Gorbachev secured his place in history by what he didn't do. While never endorsing the end of the eastern bloc, he made it clear beginning in the late 1980's that unlike his predecessors, he would not oppose democratic reforms in Eastern Europe by force. To general astonishment, he kept this promise, and with the regrettable exception of Lithuania this commitment to not repeating the crimes of his predecessors is Gorbachev's greatest legacy. In 1988 you would have been hard pressed to find anyone who could imagine the mostly peaceful collapse of the Eastern Bloc, but Gorbachev had the moral courage to accept this once unimaginable consequence of his policy and to see it through.
Not to pick a fight, but I feel it's important then to note that it was not Reagan who "won" the Cold War. It was Gorbachev, who had the political courage (and idealism) to take the leap.
The people who "won" the cold war are those Eastern countries that had been occupied by Russia for 45 years and fought for their freedom in Prague, Budapest and especially in Gdańsk.
Such freedom, to get pillaged by western companies. We are now in massive debt, most public services are privatised and collapsing, the young can't afford rents, wages are constantly dropping relative to expenses.
It was the profit extractors that won the cold war.
This might be a popular notion in privileged white western high schools, but the transformation in eastern EU countries has been breathtaking.
The poverty divide between east and west Germany was so visibly apparent when you walked across that line. Today, both sides of Berlin are vibrant and thriving. The same can be said in every capital city that has joined the EU. Massive prosperity compared to the Soviet poverty.
The West's outwards aggression and effective embargo are gone, sure. That definitely helps.
However, the material conditions aren't necessarily better. It used to be that everyone was guaranteed a home, a job, healthcare, education, etc. Homelessness is now a problem in most capitals, many struggle to find a job at all, healthcare has generally been defunded and privatised, etc.
So many of us left because we clearly had no opportunities in our own countries after 89, especially after so much industry was sold off for scrap.
Your 80s experience in Eastern Europe is first hand as an adult or hearsay? I visited the GDR in the 80s as an adult and have some first hand experience which differs from yours.
In the GDR "job security" meant they told you what to work, choice was limited, if you always played by the rules, and if you didn't like that, you'd go to jail.
In the GDR no-one was guaranteed education. Today in Germany everyone can study whatever they want, in the GDR <5% of pupils were allowed to study, based on the status of their parents. Participation in events and workshops in school was based on the status of your parents or your participation in party organisations (FDJ, Young pioneers).
The GDR was on the verge of bancrupcy as were many other Eastern block countries at the end of the 80s, with low productivity but unsustainable high subsidies for food and flats. Poland went into bancrupcy and all other Eastern block countries were near that point (often because they took Western credits in the 70s and early 80s to increase consumer good production but couldn't pay back later)
(Anyone interested in Germany I recommend "Das Ende der SED: Die letzten Tage des Zentralkomitees" with protocols from the meetings of the central comitee).
I would like to amplify KingOfCoders answers with the experience in Romania. I lived in 1980's Romania. The party provided a guaranteed job - but only if you worked where the party sent you. The party provided a guaranteed apartment - but only if you lived where the party sent you. The apartment did not have heat and did not have electricity. If you were lucky maybe it had a somewhat stable gas supply. Hopefully the gas stoves you rigged to heat your apartment would not blow up (this happened). The guaranteed job did not feed you because of the food shortages. The party provided free health care - but there were no medicine. The hospitals did not have heat and when my sister went for apendicitis surgery my parents were on pins and needles just so the hospital does not get hit by an electricity blackout. I could go on and on but if you still think it was better under communism then nothing I say will change your mind.
The same in the GDR with flats. You couldn't get one, until you were married and best had a child. Without, single, you had to stay with your parents. You had to apply for a flat and it took up to several years until you got one - the one they gave you, no selection. If you had bad luck or your parents were not of sufficient socialist status, you had no central heating.
I guess you could always go the Romania way, starve the population until debt is zero. The profit extractors were the government but at least it was "our" thieves not some foreign companies.
It's also important to remember why that debt was paid.
Our government had taken IMF loans with the goal of expanding industry to sell products to the West. We did, then we were prevented from selling finished products to many countries. Some of the production was redirected internally and towards trade with other socialist countries, but the loan denominated in dollars remained.
Then the IMF demanded we pay back the loan early, while mostly only allowing us to export food. Today this would be called sanctions. This was a tactic to intentionally create scarcity of food in the country, which coupled with constant propaganda (especially from Radio Free Europe) and arming and funding local fascists (including the famous snipers shooting into crowds), culminated in a bloody coup in '89. Similar tactics have been used by NATO powers against other countries.
Well I lived in Romania in the 1980s so I feel compelled to respond to this.
Romanian leadership took a lot of loans from the West and spend the money on large industrial projects with Western technology which was either obsolete or becoming obsolete (Dacia-Renault, Olcit-Cytroen, CANDU for the nuclear energy, Rombac-British Aircracft, etc...)
This was a huge bet that did not work - but it was all done by Romanian Leadership. The West did not ask Romania to borrow, Romania asked to borrow. When the bills came due at the end of 1970s Romania asked to roll over their debt. Unfortunately for Romania at the same time US FED (Volcker) was raising the interest rates sharply to combat inflation. So rolling over the debt was very expensive. This was not economic sanctions aimed at Romania - this happened to every borrower that had USD debts (including regular people in the US).
Romania choose to pay the debts and the only way to get USD was to sell resources - because the industrial products were obsolete and nobody in the West wanted to buy. So Romania sold food and whatever oil they still had and whatever steel they still had. For the Romanian people that meant food shortages, heat shortages, electricity shortages...
This was done by Romanian leadership. It was not economic sanctions from the West.
Russia has also won the cold war, as it was, too, liberated from cumminst tyranny and quaity of life and freedom have raised significantly as a consequence. Sadly, this consequence took time to take place, which made the causal relationship not obvious for many Russians, and a lot of what Russia has won over this liberation has been gradually lost since Putin came into power.
It is, just not immediately after 1991 (there was a long period of turmoil and decline). It happened mostly in 2000s, yes, right after Putin came to power.
I mean, if by "won" you mean, "watched powerlessly as the whole rotten system collapsed around him and didn't slaughter thousands of his own people to stop it"... yeah, Gorbachev "won" the cold war.
I thought it was Reagan who forced Gorbachev and the Soviet Union into this position by arms racing them to death. I bet you Gorbachev would try to keep the empire if it wasn't for the economical collapse. He sent tanks to the Baltics. He cheered for the annexation of Crimea. His empire might've been more democratic than the USSR used to be, but still an empire. Also, he was a communist and tried to keep it, but the people were full of communism.
Gorbatchev could still have sent the tanks to suppress the peaceful protests like his predecessors did in the 50's and 60's (or China did at this very point in history, and this is exactly what would have happened under a different Soviet leader). Even if this was the only thing Gorbatchev did right in his entire life, it was this one decision that deserves to be his legacy.
No, he couldn't - there wasn't enough anything to do an operation like that, thanks to the economic pressure of the previous arms race. People were rebelling. Also, people remembered that they weren't exactly welcome in 1968. At this point the satellite states had much stronger economies than the USSR and could've effectively protected themselves (and there were very serious plans to do so).
Look at Ukraine today - they are using so much Western technology, relying on so much Western money - and yet they can't get 500 km past Ukraine border. They wouldn't reach their own border if they had only their own resources.
I don't know how it was in the rest of Eastern Europe, but for instance the East German government was much more 'conservative' than Gorbatchev and heavily opposed to perestroika/glasnost. If Gorbatchev wouldn't have left Honecker hanging dry, Honecker would have welcomed the Soviet tanks against his own people.
You don't need to be able to compete with the US military technology to kill unarmed protesters. T-54s will do just fine.
The thing is, the tanks would have to get there. Getting a tank 1000 km past at least 3 unfriendly borders is an enormous logistics issue, and a major resource drain - resources that simply did not exist, not even talking about the human resources.
And you're discounting the strength of millions of super-angry people too much. They would destroy the few tanks with rocks (or molotovs, as illustrated in Ukraine) if they had to.
You've probably been born after the Cold War, but just to put things into perspective, the Soviet Union had half a million troops and dozens of tank divisions already stationed in East Germany, they wouldn't have to fight their way through Poland. And it probably wasn't all that different in the other countries along the Iron Curtain.
Same thing in Czechoslovakia, but ultimately the KGB, StB and the local communist party government decided they would not be able to win, only prolong it a little. IIRC from my history classes their projection was 'less than a year and with enormous human costs on both sides, and productivity going to zero due to the whole-population rebellion' - which leads me to the conclusion that they would need significant resources delivered from USSR. Wasn't it similar in DDR?
(A lot of the StB guys decided to simply take advantage of the coming economical transformation and subsequently stole a lot of corporations and other stuff from the general public)
But that's the whole point isn't it? Would the local governments have held back if they would have been pressured by an aggressive Soviet overlord to start a civil war on their own soil? I guess the exact details why the East German army didn't leave their barracks are still not really clarified (e.g. was it incompetence, insubordination, passive resistance, unwilligness to have the blood of their own people on their hands?), at least the last point wouldn't be an issue for Soviet soldiers stationed in East Germany if they had received orders to crush the protests. But apparently they didn't receive such orders and I think the silence out of Moscow was the main reason why the East German government remained passive too.
What good is starting a civil war you can't win and in which you will last less than a year and end up dead?
My point is, the party/StB/KGB calculated (at least in Czechoslovakia - there are their own meeting notes about it) they wouldn't be able to win, and so decided they would rather steal some stuff than destroy it (or let the rebels destroy it). If they wanted to win by force - and initially they wanted to, until they understood the scale of the rebellion - they would need much bigger forces, but that was impossible to arrange, and not for lack of willingness.
They actually deployed the army (both CzSk and Soviet troops) and police, but the rebelling masses were way too overwhelming and they chickened out - there are videos of them going/rolling tanks backwards away from the enormous masses of people (easily hundreds per one troop, not even possible to kill them with your Kalashnikov). If they fired the tank, they wouldn't last 5 minutes and their death would've been nasty. What changed from 1968 in CzSk and from the situation in China was the scale of the rebellion - in 1968 only tens of thousands of people protested, in 1989 it was millions, and each incident (not like there weren't any) caused much more people to rebel instead of suppressing it.
And there was no silence out of Moscow. There are records of USSR-CzSk phone calls about this, and it was definitely not silence nor "we won't do it because it's bad" but "we can't do it because we're out of money, you're on your own BUT DO SOMETHING OR ELSE" (the CzSk side was asking for air support and so on). I assure you that if they went with force all the communist party members, StB/KGB agents and Russian troops would've been hanged afterwards - so the only remaining option was to let it happen and this way they all survived and some even thrived (like for example Andrej Babiš).
Gorbachev's "democratic-communist" (hah, what an oxymoron) Soviet Union could've never worked without the satellite states which supplied most high technology, a lot of important natural resources, etc with dictated prices USSR could afford, so I really don't think he'd just let it go if he had any other option. Certainly the phone calls didn't sound like they were happy about it or that it was the plan all along.
Overall, I don't buy the Gorbachev==good view. Perhaps he let the fall in DDR happen, but probably only because he was busy trying to keep other parts of the empire such as Hungary and the Baltics. He might've been better than the previous leaders, sure - but who isn't better than Stalin and the party? He was still an imperialist even to the modern times, and wanted to force communism (and all the associated baggage) down the throats of his subjects even though the people were demanding the end of planned economy. That makes him bad in my eyes regardless of whether he decided to let the fall happen or not, anyways. Certainly nobody to be fond of, and probably just a case of being at the right time at the right place - it's not like he could've said anything else than he said without being thrown out of the window.
Transport them? What are you talking about? The Soviets had bases all over the place in Eastern Europe.
The case being discussed here, Eastern Germany, was just behind the iron curtain, remember? Soviet troops were at ~300 locations on the GDR territory, ~50 airfields, over 300,000 soldiers, over 4,000 tanks.
The stationed troops and machines were not nearly enough to handle the situation, see my sibling comments. You can't suppress protests of several millions with 300k not-so-willing troops and 5000 not-so-good tanks (the Czechoslovaks manufactured their own tanks because of how bad the Soviet manufacturing was).
For one thing, the problem is your tanks and troops have to be ready all around the country - the protesting people are moving across the state quickly. One day there's a protest in Prague, second day it's in Brno - but you can't move your 300k troops and 5000 tanks from Prague to Brno in a day. And then the next day it's Ostrava and you have to do it again. Then an incident happens and that provokes a 10x bigger protest in Prague, Brno and Ostrava at the same time. That's impossible. You need much, much more troops and tanks to handle this scale of rebellion - and the requested air support that never came. And your tanks will never make people go back to work, anyways.
> The stationed troops and machines were not nearly enough to handle the situation, see my sibling comments. You can't suppress protests of several millions with 300k not-so-willing troops and 5000 not-so-good tanks
I don't know how old you are or where you were at the time. I was there. In the GDR, in East Berlin. On the streets. And I can tell you, a few tanks and troops getting their guns out would have made major impressions on people.
It's not just a numbers game. You are greatly oversimplifying history here. Quite naively so, I might add.
It's a great achievement of history that Gorbachev made the Soviets keep their feet still and among many eastern Germans it's regarded as quite the miracle that this whole episode went down non-violently. Look around in the world in the last decades. This was the major exception, and Gorbachev was central to that.
Also, let's get the picture of the situation straight. He didn't just passively sit bunkered in in Moscow, letting things happen. He actively went out to meet leaders of other involved powers, including the German chancellor and foreign minister, Kohl and Genscher, which he outlived by a few years.
Well, OK - I accept your opinion about GDR. But there are still the other states, and Gorbachev somehow forgot to save these too. I don't understand what makes him so good in light of the events in these other places. Isn't it interesting that only Germans are protective of him? You never hear such opinion in former Czechoslovakia. I never heard someone from Poland or Hungary talk about Gorbachev positively - neutral at best, and very unusually.
But Poland, Hungary, etc - they were not divided at least. It was a much bigger deal for Germany than for them. Also, the echo of WWII plays some role here I guess. Germany and other East European countries are in different positions here.
To expand, it seems to me like he worked to be friendly with the largest European economy while continuing to stomp on the smaller ones who didn't have their West part to look after them. Manipulative and calculating, definitely not good. Thank your West German friends, not Gorbachev.
