Why did the 20th century go so horribly wrong for Russia?

Why did the 20th century go so horribly wrong for Russia?

>Loses Crimean War
>Loses Russo-Japanese War
>Collapses during WW1 despite being on the winning side
>Almost loses WW2 because of Stalin's purges
>Succeeds in conquering most of eastern Europe at huge cost
>Economy stagnates because communism, etc.
>Spends decades playing spy vs. spy against American, loses
>Collapses again, losing all WW2 gains in the process
>Ends up with less territory than it started with at the beginning of the century.

How could this happen?

Rural agrarian based society,huge distances prevents rapid industrialisation ,a court that has its head stuck up far on its own ass

they shouldn't have oppressed polish, baltic, ukrainian and many other warriors
it was karma

Why is Romania shaped like a dick?

>Collapses during WW1 despite being on the winning side
You should have stopped there. Russia stopped existing in 1917. Most of their elite, the intelligentsia, the aristocracy, the artists, the scientists, the clergy, people who made Russia Russian, were either killed or exiled. Russia as people knew it vanished, and the post-1991 republic is like digging up a corpse, dressing it up and pretending it's still alive. It's a tragic parody of what Russia used to be.

>Crimean War
>20th century

Russia was rapidly industrializing in the early 20th century

it's not farmers that rose up against the Tsar, it was the newly emerging urbanized working class

>>Almost loses WW2 because of Stalin's purges
Almost lost but won... geniusly
>Succeeds in conquering most of eastern Europe at huge cost
Succeeds = horribly wrong... terrific

When the USSR collapsed, Russia lost everything that they'd won in WW2, and more.

They still have Karelia, Kuril islands, southern Sakhalin and Kaliningrad oblast.

>Karelia
Shit land, nobody except salty finns care about it.
>Kuril islands
Japan will retake it in exange of money when Rusia's economy colapse
>southern Sakhalin
Like all outer manchuria is China's economic sphere of influence

Nobody, not even Russia, wants Moldavia and Wallachia. The only worthwhile part of Romania is Transylvania

Russia lost everything in the 1990s for two reasons:

1. Political and economic liberalization was too rapid, particularly glasnost allowing nationalists from all across the Soviet Union to tear down the structure from within.
2. Most of what it "lost" was ill-gotten in the first place. The Baltics and Eastern Poland were annexed as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the Central Asian Republics were colonies in all but in name, with Ethnic Russian minorities ruling over the Turkic Majorities.

Maybe if Russia had reformed the economy at a slower pace, in a more orderly fashion, and with a stronger rule of law, the whole thing wouldn't have collapsed like a house of cards.

But if you put the whole country up for sale overnight to a society that has been ruled by thugs for all its history, and has no tradition of free speech, rule of law and democratic institutions, and has no experience whatsoever with capitalism or privatization of public enterprises, then the outcome was to be expected - A small criminal oligarchy rising from the shadows of an authoritarian and equally corrupt government of robber barons.

The same KGB apparatchiks that oppressed the Soviet people became the mafia ruling clans of Yeltsin's and Putin's Russia.

>Japan will retake it in exange of money when Rusia's economy colapse

That's never going to happen.
Kurils happen to have some of the single most rare elements on Earth. They lucked out like crazy by owning those, that place is easily worth more than half of Siberia.

My hunch is that the answer is basically like this: the only REAL way to compete in the modern world is to be a modern liberal capitalist state of the US/UK/France variety. The economic/scientific power this enables is unmatchable by other systems. Russia didn't do this and instead tried to be a combination communist/imperialist power.
We're now seeing hardcore Islamists make the same mistake in the Middle East. They don't realize that they're just fucking over their own more liberal countrymen. Militant Islam will never be able to compete with the West, not even close. To compete with the West there is only one known way: you must be a scientific/economic great power, and to do that you must have a modern secular liberal capitalism-with-social-programs society.
Ideas to do it in some other way tend to be fools' gold. Communism doesn't work. Imperialism is no longer cost-effective. Putin-style militarism just gains you small strips of land at the cost of fucking over your economy with sanctions. Etc.
There are, probably, no shortcuts.
If you want to beat the West, you have to do what the West does.

>If you want to beat the West, you have to do what the West does.

tl;dl if you can't beat them, join them

>Kurils happen to have some of the single most rare elements on Earth.
Such as?
Sounds kinda interesting.

According to wikipedia
>The Kuril Islands are estimated to have almost 2,000 tons of gold, 10,000 tons of silver, the largest source of rhenium in the world, natural gas and oil.

Not even Francis Fukuyama believes in this shit anymore.

t. overhurt commie

You forgot the civil war, though. It was one of the bloodiest and most barbaric civil wars ever fought with casualties rivaling those of WW1.

Also WW2 was the bloodiest and most titanic war in existence. The atrocities in the middle east pale in comparison to the stuff which happened in the east.

Last but not least we have the constant threat of WW3 and nuclear extermination and the few instances where it almost happened like in Cuba or in 1983.

But this is not even all. The 90s rival the economic destruction in WW2, not joking and if you extrapolate the births which were lost because humans died of suicides, drugs, in crime-related stuff etc... emmigration etc... it is not that hard to see that Russia lost more people during that collapse than during WW2, but if we are extra generous and say all of soviet union belongs to Russia, because of some common culture or something than the population of Russia shrinked from almost 300 million to 140 million, but if the soviet birth rate continued it would be like 350 million. If all the wars and civil wars didn't happen it could even be 1 billion.

But sure in our age god is merciful towards Russia, right? Wrong - the West sanctions the shit out of them and they have a war in the middle of Europe where they fight their own Slavic brethren. They still have astronomic suicide, pedophile, drug, abortion and other shameful rates.

Russia is literally the perversion of the saying "It gets worse before it gets better."

In Russia it is: "It gets worse before it gets worse." Literally the worst case scenario personified.