[balance_factor]

This is the sort of thing that led to the decline of the Soviet economy, which had been doing very well up until that point. People nowadays usually remember the creaking Soviet economy of the late 1980s, but from the late 1920s to Stalin's death, the Soviet economy grew by leaps and bounds. While the US was in a depression, Russia was building massive steel plants in Magnitogorsk. In fact Russia didn't even have enough manpower to do it, so imported American and European labor, and contracted to American and European firms.

The aim was to build up the means of production (capital, in western parlance) to western levels.

However when Stalin died, and the revolutionaries of 1905 and 1917 died and faded away, the second generation of Khrushchev's and the like slowed down the infrastructure capital spending and started increasing consumer production and freebies like this. A number of other things happened as well around this time, but all in the same direction - capital spending went lower, sops to the populace started, and a long economic, and then political decline set in. This sop was part of that. Ultimately, the money to keep up the park came out of capital spending, leading to the decline of the USSR on some level.

[AnimalMuppet]

But that was the problem with the USSR, wasn't it? Gorbachev said (quoting from memory from maybe two decades ago) that the USSR could produce a military that could go toe to toe with the US, but they couldn't produce toothpaste for their people. And his reforms started when he said, what's wrong here?

The Soviet command economy wasn't as productive as the US's economy, and it never would have been. And if you think that all that production should have gone to the military forever, and never have gone to making people's lives a little less drab, then I would ask: Why?

[cmrdporcupine]

They spent their resources on the military because the whole capitalist world wanted to crush them. If they hadn't armed themselves to the teeth the western armies would have rolled right through after the end of WWII and later.

[nradov]

I'm sure the people in Eastern Europe who were conquered and enslaved by the Soviets wished that the Allies had kept rolling east. But by 1945 the western armies were tired of fighting and had no desire for another brutal war of attrition.

[kunimu]

>I'm sure the people in Eastern Europe who were conquered and enslaved by the Soviets wished that the Allies had kept rolling east.

Do you have a citation that this was the general feeling in those countries, or only among those people mistreated by the Soviets?

[trynumber9]

The Soviet army seriously outnumbered the west for the vast majority of the cold war. Especially in 1945, when they had something like 550 divisions compared to 100 US divisions.

The real straw that broke the camel's back was their dispute with China.

[unmole]

Sheer numbers don't mean as much in the face of vastly superior weaponry. If the Soviets didn't keep pace with Western advances, they would be at a serious disadvantage.

[trynumber9]

Of course, but in many cases (BMP, T-64, SA-2, AT-3, R-7) they were ahead of the west. They built a technically advanced and massive army. Quantity was something the U.S. didn't consider necessary after the Vietnam War. At that point, the Soviets could've done the same. Except that a third of their army was deployed along their border with communist China and later they had a small problem in Afghanistan.

[Spooky23]

The Soviets were like a big corporation. People do what the big guy says. If he’s right, he’s a genius. If he’s wrong, you’re fired.

[kunimu]

This is precisely where the criticism that the USSR was "state capitalist" came from; it operated as a corporation owning its own means of production, not a dictatorship of the proletariat. "All power to the soviets" faded rather quickly even under Lenin.

[Grue3]

Like the article says, even in capitalist countries with lively economy, public parks are free to enter. And this doesn't even have the scale to affect the economy in any way, as compared with stuff like free healthcare. The Soviet economy survived on unpaid (slave) labor, when that became largely frowned upon in the civilised world, the decline was inevitable.

[mercer]

Sounds like they would've benefitted from a microservices approach!