A-Class Visual Design

Russian Soviet

Do russian think soviet is more powerful than today's russia?

I think russia is a great counrty, but I do not think russia is doing well now.

- I am not an russian.

While I admire one's patriotism, I feel it is misplaced - or worse: delusional - to believe in untruths that inflate a countries' perceived strengths.

The Soviet Union was a paper tiger - and the Politburo never knew it. Even the USA couldn't quite believe it, and they had the evidence in their hands for decades. Both read the fitness reports the regional districts sent to their masters in the Politburo, and both believed them. Only when a Western intelligence agency got someone in "on the ground" did they see some of the reality - and the magnitude of the difference between the agents' reports and the signals intelligence was so huge, the Western agencies couldn't believe the agents. Only after the Curtain came down did the real truth emerge: the fitness reports were all lies - they had been lying to Moscow for decades. Production quotas, efficiency levels, quality assurance, training levels, maintenance reports, equipment inventories, crop reports - all were lies. "So long as they continue to pretend to pay us, we will continue to pretend to work." was a popular saying in the old soviet union - and the attitude persists to the present day.

Military: training??? Conscripts serve for only two years - and they are considered worthless for the 1st year. Their basic training is less training and more institutionalized hazing, brutal enough that dozens of deaths are attributed to it each year. The equipment has always had serious quality control problems - but maintenance is simply awful: most of Russia's air force and navy is now little more than heaps of rust. They never did have anything resembling career enlisted military, so the senior enlisted men - the non-commissioned officers and warrant officers that make up the training/experience backbone of Western militaries - never did exist.

The proof was in the reaction to senior soviet military chiefs, after watching Operation Desert Storm. A modern army trained as well as any in the USSR, with the best of soviet equipment, and over six months to prepare for the attack. They experienced over one hundred thousand casualties, lost over a thousand fighting vehicles, and lost the war - in 4 days. 190 Coalition troops were killed by Iraqi combatants, the rest of the 379 coalition deaths being from friendly fire or accidents. I was told that the soviet military chiefs reactions were: "Bozhe moi - that could have been US!!!"

A retired senior soviet naval officer told me something everyone in the soviet fleet knew without a doubt (although no one in "headquarters" would admit it): the day the soviet government ordered them to war with NATO - was the the day they would ALL die. They knew with absolute certainty that it would be a slaughter - all surface vessels would be destroyed the first day or two. The submarines would last a little longer, but against USA/UK ASW forces they had no chance either. The entire Russian navy would be hard put to stand up to a single American aircraft carrier battle group .... let alone all ten of them.

The statement that Russia has as much cash as the USA has deficit requires me to ask for the speaker's latest drug test, for that statement is most certainly total nonsense - by at least 3 orders of magnitude. Russian GDP was US$ 2.271 trillion last year - but that was only 7th in the world. USA GDP was US$ 14.440 trillion, and the entire European Union combined exceeded the USA by half a trillion. China, Japan, India, and Germany all exceeded Russia's GDP. Countries that came close to Russia's GDP include the UK, France, Italy, Spain, and South Korea - all not much bigger than metropolitan Moscow. Russia's cash reserves are almost totally spoken for as collateral for foreign debt - Russia's government is very close to a fiscal crisis of its own.

Graft and corruption are hemorrhaging serious money from all business endeavors in Russia - both public and private. The corruption in the former soviet union is crippling all attempts to convert Russia to a capitalistic economy. The level of graft is beyond the comprehension of any Western person - it rivals the total GDP of most countries on Earth!

To this day Russia is several months behind in paying most of their state employees - what kind of productivity can they expect from those workers???

ΜΙ-26Τ ΗΑLO SOVIET/RUSSIAN HELICOPTER

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