What academic sources have you read about the internal functions of the USSR?

lol you don’t need a thesis to know that people having to lining up for basic essentials is broke for a superpower.

fuck mate, even in the 80s you couldn’t just go to the store and buy sour cream - they had no plastics industry, so you’d have to bring your own container to a vendor you know that had received sour cream recently, and they’d measure it out into your container.

Estimate go from 40-60 percent of the entire GDP being wasted on defense because you gotta keep those satellite stans under control.