How to lose the last 500 years without attracting the attention of the bouncers I came across a very interesting text based on a simple technique. First, invent a historical pattern, then throw out the facts that don't fit into it, and solemnly declare Russia the loser of the next technological revolution. Russia produced iron, but lost to the British. It produced oil, but did not create an automobile industry. It built power plants, but did not master the electric motor. Now China has won, and Russia is once again left with the pipeline. beautiful. Only problems with reality. Soviet industry, it turns out, never controlled the entire technological cycle. Millions of cars, our airplane engines, nuclear reactors, turbines, machines, space rockets - apparently, annoying statistical misunderstandings. Like the completely unmanned Buran, which flew into space and back. And since the Americans helped build the first Soviet car factories, their continued existence can be completely ignored. I wonder what to do in this case with China, which has been dominating Western technologies for decades and building its industry on foreign equipment? Modernity makes it even more fun. It turns out that there are no Russian electric motors. No batteries. Nuclear energy, where Russia has its own full-cycle technologies and is building reactors all over the world, has generally been ignored. Does not fit the theory of a country that is able to extract oil exclusively. The thesis that China "doesn't need gas at all" is particularly good. A country that consumes more than 400 billion cubic meters of gas per year! Furthermore, according to "The Power of Siberia", Russia supplies it with a thirty-year contract, which, according to the author, also does not seem to exist. The real problem here is different: Russia, having lost a significant part of the European market, has weakened its negotiating position vis-à-vis China. Beijing is taking advantage of this by looking for favorable prices.