But the dissolution of soviet union is not over yet. You can see this nowhere as clearly as in russias attack on Ukraine[0] where imperialistic russians that dream of restoring the glory and borders of soviet union[1] are waging their genocidal war. Meanwhile they are using hunger[2] and energy as their weapons against the rest of the world[3].
If the russians are not stopped in Ukraine, then there is no reason to believe that they wouldn't rinse and repeat in Baltic states, Kazakhstan, Moldova, and all other now independent former russian states. Including Alaska[4], should opportunity represent itself.
To truly secure Gorbachevs place in history, world must decisively say no to the russians agressions in Ukraine, and help Ukraine deliver a humiliating defeat to the russians and the dissolution of soviet union reach it's logical conclusion by stripping russia and their dreams off of any status as military, or world power.
The Soviet Union ceased to exist in December 26, 1991 [0]. Russia is not the USSR, and it's almost impossible it will never be anything remotely close.
Most of the former USSR industrial capabilities where either abandoned, razed or looted.
Russia's modern industry (including military) depends heavily on European (now sanctioned and obtained via third countries) and Chinese imports. This means that most of their industrial machinery, oil/gas extraction sector, automotive industry, chips... is now strained. They've almost stopped producing cars.
Russia is mostly burning the gigantic former USSR reserves until they dry out. And Ukraine is way bigger than Abkhazia, Ossetia or Transnistria so it has the largest burn rate since Afghanistan.
Just look up at their modern attempts of modernization. The T-14 Armata was expected to have over 100 of them built before 2020 [1] but only a few experimental units can be seen in the wild. Even the Iskander is a USSR design.
The "humiliation" is happening on both sides every day as we speak. No one will either "win" or "lose" the Russia-Ukraine war. It's just an endless attrition warfare [2] were both sides consume their huge military storage (Ukraine using a mix of exUSSR and NATO material and Russia using exUSSR material).
> Russia is mostly burning the gigantic former USSR reserves until they dry out. And Ukraine is way bigger than Abkhazia, Ossetia or Transnistria so it has the largest burn rate since Afghanistan.
As far as I've understood it, the burn rate is way, way higher than in Afghanistan. Soviet-Afghan War took ten years. I don't think we've seen this burn rate anywhere in the industrialized world since WW2.
He [Putin] became briefly close to President George W Bush - who even claimed to have glimpsed Putin's soul - until the Iraq War drove them apart. In Iraq, Putin insisted that international law must be upheld - no invasion could be allowed without approval from the United Nations Security Council, and that approval was not forthcoming.
This is also Putin and it is not singular. If you listen to his speeches, he often demands that international laws and treaties should be upheld and he became increasingly frustrated over the years that this was not done. Maybe you can argue that this was his only option out of a position of weakness, but never the less he did this.
Putin wanting to recapture and rebuild a past empire is a very new narrative without much supporting evidence over all those years.
> he became increasingly frustrated over the years that this was not done.
This may be true, but I think it's more likely that he doesn't care about it at all. He is an opportunist, and back then the best opportunity was to criticize the U.S. and Europe by insisting on international law. Today, he is saying Europe is a fascist Nazi oppressor.
I think it depends on what exactly you mean with it all. Upholding international law was most likely in his best interests, with Russia in its weak state this was probably the best option to stay relevant and have influence. If you mean that he believed that upholding international law is the right thing to do independent of Russia situation, that is something I can not say. Maybe someone who really studied Putin could make an educated guess at this.
The international organization where his country happens to have a permanent seat should decide the fate of the invasion! No need for further study, this is simple politics.
Every country has unsavoury elements within it, but attacking a country with a Jewish president for being fascist, because there are a few thousand racists in the south, is bullshit. Especially when you're at the same time busily funding and promoting fascist and racist groups all over Europe and the US, as Russia has been.
Zelensky asked the few thousand fascists/nazis to lay down their arms for a cease fire - in order to fulfil his primary campaign promise of ending the donbass war. They refused and called him a traitor.
Being Jewish they probably called him a few other names too.
He tacitly accepted this insubordination without a fuss, as far as I can see. These days he lavishes Azov with praise.
Russia has had problems with insubordination too, with soldiers refusing to fight. Frankly I don't see how it makes any difference. None of that makes Ukraine a fascist state.
Nor does it change the fact that when it suits it's own interests, Russia promotes and funds fascists. Clearly none of this has anything to do with fascism, Russia didn't send massive columns of armoured vehicles and thousands of troops at Kyiv over Azov battalion.
Im not sure you could argue that Ukraine is overall a fascist state. Zelensky isnt secretly one of them and lord knows they werent good at winning elections when they ran either.
However, with a lot of fascists rewarded with government posts after their performance in maidan and an entire fascist batallion somehow having the independence to defy a presidential order to stand down in a war, it's pretty clear that fascists hold a significant level of power in Ukraine.
They have power over themselves and their actions, they have little or no power or real influence in the country. They're certainly not making it in any way fascist. In fact the only reason they have any standing at all is due to the Russian aggression, if the Russian's hadn't invaded Azov would be truly irrelevant.
Ask any psychologist with a knowledge of the military world about the number of far right militants wearing an uniform and you'll be shocked by the response. Uniforms and weapons are like sex for some people.
Extreme right wingers want to wear uniforms and carry weapons at any cost: it's the way their brain is wired that makes them so inclined to the show of strength, obsession about physical efficiency, appearing and act dominant, being combative, in constant search of enemies to fight against (including creating them if necessary); and of course that decrepit ideology, which however in many cases is not the main motivator, therefore they're not perceived as Nazis, although they're equally dangerous.
The tale about Nazis in the Ukraine army is true for pretty much every country, including mine and yours. How many soldiers or cops or paramilitary forces does your country have? Well, you can take for granted that under at least 30% of the uniforms there are Azov-like extreme right wingers. And I'm very optimistic, because according both to personal direct experience when I was in the military and speaking with someone with connections there who now teaches in police schools, the numbers are way higher, up to 70-80% in some contexts, although lots of in-betweens make the distinction quite blurred.
> Extreme right wingers want to wear uniforms and carry weapons at any cost: it's the way their brain is wired
You lost your credibility here when you took a large group and applied a judgement on all of them based on how “their brain is wired”. Replace “extreme right wingers” in your sentence with almost any other group without evidence and you will likely not agree with your own statement.
> The tale about Nazis in the Ukraine army is true for pretty much every country, including mine and yours.
Please provide evidence to this statement and the following paragraph. You have found a hypothesis that fits your narrative. That does not make it true.
And a manipulator. He's the person who gossips in the background. He tells someone that guy over there just called you a name, and then says the same to the first guy. He's the type of person we all hate.
So when putin claims casus belli over another nation's land due to previous ownership a whole bunch of times, you just disregard it because of something he _didn't_ say years ago?
The tactic of "rules for thee but not for me" is as old as time. The implication that putin wants russia to actually be held to the same standards as he is trying to get other nations held to - all the while fomenting war on his borders and ignoring eight bajillion commitments and treaties - is laughable.
I just read the entire address by Putin [1] after the invasion started - it's all about NATO expansion, historical borders or something along that lines make no real appearance in the entire thing.
I know that he supposedly said things more in line with your point on other occasions but I never came across something that convincingly provided support for this point of view. Can you provide sources?
I read the entire thing [1], well I just skimmed the historical section until the 20th century. I do not see how this can be read as Ukraine is part of Russia end must be conquered back.
For the current situation the most relevant part is probably the one dealing with the recent history, say the fall of the USSR or maybe even only past 2014. Unfortunately I am in no position to judge what is laid out and reading up on all the events would probably take weeks and figuring out the actual truth might still be quite hard.
In the letter Putin directly states that he considers significant amount of Ukrainian territory as not-really-ukrainian, but a "present" from Bolsheviks or something. He also states that all of these territories now are "subject to discussion". I think it should be quite obvious to anyone (including the author) that Ukraine (like any other country) wouldn't be inclined to willingly discuss giving away its lands, so conquest is the only logical consequence.
Relevant excerpts:
You want to establish a state of your own: you are welcome! But what are the terms? I will recall the assessment given by one of the most prominent political figures of new Russia, first mayor of Saint Petersburg Anatoly Sobchak. As a legal expert who believed that every decision must be legitimate, in 1992, he shared the following opinion: the republics that were founders of the Union, having denounced the 1922 Union Treaty, must return to the boundaries they had had before joining the Soviet Union. All other territorial acquisitions are subject to discussion, negotiations, given that the ground has been revoked.
In other words, when you leave, take what you brought with you. This logic is hard to refute. I will just say that the Bolsheviks had embarked on reshaping boundaries even before the Soviet Union, manipulating with territories to their liking, in disregard of people's views.
...
In essence, Ukraine's ruling circles decided to justify their country's independence through the denial of its past, however, except for border issues. They began to mythologize and rewrite history, edit out everything that united us, and refer to the period when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as an occupation. ...
One can debate whether this is a legitimate point of view, that for example Crimea was given to Ukraine after 1922 and therefore they are not entitled to it after the desolution of the USSR. I do not know and have no opinion at the moment either.
But no matter what, this passage is a far cry from Russia wants to grab land left and right and conquer everyone.
Okay, so the thread started from your request to provide sources for Putin discussing historical borders of Ukraine:
"I just read the entire address by Putin [1] after the invasion started - it's all about NATO expansion, historical borders or something along that lines make no real appearance in the entire thing.
"I know that he supposedly said things more in line with your point on other occasions but I never came across something that convincingly provided support for this point of view. Can you provide sources?"
I provided a source (even though your message was directed to someone else) and you proceeded with moving the goalpost to basically "yes, but did he stated he intends to conquer Ukraine to re-establish those borders?" (even though that wasn't what you asked for in your initial message):
"I read the entire thing [1], well I just skimmed the historical section until the 20th century. I do not see how this can be read as Ukraine is part of Russia end must be conquered back."
I indulged you and provided a specific excerpts that in my opinion reasonably support the notion of re-establishing the borders by force. Now you moved the goalpost again and constructed a stawman by saying something along the lines of "yes, but how does that implies that Russia intends on conquer everyone?!". Well, guess what, no one in this thread said that "Russia wants to grab land left and right and conquer everyone"!
Let me put one thing first, I really could not care less who is to blame for what, whether Russia is the bad guy or the US or NATO or the EU or the Illuminati. I am interested in understanding what went wrong and maybe get some insight into what should be done better the next time.
With that out of the way, after the invasion started I got somewhat interested in the conflict and how it developed. Pretty quickly it seemed pretty clear to me that NATO expansion was most likely the main driving factor behind Putin's decision to start this war. But for many in the West it seems incomprehensible that NATO's actions might have played any role, even less that Putin's reaction might to some extend be understandable.
So following the invasion this narrative spread in the West that Putin is simply mad and wants to rebuild the Soviet empire - first Ukraine, then the Baltic states, then the rest of the world. And as I said, I could never find much evidence for this explanation. The thread started with the following.
So when putin claims casus belli over another nation's land due to previous ownership a whole bunch of times [...]
So I thought casus belli should maybe be best addressed in Putin's address after the invasion started and I never read it completely before. In there essentially nothing about territorial claims. So I asked for something else as I was of course aware of that other explanation. You pointed me towards On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians which, as you point out, talks about how Russia may have legitimate claims for territories in former Soviet states.
My point is just that the language in there does not match - at least in my opinion - what some people want to explain with this. »All other territorial acquisitions are subject to discussion, negotiations, given that the ground has been revoked.« I just can not see the imperial Russia in that language that would make this a reasonable explanation for the invasion, especially if you contrast it with the clear and direct language used to address NATO expansion and similar topics, repeatedly again and again for three decades now.
So if you think I moved the goal posts, then I probably just did not make clear enough where they are. I am looking for evidence that supports the theory that mad Putin simply wants to rebuild an empire as his legacy. And not some bits here and there, but something that makes it similarly plausible as NATO expansion as the leading cause, which is supported by countless speeches and documents with no uncertain language spanning decades.
Think about it that way: Ukraine was not going to join NATO any time soon while having significant chunk of its territory occupied by nuclear superpower. NATO states knew it, Ukraine knew it (Zelensky's own election campaign was along the lines "You won't take us?! Fuck you NATO we won't even apply then!"), and _Russia themselves absolutely knew it_. Also, Ukraine offered to commit to neutrality multiple times during peace negotiations, but Russia apparently wasn't interested.
Now, of course, you could reasonably disagree and continue pressing the narrative that, no, Russia has all the reasons to be concerned. However, in fact there is a Russian neighbor that shares a land border with Russia that is currently in the process of actually joining NATO for real - Finland. And what do Russia do about that? Invades them? No. Maybe a naval blockade and 100k military personnel "on exercise" near their border? No, nothing. In fact, Russia is so unconcerned that according to satellite images they have recently transferred bunch of personnel and equipment from a military base near border with Finland[0]... to fight in Ukraine. It is almost like Russia is not _that_ afraid of NATO and is actually pursuing some other goals in Ukraine... Reasonable person may even conclude that Russia was lying and faking its concern about NATO expansion after consulting the map and determining that for some reason NATO is still not nuking Moscow from Latvia that has been a member for some time now... Go figure!
He joined the checheyna war instantly after coming into office. Actions speak louder then a million voices. The empires resurection was part of day one and all else was blatant lies, in public to hypnotize the chickens.
Part of those lies also was, to become as "spokesman" for all sorts of internal oppossition, left and right alike.
People evidently did not care about the war being UN-sanctioned or not. The rule was removed at that point, although with the structure of the UN and its security council it was perhaps inevitable that people start to ignore it.
Especially with history in mind it is quite clear that Russia would take any right that former competitors took themselves. Having lost the cold war or not is secondary it seems. Of course any argument will be used to the largest opportunistic degree. Putin may have believed that invasions now always need to be sanctioned and there was a time where it probably looked like that.
That Putin wants to rebuild past empires is something he openly espouses himself now. Although I do believe this is directed towards the domestic population. I also think Russia did believe that the US tried to topple government in Ukraine and saw a need to react.
I don’t think opposing someone else’s war is much of a credit to him, or evidence against the idea that he is motivated to Make Russia Great Again. It seems more like he wants International Law to bind others but not himself.
He was not completely opposing it, he just demanded to follow the law - you make your case in front of the UN and get it sanctioned. And in this case you should get credit for opposing it as it was all made up bullshit.
Making Russia great again is also perfectly fine if it means to rebuild the economy, improve living standards, and similar things. Making it greater again, i.e. extending the territory with force is of course a different matter.
