this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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It was WWI, not WWII. And the war was lost under the monarchy.
And Russia wasn't a superpower back then, it was barely a Great Power.
The leadership of the USSR was a genocidal imperialistic regime, but it did in fact get Russia specifically from snowsleds to space shuttles.
In the meantime it caused irreparable harm to most of Eastern Europe.
They did lose WW1 because of the revolution, that's true, or rather stepped out of it, but that's not what I was talking about. I meant the beginning of the WW2 and the Russian invasion which was a huge disaster overall. They managed to come out of it on top, but the cost was ridiculous. (Edited my original comment for clarification).
I'm calling them a superpower even if they were not on par with UK, France and Prussia, they were a bigger power than the Austro-Hungarian empire or the Ottoman empire at the time.
I'm not praising tzarist Rusia. It was a shit place, a reminesscence of feudalism after the industrial revolution. I'm simply trying to argue the fact that it was communism which allowed them the progress. They started from pretty high up to begin with. In fact, the two major examples, China and Rusia, while in some sort of identity crisis when they switched to communism, were historical powerhouses to begin with.
Other, no power houses who went communist didn't fare so well. Cuba, North Korea, countries in the Balkans ...