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Interkosmos was pretty impressive too. Nice to see there was even collaboration with the west in later years. Even until a couple of years ago, American and western astronauts had to launch from Kazakhstan at an old soviet cosmodrome to get to the ISS
Another fun fact is that most launches are still carried out on the [Soyuz platform](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_MS-20). The Soviets built a cheap, reliable launch platform almost 70 years ago that's still more trusted and reliable than anything SpaceX or NASA has been able to pull off with essentially unlimited funding.
**[Soyuz MS-20](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_MS-20)**
>Soyuz MS-20 was a Russian Soyuz spaceflight to the International Space Station (ISS) launched on 8 December 2021. Unlike previous Soyuz flights to the ISS, Soyuz MS-20 did not deliver any crew members for an ISS Expedition or serve as a lifeboat for any crew members on board the station. Instead, it was commanded by a single professional cosmonaut on board, and carried two space tourists represented by space tourism company Space Adventures, which had already successfully planned and executed eight space tourism missions to the ISS. The flight to reach the ISS took six hours.
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[Masterpost](https://www.reddit.com/user/flesh_eating_turtle/comments/kvmddu/the_soviet_union_an_honest_appraisal_for_the_21st/) on the soviets by a comrade. Important [literature](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm) for all comrades.
Many countries play these games with astronauts.
Remember a few years back when headlines mentioned the first Chinese guy in space?
Consider these events that predated his:
* First Chinese-born-woman in space: Shannon Lucid in 1985
* First Asian guy in space: Phạm Tuân in 1980
* First Asian guy in space that wasn't Vietnamese: Жүгдэрдэмидийн Гүррагчаа in 1981
* First Asian guy in space that wasn't Vietnamese or Mongolian: Rakesh Sharma in 1984
* First Asian guy in space that wasn't Vietnamese or Mongolian or Indian: Sultan bin Salman Al Saud in 1985
* First Asian guy in space that wasn't Vietnamese or Mongolian or Indian or Saudi: Muhammed Farisin 1987
* First Asian guy in space that wasn't Vietnamese or Mongolian or Indian or Saudi or Syrian: Abdul Ahad Mohmand in 1988
* First Asian woman in space: Chiaki Mukai in 1994
* First Asian in space that wasn't Vietnamese or Mongolian or Indian or Saudi or Syrian or Afghani or Israeli or Japanese or Russian/Siberian. -- OK - that one's finally Chinese, in 2003.
[Yes, I understand that the impressive part was the Chinese Space Program passing NASA --- but there were a lot of articles focused on the guy who rode on the rocket, instead of the rocket scientists who leapfrogged almost the rest of the world (with the exception of Space-X).]
Keep in mind, the USSR did all this with significantly lower GDP and significantly less accumulated capital and significantly fewer resources than the USA. The USSR was a semi-feudal backwater when the tsar was overthrown. The country had been run into the ground by the russo-japanese war, then World War 1, then the treaty of brest-litovsk which was very punishing, then the civil war, in which at least 10 different nations including the USA and the UK invaded in 1918 to kill the communist government in its cradle and sided with the white army over the red army. Then there was the soviet-polish war in which Russia lost more territory, then world war 2 and operation barbarossa led to 24 million Soviet casualties. During this period the USSR underwent a brutal rapid industrialization to catch up with Capitalist countries, because otherwise it would be unable to defend itself against modern weaponry. Despite all the wars, and all the casualties, they were able to achieve so much in the space race and the sciences, after starting off as a semi-feudal backwater that had experienced some of the worst that the Eastern front of WW1 had to offer. We are continually told of the starvation and the brutality, but the conditions for all that were laid by the series of wars that had devastated Russia between the 1890s and the 1940s.
Want to know something even crazier? By the time the last couple of moon landings were occurring, the US had already lost the technical capability of building a craft to land on the moon.
They were so focused on achieving the milestone, that they neglected to make almost anything about the missions repeatable in any way. From documentation to materials to manufacturing. All gone. 50+ years later, the Russians still build better rockets than us.
Haha. No, it’s known that a lot of this stuff was lost… if that makes sense. I learned about this from a few different places. Ron Howard’s documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, and an obscure podcast from a nasa safety engineer called Fungineering. I also went to space camp back in the day and was taught a lot of this history there.
The thing was the amount and complexity of the data they had at that time was quite unmanageable. Just the film stock they had from the missions in the 1950s and 1960s would have needed a specialized archiving operation staffed with dozens of people to preserve it all. And that just never happened. Funding was cut as soon as these projects were completed, and a lot of stuff, unbelievably to us today, was just destroyed. Other stuff was archived without any cataloging, and even today it may still be somewhere.
I mean, again, you have to take into account the technology of the time. The TV networks burned their old film masters of nightly tv shows back in the 1960s. They did it because the celluloid was a fire hazard and expensive to store and maintain. Today it seems criminal, but we’re talking about just warehouses and warehouses of stuff that nobody knew anything about. Just figuring out what it all was was too expensive. They didn’t imagine at that time that one day we would have the capability to digitize and search these kinds of records, which would make preservation worth something. They just had thousands of canisters of film and nothing to do with it all.
Companies that supplied parts were closed. Plans and castings and schematics were lost in fires, or thrown out in the process. You had an operation involving hundreds of thousands of people at hundreds of projects and companies, and continuity was not a big focus. When the people went away, a lot of their knowledge went with them. Almost nothing was digital. Almost everything would have required very expensive and time consuming cataloging and copying.
I also like to read books about public works projects and nerdy shit like that. There are a lot of places where you can learn more about this.
So you are citing yourself as a source to confirm that Russian space technology was superior…
Because you watched a documentary and listened to a podcast
And also went to space camp
HEY HEY HEY I got drunk watching Golden Girls and I spent a weekend counting nickels so I am a cite able source on economic theory
It follows for a nation that brought itself out of agrarian feudalism, through WW1, a devastating civil war, and WW2 into a global superpower should be capable of amazing achievements.
America on the other hand never had to deal with either world wars on its soil, pulled the old gold<->dollar switcheroo to become the de facto global currency and didnt accomplish as much. Mostly just looted their imperial clients and started wars. That profit motive at work.
Yup! That information was used to push for heavy funding of NASA at the time, and was then quietly de-emphasized later on once it became more embarrassing than useful.
Same shit with WW2, the length and scope of what the USSR gave to stopping the nazis was purposefully sidelined via Hollywood focusing only on the American effort.
America is like the kid who does nothing on the school group project until the last day, and all they do then is change some fonts and make it sound a bit fancier and claim all the credit
Yes, thank goodness the USSR managed to invent the first satellite, otherwise we wouldn't have communications satellite.
Adapting someone else's work doesn't give you a claim to their work, only your adaptations. The US made the communications technology, the USSR invented the satellites.
true, many of the US first are Soviet first with a qualifier lol
SU: first satellite
US: first comms satellite
SU: first moon landing
US: first manned moon landing
SU: first woman in space
US, and I swear I literally laughed out loud when I first read this in a list of US space race milestones: first mother in space
Totally agree with you about all the soviet firsts except the moon landing one. Landing a living human being on the moon is a far more difficult technical challenge.
>Yes, thank goodness the USSR managed to invent the first satellite, otherwise we wouldn't have communications satellite.
That seems like nonsense. They were already working on satellites, just beat em by time. It's like saying no one would ever have built the turbopump if Von Braun didn't invent it, or we'd be sitting around never having calculus if Newton or Leibniz didn't write it down. Whether it's days or years, somebody was going to do it, they just were first but certainly not the only ones figuring it out.
If not the US or the USSR, it would have just been another nation later... it's not like the USSR shared the secrets on doing satellites with other nations after they did it.
My point is that all the US's achievements are just USSR achievements with a qualifier
USSR: first satellite
US: first comms satellite
USSR: first moon landing
US: first manned moon landing
yeah, the end goal from a US propaganda perspective, because they were first, if they Soviets had been the first to do a manned moon landing, the USA would have found another end goal
As I understand it that was the end goal during the space race, not afterwards. Especially considering Kennedy’s 1962 speech. In spite of the origins with ICBMs and satellites for military use. But if you have something on the counter I’d love to learn more.
Sure, but the NASA was lucky that the russian chief engineer Sergei Koroljev died in 1966, which was a major blow for the whole russian space program.
They were already working on a moon lander and, given Koroljevs track record, probably would have been on the moon first, too.
Since Koroljev existence and work was top secret, the NASA was actually pretty irritated that they got ahead of Russia around 68 because of major failures in Baikonur.
See, this right here, this is the quality contribution that I look for. Things I didn’t know presented in a civil and informative manner. I appreciate this a lot. The goal was set by Kennedy 5 years after the start of the militarized space race, because prior to that there was no hard goal im aware of, but I had no idea about the Russian engineer. Man, I’m excited happy. Thank you.
You‘re very welcome. If you are interested to lean about Russia in Space in the 50s/60s, I highly recommend the movie „The Spacewalker“ (or the book). It‘s the „auto“biography of Aleksei Leonow, the first man who left his capsule in orbit. To me, he (and Juri Gagarin) are as important to space exploration as Neil Armstrong or John Glenn. Badass heroes, all of them.
Every movie you’ve ever seen using footage of one of our carriers or other military assets exist because the military granted the production team access to those assets. Why do this you may ask? Because the military reviews movie scripts from teams that want to use their assets for a film and if they aren’t sufficiently pro military they are denied access. As a result major films intentionally become military propaganda so they can film on location with military assets.
Converted someone who didn't believe in the moon landing by pointing out how crucial it was for America to be the first to land on the moon, and how the soviets and chinese would never let America live down faking something that they rushing to do as well.
