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As per the Soviets, Stalin had set things straight back in 1931 when he had said that the USSR had 10 years in order to industrialise, because that's when they

As per the Soviets, Stalin had set things straight back in 1931 when he had said that the USSR had 10 years in order to industrialise, because that's when they would get involved in the next big war. He was correct on that, had it not been for the big inter-war industrialisation push the Soviets couldn't have handled the German offensive in 1941-42. And had the Germans won, which they would have done absent Soviet heavy industry, any talk of Soviet human capital would have become moot as a result of Generalplan Ost getting implemented. Even so, I agree that the big losses suffered by the Soviets during the war were a big drag on their post-WW2 economy and on their society as a whole, it is my belief that the Brezhnev stagnation can partially be attributed to that. As per Japan, I was thinking more about the political regime when I was mentioning "liberal", or at least that's what I thought the OP had in mind. I know that, on paper, Japan was a liberal democracy post-WW2 (again, from a political pov), but they were a de facto one-party government a good few decades after MacArthur's imposed constitution came into being.

ETH_start 3y ago
Wages for workers in the Soviet Union declined in the 1920s as well, before the rise of Nazi Germany. This was due to the Soviet goal of transforming the country from an agrarian society into an industrialized socialist state, which ignored basic economics to devastating effect. The USSR received a colossal amount of aid from the US during WW2 through Lend-Lease, and following the war, carted off significant amounts of physical and human capital from Eastern Europe, especially East Germany. And despite all of this, by the 1980s it was clear that the USSR's command and control economy could not keep up with the West's liberal economy, especially as emerging industries like semiconductors were too complex to manage without markets.
- paganel 3y ago
  They received trucks, which certainly helped, but the tanks and the artillery ammunition were certainly on the Soviets and the Soviets alone. You win a modern a war on the Russian/Ukrainian steppe with artillery, Napoleon and Hitler and now NATO would tell you the same thing, anything else is nice to have but if you don’t have artillery you’re toast.
  - ETH_start 3y ago
    Not just trucks, but train locomotives and railcars, planes and food.

ETH_start 3y ago

Wages for workers in the Soviet Union declined in the 1920s as well, before the rise of Nazi Germany. This was due to the Soviet goal of transforming the country from an agrarian society into an industrialized socialist state, which ignored basic economics to devastating effect. The USSR received a colossal amount of aid from the US during WW2 through Lend-Lease, and following the war, carted off significant amounts of physical and human capital from Eastern Europe, especially East Germany. And despite all of this, by the 1980s it was clear that the USSR's command and control economy could not keep up with the West's liberal economy, especially as emerging industries like semiconductors were too complex to manage without markets.

paganel 3y ago
They received trucks, which certainly helped, but the tanks and the artillery ammunition were certainly on the Soviets and the Soviets alone. You win a modern a war on the Russian/Ukrainian steppe with artillery, Napoleon and Hitler and now NATO would tell you the same thing, anything else is nice to have but if you don’t have artillery you’re toast.
- ETH_start 3y ago
  Not just trucks, but train locomotives and railcars, planes and food.