<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="1" >01 Yang Guang's revelation</h1>
As the king of the sui dynasty, Yang Guang, the emperor of the Sui Dynasty, was most impressed by the good Daxi Gong, and he never showed compassion for the people's strength in order to pretend his face. Especially in foreign exchanges, they often punch their swollen faces and become fat, and do many ridiculous things.
In 609, the Sui Emperor personally led a large army to the northwest to hunt. On the surface, it is to understand the natural conditions of the border and observe the people's feelings, but in fact, it is to show off the power of the Hu people in the western regions, to show off their wealth in a high-profile manner, and to force the Tuguhun regime to submit to the Sui Empire.
Tuguhun is very interesting, there are such a big tree as the Great Sui Dynasty to rely on, so why not enjoy it? In the end, he chose to submit to the Great Sui, and many other small tribal states also attached themselves. The Sui Emperor was so elated that in order to show the benevolence and love of the great powers, he specially held a number of grand banquets to highlight the national strength of the Great Sui and force these vassal states to be convinced. The Zizhi Tongjian records that on the fifteenth lantern festival of the sixth year of Daye (610), envoys from various countries in the western region gathered in Luoyang, and the Sui Emperor sent people to set up a large-scale hundred theater in Duanmen Street of Luoyang City, and as many as 18,000 musicians participated in playing musical instruments, and the music resounded throughout the heavens, and it could be faintly heard dozens of miles away.
The large concert began at dusk and continued until the next morning, when candles lit lit illuminated the scene as if it were daylight. Similar large-scale events lasted for a month and "cost a lot of money".
The merchants in the Western Regions were all good at trading, and asked to trade in the Fengdu Market, and Yang Guang allowed it. He first ordered the renovation of the decoration shop, the eaves should be uniform, the grand drapery should be set up, the rare goods should be filled with the store, the people should be dressed gorgeously, and even the vegetable sellers should use the dragon whiskers to pave the floor. Merchants in the Western Regions who passed by liquor stores ordered the shopkeepers to invite them to sit down, and when they had enough wine and food, they did not have to pay, and tricked them: "China is rich, and there is no money for wine and food as usual." ”
The Hu people were amazed at the prosperity and strength of the Sui Dynasty, and they all gave a thumbs up, but some people questioned it. When a Huke found that "the tree was wrapped around the tree", he asked the market officials: "There are also poor people in the Great Sui who are not clothed, so why don't they give them the satin cloth and wrap it around the tree?" Seeing that the lie was exposed, the accompanying officials were "ashamed and could not answer" and were collectively dumbfounded.
Of course, there must be more than one loser like Yang Guang in China. Ancient Chinese dynasties all regarded themselves as the Central Empire and established a huge tributary system centered on themselves. In other words, as a vassal state, as long as the Central Dynasty bows down and accepts the "canonization", it can be rewarded. In layman's terms, the tributary system is a set of false rituals, and it is the Heavenly Dynasty that, in order to maintain its own face, does not hesitate to be the head of the wrongdoing. Foreign countries came to pay tribute, although with tribute, but the rewards given to them by the Heavenly Dynasty would often be several times more. Therefore, it put a lot of pressure on the finances of the central dynasty, which is called death to face and suffer.
This kind of thin and generous tribute has actually become substantial foreign aid, and the recipient countries are happy and have their own face, and when the scale of this kind of assistance is not large, there is no big impact. If a country does not expand foreign aid indefinitely according to its own national conditions, when the scale of aid is large enough to become a burden on the country, it may become an intensification of various domestic contradictions and cause harm to the country.
For example, after World War II, in order to gain an advantage in the confrontation with the United States and the Western camp, the Soviet Union has long carried out huge and uncontrolled assistance regardless of the national conditions, which has caused a series of problems and become an important straw that crushed the huge camel of the Soviet Union.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="11" >02 Soviet frenzied foreign aid</h1>
After World War II, the whole of Europe was turned into a scorched earth, and the Soviet Union suffered particularly heavy losses. The loss of people alone reached more than 27 million, and the total casualty population exceeded more than 46 million. At the price at the time, the economic losses of the SOVIET Union in World War II were close to 2.6 trillion rubles. According to statistics, there were 1,710 towns and 70,000 villages in the Soviet Union, which were occupied and destroyed by the German army. In addition, more than 30,000 industrial and mining enterprises, 100,000 collective farms, and 1,800 state farms in the Soviet Union were paralyzed by the war. Much of Eastern Europe was in ruins, and it wasn't until 1950 that it was largely restored to pre-war levels.
