> These days, the same scenes are dominated by Chinese and Indian kids. But China and India have large populations — the Russians were punching way about their weight, demographically speaking.
> Well, with the Soviets it all went in the opposite direction: they had a smaller population, a worse starting industrial base, a lower GDP, and a vastly less efficient economic system. How, then, did they maintain military and technological parity1 with the United States for so long?
The truth is, the Soviet bloc consistently made lower quality stuff or had much poorer training.
There's are a persistent set of myths that both the Soviets and the western arms manufacturers like to perpetuate.
The t-34 tank was the greatest tank ever (sometimes had 10:1 losses offset by 14:1 manufacturing)
The ak-47 is the best due to is reliability (poor tolerances made it both reliable and astoundingly inaccurate)
Soviet/russian tanks have not come out on top in any conflict for the past 50 years. On the battlefields of Ukraine, the t72 has been infamous for its design flaws wherein even mild penetration to the gun autoloader housed in the turret ring often leads to catastrophic explosions instantly killing all the crew inside.
In Israel's fights against Syria, syrian Soviet tanks had a critical design flaw wherein they were not able to shoot downward at an angle, effectively making them sitting ducks.
The last time Soviet jets had parity with the west was when both sides were copying the same German jet fighter designs appropriated from Focke-wulf at the end of world War 2.
Repeatedly in actual combat situations, the soviet equipment fares poorly... In Israel, Iraq, and Ukraine. Perhaps the only conflicts Soviet equipment has been used effectively is when Iraq deployed its mostly Soviet weapons against Irans mostly American weapons and even that's arguable considering the United States backed Saddam (and later obliterated his army with more modern western technology)
I don’t think the napoleonic wars are a very good comparison as they happened 100 years before the Russian revolution. You do see some parallels to later wars – the Russians being technologically inferior, or getting Poland after a war, for example. If you look at overall deaths, the French side suffered half as many as their opposition, and more Russians died than people from any other country opposing Napoleon. This still ended up being much less extreme than in WWII where I guess the one sentence summary is that, in Europe, most belligerents were spending enormous amounts of money on weapons and technology whereas the Soviet Union suffered enormous military and civilian casualties to achieve victory.
You need to look at the casualty figures from the actual battles, not the attrition figures from Napoleon's march back to French allied territory. Russian soldiers under Russian (very often not ethnic russian) generals suffered staggering losses.
But the Russian Empire in 19th century is not the Soviet empire in the 20th century. This topic is about Soviet math and engineering, not 19th century Russia
> These days, the same scenes are dominated by Chinese and Indian kids. But China and India have large populations — the Russians were punching way about their weight, demographically speaking.