How well Russia followed the laws and treaties itself, I can not judge, I only know that Putin often said, we are fulfilling our obligations even though the US or someone else does this or that. See for example the speech at the 2007 Munich security conference [1]. How true this all is, I can not tell, I would have to become a full time fact checker.
> He was not completely opposing it, he just demanded to follow the law - you make your case in front of the UN and get it sanctioned. And in this case you should get credit for opposing it as it was all made up bullshit.
Well, as you point out, he doesn't get credit for opposing the Iraq War because he wasn't opposed to it (he just wanted Bush to ask his permission). He also doesn't get credit for upholding the value of International Law because he only does so when it suits him, which is essentially my point.
> How well Russia followed the laws and treaties itself, I can not judge
Sure you can. Russia regularly flouts International Law and it's currently in the process of doing so.
> Making Russia great again is also perfectly fine if it means to rebuild the economy, improve living standards, and similar things. Making it greater again, i.e. extending the territory with force is of course a different matter.
Right, but we're talking specifically about extending the territory with force.
> He was not completely opposing it, he just demanded to follow the law - you make your case in front of the UN and get it sanctioned.
Which, given how he didn't do that before invading Ukraine, was just him spewing bullshit. Why are you repeating his bullshit as if it somehow excuses his actions?
> Making Russia great again is also perfectly fine if it means to rebuild the economy, improve living standards, and similar things.
Did you really miss the initial capitals in MAG-- eh, MARA? It has about as much to do with rebuilding the economy, improving living standards, and similar things as MAGA had to do with rebuilding the economy and improving living standards in America.
> I only know that Putin often said ...
If even you realise that all you know is his own spin, then what makes you think you have anything worthwhile to contribute to the discussion?
Even their source says "a random politician", so this is geo-politically equivalent to MTG hypothetically giving a throwaway comment about how we should take the Gulf of Texas back from Mexico.
What do all these trite propaganda lines about "UkRaiNian NazIs oPpreSsing RuzZiAn-sPeaKinG pEoPleS iN teh EaSt!!1" have to do with Russian army trying to occupy Kyiv or annex Kherson (while indiscriminately murdering civilians in the process)? Do you need my help to verify on the map that those places are not in eastern Ukraine or in Crimea?
Well of course, they are at war. Especially as weapons and money flood in from both sides, escalating the conflict further (long-range missiles from the USA that can hit Sevastopol, the economic conscription of the Chechens and Daghestanis in Russia, etc.)
But do you think this conflict is worth it? Do you support the Ukrainian claim on the Crimea? Is it worth the bloodshed and economic destruction?
It's as though we're stuck in a terrible local minimum because both sides are too stubborn to compromise for peace, and there is no real way of having a truly independent process and decision-making (e.g. from referendums in the DPR + LPR, etc.) - ideally this could have been resolved diplomatically a year ago.
For Russia, no. For Putin specifically, maybe. Russia is going to end up in a much worse position without any significant (and maybe any at all) gain. Putin is in a position where backtracking is difficult and dangerous, so he probably won't until things become completely untenable.
For Ukraine it's very worth it because they're fighting for their own existence.
> Do you support the Ukrainian claim on the Crimea? Is it worth the bloodshed and economic destruction?
At this point, I do. Formerly, I'd tend towards "no", but I changed my mind. My reasoning:
* The war has already started. Crimea has a very strategic place in it, and a vulnerability for Ukraine.
* Strategically it's very desirable for Ukraine to own it, as well as for its allies.
* Strategically it hurts Russia a lot to lose it.
* From the long term point of view I think it's good for Russia to lose something significant in the conflict. It changes the calculus. Trying to take over Ukraine not only won't succeed, but will put them in a situation worse than before, and that hopefully is an additional reason to avoid a repeat. Russia can tolerate losing soldiers, tolerating losing a chunk of themselves is harder.
> It's as though we're stuck in a terrible local minimum because both sides are too stubborn to compromise for peace,
I don't think a compromise is really possible at this point. It might have been a possibility in the past, but it's too late.
> Russia is going to end up in a much worse position without any significant (and maybe any at all) gain.
Judging by how bad the inflation and energy poverty is in the West, as well as the continued loss of ground and billions in Western funds in this war whilst the ruble stays strong, I don't have the same optimism whatsoever.
All the more reason to help Ukraine smash Russia quickly. Ukraine is friendly to the West, and has its own gas and oil resources.
But personally I don't mind that much, it's long been time for us to wean ourselves off gas and oil. It'll hurt a bit, but will be a huge benefit on the long term.
No, its the same as with Weimar Germany, once the "we will be big again" sentiments wins over, compromise just gives the perpetrators results. The party was over the moment "greatness/stability" won over "quality of life/freedom/chaos" in the heads of the common man.
> Well of course, they are at war. Especially as weapons and money flood in from both sides, escalating the conflict further
Wait, so are they just protecting Russian-speaking people of the east from bloodthirsty Ukrainian Nazis or they are waging aggressive war with intention to topple Ukrainian government and annex significant portion of Ukraine outside eastern regions and Crimea?
> But do you think this conflict is worth it?
Worth it for whom?
> Do you support the Ukrainian claim on the Crimea?
AFAIK returning to status quo of pre-Feb 24 was proposed multiple times by Ukrainian side. That would imply Russia retaining control over Crimea indefinitely. You make it sound like Ukraine attacked Crimea first and Russia is just defending or something.
> Is it worth the bloodshed and economic destruction?
Of course not! I would prefer Russians to just pack their bags, leave and happily continue selling resources to Europe! They could even invite Angela Merkel to Gazprom board for bonus points!
> It's as though we're stuck in a terrible local minimum because both sides are too stubborn to compromise for peace
Ukrainian side offered peace with concessions multiple times (including neutral status, which is another usual bogeyman of Russian propaganda "we are just afraid of NATO nuking us from Ukrainian territory!"), but Russia didn't want to have any of that. It is almost like Russia is actually interested in something else besides securing oppressed Russian-speaking population of Ukraine and ensuring that no evil NATO nukes are installed on Ukrainian territory...
>And Ukraine is a complicated conflict, Crimea was granted to Ukraine by the Soviet Union which modern Russia considers to be an illegitimate act,...
If they considered it illegitimate, why did they sign a treaty guaranteeing Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity?
The answer is because at the time Ukraine was controlled by Russian stooges, and as long as Russia had control of Ukrainian politics it was all fine. What they couldn't stand is the idea of a genuinely free democratic Ukraine sat right next to an oppressive and kleptocratic Russia. The Russian regime sees all of Ukraine as their back yard, every last square inch of it. They have even said so many, many times. Putin wrote an essay about how Ukrainian sovereignty is "only possible in partnership with Russia", and if you think he means anything like an equal partnership I can't help you. Crimea and the Donbas are excuses, they're a foot in the door to Ukraine as a whole.
Here we come again with the "Ukrainian nationalism" and "coup". So boring. Will you ever update your guide on Russian propaganda? Even the russian troll factory stopped using these arguments like 2 years ago.
But here in Europe we've had 25% of our savings and purchasing power destroyed almost overnight, for a conflict that really has nothing to do with us (CIS borders and nationalism after the USSR).
Why can't we just be neutral? We didn't do this for Georgia's claim in Ossetia or Armenia's claim with Azerbaijan (both similar scenarios), or the Iraq-Iran war, etc.
> But here in Europe we've had 25% of our savings and purchasing power destroyed almost overnight, for a conflict that really has nothing to do with us (CIS borders and nationalism after the USSR).
Very weird to say those things
- Inflation isn't just caused by the invasion.
- Inflation is at ~9%, not enough for 25% purchasing power loss.
- The conflict has a lot of things to do with Europe. Since when is Ukraine not an european country? Even if you mean just the EU, both Ukraine and Russia border several EU countries, and Russia has threatened some of them.
- "Remaining neutral" doesn't mean "free of consequences".
The fact is we should have intervened in Armenia and Georgia. We should have intervened in Syria, at least to some extent. We should have imposed crushing sanctions on Russia after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. The fact that we did not is a causal direct line to this invasion.
Since the gulf war the west has become averse to foreign adventurism. I understand that and why, but it's misconceived. Washing our hands of the rest of the world and letting countries like Iran and Russia (and Iraq under Saddam Hussein) do whatever they like doesn't work. It comes back to bite us every single time.
Even if we say it's not our problem, it's not our responsibility, it always comes back and hurts us and our direct economic, political and humanitarian interests again and again. It leads to things like the rape of Kuwait and 9/11.
Being fully engaged internationally is expensive in money and lives, it's messy, it's morally compromising. It's also unavoidable. We are part of the world and can't deny responsibility for playing our part in it. Or rather we can, but at a heavy price to ourselves and others.
Intervened on which side in Georgia? That Georgian government was absolutely terrible, putting dissidents in prison, firing on protests, etc. - just because they're anti-Russia doesn't make them good.
We should just try to live in peace and focus on our own nations and stop making enemies.
I'm sorry my friend, but our enemies are out there. They hate us and they want to kill us or force us to change politics or religion whether we like it or not. If they can't get to you they will get to your friends, or neighbouring countries, or countries you trade with, or that you visit on holiday. They're not going to suddenly decide to be all friendly and nice to us, just because we turn our backs on the people they are already terrorising and assaulting.
I'm in no way supporting or justifying the Georgian government at the time, we shouldn't have been tolerating that either. The point is what happens in these places matters to us. It affects us, whether we like it or not.
>Why is it our responsibility?
Because we are moral beings that live in the world, we benefit from the things that world provides to us, and therefore have responsibility for the state of the world we live in.
Millions of Europeans in nations bordering Russia disagrees. This conflict is all about us. We'll take the economic troubles and the cold winters as they come. We can still see clearly that we're not freezing in a bomb shelter or trench, as the Ukranians are on our behalf.
Take your neutrality and what-abouts and stuff them.
The Ukranians are free to surrender to Russia should they want to. But the decision is theirs. As long as they want our support I say we are obligated to provide it.
I'd also recommend you to be careful with predictions on the outcome of wars.
> for a conflict that really has nothing to do with us
This is so wrong. Where do you think all the disinformation comes from? The rise of far-right parties across Europe. The attacks on democracy. Putin has been waging war against us (albeit a new kind of war) for many years. It is time to fight back if we value democracy at all.
Damn that Putin is both very weak (his Country has GDP of Texas while having way more people), and absolute mastermind organizing far right as some kind of pauper Lex Luthor, on a shoestring budget.
Disclaimer: Western troubles are features of capitalism, they provide the fuel, even if Putin is the one to throw the cigarette butt.
Check my comment history here. You'll see I'm no particular fan of capitalism.
And of course the far-right existed before Putin.
But he is the head of a mafia organization that controls the world's largest supply of natural gas. So I think funding a few right-wing grifters/useful idiots like Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage is within their capabilities.
"But here in Europe we've had 25% of our savings and purchasing power destroyed almost overnight, for a conflict that really has nothing to do with us..."
Come now, how can you say that?
After the fall of the USSR, Europe willingly got into bed with the 'new' Russia because it saw an opportunistic economic advantage to do so.
Even back then it was a gamble for Europe to put too many of its eggs into that Russian basket and now it is paying the price. ...And a hefty one at that.
This isn't a simple territorial dispute. Russia has abducted vast numbers of people to camps from where we have no idea what happened to them, vanished Ukrainian children into their adoption system, and massacred huge numbers of civilians wherever it has taken control. They are clearly trying to wipe Ukraine and its identity off the map.
why are (western) Europeans such pussies? Like, really, short-term economic loss is not going to kill anyone. I'm glad to see that the eastern, slavic and baltic part of Europe can handle it so much better. Partly because they've been under totalitarian rule, and gone through the economic disaster it left behind. Which was waaay harder then the current cost surge
> Why can't we just be neutral? We didn't do this for Georgia's claim in Ossetia or Armenia's claim with Azerbaijan (both similar scenarios), or the Iraq-Iran war, etc.
Errors of the past are not a good way to go further.
Lack of any defense for Georgia was very sad (similarly for Chechnya, but Russians might look at it a bit more angry). Fortunatelly Ukraine is to close to EU borders to be ignored and handed over to Russian war mongering.
Russia may not be the Soviet Union, but the Soviet Union was Russia. Russian ambitions and attrocities in the area go back to at least Catherine the Great.
Russia has no moral or any other claim over Crimea. Their actions in starving millions of people to death in Crimea in the 20s, the ethnic cleansing by evicting Tartars and Cosacks, replacing them with Russians - these all go to the long term drive of Russian imperial ambitions in the area.
Putin tried to take the whole of Ukraine and has tried several times to assasinate Zelensky, just like he has assasinated many others (and tried but failed to assassinate a previous Ukrainian president with poison).
The internal politics of Ukraine are just a pretext that Putin is using to realize his ambitions. They are not a reason in any way for the war crimes and attrocities he has committed.
> Imagine if Trump had really been a Russian agent and had returned Alaska to Russia, would you expect all subsequent administrations to just respect that it is Russian now?
Huh? You mean: Imagine if Russia just annexed Alaska after they sent their green men over-there, to disrupt and takeover the region.
Since when Ukraine just gave up on crimea? They were bullied off it and same with donbass. Their military was weak and disorganization so puting took advantage then.
No, I was referring to when Khrushchev just arbitrarily transferred the Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR.
It had been independent / Tatar before, and Russification meant it was mainly populated by Russians.
The issue is that Ukraine refuses to allow for the self-determination of the Crimea and Donbass since Euromaidan. Why can't they just allow internationally managed referendums to take place? This would be far better than warfare and paramilitary killings, etc. for both sides.
>The issue is that Ukraine refuses to allow for the self-determination of the Crimea and Donbass since Euromaidan.
Wow, just wow. And how exactly were they supposed to do that?
The unity government was declared on 24th February and was formally convened on 27th February 2014.
How long did Russia wait to see if the new government would accept regional referendums?
Well, Russian forces seized control of key strategic sites across Crimea on, er, 27th February 2014. The same day the new government formed. The idea that genuine free and fair regional referendums were ever an option, or even something Russia had any interest in pursuing or allowing whatsoever, is pure fiction.
Suppose the regions did hold referendums and chose to stay part of Ukraine, do you think that would have been the end of it? Russia would have just backed off and respected Ukrainian sovereignty? That's just not how the Russian leadership thinks. Putin had no interest in allowing even the possibility of any such thing.