But the dark clouds of World War II had just cleared, and the Iron Curtain of the Cold War had already been lifted. In 1946, Churchill delivered his famous Iron Curtain speech: "From Szczecin in the Baltic Sea to Trieste in the Adriatic Sea, the Iron Curtain across the European continent has been pulled down." Faced with the devastation of Western Europe, the United States threw out the famous "Marshall Plan", that is, the "European Revival Plan". Western European countries are already much stronger than Eastern Europe, and with the massive assistance of the United States, economic recovery is just around the corner.
In order to take care of its own group of younger brothers, the Soviet Union gritted its teeth and offered the "Molotov Plan" in the face of its own economic difficulties, and then established the "Economic Mutual Aid Committee". When the ECE was first established, six countries from Eastern Europe participated, and later, albania, the GDR, Mongolia, Cuba, North Korea, Afghanistan and many other Asian, African and Latin American countries also participated.
If you want to win over so many little brothers, you have to take out real money and silver to share with everyone. Unlike the United States, which had a lot of money, it was much more difficult for the Soviet Union to support the façade. So as soon as World War II ended, the Soviet Union tried to steal wealth from various countries. In addition to plundering a lot of Germany's cutting-edge technology and talents, it also moved all the machinery, generators, trams, etc. in Germany to the Soviet Union, and even did not spare the rails and factory buildings. Of course, there have also been many cases of being looted by the Soviet Union in other countries. With technology and equipment, it was naturally very simple to produce commodities, and after several years of hard work, the industrial output of the Soviet Union soon surpassed that of the pre-war period.
With these undertones, large-scale foreign aid from the Soviet Union began. Of course, Soviet aid had a purpose. If you are pro-Soviet, I will help you; if you are pro-American, I will give up my assistance to you.
Before 1953, the Soviet Union's foreign aid was mainly for the 8 member states of the Warsaw Pact and 3 observer states and China. With the growth of the Soviet Union's national power, the Khrushchev era began to provide assistance to the "non-capitalist road" of the Third World, and the number of recipient countries has increased to 27. During the Brezhnev era, the Soviet Union further strengthened its global strategic offensive and extensively cultivated pro-Soviet forces in the Third World, and by 1981 the number of Soviet aid countries had reached 64, covering almost all important Third World countries.
The size of this aid has long been silent in the Soviet Union. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviet government for the first time fully announced the situation of foreign aid: by 1989, the Soviet Union had provided a total of 85.8 billion rubles in loans to 12 socialist countries and 49 third world countries, about 149 billion US dollars at the US dollar exchange rate, which was roughly equivalent to about 8% of the total national economic product of the Soviet Union, far exceeding the comparison of foreign aid and national strength of the United States, Britain and other countries.
In India, for example, the Soviet Union began aiding India in the 1950s. When the Sino-Indian War broke out in 1962, Soviet aid to India almost doubled. By brezhnev's time, Soviet aid to India had peaked at $5.1 billion, accounting for more than 10 percent of India's entire industrial output.
In addition, 15.3% of the total investment in the Syrian economy, more than 30% of the industrial investment in Afghanistan, and more than 60% of the projects in Iraq, Algeria, Egypt and other countries were contracted by the Soviet Union.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, countries such as North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba, which had long relied on Soviet aid, immediately fell into huge economic difficulties. In the 1960s and 1970s, the lives of the people of these countries were generally better than those of the surrounding developing countries, but in fact, this was the result of the Tightening of the Belt of the Soviet People and the vigorous transfusion of blood.
In fact, my country was also a beneficiary of Soviet aid. After liberation in 1949, China implemented a "one-sided" pro-Soviet policy, and during the period of China's First and Second Five-Year Plans, the Soviet Union carried out the construction of basic industrial facilities known as "156 items" for China, laying the foundation for China's industrialization. In addition to giving money and materials, this aid is the aid of a complete industrial system, which is equivalent to hand-in-hand building a poor and white China into a preliminary industrialized country.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="23" > 03 blind aid under petrogon</h1>
Some people will say that the Soviet Union can transfuse so many countries in the world, and it is certainly not bad for money. On the surface, this is indeed the case, as a superpower in the world on an equal footing with the United States, the Soviet Union's technological reserves and resources are incomparable to those of other countries, and it is easy to convert its rich resources into wealth in good times.
In 1973, the third Middle East war broke out, triggering a new oil crisis. International oil prices soared. From $1.8 a barrel in 1970 to $30 a barrel in 1980, it has soared more than ten times.
