this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2026
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Russia did though, before the revolution Russia was still mostly agrarian and way less developed then western europe. Under communism they developed faster then any other country up to that point and nearly caught up to the west.
People often compare the soviets to western europe and say they're poor, but Russia was half a century behind the west before the revolution, and the revolution/ civil war caused even more destruction. A better comparison would be a country like Mexico which also was mostly agrarian and just finished a revolution in 1920. Compared to that the Soviet union did pretty well living standards wise.
Just look at there war performance , WWI Russia lost to Germany whose main focus was on the western front, WWII Russia was able to halt Germanies full force after they had conquered France and drive them back.
A better comparison would be Finland, which was literally a part of Russia.
We kept market economy. Russia didn't.
Capitalism sucks, but so do planned economies. Socialist market economies are the thing.
Also WWII Russia won by having tons of disposable troops to toss at any enemy position. Not because their economy was magnificent.
Russia also was unable to take Finland, despite us having way worse military equipment and way less people.
Finland was much more industrialized, urbanized and developed then the rest of Russia prior to 1917. It was barely even part of Russia as it was mostly autonomous with its own parliament. So it's not as good of a comparison.
Russia didn't win the war solely through manpower. They had just as much of a man power advantage in WWI and still lost because they're industry was shit. Without Stalin's obsession with increasing steel and war production, heavily mechanized battles like the battle of kursk would've been lost. A 10 to 1 advantage in manpower won't matter if that 1 guy is in a tank and the 10 guys don't even have a gun.
IDK if that meme is outdated or fabricated but the current wiki page shows way less casualties on the Soviet side and more even strength in man power. Even then it shows the lopsided Soviet industrial capacity with how many tanks and planes they had. They were wasted on a war in terrain that would've been difficult without snow, and even more so with.
Yeah the soviets weren't able to fully conquer finland but they did get a lot of there demands and a good chunk of territory. If the war had dragged out longer and the snow thawed then finland probably wouldn't have been able to hold them off for much longer in conventional war, though a guerilla campaign would probably be effective.
You've never heard of the Winter War, I see.
Russia had a massive war industry in comparison to Finland, where it was literally non-existent.
Finland had a couple of WWI tanks. And I mean just a couple. When the USSR attacked, we had already placed an order for new tanks from the Brits (Vickers 6 ton tanks) but the first ones were delivered in 1938 and the deliveries weren't complete when the Ruskis attacked.
So they literally had more manpower and more war industry, especially armored vehicles. Tanks.
We found the Russian tanks actually really useful and they helped us keep Vanja at bay. So it wasn't the terrain, it was user error.
Please do elaborate. Yeah we lost Karjala and the NE arm. But that's like saying the US won the Vietnam War. They most certainly didn't. Perhaps people won't say Vietnam or Finland straight up won, but both show just how much determination matters.
Because in both cases the invading force had a lot of people from thousands of kilometres away who had never even seen the land they were invading.
So what do you base this "Finland was much more industrialised" bit? Because we really weren't much of a country until Nokia. Really the only thing Finland made was what you wiped your arse on. As in we had a well growing forest industry, and still do. But other than that, we weren't highly industrialised in the 20th century. That only came in like the 70's.
You know people were on rations right? Like my grandma went on and on about rationing. And my dad still had a booze card, although that wasn't just for rationing because of lack of resources (the Bratt system is what I advocate in unison with legalising drugs).
As if motitus in the woods would be any different with snow or not. We're good at using the forests, no matter the time of the year. You know there was another war, right? The Continuation War which lasted from 1941 to 1944. Where we actually advanced into Russia. As in, we invaded Russia.
That wasn't a guerrilla campaign. It was an open invasion. And a successful one.
It started in June and by September we'd gained all the previously lost ground. It doesn't snow in September.
Seems like you're a bit sore about Ruskis sucking so hard?
In the Winter War Finns lost 20-30 tanks. Russia lost SEVERAL THOUSAND.
But yeah, Ruskis would've deffo had Finland if the snow had only thawed ;>>>>>
Yeah those were the soviets demands prior to the war. They got even more territory then they were demanding in fact. This is more like the Korean war, the US went in with the goal of protecting the south, then they got cocky and thought they could take the whole peninsula and got pushed back by China until they got to the modern border. They achieved there initial war aims but didn't get there maximalist aims.
