But the entire Cold War was about which economic system was the “best” and in the end, the Soviet Union frankly ran out of money and could not even test their Buran spacecraft before launching it to see it crash.
Running out of money is how you lose this battle.
To be perfectly fair, this was at least partly the result of the immeasurably expensive clean up of Chernobyl.
Estimates vary but the most recent numbers put it at about $700 Billion.
However they did fuckup in many areas in the economy, something that was recognised internally at least by some - as seen by multiple attempts at reforms.
Also, one can't discount the unbelievably favourable position of the USA at the end of WW2 when analysing this (in comparison, Soviets started with a worse position than many would believe, because Imperial Russia really wasn't well off)
It's not just the man or woman at the top who make the country work. Peter the Great and Catherine the Great tried to modernize. But the nobility put up a lot of resistance or simply didn't turn up for committee meetings.
The pre-soviet famines were of natural causes - crop failures due to droughts etc. After soviets took over the country, these were still ocurring, but were dwarfed by man-made famines, caused by idiotic economic policies (mainly by forced collectivization, which decimated productivity).
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/06/stalins-war-by...
It's just that usually in such comparisons you get to see USA, and USA was an extreme outlier that makes comparison useless in my opinion.
And in the USSRs case, it was from an ecomony that had just had gotten into large scale industrial production, after having been way behind under the Czars, and after a major war, a revolution, and several years of civil war.
If anything, they did better than expected. Even more so given that they had an inexperienced government, external pressure from unfriendly western countries, and had to prepare for future wars that were already breeding (and luckily the did it just in time for WWII).
The US had millions of hungry people. At the peak of the Great Depression, deaths from starvation peaked at a (still terrible) ~110k. Under Soviet rule, an order of magnitude more, actually millions, perished unnecessarily from hunger just in Ukraine.
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory2os2xmaster/...
The initial emergency response, together with later decontamination of the environment, involved more than 500,000 personnel and cost an estimated 18 billion roubles—roughly US $68 billion in 2019, adjusted for inflation.[3]
Wait, what? Buran did launch for a test flight, in a fully remote-controlled flight(something that the US Shuttle couldn't do at the time), and landed successfully. It never crashed.
I've been watching MIT 16.885J recently, it's a lecture series from 2005 about the space shuttle with lectures given about numerous shuttle subsystems by people who actually worked on them, administrators and lead engineers. Several of them have expressed reservations about the systems in the shuttles. Fear that the hydraulic system was a ticking timebomb that should be replaced with electromechanic systems, recounting an early fear that the Colombia breakup had been caused by a landing gear explosion, etc. These guys weren't certain of much, everybody knew it was a risky project.
True, but I honestly find it hard to conceptualise how that relates to military spending.
You think the Soviet population would be better fed if MIC scientists had paid more attention to food production? Unlikely, it seems if anything in the Soviet Union that has a negative correlation. And the factories are, famously, dual use in capitalist or communist systems, so without the military demand, it seems more likely their population wouldn't have engineered products at all.
By design, they lacked a middle class. I think it's worth stating: any system that can produce a > Mach 2 fighter is incredibly advanced, that that society was serfs < 100 years prior also incredible. But the products - military or civil - were consistently less rounded, more slapdash, than US fare. We could therefore infer - again, since the factories and talent are dual-use - the middle class drove product quality in both the civil market, and ultimately the military one.
They also, of course, didn't trade much with the richest economy in the world - unlike, say, recent China. It certainly seems to be a famous nail in the Soviet coffin that people did know regular civilian life in the West was better, and they couldn't get a slice of that pie.
(Plus, spoilers: Project Orion in that season! Which is one of the things that I can point to where FAM's timeline is maybe worse than ours, as it is fun to bring up every time people suggest they can't watch FAM because it is too "utopian". Project Orion was in part cancelled because of advances in cancer research, especially with respect to radiation. The FAM timeline seems to be spending so much on aerospace at the expense of cancer research among other things, and things like the 80s and 90s fights against tobacco seem almost non-existent in that timeline. People are still smoking nearly as much in that timeline's 80s as they did in the 50s. There are no signs of the near ubiquitous anti-tobacco PSAs of our timeline's 80s and 90s. I don't know how much the writers are intentionally working in such trade-offs, versus just trying to maintain storylines and aesthetics across its decade jumps, but it makes a ton of sense that there would be such trade-offs. Similarly, there are signs that civil rights are still generally worse in that timeline than ours, especially gay rights and feminism.)
Do you live in a universe where 2020 are closer to 1960s than 1990s? Must be great to live in such a world.
> US couldn't even send somebody to the space station and had to borrow their tech
Anyways, I wouldn't call Russian tech, Soviet tech. Remember the Soviet Union died in 1991, we can't call 2010s tech Soviet lol.
But looking at the big picture, the Soviet Union was far superior to the US in terms of space technology and scientific accomplishments up to that point. As with World War 2, the US showed up late to the game, spiked the football and just declared itself the winner.
If SU got to the moon first US would've ignored it too and said Mars was the real target...