At this time, the Soviet Union, with a vast territory of 22 million square kilometers and rich resources, had already detected several oil fields with huge reserves. Coupled with the soaring international oil prices, this seemed perfect for temporarily solving the Soviet Union's economic problems.
Seizing the favorable opportunity, the Soviet Union began to make simple and crude use of oil and gas resources to make a fortune. In the decade from 1970 to 1980, annual oil extraction soared from 31 million tons to 312 million tons, and natural gas rose from 9.1 billion cubic meters to 156 billion cubic meters. In just a decade, the Soviet Union earned nearly 200 billion rubles of wealth through oil, and the Soviet Union entered a brief boom. According to statistics, in 1975, the Soviet Union was at its peak in history, with a GDP size of $685.9 billion, while the United States was $1,688.9 billion, and the Soviet Union accounted for 40% of the US GDP.
The good old days of the Soviet Union in the 1970s
With the billowing oil dollar, the Soviet Union's foreign aid was even more generous. Taking Egypt as an example, after President Sadat came to power in 1970, the Soviet Union believed that the opportunity to open up influence in Africa had come, and immediately signed the "Soviet-Egyptian Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation", providing it with economic and military assistance of 5 billion US dollars, sending more than 18,000 expert advisers to help Egypt develop, and building the world-famous "Aswan Dam" for it.
According to some data, the Soviet Union aided its allies by at least $100 billion in the 10 years of the 1070s, making it a huge burden on the country's finances. Then one would ask, why didn't the Soviet Union put the brakes on crazy foreign aid?
Soviet leaders at the time believed that the United States had fallen after being mired in the Vietnam War and that it was time to take over global hegemony. The second was that the Soviet leaders over-believed in their own economic strength and the power of money, believing that money was omnipotent and that money could buy off friends. In the end, the Soviet leaders did not use money like the United States, and they had to go through Congress because they had monopoly on power and wanted to use money, and as soon as their heads were hot and their thighs were patted, they decided. Therefore, the Soviet Union's foreign aid has a great blindness, and many foreign aid is even more costless. Let's take a look at how effective the Soviet Union's foreign aid has been operating for many years.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="31" >04 Wine and meat friends are unreliable</h1>
It is reasonable to say that the Soviet Union's comprehensive foreign aid should reap many hardcore allies, but the gap between reality and ideals is too big. We also take Egypt as an example, after receiving a huge amount of Soviet aid, Sadat turned to the United States and Israel, and Soviet-Egyptian relations deteriorated sharply. Enraged, the Soviet Union first abrogated the Soviet-Egyptian Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in 1976 and closed its diplomatic mission in Egypt. Finally, in 1978 Sadat passionately announced in the People's Assembly that he would terminate the repayment of the approximately $4 billion in debts owed to the Soviet Union!
For an ungrateful country like Egypt, according to the temper of a fighting nation, we must teach a good lesson. Ironically, the always domineering Soviet Union ignored the lessons learned, and three years later, sadat was assassinated, Mubarak came to power, and the Soviet Union again provided aid to Egypt.
This happened repeatedly in Yugoslavia, Libya, Chile and other countries, which also shows that the Soviet Union's aid policy was not very successful, and the Soviet Union did not harvest the hardcore allies it expected. Many countries are friendly with the Soviet Union, they are coming for money, they get benefits and say hello, and whenever there is a wind and grass, they change their faces, which also shows that "wine and meat friends" are not reliable. The President of the United States has said that "without economic and military assistance, Moscow's friends in the Third World cannot sustain even one family".
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="35" >05 conclusion</h1>
During the Soviet Union's golden age, in 1976 its military spending surpassed that of the United States, reaching an unprecedented $120 billion, accounting for nearly 20 percent of the country's GDP. The Soviet Union's huge military industry system has swallowed up more than 25% of the wealth of the people of the country. Even during the time of Gorbachev, the military budget accounted for 40 per cent of the state's finances and 20 per cent of the total economic output.
In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and the protracted war lasted for a full decade. During this decade, the Soviet Union spent about $100 billion on military spending in Afghanistan, and the Soviet Union was saddled with a debt of up to $66 billion, exacerbating the Soviet Union's financial problems.
After entering the 80s, under the manipulation of the United States, the international oil price fell, and the Soviet Union lost the oil dividend, and the fiscal revenue fell sharply, and even could not make ends meet. At this time, the Soviet Union struggled to maintain its "image of a strong country" and had to take out real money and silver to serve other countries, which was really an incredible "punching a swollen face and being fat". In the end, this unrealistic gratuitous aid became a huge burden on the Soviet Union, and eventually dragged itself down.
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