Somehow I find it both funny and disgusting that Zelensky has sunk to this new low, not that I am surprised but given that he is willing to say this at Davos and that he wasn't ejected from the room means that this is sanctioned by the USA
Zelensky said in a NATO security conference, and this is recorded, that Ukraine should get nuclear weapons. Then he got his country invaded.
He is an idiot. The only reason he is still alive is that he serves a better purpose remaining in power since he is totally incompetent. It makes the Russians' jobs much easier.
And the Russians, just like the Soviets before them, have a long history with targeted assassinations. Perhaps he should go read what happened with Stephan Bandera or all those independentist Chechen leaders. If he thinks he will be safe in Israel, like his parents are, on in the US or whatever he is wrong.
By the time of the digital revolution, with the advent of computers and internet, the USSR no longer had any realistic hope of catching up the US and the West in technology and economy.
In the 1980s the Soviets were making some pretty huge investments trying to plug the gap in semiconductors. They wanted to jump straight into x-ray lithography and surpass the West basically.
This is the master plan for the new facilities that were supposed to be built in Zelenograd. You would have a Synchrotron in the middle and the industrial facilities would feed off beamlines radiating from the center.
Construction was eventually frozen because of the economic crisis in the Soviet Union. But some of the buildings are still there.
The Russians today make their own optical fiber. They are basically independent in terms of its production and deployment. So I am not sure they would be that hopelessly behind.
how does the sino soviet split affected USSR internal politics?
It affected them quite a lot. The Soviets had to keep military expenditure up to man the Sino-Soviet border for example. In the late 1970s the consideration that China could easily capture the Trans-Siberian Railway (it's right next to the border) and cut access to the Far East meant they spent a boatload of human and economic resources making the Baikal-Amur Mainline. Or as the Soviets called it back then the project of the century.