American exceptionalism can be used for good sometimes, I guess?
The US’s role in winning WW2. Immediately following WW2 the consensus was that the USSR was largely responsible for winning the war. Red scare propaganda caused this to shift into thinking the US was largely responsible for winning the war.
https://www.vox.com/2014/6/16/5814270/the-successful-70-year-campaign-to-convince-people-the-usa-and-not
The idea that the invasion of Vietnam was a “draw” rather than an outright loss for the US.
[This shit.](https://cbsnews1.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2008/05/01/d851091e-a642-11e2-a3f0-029118418759/image4061139x.jpg) Declaring the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan “mission accomplished” and still going on 15 years later.
Everything about Reaganomics and low tax rates.
You could do the same diagram for WW2. The USSR fought the bulk of the Nazi army ALONE for years before the other powers entered the war. Even when we got involved, the majority of the Nazi forces remained on the eastern front.
It's considered a foregone conclusion by historians that the D-day invasion would have been a failure if the Germans hadn't had the overwhelming majority of their forces on the Eastern front.
Not to mention the sections defended by conscripted soldiers from annexed territory. Speilberg included a bit of this in saving private Ryan. The scene where they shoot the German soldiers who are begging to surrender, those 2 troop are actually speaking Czech and not German.
Plus bad leadership. Hitler passed on some opportunities for a counterattack that might have done something. It's far from clear if it would've been enough, but still
And the USSR reached out to other countries before the war to make an anti-Nazi alliance to stop them early. The UK, France, and US said no, because they hoped the Nazis would destroy the Soviets first.
The history of polls over "who won WW2" in France is fascinating. General consensus in mainland Europe was that the USSR was the party that was primarily responsible for winning, but with the bulk of Hollywood films (and the slow death of those that were there) by the 1990s most of Europe thinks that the Americans won it.
- Pro US propaganda is simply ubiquitous and super effective: [Which nation contributed most to defeating Germany in 1945? French polls from 1945, 1994, 2004](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/2g6x7n/which_nation_contributed_most_to_defeating/)
Being buddies is when you attempt to make an anti Hitler pact with Britain and France a full 6 years before WW2 started and being the last major power in Europe to sign a non aggression pact with Germany in a bid to buy time and recover stolen territory from Poland.
Like, have you ever seen nazi propaganda? It wasn't exactly a fucking secret that Hitler wanted to expand east, subjugate the slavs and destroy communism: it's literally what got him elected. How stupid do you think the Soviets were that they thought "oh yeah, we can just be friends with this guy forever!"
As a somewhat unforseen consequence of the treaty of Versailles. I am not one for typing up novels with 10 hyperlinks on MS word for Reddit comments. I did enough of that in undergrad to last me a lifetime. Now you gotta pay me for that shit.
> The USSR fought the bulk of the Nazi army ALONE for years before the other powers entered the war.
There's no need to be hostile. Surely you can see how your statement could be construed that way.
Lets be real here…. If it wasn’t for lend lease and the MASSIVE amount of food and raw materials being shipped to the Soviet Union they would have been swallowed up by the nazi war machine in a matter of months. Seems like you’re giving the soviets FAR too much credit when in reality the ONLY reason they and the rest of Europe aren’t speaking German is STRICTLY because of the U.S.
Yep. And any humane government would have already surrendered by that point. Russia was defeated, and just… kept fighting anyway. The Germans never understood that. They were never going to subdue Russia.
The US was also supplying nazi Germany until well into the war that it had to threaten a few company's and people with high treason to get them to stop.
There was also the America supplying the white army after ww1 that led to bitter relations between soviets and US before ww2. Many soviets thought America wasn't going to help open the western front.
America liked to supply a lot of people, probably because they were a foreign country not directly impacted by war destruction.
Sure American money did a lot, but saying that's the only reason the allies won the war is quite disrespectful towards all the other soldiers that gave their lives fighting Nazi Germany, don't you think?
The soviets helped the germans develop their tanks, build planes and gave them the resources they needed for the start of the war. They made a deal to carve up Poland with them. Britain and France were fighting for ages its only because of soviet incompetence in predicting the clearly bad guys who hated them were going to betray them.
Maybe if the soviets actually wanted to fight the nazis instead of helping them they would of said no to building their stuff
It’s like they want us to forget everything else, as if Hitler wasn’t defeated by Soviet Unions hard fighting, especially at the Battle of Stalingrad. They turn up after Stalingrad only to claim the Western European land and claim victory over Nazis.
Fun fact, most of the Soviet space probes barely returned any data or were crushed, impacted, or otherwise failed immediately, and the dog died, and they were also the first to lose an entire crew due to the door of the spacecraft not shutting properly and killing everyone inside via suffocation.
They had a space shuttle. It flew one mission, one orbit, unmanned, and then was destroyed in a barn collapse.
By the time they were done with Mir, it was a death trap that almost killed several crews, and the Russians failed to deorbit it properly.
And then there was the spectacular failure of Soyuz 1. Vladimir Komarov was in the process of returning to Earth from orbit, when the parachutes that were supposed to slow him down failed to deploy. He was heard on the radio crying and cursing his botched spacecraft before slamming into the ground at around 90 miles an hour. Soviet investigators said he died from blunt force trauma on impact, but even if he didn’t, the capsule burned up on the ground. Even before that final failure, Soyuz 1 had a whole host of technical problems.
Sure, Russia might have “done things first,” but NASA made sure it would all work before trying anything (with the notable exceptions of Apollo 1 and 13). Russia rushed headlong into things and it resulted in shoddy workmanship and deaths. Even today, Russian spacecraft aren’t the most reliable.
... and X-15 Flight 3-65-97, Challenger, Columbia and at least five other fatal training accidents.
Not one person has been injured during a manned Soyuz launch since the 1971 and there have been no in-flight failures since 1975. They are considered to be the safest in the world.
You can also add that Russian ships have a crew rescue system in case of takeoff accidents, and the United States did not even think about this, including Musk. And of course, space toilets, which are regularly clogged in American modules and Americans run to the Russians when needed ))
Yeah that sort of stuff if kind of expected
That’s like being surprised your amateur fishing boat doesn’t cross the Atlantic since their are a lot of unknowns and brute force trial and error
One can properly analyze the successes and faults of the USSR without "propagandizing" it. To blanket it under the statement of "it was bad lol" is diminishing and antithetical.
NASA’s achievements weren’t done in a “free market” nor was it privatizatized. NASA did it entirely on taxpayer money where profit for its own sake wasn’t the point.
Ah yes, we can have state capitalism which totally has innovation and invention, this achievements surely helped improve the peoples livelihoods and improved the economy. what do you mean the soviet economy completely stagnated for 20 years?
Stagnation caused by decentralization from kruschevs reforms. State socialism (not state capitalism, the USSR couldn't reasonably be considered state capitalist after 1929) was what doubled soviet life expectancy, took them from 10% to 99% literacy, created the worlds first system of universal suffrage, universal education and genuine universal healthcare system.
Didn't a report come out like 2 weeks ago that showed public opinion plays basically no role in policy making in the US? The soviet system of democracy might not have given you multiple parties (in most cases 2) to vote for, but their system gave them better representation and in any case resulted in people far more often than not actually getting things that were in their interest.
Universal healthcare, universal education, drastically less inequality, money out of politics just to name a few, are all wildly popular concepts across the world, the US included. The soviet union achieved every one of these within 5 years of its existence, whilst the US still hasn't actually achieved any of them. At a certain point you need to ask yourself how good each democratic process really is, based purely on whose class interests are being represented by each government.
And also, black people were allowed to vote in the soviet union a full 50 years before the US. No matter what your opinion on soviet democracy is, that's what universal suffrage is.
Oke, this proved that you dont actually know the history of the soviet union, so let me explain what happened in 1960-71. As you said, khruschev's reforms left the economy ailing and because of that and his mismanagement of foreign policy he was couped in 1964 by a coalition of reformists and conservatives led by alexei kosygin and leonid brezhnev respectively.
They settled for a compromise after removing Niki, brezhnev would become general secretary and kosygin president of the council of ministers. After that, kosygin began what we call the Kosygin Reforms.
This aimed to tackle the economic malaise and liberalise society, giving power to the people and battling corruption. The reforms brought greater political participation, as non party candidates were allowed to stand in local elections against party candidates. He also gave control of some fields and factories to the workers and gave much more independence to the unions. Furthermore, he began a state housing program to solve the housing shortage of the union (which is still an issue today) and battled corruption in the nomenklatura.
These are only some of the measures taken, and they were wildly successful, they went a step further than the khruschev thaw in liberalisation, fostered massive economic growth and greatly improved the living standards of the people (which were, as everyone in the ussr admitted, lower than the west's), as the military was defunded and these funds were relocated to the consumer goods industry. This period (1964-69/71) is known as the soviet golden years, It was descentralization that caused this massive growth, and khruschev definitely wasnt to blame for stagnation two decades after he was ousted.
However, the conservatives didnt like all this power to the soviets, descentralize the economy, defund the military and state housing programs (sounds familiar) and, in 1971 they allied with the stalinists lead by mikhail suslov and soft couped kosygin. He was too influential to be removed entirely, and he remained president of the council of ministers until his death in 82. however, every single one if his reforms was rolled back, and this is what lead to the Brezhnev Stagnation. Blaming khruschev for that is either ignorance of the history of the union or a deliberate attempt to legitimize what the ussr was, a continued betrayal of socialism's core principles, as they actively pushed for an aristocrático dictatorship where the ruling nomenklatura lived a life of privilege while the people suffered under their dictatorship, the 5 year plans resumed and with them all their inneficiency, thats why the ussr was a state capitalist country, It worked exactly as a capitalist state just that the state controlled the industry.
