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The soviets made a pretty good go of turning a theistic feudal monarchy largely with an economy focused on agriculture into the second biggest industrial power in the world for almost a hundred years. Certainly not perfect, and horrible to live in in many ways, but better at building an economy than a lot of other similarly sized places.
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For me, the surprising part was learning how many Russian people I know have parents or grandparents who were born in Ukraine. I knew that Soviet Ukraine had ~50 million people. Almost 20% of the USSR, and a bit less than France, Italy, or the UK at the time. I knew that Ukraine was one of the most developed and densely populated parts of the USSR, and of the Russian Empire before that. I had some idea how the border…
At the individual level, the boundaries are really blurry. I'm a Russian. I know many Ukrainians. Often, when you meet a Ukrainian, you'll never know that they are, in fact, from Ukraine, unless you ask. Sometimes their pronunciation ("г" as "h" instead of "g") would give them away, but other than that, there are practically zero differences — especially cultural ones. We really are mostly the same people and we shou…
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The world is never short of ignorant idiots.
Modern Russia is fascist in all meaningful ways. This—at least emotionally—overshadows the positive contributions the country made in the past.
The machine was composed of a 4 bit HT1130 CPU.
IDK if the MAME programmers RE it yet.
http://web.archive.org/web/20150417011515/http://brickgame.b... (Portuguese).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handheld_electronic_game#Handh...
There is a joke about how Tetris has been the most effective soviet weapon against the US, causing more damage in productivity losses than anything else the USSR did during the cold war.
Microsoft’s Solitaire might compete, being bundled with windows itself.
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We have to agree that either “modern Ukraine” was created in 1920s from Russians and Russian territories or there were different people on that land long before that. If you are leaning towards the former then this could be extended even further: Soviet Union only ever harassed itself. There were no occupied Baltic states, there was no Ukraine, etc etc - just one big happy family called USSR.
> We have to agree... No, you just constructed a false dichotomy. Russian Empire and its successor states USSR and Russia is a product of imperialism that was born in Kiev when Grand Prince Vladimir has brought Orthodox Christianity to those lands. This imperialism conquered some territories, lost some territories (Kiev proper), then regained them back and conquered a lot more, then splintered. The current war is the…
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The soviets made a pretty good go of turning a theistic feudal monarchy largely with an economy focused on agriculture into the second biggest industrial power in the world for almost a hundred years. Certainly not perfect, and horrible to live in in many ways, but better at building an economy than a lot of other similarly sized places.
And somehow they managed to starve millions of people in the process. If you call this a good job.... okay.
Quoting the CIA factbook from 1983:
> American and Soviet citizens eat about the same amount of food each but the Soviet diet may be more nutritious.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp84b00274r000...
Yes hunger was problem in the civil war to world war 2 era with some really horrible famines but famine was also a regular occurrence in Tsarist Russia to begin with.
Now there is the discussion to be had of whether they were "man-made" or not and that is indeed a important discussion but that also needs to be contextualized: Historically capitalist countries going through industrialization have also seen famines.
In an alternative universe where the October Revolution did not succeed, can we honestly assume that there would have not been any famines? No, so there is not a direct causality. (Again, note that I purposefully not talking about specific events and responsibilities but instead showing that these question are not relevant for the big picture discussion.)
It is a common mistake in the study of history to confuse structure and specific events. Was hunger a structural, common occurrence in socialist countries? Absolutely not.
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It's a bit more than that - the Russian part of civilisation came _from_ Ukraine. Kiev is much older than Moscow, and that's not something Rashists can forgive.
That's quite a one-sided viewpoint. Kievan Rus was founded by Rurikids who were Scandinavians originally based in Novgorod (now Russia). According to the Nestor's chronicle, Kiev basically became the capital after Oleg of Novgorod (a Rurikid) killed local princes Askold and Dir. Age of Kiev has nothing to do with it. 1000 years ago there was no "civilized Ukrainians vs non-civilized Russians" argument, it was just a…