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The significance is even greater than many leftists who live in the 21st century realize:
The Soviet Union was the ONLY adversary that the United States has ever been afraid of.
Yes, you heard it right. Not even the threat of China today reaches anywhere near the fear that the US had against the Soviet system. I’ll get into that in a moment.
It would be a grave mistake to see the 70-year long epic struggle between the US and the Soviet Union as nothing more than two superpowers vying for global domination. Such thought would be a great disservice to the significance of the 20th century Cold War: an ideological battle for the future of humanity.
Many people go crazy about China’s amazing economic transformation, but understand that what China has managed to overtake the US, whether it is infrastructure, shipbuilding, automation and robotics, cars, advanced electronics etc. all of that had already happened before with Japan more than 40 years ago.
And the rise of China since the reform and opening up through its integration into the global free trade market by producing cheap exports through suppression of domestic wages and demand makes perfect sense for countries/economies that were able to take advantage of industrial policies and the geopolitical circumstances of the time in the decades even before China (e.g. Japan, Germany, Taiwan, South Korea etc.)
What made the Soviet Union truly unique and a fearsome adversary to global capitalism was not its technological advances, rapid industrialization, or winning the space race, BUT that it managed to achieve all that in defiance of the Western economic theory!
A true socialist state where workers were treated with dignity and respect.
A country that is not drawn on nationalist lines but on a supranational identity committing to an ideology that brings together people from all over the world, regardless of nationality, ethnicity and culture.
A society without the oppression of an exploitative and parasitic capitalist class.
A system once thought impossible to achieve progress by capitalist propaganda. No, you see, capitalism is the fastest way to build a nation, while socialism only ends up bringing poverty to all!
The Soviet Union smashed all the capitalist propaganda into pieces.
It is unfortunate but I have to say this: unlike China today, the Soviet workers enjoyed the full welfare and protection of their rights as workers, did not have to worry about being unemployed, did not have to live paycheck to paycheck, did not have to pay mortgage, received free education and healthcare of the highest quality, enjoyed labor rights including working hours comparable to those of the “wealthier” social democratic Western European working class, and most impressive of all, the Soviet government continued to pay out full pension and free healthcare throughout the entire Great Patriotic War (WWII) even when unthinkable deaths and destructions were happening all around the country and the world.
I know it is hard for people who live in the 21st century to understand, but know that there was a time when workers committed their energy and time not to work to survive, but to build a new society that would benefit all of humanity.
I strongly recommend reading Ostrovsky’s semi-autobiographical novel How the Steel Was Tempered (1930s) to get a glimpse of what I wrote above meant:
Man's dearest possession is life.
It is given to him but once, and he must live it so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past;
so live that, dying, he might say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world──the fight for the Liberation of Mankind
Seriously, read the novel which was based on the author’s own lived experience. It is impossible to grasp what happened in the minds of the Soviet people with a perspective of the 21st century world.
This is not the say that the Soviet Union did not have its flaws, but that its existence served as a beacon for a different kind of future for many people living in the post-war reconstruction era. That brief period of hopefulness has never been replicated, nor has its conditions emerged again (so far), since the fall of the Soviet Union. It is an entirely different kind of future that we had lost.