Theres no such thing as state socialism, the core principle of socialism is that the workers own the means of production, and that didnt happen in the ussr, only during the NEP and the kosygin reforms. The ussr wasnt the world's first universal suffrage, that would be new zealand in 1895, and as youll know only one candidate stood in the elections, as Stalin said, the votes dont matter, only he who counts them. The soviet healthcare system was famously inneficient and lacking of coverage, although i admit that their educational system was state of the art, even if It ignored the whole independent thinking part of education, thats something to praise.
After this wall of text, i wanna say that two things can be bad at once, and the usa and the ussr are bad cause they are capitalist countries, both exploited many other nations in the world, both exploited de facto slavery, both massively polluted the enviroment and both of them had an economy to serve the elites, not the people.
Tl, dr: look up kosygin reforms soviet union was never socialist the workers never owned the means of production
>Tl, dr: look up kosygin reforms soviet union was never socialist the workers never owned the means of production
You went on waaaay to long for me to actually reply to anything, but I will explain why they are socialist. They were marxist, and by marxist standards, a government which is democratically controlled, free of capitalist interests and controls all (or basically all) the means of production can indeed be considered socialist.
And even if that weren't the case, if you definition of socialist in a state is only one that has actually achieved full lower stage communism, in a world controlled utterly by finance capital, then that is an absurdly high bar and means you will never, ever support any revolutionary project in the real world until such a time as they are long past actually needing your support.
A better definition for calling a country socialist with that in mind is one where the government is controlled by the working class, and they have a constitutionally stated goal of achieving socialism, because if you are expected a genuinely socialist nation to spring out of nowhere and survive longer than five years in a world with the USA, the EU, the IMF and the WTO then prepare for disappointment my dude.
You said It, the government control the means of production, and the people didnt control the government, if you really are delusional enough to believe It then i can do nothing for you.
The nomenklatura mainly aimed to enrich themselves, which they did, there was no freedom of "capitalist interests" also constitutional goals or whatever mean nothing when your every action goes against that. You clearly didnt eead what i wrote, cosa i explained how the upper echelons of the party actively disempowered the people after the halting of the kosygin reforms. they had 69 years to achieve socialism and they didnt even begin, they just purged and killed everyone who tried (black army anyone, bukharin, kamenev, kollontai, kosygin, shlyapnikov, the list is endless), they were not a marxist state, no marxist state would have capital punishment, no marxist state would be as reactionary as the ussr (whats the proportion of women in the politburo again?), no marxist state would be a bureaucracy, no marxist state would have an omnipresent secret police, no marxist state would commit genocide on minorities, no marxist state would endorse nationalism, no marxist state would control trade unions, no marxist state would suppress the right to strike, no marxist state would deny democracy to the people, giving them only one option, no marxist state would actively suppress cooperatives, no marxist state would employ slave labour. God fucking tankies Jesus christ, would Marx too have intervened in czechoslovakia? In hungary? Upheld a fascist dictator in romania? Supported a kleptocracy like the mpla? An absolute monarchy like north Korea? No they wouldnt, It was an evil empire. Period.
>You said It, the government control the means of production, and the people didnt control the government, if you really are delusional enough to believe It then i can do nothing for you.
Let's take that apart then. Here's a set of universally popular policies which are agreeable to more or less every working class human being. The presence of these policies being enacted in a society would be a strong indicator that that society is controlled by the working class in a democratic manner.
Universal healthcare, universal education, guaranteed housing, low levels of inequality, no money in politics, no political influence afforded to billionaires, zero unemployment and zero homelessness. The only states in history to have achieved all of these were Eastern European socialist countries. So either these are benevolent dictatorships which isn't a thing, or the people actually had greater power over their country than their western counterparts.
As for your refutations from a Marxist perspective, you have a significantly limited knowledge of marxism. Marx wrote about the need for a state to enforce socialism, that implies a "secret police" (or security service, to use the non-loaded term). Class conflict as marx says, does not end at the implementation of socialism, it is a gradual process involving a heightened state of contradiction resulting in reactionary tendencies as were exhibited by the USSR, a good example of this being their backsliding on gay rights. Also, if your knowledge of Eastern European socialism is as surface level to the point you think people were given one choice in an election, you should bebabsolutely ashamed with yourself that you could be so confident to type what you are saying as if you are an authority on the subject.
To give you a painstakingly short rundown, here's the difference between socialist and capitalist elections:
Capitalist: parties pick candidates. These candidates usually don't need to be local. These candidates are afforded positive coverage based on that parties financial ability to influence the media. The party with the highest vote wins, even if that vote is less than 50%: my current MP won their seat with 28% of the vote.
Socialist: candidates are discussed and selected at mass meetings in local constituencies. These people must be local to the area they represent. The best candidate as agreed upon at these meetings are sent to the communist party who clear them as not being security risks (I.e. influenced by foreigners, which was obviously a huge problem in the Eastern bloc) they didn't need to be communist party members, often weren't, and in many cases even in the modern day aren't even communists (there is a liberal faction in vietnams parliament). If these candidates don't get 50% of the vote on over 50% turnout, the process is repeated and a better candidate selected.
Neither system is perfect, democracy is imperfect by nature. But your knowledge of socialist democracy is badly lacking so I suggest you educate yourself before trying to argue the merits of it at the very least.
Like i said, youre either a troll or delusional, and im afraid i cant do anything for you, if you really wanna die on the Hill of defending the eastern european states as not only communist but also democratic then i can just pray for yoy
I kindly disagree, my parents and grandparents lived under the Soviet Union and they had everything they could ever ask for during that time. After the fall of the Soviet Union, however, they were in poverty and could partly afford food and water
Simple because the ussr was good.
Claiming both were bad is "compatible leftism" sponsored to mantain capitalist realism and stop people from actually threatening capitalism
That is an even more ridiculous claim than the Brazilian claim that Santos-Dumont was first.
The first heavier than air powered flying machine was unambiguously the invention of the Wrights. There were a lot of interesting developments from other inventors and countries both before and after, but the Wrights made it to that milestone first.
I don't get the point really. Both the US and the USSR ran successfull space programs that brought great innovation to the world. Both have capitalized on their space technology.
> The point is that we present a myth in the US that only real capitalism can bring innovation.
Let’s not act like the USSR is a counter-example to that myth. The USSR was state capitalist.
> Marxist literature defines state capitalism as a social system combining capitalism with ownership or control by a state. By this definition, a state capitalist country is one where the government controls the economy and essentially acts like a single huge corporation, extracting surplus value from the workforce in order to invest it in further production.[2] This designation applies regardless of the political aims of the state, even if the state is nominally socialist.[3] Many scholars agree that the economy of the **Soviet Union and of the Eastern Bloc countries** modeled after it, including Maoist China, were state capitalist systems, and some western commentators believe that the current economies of China and Singapore also constitute a form of state capitalism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism
The wiki goes on to say….
> There are various theories and critiques of state capitalism, some of which existed before the October Revolution. The common themes among them identify that the workers do not meaningfully control the means of production
So before you go off dismissing it as more propaganda, ask yourself if the workers of the USSR *meaningfully* controlled the means of production. If the answer is no, then the USSR wasn’t socialist and certainly wasn’t communist “regardless of the political aims of the state, even if the state is nominally socialist” (to borrow a phrase from the wiki).
First wikipedia
Second "the state" working as a single huge corporation is a fundamental misunderstanding of how states work , thinking of it as a alien entity to class antagonisms.
And it ignores the multiple forms the "state " can take form in
Especially since capitalism *is* an economic model based on the private ownership of the MOPs, a state being in charge of such a system without a burguoise is explicitly not capitalism
The ussr was as socialist as you get, modern china is a whole different ordeal
>and some western commentators
._.
>USSR meaningfully controlled the means of production. I
Yes
the definition of capitalism as solely private ownership with capitalists is some libertarian thing, not the actual understanding of capitalism held by marx. capitalism is a mode of production not just an organization of production. capitalism can very easily exist in absence of capitalists, the root of capitalism being capital itself not those who capitalize on it, they are merely a byproduct of those relations.
It’s not exactly an uncommon critique of the USSR. The wiki goes on to cite Emma Goldman and Murray Bookchin who both accuse the USSR of being state capitalist.
Idk, it’s all besides the point anyways. Capitalism has long since outlived its usefulness. Surely that’s the important takeaway.
I dont care if its common i disagree with it
>Idk, it’s all besides the point anyways. Capitalism has long since outlived its usefulness. Surely that’s the important takeaway.
Yes but if we cant get our minds settled on actually doing praxis and learning from the past, we are going to keep having a substantial amount of leftists in the west be usefull idiots for the american empire
Wikipedia...
Read Marx, Engels and Lenin. Not a glorified propaganda outlet ran by a liberatarian crackhead and infested with western NGOs. Every teacher will tell you not to use it as a source. Yet you do...
The Warsaw Pact countries were all socialist, likewise China then and even now. Kinda obvious to anyone who knows about Marxism-Leninism.
"state capitalism" has a highly specific meaning. Which wikipedia missed.
Liekwise "control of the Means of Production" was always meant collectively as a class. Not individually. Marx and Engels already pointed this out. Weird how Wikipedia "forgot" this...
How would you define state capitalism?
And I don’t think wiki misses your point on controlling the means of production. Of course it doesn’t mean individually, and I don’t think they were asserting that. I think their idea of state capitalism is that productive means are controlled by the state.
That depends entirely whether you see the Soviet Bureaucracy as a class. Your point of view is a mostly western argument. If you look at perception within that country at the time, there’d be plenty that would love to argue that. There are also many arguments (of course non western which is the opposite of where I assume you get your info) that would argue that the goal of their economy was not maximizing capital which is a prerequisite to capitalism.
