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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1731 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 7, 2026

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I'd like to hear that tangent. Was Russia's leadership class always better or is just relatively better in the present, due to the culture wars in the West?

I agree with @DradisPing that the Communists were terrible (although this didn't necessarily have anything to do with their talent pool; Soviet engineers were very innovative). I have an earlier comment where I compare Russia to other countries, and it seems fairly clear to me that despite being dealt a bad hand (despairing population, low TFR) Russia has a low debt-to-GDP ratio, fairly high GDP PPP per capita, and fewer drug deaths (per capita) than the US - all the sorts of managerial items that suggest, to me, fairly good governance.

Another way of looking at it is that Russia's GDP PPP is above (or roughly on par with) Estonia and Latvia (but behind Poland and Lithuania) even though it has less debt than those countries! And the Baltics and Poland have been in the EU for twenty years!

I think this framing is overly reductive and simplistic, but to me it strikes me the same way it would if you had two siblings, one of whom moved into the city, got their bachelor's, and enjoyed all that market access had to offer, and the other stayed in their small hometown. If you checked back in in 20 years and you found that one of them hadn't paid off their (substantial) student loans despite working a well-paying job in the big city while the other's only substantial debt was a mortgage, and they both had a house and a car and a TV, you'd have to conclude the second brother was better at managing his money. If the second brother had managed to accomplish that despite crippling depression and a year in jail for a DUI you'd be more impressed by his self-management, not less.

Caveat that the war may change all of this in the long term.

Getting into devastating wars is part of Russia's time-honored history, they do get a bit wrecked but always end up surviving, though the elites may get shuffled up. The wars may even be a source of eugenic pressure keeping the IQ high, as the generally low IQ front line chaff is killed off.

Not always better. Despite always having ardent defenders on the left, the communists were just terrible.

Basically in the post communist era it's been clear that Russia was much poorer than it should have been. So a lot of bright minds went into government to improve things.

In the West improving things inevitably involves fighting tooth and nail with entrenched powers.

I post-Soviet Russia smart people can dedicate their lives to looking for easy wins.

The big problem that the West has is that their elite has been focussed on how to get rich in the global economy. That doesn't require them to improve things in their actual countries at all, and in some cases making them worse will be more personally profitable.

But are you correcting for the fact that Tsarist Russia was basically a feudal backwater? It’s not like the communists inherited a shiny industrial state and then drove it i to the ground. They’re the only reason the industrial state exists at all.

So historians tend to have either a pro-Soviet or anti-Russian bias. If you start looking into the numbers Russia was well behind the great powers but industrializing.

At the dawn of WW1 Russia had more km of railway than anyone except the US. Note that sources split the UK and British India, so you can easily argue that the UK was ahead. Obviously that's spread over a massive territory, but it's still something. The Trans-Siberian Railway was pre-communist.

During WW1 the Russian Empire was making it's own artillery, rifles, and armoured cars.

Sure it was underdeveloped, but it was a major oil producer during the age of oil. A more moderate government would have been able to industrialize a bit more slowly but with far fewer corpses.

The big problem that the West has is that their elite has been focussed on how to get rich in the global economy.

That’s been true since Columbus; clearly it can coexist with a desire for local improvements. Conversely, local industry does not automatically trickle down to local quality of life. For every urban core there were a dozen company-operated mill and mining towns operating on the margin.

On the other end, if you look at the top American companies or billionaires, they all sell stuff to Westerners. After all, we have the most money. If those purchases mean anything at all, we’ve been getting something out of this massive, interconnected mess. Clothing, food, electronics—none of those markets look the same under an autarkic model. The real benefits came from extending specialization of labor.

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