At the time of the revolution finland was more urbanized then the rest of Russia, the population was more concentrated in Helsinki, like you said involved in paper milling. In order to industrialize you need to get the peasants into the cities to work in factories. To do that you need an efficient agricultural system that can produce the same amount of food with less man power.
Prior to the revolution finlands agricultural production was on similar levels to other Nordic countries with land being consolidated under more efficient middling farmers, which freed up agricultural laborers to go work in the cities.
The rest of Russia was still operating mostly on pseudo-serfdom with a bunch of rich landlords ,who didn't have the knowledge to increase efficiency, driving dirt poor peasants, who didn't have the incentive to increase efficiency as it would all go to the landlord anyway. Because of this Russia had the most backward, inefficient agricultural sector in all of Europe. This meant they needed more peasents working the land instead of moving to the city and working in factories
This changed when Stalin forced the collectivization of the land and the adoption of modern agricultural practices and forced peasents to move to the cities. While this did increase agricultural efficiency, it didn't do so by enough to compensate for all the new people in the cities eating food instead of out in the country making food and caused a massive famine.
This had a huge cost in lives but it did give results as russias industrial capacity increased massively, as shown by there ability to churn out tanks so easily during the war.
This wouldn't have happened under capitalism or market socialism as it took the very heavy hand of the state to do all of this. If it were capitalism the peasents wouldn't have been pushed to the cities as quickly, and there probably also wouldn't have been a famine.
Millions of people starved to death under the Soviet Union. it sucked.
Also do you think Korea was some developed country at the beginning of the 20th century. They had it hard in WWII and the Korean war. How did SK become a developed country and North Korea remains a horrible place to live.
Perhaps central planning can be beneficial for a developing country, if you don't get ideology brained and do stupid mistakes like the Soviet Union and China did which resulted in famines. But even then once you get past basic needs, socialism stagnates. Who determines what people "need"? What if the powers that be decide "the people need more tanks?"
Once a society reaches a certain level of prosperity and people have some disposable income, it's better to have a system that allows people to choose to do what they want with that income. Socialism fails at that point.
Just to be clear capitalism and markets aren't equivocal. Market socialism is a thing.
Socialism is a really big umbrella term.... similar to "democracy" there are a bunch of different ways to actually apply it. State socialism is only one scheme for it.
There were famines before the Soviet Union. That's kind of how things worked before modern industrial agriculture.
As for Korea.... just think about it for 30 seconds... I'll give you time....................
...ok: South Korea was allied with the US, which helped rebuild it and became a trading partner. North Korea is an enemy of the US and has spent it's entire existence being blockaded and provoked by the world's largest superpower. Gee, why might they have had different economic outcomes?
As for the central planning point: idk. That's something to figure out. It's not even really the important part of socialism/communism. The important part is making sure the state can't be taken over by a ruling class. Capitalism absolutely can't keep capitalists from taking over the state. Whatever we should do, we don't get to choose until we get the government in the hands of the people.
A lot of modern-day critique of communist regimes like Stalin's are critiqued in a way that the problems they had are not only unique to communism, but were due to it. My great-grandfather was jailed into a gulag due to arrest quotas and being at the wrong place in 1956 in Hungary. By 2013, he was instructed to stop mentioning the arrest quotas by the NGO he used to volunteer to (due to "future US presidents might want to use them"), and that he'd get money if he made up a lie that would make it seem like he was arrested for being a conservative christian or something like that.
Lots of countries have done that dude. Had nothing to do with communism, so much as a leadership of the nation that was desperate to modernize due to fear of being invaded or falling into international irrelevancy.
Dead wrong as usual lol
My comment was in reply to another one saying something along the lines of "Russia poor because communism". So it was more about how communism can lead to development.
Either way though I would say its development was largely because of communism. The czarist regime faced similar pressures and didn't develop like Russia did in the 30s
An even better comparison would be Poland which faced an even greater existential threat from its neighbors and didn't industrialize as quickly. For example Poland built about 150 of there tp7 tanks in the interwar period while the Soviet union had around 25,000 tanks built before the war. Even accounting for the Soviet unions 5-6x population that's still a lot more production capacity per capita.
The Soviet industrialization during the interwar period was unprecedented and relied on a command economy to force the peasants off the land and into the cities, at the cost of a famine that killed millions.
Of course, those 25000 tanks were probably built by Gulag slaves and children, and had shit welds and no QC. Also y'know being willing to kill millions with a famine. Had Poland just done that they'd have bigger numbers too I'd bet.
Anything's possible when you make shit up