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by ivan_gammel 1260 days ago
Yes and no, it’s more complicated than that. SU style welfare state wasn’t really unsustainable economically — in fact it was rather cheap, it collapsed from different reasons (too much spending on military industrial complex and heavy industry at cost of everything else, no market feedback loop despite having quasi-market relationships between consumers and producers). Basically their economic models at strategic level had wrong KPIs, but incentive system for middle management and workers was ok. In late USSR it wasn’t really a slave labor.