Isn't that up to them? I mean the Ukrainians? It's not as if the west is forcing them against their will to keep on fighting for their country and freedom.
In the first months of the war hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians returned to their country to sign up to fight. We either support them, or abandon them to their fate. I don't see how you can credibly claim that abandoning them, despite their appeals for support, is better for them and in their interests. It's clearly in the interests of the Russian government, but why should the west care about that?
Sending UN peace keepers is a nice idea, but unfortunately Russia is a permanent member of the UN security council, with a veto.
> The issue is that Ukraine refuses to allow for the self-determination of the Crimea and Donbass since Euromaidan. Why can't they just allow internationally managed referendums to take place?
The internationally managed referendums Russia has never asked for and would never permit?
Arguments that "real issue" with Russia repeatedly invading its smaller neighbours is that one of the neighbours won't grant something never asked for are not made in good faith.
I'm not pro-Russia either, I just don't understand why we're completely destroying our economies for a conflict that has nothing to do with us (post-USSR border division and nationalism).
No, but you are definatly following a script. Once the "Due Process self determination" runs out, you fall back to economics. Just dump the dialog tree?
The Georgian war was instigated by Georgia though, that authoritarian president wanted to reclaim South Ossetia - read the unresolved conflicts part of the article you linked yourself! Sure, Russia took advantage of the situation, but there's no way that extrapolates to them invading Poland and Europe.
How do you see a referendum working out fairly when the population that sees itself as ukrainian has been forced out and forced to flee and only the russian locals will be able to vote? "Referendum" haha
What happens to the Russians in the Crimea? Do they just let Right Sector and the Azov Battalion carry out their persecution, and move Ukrainians in just like the RSFSR did to the Tatars?
Likewise how do they control the DPR and LPR? They previously elected Yanukovych, the problem isn't just going to disappear.
From everything I've read about him, he was a true liberal and egalitarian. How does someone like that rise up the ranks of an authoritarian USSR in the first place? Did he hide his beliefs and present as just a competent bureaucrat until he got to the top?
If I remember correctly (and please correct me if I’m wrong) his ascent was influenced by his predecessor Andropov, which was one of the original revolutionaries but like Gorby he had a more liberal approach. Andropov’s health was really bad and Gorby being his right arm ended up as chairman of the union.
Andropov was absolutely not liberal. I don't think it was that Gorbachev was Andropov's favourite, but that the politburo realized it was a problem to keep a
appointing elderly leaders in bad health. Gorbachev was "only" 54, and since he lived to 2022 I'd say they made a pretty good bet on his health, too.
The way I remember as a far off observer was the Soviet Union went through a few very old and ineffective leaders after Brezhnev died, while their war in Afghanistan drained resources so they couldn't possibly keep up with Reagan's Star Wars initiative. Gorbachev was a young, vital fresh face with new ideas that they had to go with to try to reform and survive.
It was a gerontocracy, with old dryed husks dying on the throne pre gorbachev. It was also mostly resource exporting back then, econimically dependent on the west. The oil prices during the gulf war killed them.
But with the Soviet healthcare regime of the time (mainly, I'd guess, smoking like fucking chimneys), their effective age was probably at least that of Drumpf and Biden.
To take a President more contemporary to Andropov and Gorbachev: Jimmy Carter is still around, at 97.
No doubt the opinions of Americans here on HN will do a swift 180 once they realize Gorbachev supported the annexation of Crimea and that he condemned the growing NATO presence in eastern europe.
He was not. He send tanks to crush protests, arresting killing and wounding people. He has his own massacre's. It is just that they did not happened in west.
Well, while the satellite countries were allowed to leave, the dissolution of the Soviet Union was met with stiff and deadly resistance. Not just Lithuania but Latvia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan all had their deadly clashes with Soviet forces.
Not true, under Gorbachov SU raided every and each country seceding SU. One example being Georgia where Russians soldairs raided public protest and killed dozens of kids.
Personally, I try to avoid characterizing anyone in politics as a "genuinely good person" or otherwise. I don't think it's a useful framing.
As humans, we gravitate toward personalities, identities, and stories, and these all matter for the people we keep close to us. In the public sphere, however, actions and legacy are what matter, for better or worse. For a major historical figure like Gorbachev, there is bound to be both better and worse, and to me the most valuable analysis is of those actions and legacy rather than personal character.
I think sincerity is a better measure. As leaders go, he is one of the lasts of his kind.
He was 14 when the war ended. “Our generation is the generation of wartime children,” he said. “It has burned us, leaving its mark both on our characters and on our view of the world.” -- Quote from the WAPO article on this.
Interesting reaction to the phrasing here. I read OP as framing Lincoln through the eyes of the people who suffered the consequences of his decisions. History is messy. Even unambiguous positives like ending slavery come with a ton of collateral damage. If that collateral damage is your husband or brother coming home in a pine box, you're likely to have a poor view of those who caused it.
A few questions to consider:
1) If Texas or California were to secede in 2023, should the rest of the United States declare war on them and force them to return to the union? What if that war costs the lives of 500k people? 1 million? How many deaths is too many deaths to maintain the geo-political status quo?
2) There are places in the world today where slavery or near-slavery like conditions are a fact of life. Does the United States have a moral obligation to intervene? US interventionism in recent decades has led to unaccountable suffering for the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. The American South suffered a similar fate during and after the civil war.
All that to say, big evils like slavery or Nazism tend to distort historical objectivity. Any cost seems small, any act defensible, as long at it helps end the big evil. Once a historical figure becomes canonized, the negative consequences of their actions get glossed over.
That’s some choice phrasing there. Mind explaining this framing? Pretty sure the only people I’ve seen use this phrasing were people who thought the confederacy and slavery were good things
The term "Civil War" affirms the United States' (i.e. Northern) viewpoint that the secessions of the southern states were illegitimate and the conflict that ensued was between citizens of the same country.
If you think that the secession of southern states was a legitimate act and the formation of the CSA was legitimate, you can't call it a civil war. It's a war between two sovereign states, of which the United States (i.e. "The North") would be seen as the aggressor, hence "War of Northern Aggression."
The motivation behind seceding was predominantly maintaining slavery, though then a deeper question might be, when is secession legitimate? And is there any justification that the United States might simply accept secession of a state from the Union?
> though then a deeper question might be, when is secession legitimate?
It's an entirely subjective question. Never, according to the state being seceded from or revolted against, and always, according to the secessionists and revolutionaries.
It's worth mentioning that the same American government that added the Second Amendment and spoke in florid prose about the blood-sacrifice of patriots and rebellion against governments also put down rebellions against itself.
>And is there any justification that the United States might simply accept secession of a state from the Union?
No. Cultural reasons aside, there is simply too much money and infrastructure at stake (to say nothing of political instability threatening its superpower status) for the US to be willing to lose even a single state.
If you are to suppose that the Confederate States of America were a legitimate, sovereign government of the Southern states, the term "War of Northern Aggression" makes more sense. They did not threaten to secede from the United States, they did secede from it. The United States taking action to take back control of the southern states could be viewed as "Northern Aggression."
Granted, it is a little odd considering that the Battle of Fort Sumter was initiated by the Confederates, though you could argue that attempting to resupply United States troops in Confederate territory as an act of aggression from the United States.
In either case, the argument seems to be that Gorbachev being responsible for the death of many lives doesn't discredit the notion that he could be a "genuinely good person" since there examples of people that have been responsible for the death of many that are generally viewed favorably, such as Lincoln.
It doesn't really make sense in that context. The Thirteen Colonies seceded from Great Britain, something not in dispute even in the UK. Great Britain sent troops into the United States to oppose the secession. But it's not referred to as "the War of British Aggression".
The only sense that singling out "Northern Aggression" makes sense in is perpetuating the myth that the slaveowners were the real victims.
> It doesn't really make sense in that context. The Thirteen Colonies seceded from Great Britain, something not in dispute even in the UK. Great Britain sent troops into the United States to oppose the secession. But it's not referred to as "the War of British Aggression".
You're making the mistake of assuming that every conflict must follow a strict naming convention when in reality it'd usually be called something different based on who you ask. The annexation of Texas by the United States resulted in what the United States calls the Mexican-American War, while Mexico refers to it as "U.S. Intervention in Mexico." I'd say that the "War of Northern Aggression" would pretty much exclusively used by people that view Southern secession from the United States as legitimate, but that doesn't mean it is used exclusively by your strawmen.
Just because there isn't a strict naming convention doesn't mean there isn't a longstanding convention in English-speaking countries of giving wars boring names based on the participants or theatre, even when it's absolutely unambiguous that the other side was the belligerent. Picking a ludicrously overblown name like "Northern Aggression" for a failed secession makes no sense in that context, but plenty of sense in Lost Cause victimhood narrative.
Which is why it was a name popularised by 1950s segregationists, not the original secessionists who may have rejected the notion that it was a "rebellion" or "civil" war, but talked about wars of "Separation" or "War for Independence" instead.
> Just because there isn't a strict naming convention doesn't mean there isn't a longstanding convention in English-speaking countries of giving wars boring names based on the participants or theatre
That is one name that is ascribed to a conflict, but we often have many. The Forgotten War is the Korean War, The Great War is World War 1, The American Civil War had many names.
> Picking a ludicrously overblown name like "Northern Aggression" for a failed secession makes no sense in that context, but plenty of sense in Lost Cause victimhood narrative.
How is it overblown? It's a descriptive title that is certainly controversial, but if you accept that particular viewpoint, it's simply descriptive.
> Which is why it was a name popularised by 1950s segregationists, not the original secessionists who may have rejected the notion that it was a "rebellion" or "civil" war, but talked about wars of "Separation" or "War for Independence" instead.
You can certainly find its usage linked to segregationists, but the entire basis for suggesting it wasn't used before the 1950's is that people couldn't find any evidence of the term being used prior to that in their google searches. It not showing up in term searches for archived OCRed newspapers is hardly evidence that it wasn't a term used before then. Regardless, that is beside the point. You're going out of you way to project meaning into it that isn't intrinsically there.
> How is it overblown? It's a descriptive title that is certainly controversial, but if you accept that particular viewpoint, it's simply descriptive.
Suuuure. Nothing remotely overblown about the sole popular name for conflict involving English speakers with "aggression" or similar being that one. Completely normal name for a war with no propaganda value for Lost Cause mythology, and just coincidental its print usage maps perfectly to Southern indignation at the Civil Rights movement.
I saw that Pizza Hut commercial earlier today and I can't stop thinking about it. It has so much going on. It's the victory of capitalism over Soviet communism, the rise of neoliberalism to global hegemony, and the "End of History" in the form of a 30-second ad for pizza.
It was also the start of the rush to full neo feudalism. Many conflate capitalism (oppossed) with what we had after the USSR got weak capitalism(unopossed). Turns out the remarkable archievments happen with systemic competition.
For the West he was a hero, for the Russians he was a disaster https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Russia/Death_rate/ . I don't blame Gorbachev for this. Just as in the case of Nikolai II Russian totalitarian state and lack of checks and balances washed out an inept person to rule the country.
The communist system is responsible for that, not Gorbachev. Centralized gov't controlled economies create corruption which results in ultimate economic collapse.
I partially wanted to express it with "totalitarian state and lack of checks and balances". However, I slightly disagree. Being an authoritarian ruler, Gorbachev had lots of power. It is proven by the fact that his reforms were radical and unsuccessful, and many of the problems that the Soviet union faced during its demise were exacerbated by them. Of course, the Soviet Union was to suffer some losses but they could have been milder. But may be you are 100% correct. I don't feel knowledgeable enough on the topic of late Soviet union to argue.
"Checks and balances" mean nothing unless you specify who's checking who. System where the military keeps a check on the president, or the king keeps a check on parliament, aren't really much better than the "checker" being in charge all the time. And systems based on mutual checking tend to just reel from one constitutional crisis to another.
The quality of implementation definitely matters, agreed. However, the Soviet states by and large didn't even have a shitty form in place, the party leader was an 'elected' dictator.
He also did a cameo in Faraway, So Close! (1993)[1] by Wim Wenders:
> Mikhail Gorbachev only appears because his secretary was familiar with the movies of Wim Wenders and was a great admirer. She talked Gorbachev into giving up a couple of hours to do the cameo as he was on a trip to Germany anyway.
Supported the annexation of Crimea. Organized highly corrupt privatization of Soviet Union assets. Robbed Soviet working class of their pensions. Handled Chernobyl by throwing people into the furnace and withholding information.
Not sure where you were back in the 80s, but he is one of the etalons of a horrible, corrupt politician.
Gorbachev good? You think sending tanks to Lithuania to kill people is what good person does? Or hiding everything about Chernobyl and not telling people what happened is also good person best move?
I wish I had it! I think I would have to travel to some physical German archive to lookup old magazines... Or maybe Apple itself has the original digital version in their archives.
Say what you will, he seemed a politician very keen on world peace, beyond mere lip service. He understood the lacunae of the Soviet system and genuinely set about to reform them. But ultimately it was Ethno-national interests in Ukraine, Baltics and Central Asian republics along with the rise of opportunist power-grabbers like Yeltsin that did him and Soviet Union in.
And perhaps his own reluctance to follow the Chinese model. He prefered to do political reforms before economic ones, while the Chinese prefered the economic reforms first and foremost.
He ended the war in Afghanistan. He was more keen on Nuclear disarmament than Western leaders: Western leaders dragged their feet on that matter, and ultimately we didn't get no where near Nuclear disarmament.
He ushered in reforms. See the Soviet films of the period to see a very different picture from cold war era Hollywood depictions.
That was a very human mistake to prioritize politics (people) over essential root-causes (money). I am convinced that for most people, their development years (pre-adolescent) shape them, and for Mikhail, the experiences of his father and maternal grandfather as he witnessed as a child shaped him. He saw a cruel world made by people and tried to fix it, but for humans, the root cause is always superseded by basic needs.
That's very skewed, at the moment yes Chinese people aren't interested in demands, but you can 100% already get a taste that if the ccp doesn't back off / reform certain areas of society people will demand change.
> And perhaps his own reluctance to follow the Chinese model.
I always thought it was the other way. The Chinese saw what Gorbachev did and didn't like the results. June 4th (this was 1989, where Gorbachev's reforms were well on their way) was the turning point where the CCP decided collectively to conclusively reject political reforms and crack down on those who insisted on them. I think the hardliners in CCP felt vindicated when USSR disintegrated a short while after believing they dodged a similar bullet by the crackdowns.
