It might be that my comparison wasn’t the most accurate, since my main insight in the USSR is through the DDR, which was mainly a pawn in the face off between the superpowers at that time, and thus was a hotspot for tensions around that time. And I do believe that the wealth disparity wasn’t as extreme as in capitalist countries, yet it says little about what the actual average living conditions were compared to other countries. Also, corruption doesn’t always have a wealth disparity as a result. After all, people can also get corrupt due to self-preservation, which I think is most evident under Stalin’s later rule, after his wife committed suicide.
Yet I can’t really agree that it was “killed off” during its downfall, as I have my doubts that it would have survived much longer than it did without its subnations separating from it. The only way I could imagine it surviving would have been if they “licked their own wounds” after the war, so to speak, recuperate from their losses instead of its rapid militarisation that it gone through to keep up with the USA in order to win a dick measuring contest.
The USSR was constantly trying to de-escalate tensions on the Cold War. The US actually kept pushing because they knew they had the upper hand in terms of resources in a post-war world, so it was a way to keep the USSR focused on keeping up rather than rebuilding. This led to the USSR using a significant chunk of resources on keeping up so as to not be nuked into oblivion in a first strike attack by the US. I recommend reading Do Publicly Owned, Planned Economies Work? which goes over the actual state of the USSR and what led to its downfall.
It might be that my comparison wasn’t the most accurate, since my main insight in the USSR is through the DDR, which was mainly a pawn in the face off between the superpowers at that time, and thus was a hotspot for tensions around that time. And I do believe that the wealth disparity wasn’t as extreme as in capitalist countries, yet it says little about what the actual average living conditions were compared to other countries. Also, corruption doesn’t always have a wealth disparity as a result. After all, people can also get corrupt due to self-preservation, which I think is most evident under Stalin’s later rule, after his wife committed suicide.
Yet I can’t really agree that it was “killed off” during its downfall, as I have my doubts that it would have survived much longer than it did without its subnations separating from it. The only way I could imagine it surviving would have been if they “licked their own wounds” after the war, so to speak, recuperate from their losses instead of its rapid militarisation that it gone through to keep up with the USA in order to win a dick measuring contest.
The USSR was constantly trying to de-escalate tensions on the Cold War. The US actually kept pushing because they knew they had the upper hand in terms of resources in a post-war world, so it was a way to keep the USSR focused on keeping up rather than rebuilding. This led to the USSR using a significant chunk of resources on keeping up so as to not be nuked into oblivion in a first strike attack by the US. I recommend reading Do Publicly Owned, Planned Economies Work? which goes over the actual state of the USSR and what led to its downfall.