Why is Poland weaker than Russia?

It also depends on how exactly calculate GDP per capita. Western countries often have overinflated estimations regarding their service sector output. Real goods production output (which includes manufacturing, agriculture and natural resource extraction) of Russia is just 1/3 lower that of Italy per capita according to some estimations. According to some info manufacturing comprises over 36% of Russian economy and just 24% that of Italy. Total - 46 bln. in Russia and 38 bln. in Italy.

knoema.com/atlas/topics/Economy/Short-term-indicators/Industrial-production
Another thing is that income distribution over entire population curve is much flatter in Italy than in Russia and hence a drastic social problems of Russia.

Well, Poland have survived Teuton Knights, Turks, Swedes, Russians, Bolsheviks, Germans, Bolsheviks again and it is now surviving the EU neo-marxism :-)


I like regular Russians but the same cannot be said about homo sovieticus. Russians should go back to their roots, religion and traditions instead of constantly remembering the USSR "glory". There was nothing great about it.

Rich,I am old enough to remember the propaganda from Radio Moscow and although RT are much slicker in their presentation,it is still the same propaganda......don't be blinded by their lies.

I will take RT over CNN, MSNBC, ABC, and CBS every single moment.
The US press wh*res lie always. By commission, by omission, by deliberate choice of terms and words. My contempt for them is total because they don't have to do it. They are now nothing else than Democrats' Pravda, except that Pravda editors were morally on higher ground - they had to serve the Communist party or risk everything, including their lives. The American liars do it because they are in bed with the America's enemies - from Pelosi down to the last black thug - and they love it.

He wont be blinded by their lies Milo - RT are just a short walk down the corridor from his desk and it his dream to get promoted there ( admittedly RT have much nicer offices with a new coffee machine and a genuine Korean microwave)

Stalin's evil acts aside, the USSR at its peak vs Russia hundred years before .....Not even close.

Just a couple of little factoids: it was the USSR and Gagarin, not the US and some transgender weirdo. It was the USSR who exploded the mother of all bombs, the 100 megaton nuke. It is Russia now playing Uber for the US on the way to that space lab up there.

They even elect our presidents, according to the Dems.

To be honest, Lenin wasn't any better than Stalin. He may not have killed as many people as Stalin but his ideas and administrative decisions lead to the deaths of millions. He started the Red Terror. Stalinism was only a logical extension of Leninism.

I imagine that if Lenin didn't die on syphilis in 1924 and ruled a little longer he would match Stalin's "achievements".

@Rich, the fact that Gagarin flew to space didn't improved lives of common Russians who lived in the same state of misery as 100 years ago. And millions of them who ended up in Gulags were even worse off.

In the 80's military spending of the USSR has reached 25% of their GDP which eventually lead to economic collapse. People were starving yet they had thousands of tanks and howitzers to be proud of. Communism had never ever worked in any country.

I think common people may not know exactly what caused USSR economy collapse in 1990. Were it Gorbachev' economic policies, military expenditures or something else... One of Gorbachev's reforms was permission of private co-ops in 1988. I think may be it wasn't the bad idea if introduced much earlier and in more transparent way. But in 1988 it was too late possibly... They would need to do it in 1960-s, the latest.

The USSR bankrupted itself when it tried to keep up with the American military budget.

But today Russia still poses the largest nuclear arsenal in the World (just officially!), the largest Navy (by total amount of vessels), a larger amount of armored vehicles than US, and even trying to develop new kind of weapons (like hypersonic weapon or new tanks like "Armada"). And doesn't go bankrupt just because of that. Do you think Russia is overall in better shape on total than it was in 1980? And now Russia is much smaller than USSR. So, I afraid your theory could be exaggerated.

You mean in 1940-th?

I am never going to defend communism the USSR-style. But I like practicing yeah-but-ism using the modern, peaceful, and democratic West as a point of reference.

A country that proudly allowed over 50 million abortions, some up to the day of natural birth, and deliberately, out of greed, feeds another communist monstrosity, Communist China, as we speak, has no moral right to retroactively pass judgement on the USSR, the dearest friend of the American intellectuals way past when it was necessary to win the war.

All that aside, their technological achievements were amazing considering the starting point in 1945.

Rich, pleeeaaase. Everything what Soviets developed right after WW2 was based either on German science or Western technology stolen by Stalin`s spies. Either you don`t know basic facts or ......

