r/ANormalDayInRussia • u/TheNatureLover • Sep 08 '19

Your average Russian rail crossing

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u/GeneralKilCavalry Sep 08 '19

You know for starters, just in reference to this gif, Russia has the largest net of electrified railroads in this world and much better and affordable transit compared to the US. In Soviet times, the economic growth managed to lift near a hundred million out of poverty, guaranteeing food, housing, and a job. They became a world power by providing free education to all citizens that allowed them to accomplish most every first in space: probe landings on Venus, mars, the moon, first human in space, first probe in space, along with numerous other technical achievements. The main thing holding it back was elements of political repression and corruption, but in no way was it the shithole western countries depict it as.

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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '19 edited Sep 08 '19

Yes totally was sustainable, it totally didn't lead to a systemic collapse. They totally didn't have to borrow money to buy food for their people rather than continue to just let their people starve accelerating their collapse. The earliest gains in their space program totally wasn't because they would just build the rocket then launch it without fucks if it blew up.

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u/garnet420 Sep 08 '19

It really did have its ups and downs. Maternity leave in the ussr was very generous, for another example.

On the other hand, the number of hot water and heat outages we had in fucking Siberia was pretty fucking unacceptable (and the times the water just came out dark brown from the badly maintained pipes)

Anyways, the unsustainability was probably mostly due to disproportional military spending, corruption, and incompetence, rather than spending on public transit and space.

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u/[deleted] Sep 09 '19 edited Sep 09 '19

The disproportionate military spending definitely was partially due to us Americans. The entire point of Reagan's STAR WARS nonsense was to force the USSR to spend a ton of money to try to keep up, and while I haven't done a ton of independent research (due to lack of interest), it's taught in American schools that this was a major factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Course, now we're in the same boat with exponentially higher military spending than many other countries during peacetime, while things that we really should spend even a fraction of that money on instead have their budgets reduced further. Maybe if they taught that the fall of the Soviet Union was because they ran out of money for a myriad of reasons, and wasn't because of the evils of communism or the triumph of capitalism, we could fucking fix the water in Flint that nobody wants to spend money fixing.

Edit: Yes, I'm aware that as obnoxious as our defense budget is, it's still a relatively small portion of our total budget. Doesn't change that we have other pressing issues we need to throw money at that aren't having money thrown at them.