>>24663049
>Under socialism, you were expected, at times forcibly, included in social mobilization, you are forced to acknowledge necessity and the existence of the Other, so it produced a more physically and intellectually fit population than did most of the west once the tumult of the first half of the twentieth century concluded (obviously with uneven development across the socialist world inb4 “starvation”). This explains why most communist states in periods of stability were Olympic athlete and scientific/engineering powerhouses
Don't believe everything about the propaganda that communists governments put out in picture books in the 1960s. The reality was different. Well, there were elements of truth in this. Soviet schools for example were HIGHLY competitive, because education was the most assured path to upward mobility. It's like that in capitalist countries too, but you can be a dropout in a capitalist country and still become rich (even if it's unlikely). It wasn't like that there. The command economy also selected for engineers and sent them to work on projects where they could get whatever they needed to build airplanes or nuclear reactors. There were military-technical and nuclear closed cities (tight restrictions on getting in / out) that were much better off than most of the population.

But if you drove around the USSR in the 1980s, much of the country would have looked virtually unchanged since the 1950s. The health of the population was also rather poor, and life expectancy was decreasing already by the mid-1970s (it began increasing again in the late 1980s and then plunged after the collapse). There were shortages of virtually everything, but not vodka, which contributed to debilitating amounts of alcoholism. Visitors could be shocked at the sight of drunks all over the place. Average alcohol consumption annually was 14 liters of pure alcohol per capita, which doing the math, is like one man finished a bottle of vodka every two days. At least as an average.