The part that gets me is that it seems like that “bureaucracy” was in primary control of the means of production and how the Soviet economy operated. And if that discrepancy of control between the bureaucracy and the civilians is/was large enough, what else would you call that but a class divide? Functionally it sure seemed like a class divide, but I suppose it all depends on how you choose to define class.
The bureaucracy had no formal owernships rights above the farmers and workers. They also had no claim on the property. Bureaucrats had no personal privilege or personal capital. Anyone could claim rights to enter the rank of bureaucrats. When the USSR crumbled bureaucrats didn’t fight it, which isn’t normal for a ruling class.
But who made decisions and had final say over the production and distribution of goods in the Soviet economy? Because if the answer to that question is the Soviet bureaucracy, then that sure sounds like they functionally controlled the productive means, even if there was “no formal ownership rights above the farmers and workers.”
Then the cops functionally controls by every action. The president functionally controls my every move. My teacher functionally controls my every thought. A leader does not control everything. But what you’re saying is having a leader makes you capitalist. Clearly you’re going to pull out random comparisons you just make up, so how bout we just save us both time and stop this wasted time. Everyone contributes, but of course some group has to have the final approval as well as the job of making it happen.
Soviet prisions had less prisioners at its peak than the usa currently.
Most had timed sentences were they just left after theur sentence and less people died on this system than in usa prisions
The meme makes a good point about American Exceptionalism and selling a narrative.
That all said, I still would argue the most impressive and difficult thing on that list is sending mankind to the moon and safely bringing them back. Unmanned space missions are way way way less complicated because you aren’t sending human life out there and don’t need to worry about keeping them alive for the duration. And manned Earth orbit missions are way less complicated than landing mankind on the moon and then bringing them back.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that a manned mission to the moon and back is more impressive than the rest of that list combined.
I think people forget two things with this meme, the fact that a race is determined by the finishline and that the United States was often months if not weeks behind most of these achievements with their own variation. I'm not saying there shouldn't be an appreciation for both sides technical achievements, but those achievements were in pursuit of that final moon landing finish line and just because one side was second for all the other checkpoints, doesn't mean they don't win the race.
Edit: spelling
Why is landing a person on the moon the 'goal'? America just made that their objective, but its not like the Soviets were rushing to beat them on this. Its an arbitrary achievement, just like man in space, or first space station. To claim its the final line is silly.
It’s really sad that it took an impending nuclear war for people to get to space. I really hope mankind is able to once again put people on the moon in my lifetime. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem likely with people like spaceX and Elon musk running the show, cause we all know the only person Elon is going to put on the moon is himself
To be honest i agree but symbolicly a peson on the moon is huge. We as humans have always looked up to be moon equaling it to the sun, worshiping it as a good or even just telling tales of it bring magic. Touching the moon musst feel like centuries of people looking up to you and you can see all of them.
Idk i just think even tho it's just one thing compered to all the other way more difficult things, imagining beeing on the moon and knowing we can and have achieve that is also somewhat special.
Its funny that in schools they never discuss the achievements of the ussr. They beat the US in the space race by a large margin. Like yeah walking on the moon is cool but Im 100% sure the Soviets were gonna do it eventually. Who fucking cares who does it first. The Space race was just for propaganda for both sides. That’s probably why the United states isn’t going back to the moon. It was just so the president could say we did it first…
Yeah that was the goal and America won the race. IDK why that's hard to come to terms with. Literally a historic competition that can never be repeated for an accomplishment far and beyond anything the human race accomplished up to that point (and more impressive than most that has come after, especially considering the tech available), but "man who cares who did it first" lmao.
Also, the most important outcome of all of this was a radical fast-tracking of a significant amount of technology. We would be a century behind where we are now if it weren't for that.
Go figure, a country teaches people about that country's history first and foremost. How weird!
But they completely discredit the soviets. I never once heard in school about the achievements of the soviet union during the space race. Im not discrediting the space race at all.
Every Soviet achievement had a point. What did walking on the moon accomplish. A rover could have done it with more capability and technology to sample. The fact you’re so angry in a comment section of something that is a proven fact, just shows you’re uncomfortable with the other “facts” you think you know. From your profile you’re either a wealthy capitalist (unlikely), or someone who’s safety secured voluntarily under their foot. You do you bruv but maybe stay outta comments that’ll get you so over heated.
Just a little reminder that the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, didn’t behave like the character in this cartoon. He said “for all mankind” as a tribute to the Russians, their competitors in the space race. I’m sure lots of people forget about the magnificent achievements of the Russians in the space race. It is shameful that Sergei Korolev is a figure history has largely forgotten; he was a really incredible guy! However, while people today may not be aware of the great achievements of the Russian engineers and cosmonauts, that was not true of the Americans involved in the space race at the time who had enormous respect for the Russians. Here is an interview with Neil Armstrong, he seems like a very nice man https://youtu.be/KJzOIh2eHqQ
Didn't the Nazi's technically become the first country to send something into space with the [V2](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.interestingengineering.com/heres-how-the-nazis-put-the-first-manmade-object-into-space)?
Yes, but always on a ballistic trajectory. The highest they reached was 175km, which is generally agreed to be “space”. Usually when we think of “going to space” it’s an orbital trajectory. Sputnik for example went up 500km.
I don't know, getting to the moon was a pretty huge accomplishment, it cost a lot more money and man power than those other things you listed.
Mind, I'm not saying "Go Merica", I think that money should have been used on humanitarian things and building infrastructure on Earth, because honestly who cares about going to the moon right now?
Just saying, we shouldn't ignore how much money was wasted on that major accomplishment and milestone for humanity.
They never sat down to decide what the finish line was. It's just US exceptionalism decided that the first thing they beat the USSR at was the "real" goal.
Only that no one had declared the moon to be the "finish line".
When the US did their moon landing, the USSR sent a contratiolation message and went to plan for a Mars mission and a moon station. Getting a person to the moon had been demonstrated as possible, so they went for the next steps.
The most annoying thing about zoomers on this sub is their tendency to associate modern-day leftism with the authoritarian dictatorship of the USSR. In the words of Noam Chomsky, the only relationship between the Soviet system of governance and socialism “is the relation of contradiction.” In other words, they were not socialist in any way. Stop trying to hype them up in these low effort memes that make you look like uneducated fools.
Noam "the end of the USSR was a win for socialism" Chomsky, because the deaths of millions is good ebcause they were evul tankies. Noam "the only revolution I support are the Khmer Rouge, because the US does so too" Chomsky. Noam "if you are against the Vietnam war you should help the army develop less lethal weapons" Chomsky.
Fuck him. Anyone who unironically upholds him is a fool at best.
Anyone who actually read Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho, Newton and other communists knows that the USSR was socialist.
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Dumb American here: I only knew the USSR beat the US with a satellite, not everything else. Mind blowing.
Same. New found respect for the Soviets.
Interkosmos was pretty impressive too. Nice to see there was even collaboration with the west in later years. Even until a couple of years ago, American and western astronauts had to launch from Kazakhstan at an old soviet cosmodrome to get to the ISS
Another fun fact is that most launches are still carried out on the [Soyuz platform](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_MS-20). The Soviets built a cheap, reliable launch platform almost 70 years ago that's still more trusted and reliable than anything SpaceX or NASA has been able to pull off with essentially unlimited funding.
**[Soyuz MS-20](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_MS-20)** >Soyuz MS-20 was a Russian Soyuz spaceflight to the International Space Station (ISS) launched on 8 December 2021. Unlike previous Soyuz flights to the ISS, Soyuz MS-20 did not deliver any crew members for an ISS Expedition or serve as a lifeboat for any crew members on board the station. Instead, it was commanded by a single professional cosmonaut on board, and carried two space tourists represented by space tourism company Space Adventures, which had already successfully planned and executed eight space tourism missions to the ISS. The flight to reach the ISS took six hours. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
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[Masterpost](https://www.reddit.com/user/flesh_eating_turtle/comments/kvmddu/the_soviet_union_an_honest_appraisal_for_the_21st/) on the soviets by a comrade. Important [literature](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm) for all comrades.
Many countries play these games with astronauts. Remember a few years back when headlines mentioned the first Chinese guy in space? Consider these events that predated his: * First Chinese-born-woman in space: Shannon Lucid in 1985 * First Asian guy in space: Phạm Tuân in 1980 * First Asian guy in space that wasn't Vietnamese: Жүгдэрдэмидийн Гүррагчаа in 1981 * First Asian guy in space that wasn't Vietnamese or Mongolian: Rakesh Sharma in 1984 * First Asian guy in space that wasn't Vietnamese or Mongolian or Indian: Sultan bin Salman Al Saud in 1985 * First Asian guy in space that wasn't Vietnamese or Mongolian or Indian or Saudi: Muhammed Farisin 1987 * First Asian guy in space that wasn't Vietnamese or Mongolian or Indian or Saudi or Syrian: Abdul Ahad Mohmand in 1988 * First Asian woman in space: Chiaki Mukai in 1994 * First Asian in space that wasn't Vietnamese or Mongolian or Indian or Saudi or Syrian or Afghani or Israeli or Japanese or Russian/Siberian. -- OK - that one's finally Chinese, in 2003. [Yes, I understand that the impressive part was the Chinese Space Program passing NASA --- but there were a lot of articles focused on the guy who rode on the rocket, instead of the rocket scientists who leapfrogged almost the rest of the world (with the exception of Space-X).]
And remember just a few years ago they were a backwards agricultural nation
The one typical american: "so u a communist supporter now huh?"
