Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first catastrophic failure of the Soviet Union was agriculture. When the West was beginning Borlaug's Green Revolution they were deep into Stalin's great famine, the Holodomor. Their inability to put bread on tables is at the root of their collapse. Most tragedies in China's recent history also have their cause on failure to produce food. I wonder how China is prepared to handle the impact Global Warming will hav…
>Stalin's inability to put food on tables = cause for USSR's failure I need to clarify something on this point. Stalin's famine was deliberately engineered to kill Ukrainians. It was not a failure of central economic planning, but actually, shockingly, a triumph. Stalin confiscated Ukrainian citizens' guns and land, and forced them to work 180 days per year on centrally planned crop attempts. The product of their lab…
The English justified it by invoking the divine right of the free market.
In the Soviet Union's case the money derived from exporting the grain abroad supposed to be to help industrialize - which it did.
It's a bit hazy whether or not it was deliberately engineered to kill off the Ukrainians. It hit every grain producing area of the Soviet Union - it just hit Ukraine the hardest.
Stalin may have simply been indifferent to their plight rather than actively trying to kill them.