Now we're right back in the Cold War, tensions right up around Able Archer level, ready to torch much of the world on another misunderstanding. No, you won't hear about it on social media but I bet all the nuclear submarine commanders have been doing extra drills lately, what?
As far as economics, what did Russia ever have that China didn't? An absence, that's what China had. An absences of lucrative fossil fuel reserves to sell to Western countries, isn't that the Russian resource curse model? What if Europe stops buying Russian gas? But China never had any gas to sell, just rice. Now, what, we'll all be buying Chinese silicon instead? Why didn't Russia develop modern tech, while China did?
Putin would have got on just fine with Wall Street, like Mohammed Bin Bone Saw Sultan did, but he didn't sign up for petrodollar recycling, so war. Not much more to it than that, really. Same with Qadafy, Sadam, etc. Old dying empires are so ugly on their way down aren't they?
For anyone interested in getting a vague sense of what it might have been like to be Mikhail Gorbachev there is a pretty low-fi simulator game called Crisis in the Kremlin on Steam.
I played through it and it requires juggling the various factions in Soviet Russia. I ended up getting couped by the military but just reading the various prompts and choosing where to put resources gave me a better understanding of the dilemmas anyone in power in the USSR might have been going through.
I can't attest to whatever bias might have been embedded in the game mechanics but it was interesting. Actually I only played the 2017 re-make. I didn't realize there was an original game from 1991. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_in_the_Kremlin
Hard to know the man behind the image, but Gorbachev seemed like a fundamentally decent man, who was perhaps over his head at a moment no one could be reasonably be expected to prepare for. Still, with him at the helm of the sinking ship, chaos and conflict was at least avoided, or at least deferred, and for that we should be thankful. RIP
It was very sympathetic toward him. And I don't think it is a "great" film in any sense. But I did feel like I got a taste for who he was. And I also felt he was a fundamentally decent person.
Fundamentally decent man ... don't want to jinx it but reminded me of Jimmy Carter. Separated by 5-10 years in their peak power, with similar difference in their age. Both well regarded by their followers but eventually significantly irrelevant (except symbolism) once out of power.
Carter made peace between Israel and Egypt. Hardly a term without significance. Carter went against the real powers in the US and that's why he is being written off history.
Reading the description of the events, it sounds like they intervened militarily after this event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baku_pogrom , which sort of makes sense.
He was able to get into politburo very young because he was a good administrator and he had powerful patrons. But he became the leader of the USSR just because there was nobody else. Politburo was so old that everybody ahead of him, or more power hungry than him was in hospice or otherwise not fully functioning.
Then he started finally some of the common sense reforms needed.
His intention was never to drop communism or let the soviet block to disintegrate, but things got out of hand. His greatest act was let it happen even when it was against everything he had worked for.
Today they are rich and poweful, but have pretty much abandoned any pretense at worrying about capital exploitation of labour. It's a nationalist, corporatist, authoritarian state, ironically closer to Chiang Kai-shek's ideal state than Mao's, let alone Marx's.
That was not the outcome he wanted. People often paper over that he was a true believer in Marxism-Leninism, unlike his predecessors.
The Chinese have successfully uplifted most of their citizenry out of poverty while their neighbour India - despite a head-start - is yet to manage the same. Looks like the corporate nationalist approach works well at overcoming the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Maybe not a popular opinion, I think that had Gorby been able to succeed in his reforms rather than be squeezed from both sides, Russia would have been better off in the long run both economically and politically. Instead, it swung from autocratic communism one day to near total collapse ("free market" anarchy) the next during which those with connections and saw the opportunity gobbled up all the resources eventually leading to a oligarchical authoritarianism.
Is seems clear that Russia did not fare well in its move from corrupt authoritarian Communism (a tautology if ever there was one) to the kleptocracy which replaced it - often by the hands of the same people. It is just as clear that eastern Europe did fare well by the fall of the Soviet empire. If Gorbachev had succeeded in dissolving the Soviet Union without having Russia descend into the chaos which followed things might have been better but I find it hard to see how something like that could have been orchestrated. It more or less worked in Eastern Germany due to the efforts (financially and socially) of Western Germany. The way this was handled in Russia was scandalous and led the country from one failed economic system into another failing one with the oligarchs and their cronies taking the place of the Party. Which country could have been the 'Germany' for Russia? Who could have dissolved the inefficient state conglomerates like Treuhandanstalt [1] did in Eastern Germany, who would have covered the financial losses?
Historically it's very unusual for someone with so much power to allow his regime to collapse so peacefully. And it's remarkable that Soviet politics, some of the most brutal and self-serving in history, would find such a figure at its head. God bless him and keep him.
Indeed, what he did by stepping down peacefully was highly unusual for a politician in his circumstances. It was like a miracle. And now we're seeing a more typical behavior from the successor of his successor.
It is too bad that in his later years he kinda regretted it, and kept saying "I should have kept going until the end". Perhaps it is natural to regret past decisions wondering if an alternative decision might have led to a better outcome. Hope that before he died he realized that had he pursued that alternative path he'd end up like Putin.
In summary -- Mr. Gorbachev was one of the most decent politicians and upstanding people in general that ever lived.
It was interesting but not as good as I expected given that Herzog is quite brilliant. I think he got less of Gorbachev's time than he expected when he started.
I thought the Mandela Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_Effect) was a myth ... but now I experience it myself. I can so clearly remember reading Gorbachev's obituary a few years ago ... Did anyone else have a similar reaction?
(Perhaps I read an article about him on his 90th birthday and assumed it was an obituary?)
I wanted to find out how the media could mess up a simple factual story on whether or not a famous person had died. It proved to be quite difficult to google for "Gorbachev death/died/dead misreported/erroneous/false" and lots of other variations; I kept getting hits on current news. But I finally found a report from 2013 here:
The state-run news agency RIA Novosti in Moscow that published the erroneous story for just 5 minutes blamed it on hackers. But the false news spread widely from there.
"Arsenals of Folly" By Richard Rhodes is one of the best records of the Gorbachev era with respect to negotiations over arms reductions with Reagan (which resulted in a highly fractured US administration, with opponents (Cheney etc.) fighting advocates (Shultz etc.) over what policy Reagan should support), the immense effect of the Chernobyl disaster on the Soviet Union (something many nuclear energy proponents still try to downplay), and a few other aspects of Gorbachev's years in power in the USSR.
The culmination of Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika was the Fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the more memorable historical moments of the 20th century and one which gave a lot of hope to young people who grew up under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. If you watched "The Day After Tomorrow" on American television in the 1980s, you might know the feeling.
However, in retrospect that was a high point in terms of hopes for peace and prosperity. The Soviet Union went rapidly from communist authoritarian to oligarch kleptocracy during the Yeltsin era, and NATO wasn't disbanded like the Warsaw Pact was but instead started bombing Europe (Yugoslavia), and the steady downhill progression has continued ever since. Putin threw out or jailed the oligarchs Washington preferred by 2005 or so, and since then it's been a steady return to full on Cold War proxy wars and gas and oil pipeline control conflicts (Georgia, Syria, Azerbaijan, Ukraine) stretching from the Middle East to Northern Europe.
It's ridiculous that after all those peace efforts in the late 1980s, we're back to early 1980s levels of nuclear tension. As far as who to blame, there's plenty to go around - oil corporations wanting more profits, arms dealers wanting more wars, authoritarians wanting more power, empires wanting more control of resources, etc.
I won't attempt to defend NATO interventions in other countries, but disbanding it like the Warsaw Pact was never a real option so long as Russia continued to maintain a significant military capability including nuclear weapons. The Warsaw Pact was never a real thing to begin with. It was a total fiction, not a voluntary alliance of (somewhat) equal sovereign states like NATO. All of the other Warsaw Pact members were under military occupation by the USSR and had zero real decision making authority. Any attempt to go their own way was immediately, violently crushed. So dissolving the Warsaw Pact when the USSR disintegrated meant nothing.
And before someone tries to draw a false equivalence between the USSR's role in the Warsaw Pact and the USA's role in NATO, those were hardly the same. NATO members were free to leave at any time without fear of a US invasion. France actually did withdraw from the NATO command structure for a while and nothing happened to them.
Yes, Yugo and Albania broke from the Soviet sphere early in the 1950s.
Look Im not saying Albania was a swell place to be in 1950. It sucked. Commies are terrible terrible people. But the relations in the Eastern block were far more nuanced than the caricature we're spoon fed.
> Any attempt to go their own way was immediately, violently crushed. So dissolving the Warsaw Pact when the USSR disintegrated meant nothing.
that’s not completely accurate. e.g. Romania even publicly condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia. They didn’t support Russian foreign policy that much in the 70’s and 80’s either with no direct consequences.
While obviously it was Moscow keeping the communists in charge, the local dictators supported the suppression of the reforms in Cezhoslovakia largely out of self-interest.
When the Berlin Wall came down, there were not a few people still around with vivid memories of what 'Unified Germany' had got up to in the 20th century, so there was that. Just sayin.
Well, that's why disbanding NATO and giving military control of Europe to a German-centric organization was viewed with, well, uncertainty about what they might get up to. Given the persistence of the Nazi mentality in that region, one might also point out. It's not like the Japanese were the only ones with their holy shrines in the mountains to fallen heroes, was it?
This entire thread instantly devolved into political football humping. The problems within the new post-USSR Russia couldn't have been fixed by the US or the West. The roots of what Russia would become were already deeply set as the USSR collapsed. The main actors there just changed names and continued business as usual.
That's where I think you're wrong. The West had a chance to to alter history in 1991, instead Russia was treated like a loser (much like Germany was at the end of WWI and we know how that turned out). To quote a review of a biography of Gorbachev by The Economist from a few years ago:
"Even when Mr Gorbachev accepted the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany and ultimately its membership of NATO, Mr Bush would play to Mr Gorbachev’s weakness for wanting to be lionised, but felt no obligation to help Russia financially or accommodate him politically. “To hell with that! We prevailed. They didn’t. We can’t let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat,” he said to Helmut Kohl, Germany’s chancellor. This triumphalism was misplaced and would later backfire on America.
Mr Taubman argues that those in power in the West lacked the vision and will to extend a Marshall-type plan to Mr Gorbachev’s Soviet Union (and later to Yeltsin’s Russia). Those who had it were no longer in power. In 1991 Mrs Thatcher appealed to Mr Bush: “We’ve got to help Mikhail…Just a few years back, Ron and I would have given the world to get what has already happened here.” If the West did not come to Mr Gorbachev’s aid, she argued, “history will not forgive us.”" [1]
He seems like the least bad of the Soviet/Russian rulers and that's why he's revered. Compared with the rest he's a shining star because the others are/were so bad.
At least he only sent tanks in to suppress peaceful protests and killed a few people in a handful of EE countries and not all of the Eastern Bloc.
Rest in peace Sir. Because of you hundreds of millions of people are living a better life. A pity that Putin came shortly after and is in the active process of destroying a country (or two). But you couldn't control that. You did more than most people in the world to move humankind towards a better place.
I'm really astonished. In what kind of echo chamber do you live in? Have you been in Russia in 90's? It was not only an economical disaster, more than ten years we lived in a constant bombardment by the media of "revelations" about our lives before, kinda non stop shit storm (we even believed this was the press freedom as the west sees it).
In the hindsight it seems like it was impossible to devastate a country to such an extent even intentianally. Getting out of this shit strongly correlated with Putin.
But that’s on Yeltsin, not on Gorbachev. What’s on Gorbachev is that all the Eastern European countries got to be free. I was born there. Life now is many times better than it was during Communism.
It's because problems today are a bit more pressing than problems 40 years ago. And also people who lived in those times were much younger back then, and so generally much healthier and stronger. They are weaker now, and maybe more stressed, and with more health problems. And they subconsciously think that their health decline is due to the change from Communism to Capitalism.
But they forget the empty shelves on stores, the food rationing, the need to bribe the doctors and everyone in the health system, the almost impossibility to move from one city to another (huh, from one country to another you ask? forget about it). The permanent fear of saying the wrong thing. The long lines to buy bread or milk. The hoops you needed to go through to get a color TV set. Do you like reading books? Do you like watching movies? Too bad; you could watch the local productions, or Soviet movies, but not the hundreds of movies that Hollywood produced each year, or read any of the thousands (or tens of thousands) of books published in the West each year. Driving cars? I hope you enjoyed Trabant or Yugo or Lada. Tropical fruit like oranges or bananas? At Christmas time, but not every year. Actually, Christmas was not celebrated, so it was at the New Year time.
I've read memoirs by Anatoly Chernyaev [1]. And the whole impression was that Gorbachev had no clue about what do next. He was quite successful in breaking existing system but no feasible plan for further movement. Quite similar to what bolshevicks did earlier. Not surprising such people treated with a big share of skepticism in Russia.
Recently, I saw the hour-long documentary of Werner Herzog interviewing Mikhail Gorbachev and it was not only riveting television but also one of the saddest and most upsetting I've seen in a long while.
I'm not going to go into details as I don't think I could convey the tone and atmosphere of the conversation and do it justice. All I can say is that if you haven't seen it then you should make an effort to do so.
YouTube doesn't have the full video but there are a few short excerpts from it of a minute or two in length.
For those unfamiliar with what happened in Lithuania, in 1991 Gorbachev used military force to kill 14 Lithuanian civilians who were demonstrating for democratic reforms.
You seem to comment to better inform readers, yet your comment distorts the truth.
Even the article you linked talks about Lithuania declaring independence from the USSR, not asking for democratic reforms.
Despite what your article says, if you read the story on Wikipedia, Lithuania did in fact unilaterally declare independence from the USSR in March 1990.
Just as an example, check what Spain did in 2017 when Catalonia tried to declare independence after a popular vote. If Catalonians decided to resist, there is no doubt that the Spanish state would have used violence to suppress them. Try to imagine what the USA would do if any of its states tried to declare independence.
The parent comment is correct, Lithuanians were demonstrating for the right to self-determination. The Baltic States were forcibly annexed to the Soviet Union in 1940; the comparison to Catalonia or US states is specious. Over two million people participated in peaceful protests in 1989 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Way), the Soviet decision to suppress this movement by force is a black mark on Gorbachev's legacy.
Very much like Hawaii and Florida, weren’t they? Weren’t those countries ruled for decade or so by dictators who ceased power in late 20s? Didn’t Soviet actually organized elections and then their parliaments voted to join the USSR? I’m sure it’s all a sham but history is a bit nuanced.