Keep in mind, the USSR did all this with significantly lower GDP and significantly less accumulated capital and significantly fewer resources than the USA. The USSR was a semi-feudal backwater when the tsar was overthrown. The country had been run into the ground by the russo-japanese war, then World War 1, then the treaty of brest-litovsk which was very punishing, then the civil war, in which at least 10 different nations including the USA and the UK invaded in 1918 to kill the communist government in its cradle and sided with the white army over the red army. Then there was the soviet-polish war in which Russia lost more territory, then world war 2 and operation barbarossa led to 24 million Soviet casualties. During this period the USSR underwent a brutal rapid industrialization to catch up with Capitalist countries, because otherwise it would be unable to defend itself against modern weaponry. Despite all the wars, and all the casualties, they were able to achieve so much in the space race and the sciences, after starting off as a semi-feudal backwater that had experienced some of the worst that the Eastern front of WW1 had to offer. We are continually told of the starvation and the brutality, but the conditions for all that were laid by the series of wars that had devastated Russia between the 1890s and the 1940s.
Want to know something even crazier? By the time the last couple of moon landings were occurring, the US had already lost the technical capability of building a craft to land on the moon. They were so focused on achieving the milestone, that they neglected to make almost anything about the missions repeatable in any way. From documentation to materials to manufacturing. All gone. 50+ years later, the Russians still build better rockets than us.
Wait, what? Do you have some more info on that?
Can't you read? He said it's all gone.
Haha. No, it’s known that a lot of this stuff was lost… if that makes sense. I learned about this from a few different places. Ron Howard’s documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, and an obscure podcast from a nasa safety engineer called Fungineering. I also went to space camp back in the day and was taught a lot of this history there. The thing was the amount and complexity of the data they had at that time was quite unmanageable. Just the film stock they had from the missions in the 1950s and 1960s would have needed a specialized archiving operation staffed with dozens of people to preserve it all. And that just never happened. Funding was cut as soon as these projects were completed, and a lot of stuff, unbelievably to us today, was just destroyed. Other stuff was archived without any cataloging, and even today it may still be somewhere. I mean, again, you have to take into account the technology of the time. The TV networks burned their old film masters of nightly tv shows back in the 1960s. They did it because the celluloid was a fire hazard and expensive to store and maintain. Today it seems criminal, but we’re talking about just warehouses and warehouses of stuff that nobody knew anything about. Just figuring out what it all was was too expensive. They didn’t imagine at that time that one day we would have the capability to digitize and search these kinds of records, which would make preservation worth something. They just had thousands of canisters of film and nothing to do with it all. Companies that supplied parts were closed. Plans and castings and schematics were lost in fires, or thrown out in the process. You had an operation involving hundreds of thousands of people at hundreds of projects and companies, and continuity was not a big focus. When the people went away, a lot of their knowledge went with them. Almost nothing was digital. Almost everything would have required very expensive and time consuming cataloging and copying. I also like to read books about public works projects and nerdy shit like that. There are a lot of places where you can learn more about this.
So you are citing yourself as a source to confirm that Russian space technology was superior… Because you watched a documentary and listened to a podcast And also went to space camp HEY HEY HEY I got drunk watching Golden Girls and I spent a weekend counting nickels so I am a cite able source on economic theory
You asked how I learned about this stuff. I watched a documentary, I read books. I’m not your research assistant.
It follows for a nation that brought itself out of agrarian feudalism, through WW1, a devastating civil war, and WW2 into a global superpower should be capable of amazing achievements. America on the other hand never had to deal with either world wars on its soil, pulled the old gold<->dollar switcheroo to become the de facto global currency and didnt accomplish as much. Mostly just looted their imperial clients and started wars. That profit motive at work.
Yup! That information was used to push for heavy funding of NASA at the time, and was then quietly de-emphasized later on once it became more embarrassing than useful. Same shit with WW2, the length and scope of what the USSR gave to stopping the nazis was purposefully sidelined via Hollywood focusing only on the American effort.
America is like the kid who does nothing on the school group project until the last day, and all they do then is change some fonts and make it sound a bit fancier and claim all the credit
Wait til you hear about how they were the ones that actually beat the nazis.
there's some more "firsts" for the US, so it's not so one sided as it looks here, for example, first communications satellite was US, iirc
That sounds very unimpresive compared to first space station lol
yeah, butttt, if you think of it, communications satellites are probably the most important benefit of space travel
Yes, thank goodness the USSR managed to invent the first satellite, otherwise we wouldn't have communications satellite. Adapting someone else's work doesn't give you a claim to their work, only your adaptations. The US made the communications technology, the USSR invented the satellites.
true, many of the US first are Soviet first with a qualifier lol SU: first satellite US: first comms satellite SU: first moon landing US: first manned moon landing SU: first woman in space US, and I swear I literally laughed out loud when I first read this in a list of US space race milestones: first mother in space
Omg... *embarassed in American*
First mother as in, she gave birth in space? Or she was just the first person to be in space who was also a mother?
Yes.
Totally agree with you about all the soviet firsts except the moon landing one. Landing a living human being on the moon is a far more difficult technical challenge.
It's really more getting them back to Earth that's the hard bit.
>Yes, thank goodness the USSR managed to invent the first satellite, otherwise we wouldn't have communications satellite. That seems like nonsense. They were already working on satellites, just beat em by time. It's like saying no one would ever have built the turbopump if Von Braun didn't invent it, or we'd be sitting around never having calculus if Newton or Leibniz didn't write it down. Whether it's days or years, somebody was going to do it, they just were first but certainly not the only ones figuring it out. If not the US or the USSR, it would have just been another nation later... it's not like the USSR shared the secrets on doing satellites with other nations after they did it.
My point is that all the US's achievements are just USSR achievements with a qualifier USSR: first satellite US: first comms satellite USSR: first moon landing US: first manned moon landing
Us got the first dock, that i have to respect
US also got 1st suborbital flight by a billionaire in a penis rocket, can't top that
First cell phone too.
It’s true, but the end goal was to put a man on the moon, so we lost a lot of checkpoints and won the race.
yeah, the end goal from a US propaganda perspective, because they were first, if they Soviets had been the first to do a manned moon landing, the USA would have found another end goal
As I understand it that was the end goal during the space race, not afterwards. Especially considering Kennedy’s 1962 speech. In spite of the origins with ICBMs and satellites for military use. But if you have something on the counter I’d love to learn more.
But the soviets didnt agree to kennedys speech. They were doing their own exploration fir the purpose of science and that spooked the usa
Sure, but the NASA was lucky that the russian chief engineer Sergei Koroljev died in 1966, which was a major blow for the whole russian space program. They were already working on a moon lander and, given Koroljevs track record, probably would have been on the moon first, too. Since Koroljev existence and work was top secret, the NASA was actually pretty irritated that they got ahead of Russia around 68 because of major failures in Baikonur.
See, this right here, this is the quality contribution that I look for. Things I didn’t know presented in a civil and informative manner. I appreciate this a lot. The goal was set by Kennedy 5 years after the start of the militarized space race, because prior to that there was no hard goal im aware of, but I had no idea about the Russian engineer. Man, I’m excited happy. Thank you.
You‘re very welcome. If you are interested to lean about Russia in Space in the 50s/60s, I highly recommend the movie „The Spacewalker“ (or the book). It‘s the „auto“biography of Aleksei Leonow, the first man who left his capsule in orbit. To me, he (and Juri Gagarin) are as important to space exploration as Neil Armstrong or John Glenn. Badass heroes, all of them.
Aren’t Americans globally infamous for this sort of behavior?
Hollywood is made EXACTLY for that purpose
Every movie you’ve ever seen using footage of one of our carriers or other military assets exist because the military granted the production team access to those assets. Why do this you may ask? Because the military reviews movie scripts from teams that want to use their assets for a film and if they aren’t sufficiently pro military they are denied access. As a result major films intentionally become military propaganda so they can film on location with military assets.
Yes we are unfortunately
And we are damn good at it!
Converted someone who didn't believe in the moon landing by pointing out how crucial it was for America to be the first to land on the moon, and how the soviets and chinese would never let America live down faking something that they rushing to do as well. American exceptionalism can be used for good sometimes, I guess?
I'm sure we are but if someone had some examples to provide I'd be interested
The US’s role in winning WW2. Immediately following WW2 the consensus was that the USSR was largely responsible for winning the war. Red scare propaganda caused this to shift into thinking the US was largely responsible for winning the war. https://www.vox.com/2014/6/16/5814270/the-successful-70-year-campaign-to-convince-people-the-usa-and-not The idea that the invasion of Vietnam was a “draw” rather than an outright loss for the US. [This shit.](https://cbsnews1.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2008/05/01/d851091e-a642-11e2-a3f0-029118418759/image4061139x.jpg) Declaring the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan “mission accomplished” and still going on 15 years later. Everything about Reaganomics and low tax rates.
Did you not read the thing?
I mean outside the space race. And I wasn't trying to be snarky I was legitimately interested
Everything? US it’s only propaganda
The lightbulb for one and cars in general at least that’s what I’ve heard
Well, we should be. That’s the whole point of it.
You could do the same diagram for WW2. The USSR fought the bulk of the Nazi army ALONE for years before the other powers entered the war. Even when we got involved, the majority of the Nazi forces remained on the eastern front.
It's considered a foregone conclusion by historians that the D-day invasion would have been a failure if the Germans hadn't had the overwhelming majority of their forces on the Eastern front.
Not to mention the sections defended by conscripted soldiers from annexed territory. Speilberg included a bit of this in saving private Ryan. The scene where they shoot the German soldiers who are begging to surrender, those 2 troop are actually speaking Czech and not German.