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_space_program

Of course I know this. They took everything with them of any value after 1945 as they should, including Germans with brains. Scientists can design and advise, but it takes a million people and tons of money to make things happen. Claims that without the German experience both the US and the USSR would not be successful are baseless. The Germans merely made things happen sooner.

Quite interesting that the first UN-manned artificial device that successfully landed on Moon was a Soviet one. It contained a TV translator with video camera that translated video of Moon surface on Earth. Either Soviets were the first to send an unmanned spaceship to fly around Moon. Yet Americans were the first to send a human to Moon. How that's happened? Mystery... I read Soviet engineers believed it is to dangerous to send a man on Moon in a regular space suits because of radiation. They designed a space suit made of thick Lead and even Lead shields for the astronauts. Yet Americans succeeded to spend many hours on Moon without any special protection and perfectly survived. Neither their photographic films suffered from radiation exposure, what is strange...

You are going where few dare.
Did you see that photo of the US flag with no shadow?
On the other hand, with the thousands on the program, how do you keep that hoax alive till now?

Here is interview with Alexei Leonov - a first man who visited the outer space (from Soviet space ship).

Alexei Leonov: "At the 500 km above Earth orbit where I exited in the outer space radiation is typically 500 microroentgens, what is deadly to a human. Fortunately Sun wasn't active and radiation was only at 400 microroentgens when I did it. In the Lead-containing space suite that I used movements were constrained and I stuck in the manhole on my way back to the ship".

portal-kultura.ru/articles/person/157143-aleksey-leonov-v-zhizni-bylo-strashnee/

And here mission on Moon according to Americans (turn sound on):
youtube.com/watch?v=8V9quPcNWZE

Of course it is. Modern Russia may not be fully capitalist but it's not communist either. And Russia spend "only" 4.5-5% of its GDP on military as compared to 25% in the 80's.


True. Abortion should be called by its real name: a murder of an innocent human being.


After WWII they had an aid in form of skilled German engineers and their inventions and prototypes. The US has also benefited from it, but USSR more since their starting point was much lower.

Sometimes I have strong suspicion that some of the most important technological "achievements" of the late 20 - early 21 centuries could be a complete mystification. For example those related to micro/nanoelectronics or genetic engineering.

Don't forget that gift from Satan himself and his wife, Satana - smartphone with Facebook. No invention was ever so successful in turning fairly normal people into moronic zombies.

Why not?

No country today is. They are all crony capitalist.

US military budget in 1945 comprised 41% of their GDP. Yet they didn't collapse, but Japan did.

Yeah,but have you seen the state of that prehistoric fleet?????
No threat to anyone.

How many submarines, B-52's and aircraft carriers did Vietcong have? And they won. Now, we are about to lose to Taliban. Yeah, that Taliban without Cobras, cruise missiles, and toilet paper.

I agree. Miloslaw's comments about Russia's impotence, as supposedly demonstrated in Afghanistan and Chechnya, are laughable.

As an illustration of the many levels of "wrong" in Miloslaw's comment - the Russians were not fighting "drunk Chechens", but rather radical Salafists that were trained in specialist camps in the Middle East, and who would never touch a glass of alcohol. Many of the Chechen insurgents had experience serving in the Soviet Army, while their leadership consisted of former Special Forces operators and an actual soviet general. Regardless, once Russia got serious about the insurgency it handled it within 6 months, at the end of which the UN declared Grozny the most destroyed city in Europe since the fire bombing of Dresden during WW2.

As regards Afghanistan, the ISAF currently relies primarily on military infrastructure erected during the soviet occupation - which by any measure was a more successful occupation than the current one lasting from Oct. 2001 (1 month after the twin tower attacks). When in 1988 the Soviets abanadoned the Afghan government they installed, it managed to defend itself against the Taliban until 1995. When Trump pulls out forces from Afghanistan this year, it's a question whether Ashraf Ghani's government can survive even 6 months without American help.

Long story short - using Afghanistan and Chechnya as examples of Russia's conventional military impotence is foolish.

Has anybody already mentioned what Bismarck said? Russia is never as strong or as weak as it looks.

....and he was so right!

Yes, another German politician learnt it by his own sad example.. :)

Hitler stupidly waged a two-front war, and merrily ignoring his advisors, refused to quit while he was ahead on the Western Front, boldly defying the Russian winter as though he'd never even studied Napoleon's failure of taking on the Russian Bear!