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Notes -
This is a real shower thought, but doesn’t the fact that the USSR was rival superpower to America prove without a doubt that communism actually does work? In fact, it works really well?
Thinking about it, it makes no sense to ever retort “well did it work for the USSR?” when someone brings up the prospect of communism. It worked so well that the communist USSR rivaled America and launched the first satellite. If it didn’t work well, the USSR could never have been a competitor to America. One could even argue that America cultural capital is what really led to American dominance later on, which is independent of political system and relies on America’s unique position as cultural crossroads, but that is beside the question.
So, everybody knows about Lend-Lease (and perhaps exaggerates the scale of it). But I think not enough people know about the aid that the US gave to the USSR before the war. First was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Relief_Administration, run by Herbert Hoover, which gave an enormous amount of aid to the USSR so fight Typhus and famine. Alternative history is tricky, but it's easy to imagine how the USSR might have collapsed right away if not for that aid.
After that came a ton of international trade deals, like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtorg_Trading_Corporation (exporting resources, importing machinery and technology) and Henry Ford building the GAZ automotive plant: https://autos.yahoo.com/blogs/motoramic/may-31-henry-ford-cuts-deal-ussr-changes-125237773.html . So sure, it can "work" provided that it has an enormous amount of help from more advanced countries, and can get that help either from propaganda or selling natural resouces.
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