[testdelacc1]

Here’s hoping they feel the war in Moscow and St Petersburg this year. A bit of rationing wouldn’t hurt them.

More than the war, they’ll feel the peace. More than 100% of the economic growth of the last few years has gone into war production, meaning the civilian economy has shrunk. When the weapons factories are scaled back the economy is going to hurt something fierce. Even Muscovites will notice.

This is why Putin can’t stop fighting. When the fighting stops Russia will face a reckoning. Better to postpone that day hoping that Europe runs out of steam.

[braincat31415]

ww2 history begs to differ. The USSR has seen massive economic growth in 1946-1950s.

[simonh]

That was a very different situation. The USSR was still catching up in industrialisation, and despite its huge losses still had vast reserves of labour in the countryside to tap. It was much more like the process of industrialisation in China that’s seen huge growth there over the last generation. Russia has already industrialised so it doesn’t have a catch-up growth opportunity in the same way. They are much more labour and resource constrained these days.

[KPGv2]

The USSR's (well, Russia's) growth had begun before WW2, and it was in response to pre-WW1 Russian being severely underdeveloped. There was a ton of room for growth that started before WWII, and it continued unabated.

Basically, Russia up to WW2 had economic growth because it was "catching up" to the West. Industrialization was one place. Literacy was another. There was a huge effort to improve literacy after the Tsar was killed.

Finally, because the Nazis occupied Ukraine during WW2, Russia/the USSR had to develop other places during WW2 just to feed its people, which accelerated growth post-war.

These conditions do not exist today, I don't think. But this isn't my area of expertise. I just know that Russia was a feudalistic shithole until the Tsar was overthrown, and then they worked hard to turn the serfs into educated and literate people, right as they were forced by invasion to economically develop previously overlooked lands.

If you want a very pro-1% take on this, check out Anna Karenina. The "good guy" main character of the novel is a large landowner with a lot of serfs (read: slaves) whom he visits and instructs, based on latest science, how to farm better.

Same thing happened in Japan about a generation or two earlier. There's ar eason tiny, flyover Japan beat Russia in the Russo-Japanese war. Russia was totally backwards, even by "barely industrialized Japan" standards.