I'm not sure if you are serious, but just in case: no, this is very much not like Hawaii and Florida. We are talking about countries with history, that were forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union.
Also, there are no elections or parliaments anywhere within the Soviet (or Russian, for that matter) sphere of influence. There are "elections" and "parliaments".
> no, this is very much not like Hawaii and Florida. We are talking about countries with history, that were forcibly annexed
So how is this not like Hawaii?
It's a matter of US law that "the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii occurred with the active participation of agents and citizens of the United States and further acknowledges that the Native Hawaiian people never directly relinquished to the United States their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people over their national lands."
(The US didn't comport itself very well in Florida - or anywhere really - but I'll at least grant a difference in kind.)
unilateral secession was not illegal according to the constitution of the USSR. I’m sure it (the constitution) was obviously a sham but history is a bit nuanced.
Irrelevant. Literally any country in the world would suppress independence declarations with violence, regardless of good justifications or not. That's just how nations work and has nothing to do with USSR specifically.
Well Britain allowed Scotland to have a vote, Czechoslovakia is another example, even back in 1905 Sweden allowed Norway to declare independence without a violent response. There are many other examples. So you’re wrong...
> even back in 1905 Sweden allowed Norway to declare independence without a violent response.
Norway was always independentof Sweden; it was never subordinate, only part of a "personal union", i.e. had the same king. Apart from that, it was an independent nation.
Sweden invaded Norway in 1814 defeated it and force it to accept the king of Sweden as their king. While Norway had considerable independence compared to most other occupied countries it was nevertheless a junior partner in the union (initially it’s foreign policy was fully controlled by Sweden)
Interestingly, South Carolina declared its independence December 20, 1860, and the US Civil War didn't begin until April 12, 1861, when the Confederate Army attacked Fort Sumter.
It's an intriguing historical question what would have happened if Fort Sumter hadn't been attacked. Would the Union have eventually made the first move? Would peaceful negotiations have eventually resulted in some stronger guarantee in the continuance of slavery and an end to secession? Would the Union have eventually dissolved amicably?
Wargaming political negotiations is far less popular than wargaming, well, wars.
You might be able to have a little fun with the first option -- the Union attacks first -- but it's still going to largely end up political questions:
1. If the Union attacked immediately after South Carolina seceded, how would it have changed which States would follow suit?
2. If the Union attacked in 1862, would more States have seceded by then?
3. Would the Union have lost any supporters -- either notable generals or even member States -- if it had fired first?
After those political questions are answered you could have fun wargaming out the subsequent war with new sides, but trying to answer the political questions is not as easy or fun.
> It's an intriguing historical question what would have happened if Fort Sumter hadn't been attacked. Would the Union have eventually made the first move?
Going by what happened during the Nullification Crisis, the answer is likely a "Yes".
> Just as an example, check what Spain did in 2017 when Catalonia tried to declare independence after a popular vote. If Catalonians decided to resist, there is no doubt that the Spanish state would have used violence to suppress them.
USSR constitution did allow such unilateral exit declarations.
Of course, USSR constitution declared many things that were far from truth. But ultimately words on paper do make a difference, even in totalitarian regimes.
There are a number of states that would result in great rejoicing if they were to declare independence today. They suck up so many federal resources without giving much back.
The majority of Catalonians didn't support independence in 2017, at most only 50% were in favor according to opinion polls. They only won the vote because most people ignored it (barely 43% even turned up…). When the referendum was held in Lithuania 93% voted in favor, in 1990 124 out of 141 MPs in parliament voted for independence (including almost all communist MPs). So I don't think the situations are really comparable that much.
The Bolsheviks wrote a constitution providing for a "union state". I doubt the framers of the Soviet Constitution actually meant what they said – it was essentially propaganda to present the Soviet Union as some kind of "voluntary association", despite the reality that there was nothing voluntary about it. While it was a federation on paper, its substance was much closer to that of a unitary state.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the seceding union republics used their constitutional status to justify their secession as legitimate - they took the constitution's pretence literally. But, imagine in an alternative timeline, the Soviet constitution had been written without this pretence–would that have stopped the Baltic states from seceding? I really doubt it. Would it have made any difference to the legitimacy of their secession? Only on meaningless paper.
Even with the Soviet Constitution we actually had – why did the Union as a whole break-up, but not the RSFSR? That question is better answered in terms of real world power structures, than legal formalities. Chechnya fought for independence, and if Moscow had been weaker, they could have won. Even now, some would say that Ramzan Kadyrov rules Chechnya as his own quasi-independent fiefdom, and is just biding his time for the right moment to officially claim independence (maybe, if Putin were to suddenly die without a clear successor). If Chechnya were to successfully secede, that could inspire other parts of Russia to seek to emulate its example.
> More like Spain constitution doesn't have an article detailing exit process.
> Meanwhile USSR constitution had such article. Which was used by Lithuania when declaring independence.
Source?
I can't find any article detailing an exit process in the 1977 USSR constitution. Only at the beginning it says that the USSR is a voluntary union, but that's far from saying it details an exit process.
The Moscow police are notoriously strict when it comes to speeding. One day, Gorbachev and his driver are going to a meeting, and they are running late. Gorbachev admonishes the driver to go faster, but his driver refuses.
Finally, Gorbachev says, "Fine! Pull over! I will drive."
Gorbachev starts speeding through the streets of Moscow with his driver in the back seat. They are pulled over by the police.
The first officer gets out of the car and walks to Gorbachev's car. They talk for a moment, then the officer returns, as white as a sheet.
"Well? Was it someone important?" says the second officer.
The first officer replies, "Important?! You have no idea! Gorbachev is his driver!"
Rest in peace, Mikhail Sergeevich. You were an old school enough to perhaps not understand fully what you did to the people of former USSR, but even misunderstood it certainly was once-in-an-era kind of great.
RIP. I did my college essay on Gorbachev. Still think the Cold War was the greatest urgent threat to humanity and welcome any moves to end it, failures and all
Boomerang of what? West economies are stronger than ever. They survived COVID for 2 years and now survive bootleg Cold War while Russia is spinning into 90s again.
Despite all the really shady stuff that went on under his leadership, I think it's a fair statement to say that Russia/Soviet Union was a more prosperous, happier and more ethical state under his leadership than it is currently.
What does make you think so? I have witnesed everything since Brezhnev. Under Gorbachev thing started to detiriorate quite fast and most people shifted their focus from being happy about the iron curtain removal to making ends meet. As a person who lived through all this I would say that the last 20 years were definitely the best from prosperity and happiness point of view (frankly, the latter not being realted to the regime at all)
This is a name I associate with an era and a great change. You have names like Julius ceasar, Henry VIII, Hitler (in a negative way), Stalin, Washington, Genghis Khan,Alexander and also Gorbachev.
Gorby came to DC for a summit with Reagan in December 1987. When his motorcade stopped to meet folks on the street, he was absolutely mobbed.
I remember the news coverage (WashPost et al.) expressing surprise and bafflement. I think the power structure in the US did not expect such an outpouring of obvious hunger from the man on the street for an end to all the Cold War madness. "More popular than Reagan ?!"
He really changed the world. Ended the cold war, an incredibly important figure in 20th Century history. One of the few decent people in Russian politics.
perfectly understandable sentiment, the guy debased himself so much he turned up in a literal pizza hut commercial. (https://youtu.be/fgm14D1jHUw). As a rule of thumb, the popularity of any foreign leader in the American press is a pretty good measurement of how eagerly they're willing to drive their own countries into submission.
As a yet another filthy Russian, I don't understand all this eagerness to give people "traitor" (enemy of the people, 5th column and so on) labels. Especially since this is pretty much the favorite communist/putinist activity. This is not a healthy mindset. At some point we'll have to admit different people might have different opinions on running the country.
Are you suggesting that Gorbachev went to retire in the US? He travelled extensively to the US and elsewhere, but as far as I know he only ever lived in Russia.
> What would be your opinion of US president, if he goes to to retire in Russia?
Did Gorbachev retire outside Russia? I wasn't aware of this. He died in Moscow. The last time I heard about him before this was when he attended an RT event in Moscow (which was also attended by Jill Stein and Michael Flynn). Where outside Russia did he retire? Why did he leave this place to die in a Russian hospital? Your comment leads one to infer he retired to the US.
> I'm reading some Russian news site, and almost universally Gorbachev is hated by Russians.
Russian news sites are notable lately for not allowing the free expression of Russian opinions, so what they show you may not be representative. I'm not saying you're wrong but that Russian news sites aren't great evidence that you're right.
>Russian news sites are notable lately for not allowing the free expression of Russian opinions, so what they show you may not be representative. I'm not saying you're wrong but that Russian news sites aren't great evidence that you're right.
There is no one in Russia who wouldn't piss on his grave if given the chance.
what are his chances living to this ripe old age if he had stayed? i don't think he had a spectacular life in the US either, just became a normal bloke
Putin is definitely trying to nullify Gorbachev's accomplishments, but I like to think that he'll actually end up strengthening them against his own will, in that the catastrophe he has created thru his anti-Gorbachev mentality will serve as a lesson of history for future generations and politicians.
For example, racism was kinda considered "normal" before Hitler, but after Hitler, even people like Putin don't want to be deemed racist. Right now dictatorship is kinda considered "normal" too b/c so many countries still have dictators, but perhaps after Putin, no politician will want to be deemed a dictator.
Like Bill clinton, he helped define 90s geopolitics. It's remarkable how he faded away like he did. Nelson Mandela, Yassir Arafat , Ariel Sharon..that whole era.
Gorbachev was interviewed about the war in Ukraine and everything, this year. So I think it's incredible how the last leader of the SU was still alive.
It goes in cycles. We go to extremes and then swing back and sometimes in unison across continents. We will go back to some centrists although whether it takes 10 years or 50 is hard to say.
This is what I meant about being one of the lasts of his kind in a different comment. These leaders lead! They had character that inspired people. They were not merely the least evil choice or the only choice, they were the choice men and women devoted their lives to.
Pretty sad but not unexpected, perhaps he just lost the will to live after seeing all the good he did destroyed, or perhaps old age just got him - either way, RIP, a good man.
But also don't forget Khrushchev, whom much of his legacy was built on.
Edit: downvoted by ignorant americans, imagine that!
I hate that my first thought was 'On the start of Ukraine's counteroffensive which is by some reports going well for Ukraine?'. Seems highly convenient as a distraction. I have no evidence for my thought and am dismissing it. The world has made me reflexively conspiracy prone, I don't believe in most conspiracies but it sucks to think about them.
The Reuters article describes Gorbachev as "the last Soviet president." This is technically correct, but misleading. Gorbachev was also the first and the only person to hold that office. Heads of the Soviet Union held the office of the general secretary of the party.
The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s. There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War like there was after World War II. This was a huge mistake, and we see the consequences now, with Russia having turned back toward totalitarianism and imperialism. Sadly, it seems that Gorbachev's efforts were mostly for naught. But it was courageous at the time to open up the Soviet Union to glasnost and perestroika.
Of course Yeltsin was a big part of the problem too.
Your comment makes it sounds like you believe the U.S. had the power to decide whether or not Russia would turn into a kleptocracy or not. Maybe I'm misinterpreting you, but if I'm not, I'm skeptical. Marshall plan notwithstanding, I would give credit to the people and government of Japan for their post-war success: it could easily have gone another direction, and the U.S. couldn't have stopped that from happening. Likewise, the people of Russia and their government are ultimately the ones with agency in their case. I don't think the U.S. should take on the burden of developing other countries; going down that road has been a bad idea more often than not.
> I would give credit to the people and government of Japan for their post-war success: it could easily have gone another direction, and the U.S. couldn't have stopped that from happening.
I suggest you read more about the post war occupation of Japan. The U.S. put its thumb heavily on the scale forcing Japan to accept democratization throughout. Unusual for the U.S. this included pushing economic democracy by supporting Japan's very successful land redistribution scheme.
isn't it cultural ? japanese seems to be ok struggling under american control and keep reaching higher. People say US money made Japan thrive but so many time throwing money at a large problem fails.. I think the population was just more mentally compatible.
Or maybe the post soviet Russia was dealt a bad hand. Hard to know (just like here, you can find infinite streams of contradictory arguments)
Hard to say. I suspect the horrific bombing of Japanese cities probably had something to do with their willingness to submit. Leaving their Emperor intact as a figurehead probably helped a lot. Perhaps American willingness to help Japan rebuild immediately after such a bitter war also played a role.
There were probably innumerable factors that went into it. But there are a lot of differences between that situation and the fall of the Soviet Union.
WW2 was the culmination of Japan's semi-conscious effort to speed run the transition from feudal backwater to first rate world power. Considering all the stuff they had pulled off up until that point and that they exited WW2 with their national identity and power structures intact I don't think it's that surprising that they pulled off the transition from imperial government to constitutional democracy with an imperial figurehead.
That's a good point. America had some influence and backed Yeltsin to the hilt but he outflanked Gorbachev in the end and I'm not sure if that could've been changed.
On the one hand, in the scale of brutality, every nation in history is at least 1 level below the Imperial Japan in WWII.
On the other hand, after the decisive show of force, beaconed by the nuclear bomb, Japan realized that brutality is going to cause the doom of that nation. So they naturally bowed down. After that brutality is no longer necessary, like a beaten dog that would not really need a leash.
It's one way to see that. But after such brutal events it's easy for a people to fall into despair or hate but Japan bounce back better than a lot of country. They rapidly absorbed and mastered electronics better than a lot of country. I always find it rare.
> They rapidly absorbed and mastered electronics better than a lot of country.
I believe this is something they started doing before/during the war. Specifically I've heard that they started reverse engineering and producing copies of allied radio equipment during the war.
This is true, the question is, what was the difference between the occupation of japan and germany and the occupation of afganistan, iraq or vietnam. The lesson of the latter is that all it takes is 20 years of low level combat until the occupying country gets tired and leaves. the lesson of the former is that defeated countries can become your greatest allies. As to what leads a nation to choose one path or the other... That is complicated. as a interesting special case consider korea
Japan and Germany were extremely well organized and coherent states before the war. They had both civic and long established cultural basis to rebuild to.
'Afghanistan' is barely a state, it never really was a nation. It's a 'border' around a chaotic gaggle of tribes living in the past. They'll ebb and flow given different kinds of leadership, most of which won't have anything to do with anything happening outside urban limits anyhow.
