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Comment by dagenleg | Hacker News Reader

Hey, it certainly was hideous, broken and inhumane, but come on, the Russian version of communism allowed for a lot of progress. Industrial and scientific both.

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Yes. In 1917 Russia was a semi feudal society with 10% literacy. 40 years later it had 90% literacy, universal healthcare, full employment, nuclear weapons and the world's leading space program. The human cost of those advances was monumental: many millions starved to death in the Ukraine during the collectivisation of agriculture, hundreds of thousands shot by the NKVD/KGB, millions sent to the Gulag, and millions of unnecessary casualties during WWII due to Red Army purges during the Great Terror and the casual attitude to spending lives in military leadership.

What kind of development could have occurred under 40 years under a Tsar? Remember, it was the actual workers who made all of that progress - presumably they would have done even better had most of them not been starved.

Well, technically, before communists took over, Tsar had already abdicated and there was something approaching, sort of, a parliamentary democracy.

Yes, the system was capable in many areas (although that wasn't enough overall). The socialism is designed to please the majority, first and foremost, so it normal to see that in USSR they addressed a lot of the common people issues that under a different establishment may have been addressed in a lesser degree. The industrialization happened, as I see it, because was an answer to several issues at once: a mean to employ masses, a mean to provide various resources thus a politically desirable and reasonably easy achievable economic independence (as before the industrialization the main exported commodity from USSR was wheat), and on ideological level - a way of depicting the viability of communism (having the industrialized nations as reference, nations that happened to be all capitalist). As for scientific progress, in USSR it had to have an ideological base (as it has to have an economical base in capitalism), and from this I see two occurring issues. First issue is that it works best when you have to compete with something other than yourself (like politically dictated/mandated cosmos-related scientific progress) and not so much otherwise, and the second issue is that things don't get multiplied the way they do in capitalist environment because things here happen when they are commissioned by the state (thus only one) actor and resource pool. (To be fair, I don't see anything serious impeding scientific progress in socialism/communism, just fewer reasons for it to happen.)

A lot of scientific progress in USSR happened despite communism, e.g. consider Lysenko, fights against cybernetics, and other ideology-based interference with science.

Pretty much anything that did not have to do with weaponry, and especially any of the social/philosophical sciences were far behind because they did (or could) go against the communist dogma.

Well, then Nazis also made some progress in science and industry, but surely you would not defend them.

Bersides, a lot of that industrial progress ewas built by Americans anyway, with USSR, at best, supplying slave labor.

But does any of this progress counterbalance all the evil they've done, in URSS and in the rest of the world?

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