In purely technological terms, the USSR trumped the USA. Sputnik and Gagarin were followed by a series of other firsts: the first woman in space, first lunar impact, first image of the dark side of the moon, first space rover and first space station were all claimed by the Soviets. But in the popular imagination, the Space Race was won when the USA put a man on the moon in 1969.
Three years later, tensions between the two superpowers briefly eased. And three years after that, in 1975, the world watched as an American Apollo module docket with a Soviet Soyuz last capsule. The two commanders shook hands in space. The Space Race was over.
Surviving propaganda posters are a potent reminder of the stratospheric ambitions of the Soviet regime during the Space Race.
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Russia was also first in destroying its own agricultural base by killing off those who knew how to raise and harvest crops, building doomsday nukes, and destroying free speech, families and the fortunes of their best and brightest.
It was a cardboard cutout potemkin village of continental proportions.
@SteelHands outside of the brutality of the soviet state, another reason for failure is that communism was actually devised as a step that follows capitalism. In a lot of the proposed theory, communism is an evolution of a successful capitalist nation that already has a strong labor base. As an impoverished agrarian state, Russia was actually a poor choice as springboard for the system. It's actually surprising how well they actually did for a while. Better managed it could have continued for a while. As it happened, fears of not making quotas led to lies about how well things were doing at foundational levels and a big part of that collapse was because information was wrong and not properly flowing. China is going to be running into this fairly quickly if they don't change their fear based model of getting results.
@ViciDraco Your arguments are wasted on him he is an unhinged right winger without any coherent thoughts. I triggered him in a comment section and now he comments each of my posts with nonsense.
@Gloomy I don't argue his points to convince him. I post to provide information and context to people reading his posts that have not made up their minds so that they get more viewpoints to consider.
@SteelHands One of the co founders Fred Koch didn't have any issues with building oil refineries for the USSR and being praised a hero in the Soviet Union.
His family has also contributed bankrolling the reactionary right in America ever since.
