By 2025, Soviet Leaders Said USSR would have a Base on the Moon, a Bridge to Alaska, and Thousands of Robotic Factories

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Jan. 1 – Before their country disintegrated, Soviet leaders routinely predicted a miraculous future for it. Most of those prognostications have been forgotten as has the regime that made them, but what Moscow told its people it would achieve by the middle of the third decade of the 21st century remains important.
    On the one hand, the Soviet leadership’s predictions that it would have by then a base on the moon, a bridge to Alaska and robots operating factories show that Moscow before 1991 was focused on the future not on the past, a very different approach than Putin’s Russia today (mk.ru/politics/2025/01/01/gosudarstvennyy-internet-baza-na-lune-most-na-alyasku-chto-planiroval-sssr-k-2025-godu.html).
    And on the other, such predictions which in almost no case ever came close to being fulfilled help to explain the cynicism of Russians about what Putin and his team predict. They have a long history of being promised the moon, literally, without the Kremlin being able to deliver.