The Soviet Union dealt such an economic and technological blow to the Wall Street imperialists that when I came there in 1989 on a student exchange, my family rode a motorcycle with a sidecar (it was probably a copy of a motorcycle designed sometime in the 1940s-50s) and the store had sugar and butter (i.e., a limited amount) on the tickets. This was the economic miracle of Russia in practice, as I experienced it first hand just before the entire Eastern Bloc collapsed. So I don't understand the comments that claim it wasn't :-). The collapse and falling behind the US by at least 20-30 years was obvious in the USSR and continues to this day. It's just gotten worse.

Russia ceased to exist on 30 December 1922, when it was replaced by the Soviet Union. That night all Russians took to the skies and were replaced by their evil clones, the so-called Soviets, with whom they have nothing in common !!! The Soviet regime existed until 26 December 1991, when all the Soviets evaporated from the face of the Earth and were replaced by the Russians, who until then had been happily and unsuspectingly hibernating in the Earth's orbit.