"Russia was never run by engineers?" That's a massive oversight of 20th-century history. The Soviet Union was the world’s first and most committed technocracy. The GOSPLAN (State Planning Committee) was a literal attempt to run a continent-sized economy as a deterministic engineering problem. By the 70s, the Soviet leadership was more densely packed with engineers than any administration in US history.

They failed because they tried to 'refactor' nature. Stalin’s 'Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature' and Mao’s 'Great Leap Forward' (which applied industrial throughput logic to biology/close-planting) are the ultimate warnings of what happens when you treat complex, probabilistic systems (ecology and humanity) like a closed-loop machine.

Mao wasn’t an engineer by degree, but he was a High Modernist by practice. He believed society could be 'debugged' and 'optimized' through central planning. The result wasn't a more efficient system; it was a total system crash that cost tens of millions of lives.

Current China is a perfect example of 'Success by Engineering'—high-speed rail and ghost cities built on a demographic 'memory leak' (the One Child Policy) that is now crashing the entire stack. This is exactly my point: Engineers optimize for the metric they can see, while ignoring the high-dimensional chaos that actually sustains life.