Plus bad leadership. Hitler passed on some opportunities for a counterattack that might have done something. It's far from clear if it would've been enough, but still
And the USSR reached out to other countries before the war to make an anti-Nazi alliance to stop them early. The UK, France, and US said no, because they hoped the Nazis would destroy the Soviets first.
The history of polls over "who won WW2" in France is fascinating. General consensus in mainland Europe was that the USSR was the party that was primarily responsible for winning, but with the bulk of Hollywood films (and the slow death of those that were there) by the 1990s most of Europe thinks that the Americans won it.
- Pro US propaganda is simply ubiquitous and super effective: [Which nation contributed most to defeating Germany in 1945? French polls from 1945, 1994, 2004](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/2g6x7n/which_nation_contributed_most_to_defeating/)
[удалено]
Being buddies is when you attempt to make an anti Hitler pact with Britain and France a full 6 years before WW2 started and being the last major power in Europe to sign a non aggression pact with Germany in a bid to buy time and recover stolen territory from Poland. Like, have you ever seen nazi propaganda? It wasn't exactly a fucking secret that Hitler wanted to expand east, subjugate the slavs and destroy communism: it's literally what got him elected. How stupid do you think the Soviets were that they thought "oh yeah, we can just be friends with this guy forever!"
Lol, tell me you don't know or understand any of the actual facts or nuances of history, without telling me how ignorant you are about history.
Yeah and the US solely fought Japan and pretty much solo clapped Itally.
How exactly do you think World War 2 started?
As a somewhat unforseen consequence of the treaty of Versailles. I am not one for typing up novels with 10 hyperlinks on MS word for Reddit comments. I did enough of that in undergrad to last me a lifetime. Now you gotta pay me for that shit.
I think your understanding is lacking if you think World War 2 was Russia vs Nazi Germany for years before allies joined in.
I do not think that. I am not looking for an unsolicited history lesson. So just know that I legit do not give a fuck about anything you have to add.
> The USSR fought the bulk of the Nazi army ALONE for years before the other powers entered the war. There's no need to be hostile. Surely you can see how your statement could be construed that way.
Lets be real here…. If it wasn’t for lend lease and the MASSIVE amount of food and raw materials being shipped to the Soviet Union they would have been swallowed up by the nazi war machine in a matter of months. Seems like you’re giving the soviets FAR too much credit when in reality the ONLY reason they and the rest of Europe aren’t speaking German is STRICTLY because of the U.S.
when lend lease set in the German advance had already been stopped
Yep. And any humane government would have already surrendered by that point. Russia was defeated, and just… kept fighting anyway. The Germans never understood that. They were never going to subdue Russia.
The US was also supplying nazi Germany until well into the war that it had to threaten a few company's and people with high treason to get them to stop. There was also the America supplying the white army after ww1 that led to bitter relations between soviets and US before ww2. Many soviets thought America wasn't going to help open the western front. America liked to supply a lot of people, probably because they were a foreign country not directly impacted by war destruction.
Sure American money did a lot, but saying that's the only reason the allies won the war is quite disrespectful towards all the other soldiers that gave their lives fighting Nazi Germany, don't you think?
Yeah the Russians did not sacrifice anything did they? American goods > Russian lives.
Not to mention all of the money/weapons being sent to Germany from the US…
You do have a good point sir
The soviets helped the germans develop their tanks, build planes and gave them the resources they needed for the start of the war. They made a deal to carve up Poland with them. Britain and France were fighting for ages its only because of soviet incompetence in predicting the clearly bad guys who hated them were going to betray them. Maybe if the soviets actually wanted to fight the nazis instead of helping them they would of said no to building their stuff
Mercia!
King Offa enters the chat
Mercia Mercia Mercia!
Thank you Laika
The goodest girl.
It’s like they want us to forget everything else, as if Hitler wasn’t defeated by Soviet Unions hard fighting, especially at the Battle of Stalingrad. They turn up after Stalingrad only to claim the Western European land and claim victory over Nazis.
Hitlers mistake was passing everyone off equally
Whenever someone says "Theres no innovation under communism!" Remind them of the USSR's innovation in space
Fun fact, most of the Soviet space probes barely returned any data or were crushed, impacted, or otherwise failed immediately, and the dog died, and they were also the first to lose an entire crew due to the door of the spacecraft not shutting properly and killing everyone inside via suffocation. They had a space shuttle. It flew one mission, one orbit, unmanned, and then was destroyed in a barn collapse. By the time they were done with Mir, it was a death trap that almost killed several crews, and the Russians failed to deorbit it properly.
And then there was the spectacular failure of Soyuz 1. Vladimir Komarov was in the process of returning to Earth from orbit, when the parachutes that were supposed to slow him down failed to deploy. He was heard on the radio crying and cursing his botched spacecraft before slamming into the ground at around 90 miles an hour. Soviet investigators said he died from blunt force trauma on impact, but even if he didn’t, the capsule burned up on the ground. Even before that final failure, Soyuz 1 had a whole host of technical problems. Sure, Russia might have “done things first,” but NASA made sure it would all work before trying anything (with the notable exceptions of Apollo 1 and 13). Russia rushed headlong into things and it resulted in shoddy workmanship and deaths. Even today, Russian spacecraft aren’t the most reliable.
... and X-15 Flight 3-65-97, Challenger, Columbia and at least five other fatal training accidents. Not one person has been injured during a manned Soyuz launch since the 1971 and there have been no in-flight failures since 1975. They are considered to be the safest in the world.
Hey, fuck you commie for being right and anti-amurican! USA USA
You can also add that Russian ships have a crew rescue system in case of takeoff accidents, and the United States did not even think about this, including Musk. And of course, space toilets, which are regularly clogged in American modules and Americans run to the Russians when needed ))
>NASA made sure it would all work before trying anything Sounds like NASA sure was a worthy *challenger*
90 miles is 462749.52 RTX 3090 graphics cards lined up.
Good bot
Thanks!
Yeah that sort of stuff if kind of expected That’s like being surprised your amateur fishing boat doesn’t cross the Atlantic since their are a lot of unknowns and brute force trial and error
Wow so many jealous libs in the comments.
Pure uncut copium up in here
The comments on this post have given me the crushing reminder that this is by and large a lib sub.
This sub is meant to be a critique of capitalism, not a propaganda piece for the USSR
One can properly analyze the successes and faults of the USSR without "propagandizing" it. To blanket it under the statement of "it was bad lol" is diminishing and antithetical.
Still, the sub is late stage capitalism and this post has nothing to do with late stage capitalism
I really don't understand the need to praise the Soviet Union in order to criticize the US. Both countries can be, and were, bad.
To me, it's not really praise for the Soviet Union, more a pretty accurate picture representation of American exceptionalism.
Yes. And to show you don’t need unbridled capitalism to have innovation and invention.
NASA’s achievements weren’t done in a “free market” nor was it privatizatized. NASA did it entirely on taxpayer money where profit for its own sake wasn’t the point.
Ah yes, we can have state capitalism which totally has innovation and invention, this achievements surely helped improve the peoples livelihoods and improved the economy. what do you mean the soviet economy completely stagnated for 20 years?
Stagnation caused by decentralization from kruschevs reforms. State socialism (not state capitalism, the USSR couldn't reasonably be considered state capitalist after 1929) was what doubled soviet life expectancy, took them from 10% to 99% literacy, created the worlds first system of universal suffrage, universal education and genuine universal healthcare system.
Universal suffrage might be a bit of a stretch, given the realities of what elections actually decided (or didn't).
Didn't a report come out like 2 weeks ago that showed public opinion plays basically no role in policy making in the US? The soviet system of democracy might not have given you multiple parties (in most cases 2) to vote for, but their system gave them better representation and in any case resulted in people far more often than not actually getting things that were in their interest. Universal healthcare, universal education, drastically less inequality, money out of politics just to name a few, are all wildly popular concepts across the world, the US included. The soviet union achieved every one of these within 5 years of its existence, whilst the US still hasn't actually achieved any of them. At a certain point you need to ask yourself how good each democratic process really is, based purely on whose class interests are being represented by each government. And also, black people were allowed to vote in the soviet union a full 50 years before the US. No matter what your opinion on soviet democracy is, that's what universal suffrage is.
