge number of people don't trust the government or their representatives. A historical analogy might be Napoleon III who ruled France in the 1850s and 1860s -- basically different social classes are divided but none are powerful enough to rule, including the capitalists, so the guy who is just after power has the advantage, and that's Putin, and his job is reconcile the different classes by presenting as a unifying force above those conflicts. Hence the schizo "ideology" (which includes tapping into Soviet-era nostalgia for the poor). But this is also a barrier to developing the economy. Russian capitalists go for short-term profits from rent seeking, not long-term strategic investments in R&D, acquiring new machinery, and expanding production. The state has become more authoritarian. There are police all over the place. The country is basically in decline because nobody wants to invest there. What the rulers want is to be treated as another great power, and has adopted an aggressive foreign policy, but this worsens its geopolitical situation and destabilizes the larger post-Soviet area (not just Ukraine but in Central Asia).
>>62889824WW2 was an existential threat to the russian nation to the point they actually got their shit together a bit.
