I've been doing a lot of research for a term paper I'm writing on the Cold War, and one thing that's been coming up at lot is how Russia emerged from the Second World War as a leading power that was contending with the US. How is this the case? From what I know of WW2 Russia it was a shitshow: Russian infrastructure was awful (barely had functional roads and stuff), the Russian army was poor and ill equipped (soldiers were made to share rifles), and generally Russian people seemed to be poor. How is it that Russia came out of the war as a dominant power when nations like Great Britain, which had been globally dominant and had a vast prestigious empire, became middling powers?
Sorry if this is badly worded and informal by the way, I'm really tired right now and have been working all day :(
Some of your assumptions are incorrect. The Russian military was not a "shit show" during WW2 - the 'sharing rifles' thing you mentioned comes from WW1. It's true Russian infrastructure was poor compared to Germany's, but it's an exaggeration to claim the whole country barely had functional roads. And again, while it's true that Russian people were poor, it's possible to exaggerate this - and the USSR was so large that it could achieve a very respectable GDP even with a comparatively low average income.
It sounds like you may be making the mistake of viewing the USSR from the perspective of German invaders. They often tended to exaggerate the squalor and poverty of Russian people, for a bunch of reasons - partly they were comparing them to Germany, one of the wealthiest societies in the world, partly they'd been exposed to a lot of propaganda about the USSR being a barbaric hellhole, and partly they themselves had done a lot to devastate Russia.
I don't want to be accused of creating a countermyth - obviously Russia had serious economic and infrastructure problems during WW2, and still had them afterwards. Russia's status as a postwar superpower was based largely on their massive military power, which very much was in evidence during WW2.