Iraq was a deeply corrupted and broken state, again, difficult to rebuild to, but possible. Absent ethnic tensions it probably would have gone a little bit better, and paradoxically, US forces were more of a stabilizing factor than not. Literally the day that US forces withdrew and US lost it's leverage in Iraqi politics, PM malaki basically launched a kind of political civil war. That scared the Sunnis who 'allowed' ISIL to come in, believing they were a better option than the Shia dominate government, unrestrained from American influence.
S. Vietnam was a bit incoherent, but it could have worked fine were the US to have been able to provide security. They did not, largely due to the historical insanity of refusing to attack the North. As Op. Linebacker I and II eventually demonstrated (but way too late), North Vietnam could be handily decimated at will with direct strategic bombing. Were those ops to have happened in 1965 instead of 1972, the war would have had a different outcome. It's unlikely that S. Vietnam would quite look like S. Korea, but it would be more like it. Instead, we have an ultra authoritarian entity that did some vastly horrible things in the past, but which has settled down a bit in subsequent decades.
'Marshall Plan' works where the Marshall Plan can be taken advantage of.
The IMF has tried similar things elsewhere after WW2, it didn't work out so well, because, well, Nigeria and Indonesia are not at all like Germany or Japan.
Russia has been 'backwards' forever, it's like part of their identity to be 50 years behind everyone but still antagonist about it i.e. aggressors and victims at the same time. I can't see how it will change.
Russians will happily exchange their own prosperity to save face to themselves, and live in a kind of delusion of their own making. They will literally lose the war in Ukraine, but believe they have 'won'. They will declare Ukraine 'denazified', have a parade about it, and 50% of the population will fully believe it, the other 50% will know the truth and go about their daily business, unable to really speak publicly about it.
Agree with most except South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese government was corrupt to the core. And if you don't have the support of the populace there was nothing that the USA could do to make it work (Linebacker or otherwise). You would only prolonged the conflict.
The South Korean government was corrupt and largely only staid in power because they were willing to commit extreme atrocities (and obviously due to US support). However it still worked out in the end. Not sure Vietnam is that difference, however Korea seems to be much more ethnically and religiously homogenous so that probably played a part.
maybe the difference is a culture you understand vs a culture you don't. Many observers have said for years that middle east statebuildibg efforts were doomed - we left iraq worse off than we found it
Middle East never had proper states. 100 years ago it was just a bunch of Ottoman administrative divisions. Since then it's been chaos and strong men. Iraq is better off now but maybe not by much.
Thanks for the suggestion about learning about the occupation. To be clear: my statement wasn't that the U.S. did nothing, but that there is no amount they could have done which would force Japan to succeed against their will, or their own ability. There are many examples of the U.S. putting its thumb on the scale, so to speak, in countries where there was not a subsequent, successful democratic transition. The difference between these cases, I'm suggesting, is not the weight of U.S. involvement, but factors external to U.S. foreign policy, such as the people in the countries affected.
I guess we'll never know. Because there was a remaking of Japanese society after the war in a democratic image. That just doesn't even appear as though it was attempted in post Soviet Russia.
I don't kmow the origins of why America departed from its usual course of propping up the traditional land owning and wealthy bourgeoisie classes in it'
s occupation of Japan. I know FDR personally held very pro democracy and anti colonialist views. He had ambitions to remake America's relations with the developing world after the war though how far he would've progressed on that front is unknown. And of course he was dead by the end of the war and Japan was in the more conservative hands of Truman.
Perhaps the Japanese people ran with this program because of their cultural tenacity. Or perhaps because their defeat had been so total that they truly considered themselves defeated and simply wished to move on whatever with whatever power structure was presented.
Ultimately though, America began a campaign to turn the "subjects" of the Japanese Empire into "citizens" of a Japanese constitutional state. They did not undertake a similar project to turn "comrades" of the Soviet Union into "citizens" of a Russian Republic.
The US never invaded Russia, so they didn’t have the kind of power they had over post WW2 Japan.
Anyways even with that kind of power, the prevailing economic ideology at the time the Soviet Union fell was of extreme neoliberalism, so I doubt it would have helped anyway.
We do know what the US wanted though, because they were quite open about it, and they got it: in particular the neoliberal shock therapy reforms which were such a distaster.
Today, we also know that they were backing Yeltsin for a long time, and supported his 1993 attack on parliament which decisively turned Russia into the dictatorship it is now.
Japanese militarist imperial culture has mostly remained intact in the corporate workplace. Other than brief political forays Japan has had one party rule at the national level for long stretches of time. They recognized their strategic position and adapted. When the convenience of a US umbrella fades the old face will re-emerge.
The idea of a democratic Japan is itself interesting as for the most part it actually is a one party state. Outside of brief breaks, one party has held power in post war Japan.
So even with the US stomping the scale, it still didn’t make it some kind of European multi partisan parliamentary democracy.
> Your comment makes it sounds like you believe the U.S. had the power to decide whether or not Russia would turn into a kleptocracy or not.
There's a lot of evidence that US kleptocrats collaborated to help turn Russia into a kleptocracy. Practically encouraged rather than discouraged that outcome.
I'm sceptical that turning Russia into a kleptocracy was a plan. Usually participants just want to quickly enrich themselves. So I can agree that "let's make it good" plan didn't work well enough, but for planned degradation I'd like to see more arguments.
American consultants were instrumental in organizing the massive selloff of state assets, and quite a few of them turned around and used their knowledge of the system they created to become quite rich. Andrei Shleifer said as much in an interview on the topic, though I can't find it now.
edit: it seems like someone else posted the same link while I was looking for the interview.
The Marshall plan was partly a plan to create allies capable of resisting further Soviet expansion, but also a response to how the Versailles treaty set the stage for resurgent German militarism.
The response to the fall of the USSR was neither, but I recall breathless reports in the US press of how Harvard MBAs were going to Russia to help it transition to a free market economy, and ruefully thinking it would be better if they aimed for emulating Western European economies.
And, outside of the former USSR, Europe had the most to gain if this could have been effected - as is now all too clear. Insofar as anything might have helped, this was not only the US's bag.
> I don't think the U.S. should take on the burden of developing other countries; going down that road has been a bad idea more often than not.
From what I can tell from history, our successes involved US taking sovereignty and ruling absolutely for a period of years while setting up a government of our choosing to replace us. Our failures involved quickly setting up a local democracy and allowing self rule while we tried and failed to help. It seems we lost the stomach to use power after military victory and the incompetent governments we set up doom the countries involved to decades of failure.
I really don’t think we should continue getting involved in places we don’t have the guts to set up a military government for a decade. It is clear you have to force societal change on a place at gunpoint in order to get good outcomes, if you’re just going to topple governments and hope whatever rises from the ashes is nice, you might as well not bother.
The only two that come to mind for me are Korea and Japan (I could easily be overlooking some), and really the former happened as a part of the latter (Korea was ruled by Japan for the 35 years prior to WWII).
As I understand it South Korea was at least nominally under local democratic rule from the start.
I'm not sure that's a big enough sample set to be making generalizations from, and even if you are happy with a sample set of 2 I'm not really sure south korea fits the mold you're describing.
That said, I could definitely be missing some examples that would make the argument more convincing.
>
Your comment makes it sounds like you believe the U.S. had the power to decide whether or not Russia would turn into a kleptocracy or not.
Given the utter unmitigated disaster of the Russian economy in the 90s, I'd daresay that it certainly had the ability to influence it away from the hard swing towards strongman authoritarianism that followed.
The Washington Consensus was a disaster, and strongly soured the country on working with the West.
The US had a very consistent pattern of going for the Oil during that period, and the results are pretty clear. I'm not sure more US influence in Russia would have gone the way people hope.
>I would give credit to the people and government of Japan for their post-war success
Perhaps a bit of both. We can also give credit to both for it's decline/stagnation. It wasn't the Japanese people that wanted quotas for US made cars, semiconductor technology transfers to the US, economic policy that didn't fit em, etc
Not to take away from that awesome concert, but Lars has stated several times it was closer to 500k, but somehow the number keeps growing...
> However, Lars explained in the conversation that he doesn’t know the exact number how many people were in the concert, but he heard at the time that there were half a million people attended the show.
> “Listen, it may go up by 100,000 people each year! I heard at the time it was around half a million. Whatever it was, it was a f*ck-load of people.
I just went with the wikipedia article which has two sources, both just newspaper articles, so who knows.
It's not implausible though. There've been a handful of concerts as large as 3 million apparently. That just boggles my mind. Can you imagine standing on a stage like that?
I think the big difference is the oligarchs. The USSR had already been transitioned to a resource state, and there was no actual rebuilding that needed to happen. The Marshall plan was almost easy because you could tally up all the broken bridges and say “itll cost us $X to fix”. What’s the equivalent for post USSR? What ended up happening was oligarchs swooped in to take over from the central planners, and it’s not clear how the US could have helped steer it differently short of going to war with Russia’s upper class.
The oligarchs didn't swoop in and ruin everything. The Russian government did not want their resources and industry controlled by foreign share holders, so they were dead set on privatizing the economy by selling to Russians only.
With this constraint, the handful of Russians who were able to raise capital in such a short time, without foreign counter bids, got the privatized businesses far below market prices as a result. This is what made them billionaires, and turned them into the oligarchs.
Not only that, it would have been highly inappropriate for the US to intervene in another country's domestic affairs uninvited.
The assumption everything bad is always our fault is just the other side of the coin of the narcissistic belief that we're the greatest of all time at everything and therefor always right.
The oligarchs were minted in the late 80s and 90s. They weren’t a preëxisting power structure. Putin came to power with their and the FSB’s help. (He was also popular for not being incompetent.)
They were minted in late 80s and 90s with the help and active involvement of the West.
There were so many stories...
Working at McKinsey in Moscow in 90s made you instantly into a multi-millionaire. US was sending planes full of dollars to Almaty. Chechen avisos were a CIA plot... and so on and so forth.
You'll have an absolute blast reading Red Notice by Browder. It's about a hedge fund guy that ends up in Russia during the privatization period, quickly realizes the country is getting looted and wants a big slice for himself. It's a true-ish story, written like a spy novel, with many fascinating details about this unique period in history.
> with the help and active involvement of the West
Yes, many ascendants had contact with the West. It’s how they played the game so well at the start of shock therapy. In most cases, they hired the right consultants who helped them do things like hoover up shares from people who didn’t know better to build a controlling stake. But to get to that point, they’d already accumulated assets.
The West enabled the rise of Russia’s oligarchs. But it didn’t mint them.
Wasn't the preexisting power structure the Soviet military? I thought that that Soviet generals stationed near large and valuable resources simply decided that these large and valuable resources had become their private property. Organized crimes and powerful politicians filled in the gaps.
No, none of the oligarchs were generals. They were usually entrepreneurs (Russia always had them, openly under Perestroika) who were well connected with one or more of
* The state apparatus
* The gray/black economy (or the criminal underworld)
* Foreign interests
The Soviet military was tightly politically controlled, they were well aware of the dangers of popular generals.
The U.S. held a lot of sway in the post USSR. They lent a lot of credibility to Yeltsin.
If the U.S. had pushed for a system that actually would've held the resources in trust for the people and allowed them to be developed by market capital, that very likely could've happened.
But the reality is that across every region of the globe, the U.S. in the constant purity quest of its foreign policy had purposefully alienated anyone with anything other than right of center views. It found itself cozied up to the most audacious, self dealing, would be autocrats, cartelists and outright gangsters for the very reason that they stood the most to gain from the decline of Communism and so they beat their chest the hardest against it.
Particularly the Reagan and Bush administrations had little interest in looking over the shoulders of those they had been ready to support as promelgators of coup. Though instead the Communists committed political suicide and these entrepreneurs of corruption instead would pick over the carcass of the state.
>If the U.S. had pushed for a system that actually would've held the resources in trust for the people and allowed them to be developed by market capital, that very likely could've happened.
No, this is purely wishful thinking. The Soviet System was one fundamentally incentivized and propagated corruption. Those who had previously been in control or had knowledge of the workings of the Soviet Economy were always going to profit significantly. The US had little control over this.
You may be right about the lack of ability of the U.S. to have much impact. Though I don't think the outcome of the was so forgone.
There was lots of corruption in the Soviet Union. But we're talking about orders of magnitude difference here. Soviet corruption revolved around small bribes for services, lies on official documentation, etc. For 30 years now, Russia's resources have been looted to enrich several dozen people. We're talking about one of the largest shifts in wealth inequality in the history of the world.
The current crop of Russian oligarchs are generally not former communist party officials. They did gain their resources from former party members and largely by bribing these people.
Much of this could've been prevented however with an orderly transition away from the single party system. By outlawing the party, Russia broke the central disciplining and organizing structure of government, the economy and law. This left in place the people but without discipline or oversight which allowed the looting to take place.
>There was lots of corruption in the Soviet Union. But we're talking about orders of magnitude difference here. Soviet corruption revolved around small bribes for services, lies on official documentation, etc. For 30 years now, Russia's resources have been looted to enrich several dozen people. We're talking about one of the largest shifts in wealth inequality in the history of the world.
This is how Russia has been under the communist rule. Everyone was "equal" and yet of course party members were "more equal" enjoy many prestiges which the common proletariat could only dream of. The meta culture was that of corruption and has been for a long time. You were never going to undo that.
To anyone interested in this topic, I highly recommend "Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union" by Vladislav M. Zubok. This comment reminded me of one of my notes:
Near the end of the book, George HW Bush tries to convince the US government to provide economic aid to stabilize the fledgeling Russian state but this fails. Earlier in the book there is talk of a "Grand Bargain", a theory that for $100 billion the US could convert the USSR from an enemy into a friend similar to how the Marshall Plan and Berlin Airlift converted the Germans into close US allies. Japan is another example of this. After WW2, instead of razing Japan and Germany as Rome did to Carthage, the US raised them from their knees. It helped rebuild and rehabilitate these countries.
There was no Marshall Plan for Russia. Many of the Russian politicians and economists expected significant economic aid from the West. This aid did not materialize, at least not in the form and magnitude that was expected. The transition from state socialism to capitalist market economy was traumatic; during the USSR the poverty rate was 30%, after the collapse the poverty rate was 80%. The average lifespan of a Russian man was 66 during the USSR, after the collapse it was around 55.
The loss of super power status, of territory, and of economic strength created significant political backlash in the years following the collapse. These conditions promoted nationalism, populism, and authoritarianism which Putin used to seize control. Russia does not have a cultural history of democracy so maybe this was inevitable, but perhaps greater Western support would have avoided it?
