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Comment by jojobas | Hacker News Reader

It didn't help that the USSR kept devoting up to 25% of their economy to the military. Improving the standards of living just wasn't a priority, the planning system was set to "just enough to avoid riots" and failed at even that.

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Devoting 25% of their economy to the military was how they stuck around to begin with. You need a pretty big military to keep half of Europe under your thumb for half a century. Operation Danube involved about half a million men at its peak.

Half a million is just the tip of the iceberg. Their workforce was around 100 million, the estimates were that >25 million were working for the military, including 83% of all research scientists/engineers.

Well, that's the personnel involved in the operation, and you need supporting personnel as well, and of course you need to be able to run these operations should anybody else get the same idea as the Czechs and the Hungarians...

Maintaining an empire ain't cheap.

Well maybe, if they didn't devote 25% of everything to keeping everybody under their thumb, they could maintain their living standards high enough for people to not want out?

If they didn't devote 25% of everything keeping everybody under their thumb, that would have shrunk their economy considerably if anyone actually escaped.

Which we eventually witnessed.

The USSR's economy grew massively and quickly after WWII. It's a country that went from literal feudalism to modernity in one generation, becoming one of the two superpowers largely dictating world politics.

"Massively and quickly" seems optimistic. USSR grew at or below the rate of most European economies post war:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Soviet_U...

A bit hyperbolic, but this is a thread claiming that the USSR grew far more slowly than the rate of capitalist Europe post war.

It went from feudalism to more technologically advanced feudalism, and remains there today.

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