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Poland's aid to Ukraine if Russia invades - part 26 [434]
Germans did amazing work building up Russian non-existent research structures
America got the lion's share of Nazi scientists. Werner Von Braun alone, was worth his weight in gold. He built the American space program.
They got nearly all the nuclear physicists. We got two dudes that knew isotope separation and gas diffusion, while the Americans got the other 80% of what it takes to make an atom bomb.
The Americans got access to all of Germany's chemical geniuses. To Japan's biologists (who collected that data by killing tens of thousands of Chinese).
Quite strange to accuse the USSR of benefiting from Nazi technology, when it was the "Free World" that got the majority of the dividends.
But Russia? They always had so much of everything....the need to develop should never have been as urgent
Russia's old school historians - like Gumilev, Solzhenitsyn, and Klyuchevsky have argued that what explains Russia's backwardness is geography and history.
Endless open plains, and no natural borders left Russia constantly exposed to invasions. Because of this... Russia could never afford weak central power or decentralized feudalism like in Western Europe. But it was precisely decentralized feudalism which sowed the seeds of a future bourgeoisie and a working class.
So these historians, then see Russia as a "fortress civilization", always centralizing, militant, and constantly paranoid.
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Modern Russian reformers, like Gaidar and Mau, subscribed more to your view. That Russia suffers from a "Dutch Disease" on steroids.
That is, that Russia's wealth in land and raw materials removed the incentive for modernization and innovation. The economy and state became addicted to resource rents (first serf labor and land, later oil and gas).
The elite, living off extraction rather than production, had little interest in legal or civic development. As Gaidar put it: "Russia learned to live by distributing resource rents, not creating value."
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Finally we have neo-conservative (or Eurasianists
as they call themselves) historians now, like Dugin and Panarin.
To these guys - nothing is wrong with Russia.
They reject the premise of backwardness itself. They think we have our own unique civilization, based on communitarianism and autocracy, as opposed to the West's decadent individualism and commercialism.
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As many Russians as there are, so many opinions there are about why we are living like we live.
