I dunno, he keeps bringing it up, and i keep shooting it down.
Soviet propaganda.
You don’t get it. The vast numbers of (shitty) T-26 tanks indicates that the pre-war Soviet Union was indeed an industrial juggernaut. The fact that they were churning out a bad design doesn’t change that.
Except even when the design wasn’t shitty (the Soviet Union had good engineers), the implementation often was. When you could be reassigned to a Siberian lumber camp for failing to make quota, you churned out anything that could pass a visual inspection and let the flaws be someone else’s problem.
There’s a story that when a shoe factory had a quota, they first made all their shoes one size. When this was banned, they made only right foot shoes- in all sizes. Of course- only one style and color in both cases.
When you measure a company that makes motors, you don’t measure by tonnage. The USSR did and ended up with ceiling fans that would rip the ceiling out because the motor casing was made of cast iron.