[Behind Liberal Lines]

You might enjoy the comments making excuses for the Soviet Union from someone from Ithaca about 3/4 of the way down in the article.

I don't know if "enjoy" is the correct word, but I am certainly not surprised:

Ithaca, N.Y.: In the early 20th century, the U.S. was fairly industrial, whereas Russia was basically an undeveloped peasant society. Then, within a single generation, Russia industrialized and modernized so fast that by mid-century it had become a world power. Ultimately, its economy collapsed for various reasons. Western orthodoxy says that the Soviet Union failed because it couldn't keep up economically with the US. But isn't that a ridiculous comparison to make given that in 1910, Russia was basically 3rd-world, and the US was more or less 1st-world? Why don't people compare Russian economic development through the 20th century with a country like Brazil, which had comparable resources and potential at the time?

Ithaca is the City of Evil.

[John Valentine]

For me "enjoy" works. I always enjoy seeing stupidity on ostentatious display, as here.

Actually, in the early 20th century Russia was well on its way to industrialization. It is a western myth that this was an "undeveloped peasant society", although I'm quite sure it had it's share of uneducated ignoramuses, just as we so obviously do today.

Russia had a very well developed system of railroads, and was hugely agriculturally productive. Russia didn't manage to recover pre-revolution agricultural production until 1953. That's a far more accurate view of the wonders of Communism than any mythic Stalinist romanticism about the soviet worker's paradise.

To this typical denizen of the deep thinhker outpost in Ithaca, New York, I'd recomment "Utopia in Power", by Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich.

[weegee]

I doubt that the "US" was 1st world in 1910. 1909 saw the SF Earthquake (and before that the port town of Galveston Texas wiped out in a flood).

We did have an "industrial" revolution but I doubt that it was widespread across the regions.

Consider too that eastern Europe had civilization 1,000 years old.

America was barely 300 years "settled" (and much less for the western regions).