Russia will bomb US military industrial complex donation centers, Foreign Minister says

The USSR quite notably developed from its starting point as the backwater of Europe in 17 to the second place industrial power by the 50s? I guess I would get a bit to charitable for you if I talked about the ways imperial relationships between regions and Russian chauvinism were challenged in the Soviet Union, and I don’t think this is the place for a reasonable discussion of failures like wartime deportations, but I do think relationships changed somewhat.

But the point was the DDR, which was in the context of postwar realpolitik and animosity, simultaneously. I think Japan might be more complex because a cursory examination of the history notes their colonial adventures in Korea and China. Funny how that comes before an industrial base in merchantalist and capitalist regimes.

Yeah it probably sucked to live in the occupation zones/East Germany from 45 to the sixties. And then shit started to decline in the 70s so yeah sucked. Point is you can’t just make economic prosperity and the liberal conception of freedom (being able to say anything and get nothing) happen out of the most adverse of circumstances. The U.S.S.R. hadn’t centuries to plunder colonies and accumulate the requisite wealth to fuel a global economic system for instance. It was always against the grain.

I would reccomend Chapter 8 of Killing Hope by William Blum. It’s all very interesting reading but this ads some complexity to the point you bring up. It’s fair to say the Soviets were harsh on the Germans with their reparations, for good reason and to the detriment of realpolitik. However when we see this as an internal failure brought on by essentially internal fuckups, we miss the external and the fact that there’s no distance between the two when you’ve been under siege since 1917. The other chapters of this book explain what happened to the other underdogs when they couldn’t keep things in perfect order.