How did they become a world superpower and almost overtake the us? During ww1 russia had the highest death toll, this led to the Russian revolution and an even higher death toll. Russia was the only entente nation that surrendered.
Ww2 was even worse, they lost 26 million people and the west was completely ravaged. The British and French empires fell apart after Ww2 but somehow soviet Russia was stronger than ever.
In: Economics
The Soviet government, Stalin from 1941 to 1953, put priority on superpower expansion, including nuclear weapons, rather than reconstruction.
They completely chucked out human rights in order to reorder the economy exactly as they wanted it. People had zero luxuries and we’re expected to do as they were told. Many people were pretty much forced to do jobs they didn’t want to do, even if they involved locating to the middle of Siberia to work in a mine.
Having said that, the USSR’s economy was never close to surpassing America. By the end of the soviet union, America’s GDP per capita was about four times what it was in the soviet union.
Despite their atrocious loses, in terms of manpower by the end of WW2 the Soviet Union had one of the largest standing armies on Earth. After WW2 the USSR effectively annexed all the Eastern European nations they liberated from the Nazi’s by installing puppet Communist governments. This gave them a massive amount of territory, resources, and manpower.
Seeing as how backwards and agrarian they were at the beginning, Stalin pushed the USSR to modernize and develop industries at an incredible rate, matched perhaps only by the speed at which the Japan industrialized. Russia and by extension the USSR went from a backwards country to cutting edge modern in less than a few decades. They did however take shortcuts like stealing western technology and sacrificing significant amounts of the population to achieve this.
The USSR also had a policy of ‘permanent revolution’ where they intended to spread Communism across the world. So any country that was even remotely interested got military and financial support from the USSR. This helped spread their influence into the 3rd world particularly in Eastern Europe, China, Central America, and Indochina.
This made the USSR a super power in terms of economics, territory, and influence.
The key though was the development of nuclear weapons. Their nuclear arsenal is what really kept the West and USSR from engaging in any meaningful conflict because the result would likely have been nuclear annihilation.
Much of the industrial might and wealth of the Soviet Union though was a sham. Their industries were woefully inefficient and the government corrupt from top to bottom. Stalin’s purges ensured that anyone remotely qualified or intelligent enough to identify and fix the USSRs social problems were killed off or sent to the Gulags for daring to criticize the system. Leaving the USSR to be lead by opportunists and true-believers that didn’t dare challenge the status quo and acted like everything was fine when it wasn’t. They were never as rich or developed as the West, much of their technology was stolen by spies or copied (from the West and the Nazis), and their industries made up for lack of sophistication with brute force and quantity.
Aside from the period in the 50s when the Soviet Union was well ahead in certain sectors like space travel, they were actually behind economically and culturally. They focused far too much of their economy on building weapons and maintaining their immense military at the expense of their citizens.
The USSR was in some ways a paper tiger. Having a massive army that was actually poorly trained and ill equipped with reliable but technologically inferior equipment. After the Berlin wall came down Generals on both sides came together and swiftly realized that if WW3 had kicked off in the late 70s to mid-80s the USSR would have been steam rolled by NATO and would likely have resorted to using Nuclear Weapons just to survive.
Ironically it wasn’t guns, politics, or nukes that killed the USSR, it was economics. Decades of trying to outdo the West while coping with systemic mismanagement and chronic corruption finally caught up with the Soviet Union. By the time Gorbachev implemented long overdue social reforms to try to reverse the problems it was too late.
Russia/the Soviet Union, even after the losses in sustained, had several things going for it.
1. Access to most of the most important resources to developing an industrial economy. Tons of oil, iron, coal, etc., as well as some of the most fertile soil in the world to feed itself (mostly. Sometimes)
2. A huge potential workforce. The USSR had the third largest population on Earth.
3. Its network of eastern European satellites. This resources and manufactured goods were extracted from these economies, while they served as a captive market for Soviet goods.
4. The Soviet economy was never actually that big. What took people by surprise is how *fast* it got big, but that’s more a factor of where it started. Through most of the industrial revolution, the Russian Empire was functionally a feudal state, and that didn’t really start to change until the early 1900s. The Soviets took this start and ran with it, but each billion you add to your GDP is harder than the last. When you start barely industrialized, the early gains happen quickly.
5. You really can’t undersell the importance of a government that is philosophically committed to industrialization as a moral good.
6. They lied. A lot. The USSR was always seriously overstating its GDP.
ELI5: while the Soviet Union was a military superpower, they were never an economic superpower. The quality of life for the average family in the Soviet Union was never as good as the USA’s, and certainly the nation never close to “overtaking the USA” from an economic perspective.
The Cold War did see both nations spend huge amounts on their military and nuclear programs, and that resulted in a classic “arms race”. The result was a nuclear capability that could have potentially ended life on most of the earth had both nations expended their nuclear and kinetic arsenals at once.
Latest Answers