| Summary: | The long collapse of the Soviet economy did not end with the dissolution of the USSR. Governments quickly changed, but the infrastructure of the Soviet economy did not. From the metalworks of Magnitogorsk to the nickel mines of frozen Norilsk, the economy bequeathed to modern Russia by Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev was only slowly changed. Not all of that inheritance, of course, was harmful. The USSR invested heavily in schooling, for example, leaving a population significantly more educated than might have been expected. Yet much of the Soviet legacy is far less positive. Few of the manufacturing industries so celebrated by the Soviets are profitable today, and almost none are at the forefront of modern technology. Russia today has over a hundred ...
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