>>512595952That is optimistic at best. The russian was right, pre-revolution there was a significant industrialization effort going on. Czar used western euro advisors to jump forward pretty hard, and would have probably ended up in a pretty solid place if they'd not gotten skull fucked by WW1 destabilizing them enough for commies to go wild.
>Muh serfsSerfdom was abolished in the 1800s, there was almost certainly still a lot of inequality, but the serf system itself was gone.
It's irrefutable that the USSR led to a lot of dead end development paths, and a great deal of wasted resources. Advancement under the soviet system was not meritocratic by any stretch of the imagination, and was more about how well you sucked your superior's dicks, like every communist regime since the beginning of history.
Unsurprisingly, when sycophants rise, and stubborn, but brilliant individuals are gulaged, you wind up with stagnation. Or are you going to claim that Lysenko didn't set the USSR back a decade or more? You can find other examples in other industries where some true believer commie retard actively sabotaged their civilization for the 'revolution'. Communism fundamentally draws it's converts from the bottom of the barrel, because the only ones who want to upend civilization are losers that exist at the bottom with nothing to lose, and a handful of retarded intelligentsia that exist in an ivory tower bubble with zero grasp of reality.
