Paul Goble
Staunton, Jan. 1 – Before their country disintegrated, Soviet leaders routinely predicted a miraculous future for it. Most of those prognostications have been forgotten as has the regime that made them, but what Moscow told its people it would achieve by the middle of the third decade of the 21st century remains important.
On the one hand, the Soviet leadership’s predictions that it would have by then a base on the moon, a bridge to Alaska and robots operating factories show that Moscow before 1991 was focused on the future not on the past, a very different approach than Putin’s Russia today (mk.ru/politics/2025/01/01/gosudarstvennyy-internet-baza-na-lune-most-na-alyasku-chto-planiroval-sssr-k-2025-godu.html).
And on the other, such predictions which in almost no case ever came close to being fulfilled help to explain the cynicism of Russians about what Putin and his team predict. They have a long history of being promised the moon, literally, without the Kremlin being able to deliver.
https://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/01/by-2025-soviet-leaders-said-ussr-would.html
Instead of all those Soviet pipe-dreams being realised, we have Putler erecting new monuments to Stalin. Now that’s what you call progress.
Instead, a third of the entire shitehole has no toilets and running water, and moskovia managed to have the world’s tallest shit and piss fountain in history.
They did invent the bathtub motorcycle sidecar though. 😂
My bad! 😁