A little background; I am still in high school and am in US history. Last year I took global history and we did talk about how the USSR came to be and the Cold War. But we did not talk about how after World War 2 they became a dominant superpower. We talked about how the US came to be a superpower. I'm just curious on how after World War 2 they had one of the best economies in the world and 40 years later the same economic system caused them to collapse.
Well one reason was the destruction and occupation of their main competitor, Germany. Another factor was their formation of a socioeconomic bloc of Eastern Europe, the Warsaw Pact, which developed from the Red Army's occupation of the area. Further, the state's development of industries throughout the 1920s and 30s under the New Economic Plan helped spur their economy towards industrialization, by loosening the iron grip of top-down economics to a certain degree. However, this was after a huge crisis of starvation that resulted from state mismanagement of agriculture. Industrial development also steadily increased throughout the war despite massive destruction, because it was necessary to manufacture armaments for the war. The industrialization the USSR was a long process, and was well underway before 1945. Russia is a massive economy, with many natural resources helpful for the development of advanced industry.