this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
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If you twiddle them, you'll see exactly what the previous commenter is talking about. For example, try comparing socialist countries like Russia and Cuba to other countries of a similar level of development, like any random country in the Third World, or Africa, Asia, or South America that didn't use imperialism in the 1800's, to boost its development.
You'll see a 15-25 year difference in life expectancy during that time. And that's without causing the awful conditions in the rest of the world that Europe and the US did by boosting their development through slavery, war, imperialism, and colonialism.
Russia started out in a terrible position (with no small thanks to the late abolishment of serfdom). But it isn't particularly surprising that it improved when or as much as it did with the arrival of new technology, urbanisation trends, better sanitation and health care (especially pre-natal care), and of course its location. The world was changing fast, and russia was well primed to change with it.
I think that the fact that the capitalist world achieved the rapid 20th century development from the plundering of the global south, while the USSR managed comparable growth as they lost 27 million people in the fight against fascism (and were later forced to spend ridiculous amounts of resources developing weapons to maintain MAD against the US) should also count for something. Capitalist development isn't very impressive in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile (despite the Allende admin), Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, etc. Even with some jumps in life expectancy and literacy rates, uneven capitalist development is undeniable and a much graver problem than its analogue in the former second world.
Recovering from WW2 losses was indeed a challenge for many soviet bloc countries. My suspicion is that without the cold war, W.Europe would also have recovered much slower as US investment and interest could have taken quite a different form.
Latin America is a different beast, worthy of its own discussion separate to this one.