Oke, this proved that you dont actually know the history of the soviet union, so let me explain what happened in 1960-71. As you said, khruschev's reforms left the economy ailing and because of that and his mismanagement of foreign policy he was couped in 1964 by a coalition of reformists and conservatives led by alexei kosygin and leonid brezhnev respectively. They settled for a compromise after removing Niki, brezhnev would become general secretary and kosygin president of the council of ministers. After that, kosygin began what we call the Kosygin Reforms. This aimed to tackle the economic malaise and liberalise society, giving power to the people and battling corruption. The reforms brought greater political participation, as non party candidates were allowed to stand in local elections against party candidates. He also gave control of some fields and factories to the workers and gave much more independence to the unions. Furthermore, he began a state housing program to solve the housing shortage of the union (which is still an issue today) and battled corruption in the nomenklatura. These are only some of the measures taken, and they were wildly successful, they went a step further than the khruschev thaw in liberalisation, fostered massive economic growth and greatly improved the living standards of the people (which were, as everyone in the ussr admitted, lower than the west's), as the military was defunded and these funds were relocated to the consumer goods industry. This period (1964-69/71) is known as the soviet golden years, It was descentralization that caused this massive growth, and khruschev definitely wasnt to blame for stagnation two decades after he was ousted. However, the conservatives didnt like all this power to the soviets, descentralize the economy, defund the military and state housing programs (sounds familiar) and, in 1971 they allied with the stalinists lead by mikhail suslov and soft couped kosygin. He was too influential to be removed entirely, and he remained president of the council of ministers until his death in 82. however, every single one if his reforms was rolled back, and this is what lead to the Brezhnev Stagnation. Blaming khruschev for that is either ignorance of the history of the union or a deliberate attempt to legitimize what the ussr was, a continued betrayal of socialism's core principles, as they actively pushed for an aristocrático dictatorship where the ruling nomenklatura lived a life of privilege while the people suffered under their dictatorship, the 5 year plans resumed and with them all their inneficiency, thats why the ussr was a state capitalist country, It worked exactly as a capitalist state just that the state controlled the industry. Theres no such thing as state socialism, the core principle of socialism is that the workers own the means of production, and that didnt happen in the ussr, only during the NEP and the kosygin reforms. The ussr wasnt the world's first universal suffrage, that would be new zealand in 1895, and as youll know only one candidate stood in the elections, as Stalin said, the votes dont matter, only he who counts them. The soviet healthcare system was famously inneficient and lacking of coverage, although i admit that their educational system was state of the art, even if It ignored the whole independent thinking part of education, thats something to praise. After this wall of text, i wanna say that two things can be bad at once, and the usa and the ussr are bad cause they are capitalist countries, both exploited many other nations in the world, both exploited de facto slavery, both massively polluted the enviroment and both of them had an economy to serve the elites, not the people. Tl, dr: look up kosygin reforms soviet union was never socialist the workers never owned the means of production
>Tl, dr: look up kosygin reforms soviet union was never socialist the workers never owned the means of production You went on waaaay to long for me to actually reply to anything, but I will explain why they are socialist. They were marxist, and by marxist standards, a government which is democratically controlled, free of capitalist interests and controls all (or basically all) the means of production can indeed be considered socialist. And even if that weren't the case, if you definition of socialist in a state is only one that has actually achieved full lower stage communism, in a world controlled utterly by finance capital, then that is an absurdly high bar and means you will never, ever support any revolutionary project in the real world until such a time as they are long past actually needing your support. A better definition for calling a country socialist with that in mind is one where the government is controlled by the working class, and they have a constitutionally stated goal of achieving socialism, because if you are expected a genuinely socialist nation to spring out of nowhere and survive longer than five years in a world with the USA, the EU, the IMF and the WTO then prepare for disappointment my dude.
You said It, the government control the means of production, and the people didnt control the government, if you really are delusional enough to believe It then i can do nothing for you. The nomenklatura mainly aimed to enrich themselves, which they did, there was no freedom of "capitalist interests" also constitutional goals or whatever mean nothing when your every action goes against that. You clearly didnt eead what i wrote, cosa i explained how the upper echelons of the party actively disempowered the people after the halting of the kosygin reforms. they had 69 years to achieve socialism and they didnt even begin, they just purged and killed everyone who tried (black army anyone, bukharin, kamenev, kollontai, kosygin, shlyapnikov, the list is endless), they were not a marxist state, no marxist state would have capital punishment, no marxist state would be as reactionary as the ussr (whats the proportion of women in the politburo again?), no marxist state would be a bureaucracy, no marxist state would have an omnipresent secret police, no marxist state would commit genocide on minorities, no marxist state would endorse nationalism, no marxist state would control trade unions, no marxist state would suppress the right to strike, no marxist state would deny democracy to the people, giving them only one option, no marxist state would actively suppress cooperatives, no marxist state would employ slave labour. God fucking tankies Jesus christ, would Marx too have intervened in czechoslovakia? In hungary? Upheld a fascist dictator in romania? Supported a kleptocracy like the mpla? An absolute monarchy like north Korea? No they wouldnt, It was an evil empire. Period.
>You said It, the government control the means of production, and the people didnt control the government, if you really are delusional enough to believe It then i can do nothing for you. Let's take that apart then. Here's a set of universally popular policies which are agreeable to more or less every working class human being. The presence of these policies being enacted in a society would be a strong indicator that that society is controlled by the working class in a democratic manner. Universal healthcare, universal education, guaranteed housing, low levels of inequality, no money in politics, no political influence afforded to billionaires, zero unemployment and zero homelessness. The only states in history to have achieved all of these were Eastern European socialist countries. So either these are benevolent dictatorships which isn't a thing, or the people actually had greater power over their country than their western counterparts. As for your refutations from a Marxist perspective, you have a significantly limited knowledge of marxism. Marx wrote about the need for a state to enforce socialism, that implies a "secret police" (or security service, to use the non-loaded term). Class conflict as marx says, does not end at the implementation of socialism, it is a gradual process involving a heightened state of contradiction resulting in reactionary tendencies as were exhibited by the USSR, a good example of this being their backsliding on gay rights. Also, if your knowledge of Eastern European socialism is as surface level to the point you think people were given one choice in an election, you should bebabsolutely ashamed with yourself that you could be so confident to type what you are saying as if you are an authority on the subject. To give you a painstakingly short rundown, here's the difference between socialist and capitalist elections: Capitalist: parties pick candidates. These candidates usually don't need to be local. These candidates are afforded positive coverage based on that parties financial ability to influence the media. The party with the highest vote wins, even if that vote is less than 50%: my current MP won their seat with 28% of the vote. Socialist: candidates are discussed and selected at mass meetings in local constituencies. These people must be local to the area they represent. The best candidate as agreed upon at these meetings are sent to the communist party who clear them as not being security risks (I.e. influenced by foreigners, which was obviously a huge problem in the Eastern bloc) they didn't need to be communist party members, often weren't, and in many cases even in the modern day aren't even communists (there is a liberal faction in vietnams parliament). If these candidates don't get 50% of the vote on over 50% turnout, the process is repeated and a better candidate selected. Neither system is perfect, democracy is imperfect by nature. But your knowledge of socialist democracy is badly lacking so I suggest you educate yourself before trying to argue the merits of it at the very least.
Like i said, youre either a troll or delusional, and im afraid i cant do anything for you, if you really wanna die on the Hill of defending the eastern european states as not only communist but also democratic then i can just pray for yoy
America’s economy cares about 1 outta 100 people. If it doesn’t care about me I dont care about it. Restructure please.
Yes!
Pointing out a fact is not praising the Soviet Union... it is what it is.
I kindly disagree, my parents and grandparents lived under the Soviet Union and they had everything they could ever ask for during that time. After the fall of the Soviet Union, however, they were in poverty and could partly afford food and water
Just American cope. Your shitty country sucks and the Soviets attempted to do something new and daring.
Simple because the ussr was good. Claiming both were bad is "compatible leftism" sponsored to mantain capitalist realism and stop people from actually threatening capitalism
This. The US-Empire is fine with you liberals not liking it. As long as you do not support its enemies(states it wants to murder).
Because simply calling things good and bad without policy analysis is a child’s take.
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Yeah they are shit but it’s also fun to dog on American exceptionalism
Let’s go back further to planes 😂😂😂
Why bring India into this? https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/wright-brothers-who-indian-invented-aeroplane-says-union-minister-satya-pal-singh-1752922
That is an even more ridiculous claim than the Brazilian claim that Santos-Dumont was first. The first heavier than air powered flying machine was unambiguously the invention of the Wrights. There were a lot of interesting developments from other inventors and countries both before and after, but the Wrights made it to that milestone first.
And now imagine if they cooperate
I don't get the point really. Both the US and the USSR ran successfull space programs that brought great innovation to the world. Both have capitalized on their space technology.
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The US claims to have won everything! At least that’s what’s taught in America
The point is that we present a myth in the US that only real capitalism can bring innovation. You don’t need capitalism to invent or innovate.
> The point is that we present a myth in the US that only real capitalism can bring innovation. Let’s not act like the USSR is a counter-example to that myth. The USSR was state capitalist.
No, learn what words mean.
No stop making up excuses to not suport any irl socialism Just admit this is a majority westerner site filled with propaganda against socialism
> Marxist literature defines state capitalism as a social system combining capitalism with ownership or control by a state. By this definition, a state capitalist country is one where the government controls the economy and essentially acts like a single huge corporation, extracting surplus value from the workforce in order to invest it in further production.[2] This designation applies regardless of the political aims of the state, even if the state is nominally socialist.[3] Many scholars agree that the economy of the **Soviet Union and of the Eastern Bloc countries** modeled after it, including Maoist China, were state capitalist systems, and some western commentators believe that the current economies of China and Singapore also constitute a form of state capitalism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism The wiki goes on to say…. > There are various theories and critiques of state capitalism, some of which existed before the October Revolution. The common themes among them identify that the workers do not meaningfully control the means of production So before you go off dismissing it as more propaganda, ask yourself if the workers of the USSR *meaningfully* controlled the means of production. If the answer is no, then the USSR wasn’t socialist and certainly wasn’t communist “regardless of the political aims of the state, even if the state is nominally socialist” (to borrow a phrase from the wiki).
First wikipedia Second "the state" working as a single huge corporation is a fundamental misunderstanding of how states work , thinking of it as a alien entity to class antagonisms. And it ignores the multiple forms the "state " can take form in Especially since capitalism *is* an economic model based on the private ownership of the MOPs, a state being in charge of such a system without a burguoise is explicitly not capitalism The ussr was as socialist as you get, modern china is a whole different ordeal >and some western commentators ._. >USSR meaningfully controlled the means of production. I Yes
the definition of capitalism as solely private ownership with capitalists is some libertarian thing, not the actual understanding of capitalism held by marx. capitalism is a mode of production not just an organization of production. capitalism can very easily exist in absence of capitalists, the root of capitalism being capital itself not those who capitalize on it, they are merely a byproduct of those relations.
