No, my point was that it was not a total failure by reasoning of it being different from Maoist China or Cambodia, as you pointed out. Unlike these countries the USSR had enough capital to keep the lights on despite losing more than 20 million people in World War II and the purges/famines, and for being a planned economy in a time before digital computing they were pretty resourceful and were able to accomplish quite a lot in terms of economic and scientific development. It was unquestionably a disaster, but it was a worthwhile attempt that unquestionably could have gotten further given a different postwar political landscape, and I think it’s a loss for humanity that we didn’t get to see some of the historical alternatives that could have permitted. The failure, really, was that the violent restructuring of the twentieth century was coalesced into a liberal order that required and was capable of undercutting mass politics the world over to enforce its own terms of geopolitics.

Addressing the comparison to Japan, the two are incomparable: Japan got aid money thrown at them to rebuild and then enjoyed a massive boost as the staging ground for the Korean War, all in a homogenous society in an area the size of a postage stamp with nary a competitor in the region, while the USSR had to recover behind the iron curtain with the same Stalinist regime it was stuck with before. (It’s worth noting that the US was able to do a lot with Japan because their leadership had lost. We came in and immediately enacted massive land reforms, which we turned around and denounced as soon as Cuba tried to do it in their own country because it meant American companies would have to cede land to the public.)

It took a feudal backwater through industrialization and into space. It did the opposite of impoverishing the nation, and it’s a shame it was the disaster it ended up being.

Because what else do they have to keep the funding coming?

Why will the best and brightest want to move there, and why would world support persist? Because they have silly accents and cute phone booths? People put up with the worst aspects of living in the UK because there’s opportunity and a cosmopolitan outlook, and both of those are drying up as we speak.