The UK hasn't been a major power in like at least 2 decades. If you mean NATO then Russia isn't really a major power in comparison to NATO. Not that it's important, Russia isn't stupid enough to pick a fight with NATO.
How dangerous a bear is is pretty much irrelevant to the whole discourse but I want to talk about bears.
Black bears are absolute cowards and aren't that dangerous unless you are an idiot
Brown bears will fuck you up if you threaten it or if it has cubs but will in most cases not attack.
Polar bears will kill you because they are bored.
My country has the highest amount of bear per person but we only have brown bears and most people have encountered a bear in the forest, it's not as scary as the idea of getting roofied and rapes. Also getting attacked by a bear is more unlikely even here than getting roofied and raped. You don't have to worried about a bear attack while you do need to guard your drink.
This triggered a lost memory of watching bootleg MacGyver with some friends while getting blackout drunk celebrating Estonian reindependence after the soviet occupation collapsed. It was in German (None of us spoke German) and he was also doing something with some nitroglycerin on a truck.
The one boycotted by 6 of the 15 territories? Or the ones that followed in each that led to them declaring independence which in turn led to the collapse of the soviet union?
The baltics were 3 of those boycotting territories and we had similar referendums for independence which, I'm pretty sure, all got over 70% support.
I never said the US was better than the USSR, I don't really give a shit about the US. One shit country being slightly better than another one does not make it good.
I like how you characterised it as "some mistakes" . The whole famine business that ravaged the USSR was caused by sheer incompetence. A guy appointed by Stalin to manage agriculture came up with a fun idea of "communist crops won't compete for resources" and forcing farmers to plant crops way too close. I'd say that was one of the greatest mistakes. There was also some killing the gays and some ethnic minorities but I think those were intentional.
I also don't attribute anything to communism, only the USSR, communism hasn't existed. I also attribute being the worst advertisement imaginable for communist to the USSR. They kinda ruined it for everyone else by calling themselves that.
In the USSR those improvents were for Russia, not so much for their colonised regions where they exported resources from. Industrialisation also helped but that's not really unique to anything.
My problem with people citing those metrics is that they are true for Russia itself while ignoring that a large reason for those improvements was colonialism done to the occupied regions. Industrialisation was another thing that improved those metrics but that was hardly unique to the USSR. Some of those regions may have had benefits but here in Estonia it was pretty much all around bad. After the occupation ended the quality of life here improved rapidly.
As far as examples for socialism I'd say the USSR was an all around failure but people still defend it and even Stalin who basically guaranteed it's failure as a socialist project. In the baltic region the word communism is basically poisoned because of the USSR.
Estonia but it's not like that was not the case elsewhere in the occupied areas. Russia mostly exported resources out of there to benefit itself which is a large reason how it raised quality of life in Russia itself.
Unfortunately most lefties are active online instead of local politics.