"The USSR mobilized its people rather as a modern Western state"

Parade on Red Square in November 1941. Photo: TASS

East and West: who is the leader and why? How did the current proportions of the world order develop and how long will they remain? Another attempt to answer these questions can be found in the book of an authoritative archaeologist and historian, professor of Stanford University, Ian Morris, “Why is the West Rolling ... at least yet. The laws of history, and what they tell us about the future ”(published in 2016 at the Press Career Publishing House). Republic cites a fragment of the chapter in which the author analyzes the process of imperial construction in the 20th century.

For centuries, a rather backward periphery - reorganized as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which, like the United States, united a rapidly growing industrial center and a huge agricultural hinterland. However, unlike the United States, state property, collective agriculture and centralized planning were supported and planted here. The Soviet Union mobilized its people more like a modern Western state than as an old dynastic empire. However, his autocrats - Lenin and Stalin - ruled more like kings than democratic presidents.

The Soviet Union was a kind of "anti -American" - a subcontinental empire, but undoubtedly not liberal. Stalin preached equality, but at the same time built a centralized economy, for which millions of his comrades were forcibly transported throughout his empire, and millions of others consisted in the “Gulags”. Ideologically suspicious ethnic groups and class enemies (often it was the same) were cleaned. And, unlike the experienced failures of the capitalist economies, the successful Soviet Union allowed 10 million their subjects to die of hunger. However, it is also obvious that Stalin did something clearly correctly. Between 1928 and 1937, while the capitalist industry was in a state of collapse, the production of industrial products in the USSR increased four times.

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