[coldtea]

>Maybe defense spending is what kept communism and the Soviet Union from setting progress back a hundred years.

When they gave up the ghost they weren't that behind. And when they started operations back in 1917, they were vastly behind the US. Plus they got to space (and tons of other space related things) first.

So there's that...

Not to mention the plethora of government funded stuff we take for granted in the West as well -- the internet (ARPA) and the web (CERN) for starters...

(And most of early computing, also heavily subsidized)

[crusso]

The USSR achieved some narrow technical/space/military successes by focusing themselves on those few things and utterly subjugating and impoverishing the rest of their society. And in the end, they couldn't even keep that up. They burned out their economy and produced conditions that could easily have resulted in a civil war there.

There's a reason the USSR felt the need to construct Potemkin villages.