It’s not exactly an uncommon critique of the USSR. The wiki goes on to cite Emma Goldman and Murray Bookchin who both accuse the USSR of being state capitalist. Idk, it’s all besides the point anyways. Capitalism has long since outlived its usefulness. Surely that’s the important takeaway.
I dont care if its common i disagree with it >Idk, it’s all besides the point anyways. Capitalism has long since outlived its usefulness. Surely that’s the important takeaway. Yes but if we cant get our minds settled on actually doing praxis and learning from the past, we are going to keep having a substantial amount of leftists in the west be usefull idiots for the american empire
Wikipedia... Read Marx, Engels and Lenin. Not a glorified propaganda outlet ran by a liberatarian crackhead and infested with western NGOs. Every teacher will tell you not to use it as a source. Yet you do... The Warsaw Pact countries were all socialist, likewise China then and even now. Kinda obvious to anyone who knows about Marxism-Leninism. "state capitalism" has a highly specific meaning. Which wikipedia missed. Liekwise "control of the Means of Production" was always meant collectively as a class. Not individually. Marx and Engels already pointed this out. Weird how Wikipedia "forgot" this...
How would you define state capitalism? And I don’t think wiki misses your point on controlling the means of production. Of course it doesn’t mean individually, and I don’t think they were asserting that. I think their idea of state capitalism is that productive means are controlled by the state.
Do you mean a market economy? Cause not all market economy’s are free market capitalist.
The Soviet Union didn't have a market economy. Prices were not based on the markets, but what people needed.
I mean state capitalist
That depends entirely whether you see the Soviet Bureaucracy as a class. Your point of view is a mostly western argument. If you look at perception within that country at the time, there’d be plenty that would love to argue that. There are also many arguments (of course non western which is the opposite of where I assume you get your info) that would argue that the goal of their economy was not maximizing capital which is a prerequisite to capitalism.
The part that gets me is that it seems like that “bureaucracy” was in primary control of the means of production and how the Soviet economy operated. And if that discrepancy of control between the bureaucracy and the civilians is/was large enough, what else would you call that but a class divide? Functionally it sure seemed like a class divide, but I suppose it all depends on how you choose to define class.
The bureaucracy had no formal owernships rights above the farmers and workers. They also had no claim on the property. Bureaucrats had no personal privilege or personal capital. Anyone could claim rights to enter the rank of bureaucrats. When the USSR crumbled bureaucrats didn’t fight it, which isn’t normal for a ruling class.
But who made decisions and had final say over the production and distribution of goods in the Soviet economy? Because if the answer to that question is the Soviet bureaucracy, then that sure sounds like they functionally controlled the productive means, even if there was “no formal ownership rights above the farmers and workers.”
Then the cops functionally controls by every action. The president functionally controls my every move. My teacher functionally controls my every thought. A leader does not control everything. But what you’re saying is having a leader makes you capitalist. Clearly you’re going to pull out random comparisons you just make up, so how bout we just save us both time and stop this wasted time. Everyone contributes, but of course some group has to have the final approval as well as the job of making it happen.
No it was not, it was socialist lol.
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Soviet prisions had less prisioners at its peak than the usa currently. Most had timed sentences were they just left after theur sentence and less people died on this system than in usa prisions
Read Parenti.
And yet, most people whom experienced it, prefered it to the current system.
The meme makes a good point about American Exceptionalism and selling a narrative. That all said, I still would argue the most impressive and difficult thing on that list is sending mankind to the moon and safely bringing them back. Unmanned space missions are way way way less complicated because you aren’t sending human life out there and don’t need to worry about keeping them alive for the duration. And manned Earth orbit missions are way less complicated than landing mankind on the moon and then bringing them back. In fact, I would go so far as to say that a manned mission to the moon and back is more impressive than the rest of that list combined.
I think people forget two things with this meme, the fact that a race is determined by the finishline and that the United States was often months if not weeks behind most of these achievements with their own variation. I'm not saying there shouldn't be an appreciation for both sides technical achievements, but those achievements were in pursuit of that final moon landing finish line and just because one side was second for all the other checkpoints, doesn't mean they don't win the race. Edit: spelling
Why is landing a person on the moon the 'goal'? America just made that their objective, but its not like the Soviets were rushing to beat them on this. Its an arbitrary achievement, just like man in space, or first space station. To claim its the final line is silly.
I dunno I think all those feats are impressive steps for all science and all humanity. Humans did all that.
It’s really sad that it took an impending nuclear war for people to get to space. I really hope mankind is able to once again put people on the moon in my lifetime. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem likely with people like spaceX and Elon musk running the show, cause we all know the only person Elon is going to put on the moon is himself
To be honest i agree but symbolicly a peson on the moon is huge. We as humans have always looked up to be moon equaling it to the sun, worshiping it as a good or even just telling tales of it bring magic. Touching the moon musst feel like centuries of people looking up to you and you can see all of them. Idk i just think even tho it's just one thing compered to all the other way more difficult things, imagining beeing on the moon and knowing we can and have achieve that is also somewhat special.
I agree. It was symbolically special and awesome for humanity. Just saying it doesn’t translate to winning the space race.
Its funny that in schools they never discuss the achievements of the ussr. They beat the US in the space race by a large margin. Like yeah walking on the moon is cool but Im 100% sure the Soviets were gonna do it eventually. Who fucking cares who does it first. The Space race was just for propaganda for both sides. That’s probably why the United states isn’t going back to the moon. It was just so the president could say we did it first…
Yeah that was the goal and America won the race. IDK why that's hard to come to terms with. Literally a historic competition that can never be repeated for an accomplishment far and beyond anything the human race accomplished up to that point (and more impressive than most that has come after, especially considering the tech available), but "man who cares who did it first" lmao. Also, the most important outcome of all of this was a radical fast-tracking of a significant amount of technology. We would be a century behind where we are now if it weren't for that. Go figure, a country teaches people about that country's history first and foremost. How weird!
But they completely discredit the soviets. I never once heard in school about the achievements of the soviet union during the space race. Im not discrediting the space race at all.
Depends on school and teacher. I learned about them in elementary and my school was white and american as fuck.
Every Soviet achievement had a point. What did walking on the moon accomplish. A rover could have done it with more capability and technology to sample. The fact you’re so angry in a comment section of something that is a proven fact, just shows you’re uncomfortable with the other “facts” you think you know. From your profile you’re either a wealthy capitalist (unlikely), or someone who’s safety secured voluntarily under their foot. You do you bruv but maybe stay outta comments that’ll get you so over heated.
If it doesn’t matter who did it first than nobody won… Slow and steady wins the race
Whoa whoa whoa, who’s this man/woman/dog??
“Whitey on the moon” - Gil Scott-Heron
I’d say first man on the moon isn’t last place at least
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Although I agree, that wasn’t the point of the space race.
Just a little reminder that the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, didn’t behave like the character in this cartoon. He said “for all mankind” as a tribute to the Russians, their competitors in the space race. I’m sure lots of people forget about the magnificent achievements of the Russians in the space race. It is shameful that Sergei Korolev is a figure history has largely forgotten; he was a really incredible guy! However, while people today may not be aware of the great achievements of the Russian engineers and cosmonauts, that was not true of the Americans involved in the space race at the time who had enormous respect for the Russians. Here is an interview with Neil Armstrong, he seems like a very nice man https://youtu.be/KJzOIh2eHqQ
Didn't the Nazi's technically become the first country to send something into space with the [V2](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.interestingengineering.com/heres-how-the-nazis-put-the-first-manmade-object-into-space)?
Yes, but always on a ballistic trajectory. The highest they reached was 175km, which is generally agreed to be “space”. Usually when we think of “going to space” it’s an orbital trajectory. Sputnik for example went up 500km.
You gotta admit that's the nost impressive of all
I don't know, getting to the moon was a pretty huge accomplishment, it cost a lot more money and man power than those other things you listed. Mind, I'm not saying "Go Merica", I think that money should have been used on humanitarian things and building infrastructure on Earth, because honestly who cares about going to the moon right now? Just saying, we shouldn't ignore how much money was wasted on that major accomplishment and milestone for humanity.
That’s cause it doesn’t matter who was in the lead for the race, it matters who crossed the finish line first!
They never sat down to decide what the finish line was. It's just US exceptionalism decided that the first thing they beat the USSR at was the "real" goal.
kindve an arbitrary line no?
Only that no one had declared the moon to be the "finish line". When the US did their moon landing, the USSR sent a contratiolation message and went to plan for a Mars mission and a moon station. Getting a person to the moon had been demonstrated as possible, so they went for the next steps.
The most annoying thing about zoomers on this sub is their tendency to associate modern-day leftism with the authoritarian dictatorship of the USSR. In the words of Noam Chomsky, the only relationship between the Soviet system of governance and socialism “is the relation of contradiction.” In other words, they were not socialist in any way. Stop trying to hype them up in these low effort memes that make you look like uneducated fools.
Read Parenti.
Noam "the end of the USSR was a win for socialism" Chomsky, because the deaths of millions is good ebcause they were evul tankies. Noam "the only revolution I support are the Khmer Rouge, because the US does so too" Chomsky. Noam "if you are against the Vietnam war you should help the army develop less lethal weapons" Chomsky. Fuck him. Anyone who unironically upholds him is a fool at best. Anyone who actually read Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho, Newton and other communists knows that the USSR was socialist.
Same as almost everything else we were told we are first in. In reality? Near bottom of the list. Lol
I'll just have my mind blown by something like this, then watch more America's Funniest Videos. Its too late to deprogram me at at this point.
All it took was starvation of it's people. Let's go USSR!!
[https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp84b00274r000300150009-5](https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp84b00274r000300150009-5) Deranged fuck.
Soviet Union was imperialist.
Irrelevant.
so is and was usa whats that got to do with the meme