system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How was Soviet Russia able to catch up to the West in the 21st century (post-Tsarist regime)?

Russia, under the Tsarist regime was highly under modernised. It was a backwards nation, and was highly inferior to the industrial economies of Western Europe.

But despite this, after the end of the Romanov empire in 1917, by the end of WWII, less than thirty years later, Russia (USSR) was already competing with the US, especially in military power.

How were they able to catch up in such a short amount of time?

EDIT: 20th Century, not 21st Century. Stupid me.
gpt
It didn't really.

While it might have looked like the Soviet union was on par with the west from the outside this was in part because they were trying really hard to look that way. They focused on prestige projects, things of military value and major population centers like Moscow. Much of the area remained at a level that fell more and more behind its western counterparts as time went by.