To be fair, USSR was also famous for its scorched earth tactics. In August 1941, Soviets blown up the Dnieper Dam, aiming to halt the German advance. Tends of thousands civilians & Soviet soldiers were killed as a result
Btw this is the Colonel Hugh Lincoln Cooper, of the US Army Corps of Engineers who supervised construction of the dam. Soviet industrialisation was not just planned by the American industrialists: it was managed and supervised directly
More on the American role in the Soviet industrialisation:
You unironically have some logical reasoning capabilities. Yes, that is exactly what happened. If in the 1960s the USSR still tried to compete, by the 1970s it essentially gave up. Consequently, Western imports comprised the ever increasing share of its high end consumption
By the 1970s Soviets could machine precise parts -> produce sophisticated weaponry either:
a) conventionally = essentially manually
b) on imported NC/CNC tools
That's it basically
And "manually" is not nearly as sexy as it sounds. First, supply of machinists that can do precision machining manually is highly inelastic. There's simply no way to train more in the short term perspective. At any given moment their quantity is given and you can't increase it
Retrospectively, the greatest crime of the Western European governments was not cutting the supplies of the metal-cutting, specifically machining equipment, machine parts and expendables into the Russian Federation. Would this happen, the war would not have lasted that long
It's kinda ironic that the war impoverishing Europe is critically dependent upon the Western European (German, Austrian, Swiss, Italian, etc.) supplies to continue
But first and foremost German. Contrary to the popular opinion, the Russian military manufacturing base was not formed by the mainland Chinese import as China was unable to satisfy the demand of the Russian military on the high end equipment
Russia and China are too similar in too many important respects. They share too many chokepoints (though to a different degree). They're kinda the same
If Russia was looking for alternatives to Western Europe, it would look at Japan - the old industrial power. If Japan was politically problematic (as it is), it would look at Taiwan and South Korea, new industrial powers on the very advanced stages of their learning process
The USSR was never "self-sufficient". The initial Stalinist industrialisation was planned and managed by Americans, and based on the import of American + to the lesser extent German equipment.
1920-1930s - US + Germany
WIth the start of the Cold War, America semi-excluded itself from the Soviet market. So it was monopolised by the Western Europe. E.g. in the 1970s Western Europe counted for like 90% of Soviet imports, Western Germany alone counting for 45%
On Twitter, you see not dumb people falling into the Grilling Trap
There are two problems with grilling
1. It gives you cheap dopamine -> very addictive
2. It destroys your brain
In this regard Grilling Trap is just a particular case of the Opposition Trap🧵
Grilling is a social game taking place in the argumentative space. Now the thing about the argumentative space is that it is not identical to the real space. A true zealot of course, believes that his own argumentative space is (more or less) identical to the real space
It's not
There is always a gap between what makes a good argument and what makes a good decision. It may be wider or narrower, depending on circumstances, but it always exists
Making a decision =/= justifying a decision
First is optimised for the real space, second for the argumentative
Soviet war machine was not created autarkically. It was built by the American businesses through the 1920 - early 1930s. Detroit-based Albert Kahn Associates company was a key organiser of the Soviet military industrial buildup
The thing about Soviet military buildup is not that they imported stuff. That's pretty obvious. The thing is that they outsourced the planning. When we are discussing the Stalinist planned economy, we should keep in mind that the planning was done in the US
Albert Kahn Associates was the most important *planner* of Soviet industrialisation. They were not alone though. It was conducted by the joint efforts of the US industrialists
"On the way to automobilize the USSR": Henry Ford signing a contract to built a GAZ automative plant