Curiosities

Was the Soviet Union doomed to fail?

By posted at 12:00 pm on June 30, 2012 1

Francis Spufford’s fictionalized book Red Plenty looks to the 1950s-1960s “cybernetics” initiative to answer one of the main questions about the USSR: “Could the Soviet project to build communism have succeeded, or was it doomed to failure from the start?” In his review for The Hoover Institution, Marshall Poe contends the latter.

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One Response to “Was the Soviet Union doomed to fail?”

  1. Bat of Moon
    at 6:42 pm on June 30, 2012

    I’m not a Hoover Institution dude, but yeah, the Soviet project was essentially a totalitarian project, from Lenin on. Terror and mass death on the top end and incompetence and decay at the bottom were inevitable. When you decided people are good or bad depending on the groups they supposedly belong to, you don’t get a system that can succeed in making life better.

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