I see this claim pop up pretty frequently but I think it ignores a rather important factor and that was that those countries suffered complete defeat at the hands of the US, that meant the US could impose any ideology they wished on the country. This was never the case with Russia. Now for sure, the USSR ended its life as a failed economic state, and the Russian Federation that emerged may have been willing to accept any economic ideology imposed on it... but capitalism needs more than this to work.
For example it needs the firm rule of law to be established, yet it is not clear there's anything the US could have done to prevent the divvying up of state resources amongst clever individuals who appropriated vast wealth, through usually dishonest means, becoming today's oligarchs. Nor could the US do anything to eliminate the Russian pride that remained in their former empire, which placed fairly unique pressures on Russia's leaders ("we may be poor but at least everyone else is afraid of us" was not as much of a fringe attitude among the common people as one might think).
So I don't think the conditions were at all similar between Germany and Japan on the one hand, and the Russian Federation on the other, and I don't think any kind of Marshal plan could have ever worked without these missing conditions.
After all, for decades we thought of China that if we just made them all rich, they'd all see the benefits of Western democracy and become more like us ideologically. So the West encouraged open trade with China and... the end result was a country which now had the resources to reäffirm their state ideology. Today we see a China pushing to strengthen the Maoist values it was founded on, rather than dismantling them.
Unfortunately, without utter national humiliation that completely breaks the people's belief in their former state ideology, I just don't think ideological transformation in any kind of short period of time is possible.
You may be right that "unconditional surrender" and occupation are prerequisites for the sort of transformation that Germany and Japan underwent. But the collapse of empire as experienced by Russia vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact may have been sufficiently traumatic that such a transformation could have been triggered.
The tragedy of not having a "Marshall Plan" for the former communist bloc is that we will never know if it would have worked. There was no guarantee, but at this point, to me it seems like a terrible lost opportunity.
But perhaps, as China's dominance becomes increasingly uncomfortable for Russia, things in time may change. A reformed Russia integrated into the "western" alliance... one can still dream, however faintly.
The EU didn't have to conquer the Eastern Europe to enforce lots of its legislation (as well as support programs) on its new member states. And compared to other post-Soviet states, the EU members are doing pretty well. So I think there is a counterexample in your claim that you need to conquer. It was a failure of neoliberalism.
Your thesis assume that Eastern European countries were fully on board with Soviet ideology until the fall of the Soviet union. In fact, most of the Eastern European nations had been forced into the Soviet sphere of influence against their people's will. Multiple popular protests that were brutally crushed by Soviet aligned militaries suggests the discontentment never went away. So I don't think the ideology in those Eastern European states needed to shift significantly after that fall of the USSR. The EU didn't need to conquer Eastern Europe because their people wanted to align themselves with Western Europe all along.
On the contrary, the "shock therapy" approach that Russia took in the Yeltsin years was, in many ways, prescribed by the West, and ended up being a complete disaster for both your average Russian person, and for capitalism and democracy as a whole, because most people just learned to associate these things with the kleptocracy that occurred in the 90s.
Interestingly, the disdain for democracy in both Russia and China is strongly motivated by "we've already tried giving people freedom and it didn't work".
China also learned a lot from the brutal liberalization in the breakup of USSR. Their own shift to markets was explicitly designed to avoid such a catastrophe. The book "How China Escaped Shock Therapy" on the topic is interesting.
Warlordism has nothing to do with democracy. Each warlord was just their own little dictator fighting for expansion. The people were just cannon fodder.
In fact the Chinese did manage to create a thriving democracy after the warlord era, which is still here today. But it's based in Taipei and the mainland Chinese leaders want to take it down because it undermines their narrative.
And the Russians having the easiest beginnings of democracy for a few months claiming they "tried it and it didn't work"? Never heard them say it but if they did it's just dogma.
West did not proscribe "shock therapy". Please read on Gaidar and his group, they were not forced to apply it, they genuinely believed that was the best approach available to them at the time.
> [Western-driven reconstruction was] complete disaster for both your average Russian person
I think that's overstating the case. In fact the "average Russian person" was living in destitute poverty through most of the cold war, and none of that meaningfully changed with the advent of a market economy. Except that Russians of the 2000's could get eat better food and watch (much) better TV.
It's absolutely true that most of the western aid ended up hurting and not helping. But the bar was very, very low to begin with.
> was living in destitute poverty through most of the cold wa
Genuinely asking, did you live East of the Wall back then?
Because I did live East of the Wall (not in the former USSR, though), and I can assure you that we were most certainly not living in "destitute poverty" (my dad was a civil engineer, my mum had graduated from a hydro construction faculty). My parents did end up living in destitute poverty, as in having to get back to literally subsistence agriculture in order to survive, but that only came in the second part of the '90s, once democracy had already been in place for a few good years (and democracy had come with privatizations and price liberalizations).
This is baloney. I was in Russia for a half year around 95-96. The standard of living was much deteriorated from Soviet times, especially for people on fixed incomes (basically almost everyone over the age of 50), and nobody hesitated telling me that.
People in the soviet union definitely did not live in poverty during the cold war.
Average Russian ranked in top 30 for standard of livings and in the first two decades after the war gdp grew more than in US. Richer countries like baltics ranked among the top 20 at times during soviet times. It was definitely not even in all soviet countries and regions, but that's not unlike other countries or regions.
That's ridiculous. The average Russian in the cold war was living a pretty okay life materially speaking. Far from destitute poverty. The economic crash in 1991 was so devastating it led to millions in excess mortality.
You're kidding. Watch a Soviet movie, estimate the level of poverty people lived - if the difference with reality was too great, people wouldn't watch them.
Big part of Putin's politics is to appeal to the older generation who remembers the Soviet Union and want it be back. So at least those people do no consider it as a poverty and they think it was better back then. Not even comparing to the modern Russia but comparing to the modern West.
(not agreeing with them, just pointing to the fact)
I dunno nothing really stands out. It looks like Russians benefited a little bit more, but Americans were starting from a higher baseline so it makes sense that gains would be harder to come by.
2019 was selected rather than 2021 for obvious reasons.
It went from 69 years to 65 in 2005 when it started rising again. However life expectancy in the USSR seems to have been mostly stagnant since the 1960's, so I'm not sure the situation was that great in 1990.
You can't impose democracy, but if democracy and associated ideas such as the free market spectacularly fails the people – as it did in the 90s – then that certainly doesn't help. We probably could have done a thing or two to make it fail less. Would that have made a meaningful difference? Hard to say for sure, but it would have been worth to try.
Not "ideas" failed the people, but the implementers - which turned out to be straight up robbers, dividing past empire's industrial base amongst them, like western idol Khodorkovsky or Berezovsky.
Where the politicians were less corrupt, the free market worked spectacularly well, like in Poland.
Every economic system has capital, even socialist ones, it just means property. What distinguishes capitalism is that individual rights over capital are respected.
Capitalism is based on private property rights, and individual economic freedoms to buy and sell your labour or property. That means it’s fundamentally reliant on the robust rule of law to enforce those rights, the rights of those purchasing property and services, etc. It’s those rights that enable the trust required for a functioning market. Corporatist, oligarchic and cartel based systems are often described as capitalist, but they’re really not capitalist because they don’t respect individual rights over capital any more than communism does. Like communism they’re just stitch-ups.
The role played by the rule of law often gets down played or even criticised by libertarian free marketeers. They think it’s needless regulation and just government interfering in free markets. But without the rule of law you get bloody free for alls like in Russia in the 90s.
The idea that capital is ahistorical (or at least, traces its origin to the concept of human property itself by being 'just' property) is not a claim to be made as though it were uncontroversial. In fact, many people proposing non-capitalist systems disagree the idea that capital is 'just property' for good reasons, which may be worth considering.
You argue that the capitalist system presupposes these rights and the rule of law; I would say that historically speaking capital itself (more importantly its production process) presupposes these rights and capitalism presupposes capital.
It doesn’t matter what you call it, capital is the same thing regardless of its ownership structure. Let’s call it woogum and the woogumist system if you like, that doesn’t change anything.
Capitalism is commonly defined as a system of economics based on private ownership, and associated rights such as free exchange of labour, free markets, etc as against state ownership. Systems based on cartels, oligarchies and corporatist systems aren’t capitalist because the oligarchs, corporatist entities, etc become part of the state system. They assume powers normally the prerogative of the state. Obviously there are different degrees, no two systems are identical and all such systems have some level of private ownership and trade. It’s all a matter of degree. Even the Soviet Union had some level of markets and private exchange.
You're just restating your definition of what you define capital to be and my point is that some qualified people disagree on that definition. You can call your definition 'woogum', but the fact is that there's no book called Woogum, yet there is probably a book called 'Property' and I'm certain there's a famous one called 'Capital'.
'As against state ownership is an interesting bit to use as part of the definition, because it creates the whole rest of your argument for you (by which you must say that a term like 'state capitalism' is nonsensical, but I disagree). This is fundamentally an issue of definitions, and I'm more than happy to agree to disagree on that, or even to go with your definition, and I'll use capital-prime to denote what I'm talking about.
However, according to Wikpedia (quoting Samuelson) capital is "those durable produced goods that are in turn used as productive inputs for further production" of goods and services" - so while a subclass of property, certainly not 'just property'. This also raises an empirical question, that is, in a given society what are those 'durable produced goods...' as they exist in the macroeconomic sense? Yet others view capital as a social relation. I'm saying there are multiple perspectives on the definition, but that's the nature of multiple interested parties talking about a politically, ideologically, and socially charged subject.
I think it's an unfortunate historical accident that what we generally refer to as capitalism, the mainstream economic system in place in the western world and in fact most of the world, has that name without a distinguishing qualifier. That's why I don't object to the term state capitalism, which is a much more descriptive term.
Ideally what we call capitalism would be consistently referred to as something like free market capitalism, or private property capitalism. I know those terms exist and are used, but very often we refer to the mainstream western system as just capitalism without qualification. So people will blame 'capitalism' for things like poverty or exploitation in the west, as though such things are completely unknown in alternative economic systems.
It was not really a base for capitalism to take hold and effect. It needs a basic rule of law and democracy to work. All it got was brief window of chaos, before the kleptocracy returned.
Best description of the cultural background i found so far was this:
> It was not really a base for capitalism to take hold and effect. It needs a basic rule of law and democracy to work. All it got was brief window of chaos, before the kleptocracy returned.
This is my understanding as well, from everything I’ve read. The more interesting question is why Russia, both as a nation state and a culture, has no history or tradition of democracy. I’ve never received an answer to this question.
Thank you! I briefly looked at the Wiki article to see what you were talking about. Apparently, some of the cultural history in regards to democracy is unknown, as the article mentions that the exact nature of the democratic experiment was lost to time.
There is no such thing as "real capitalism"; it's a broad and somewhat vague set of ideas with many possible implementations, none of which are more "real capitalism" than any other, although I'd argue that some implementations definitely better than others (and 90s Russia is a good example of that).
Capitalism is just an economic system with predominantly private ownership of the means of production. Whether a country's set of economically productive organizations are owned by shareholders via a stock exchange or by whomever was powerful enough to take control of them by corrupt means seems irrelevant, no?
If the people who own them aren’t willing to sell them for economically-rational prices, then you don’t have equilibrium capitalism; you have temporary capitalism as a reaction proceeding toward aristocracy / feudalism. When all the assets are illiquid, there’s no capitalism.
>Whether a country's set of economically productive organizations are owned by shareholders via a stock exchange or by whomever was powerful enough to take control of them by corrupt means seems irrelevant, no?
It is extremely relevant when you look at the outcomes.
For young democracies - like Russia in 1992 - it's possible to get captured by populists, who, instead of solving tough problems and laying out the groundwork for the subsequent development, promise some doubtful, in retrospect at least, things, point fingers towards convenient scapegoats etc. In this sense Russia was unlucky. Yes, people didn't know much, and were led to believe etc... so the guilt is spread of course, and many are involved. Everybody should have tried to do the best in their place, then the possibilities are larger - but in this case, it turned out to be not enough.
I'm not sure we now know a guaranteed way of how to deal with situations like that.
Certainly the west could have done more to prevent corruption and money laundering in western banks, but the opportunities were too lucrative and refusal too dangerous.
> I’m skeptical of the idea that you can impose Democracy.
We didn't need to impose democracy. Russia had democracy for a time. The Marshall Plan was about economic investment. The transition from communism to capitalism was a very rough one for the Soviet people, and that's a big part of why democracy failed.
> Marshall Plan was about economic investment. The transition from communism to capitalism was a very rough one for the Soviet people, and that's a big part of why democracy failed.
It was also about stabilising a war-torn continent’s economy. To keep them from going communist.
And it would've made a lot of sense to re-apply it here since Russia has clearly gone in a strongly authoritarian direction and is invading its neighbors. It's a pretty clear example of a destabilizing actor in the region.
> it would've made a lot of sense to re-apply it here
Absolutely agree with you. Long-term, I think the stable state for Russia is a deconstruction of the old empire and a global commitment to Marshall Plan the resulting republics into modernity.
You're in the small, but vocal minority of people who incorrectly believe that direct democracy is the only form of democracy that exists, or that the term 'constitutional republic' says literally anything about how a country is governed.
The US is a respresentative democracy that is also a constitutional republic.
Denmark is a representative democracy that is also a constitutional monarchy.
Canada is a representative democracy that is also an unconstitutional monarchy.
Russia is a kind-of-if-you-squint-but-not-really-representative oligarchy-slash-autocracy that is also a constitutional republic.
Whether or not a country has a constitution, or is a republic has almost no bearing on how it is actually governed.
> who incorrectly believe that direct democracy is the only form of democracy that exists
I never claimed that. You are trying to address a non-existing point.
Aslo, being in minority has never been an indicator of wrong by default, so I don't see why you had to mention it. At least I know that the US embassy also finds it important to remind everyone about the difference [1].
> or that the term 'constitutional republic' says literally anything about how a country is governed. [...] Whether or not a country has a constitution, or is a republic has almost no bearing on how it is actually governed.
It does have a significant bearing on applicability of popular vote in a given federation.
Hardly everyone, but left zoomers who are unable to understand the key founding papers and who refuse descriptive comments of the founders on the matter most certainly do. [1]: "While often categorized as a democracy, the United States is more accurately defined as a constitutional federal republic. What does this mean? “Constitutional” refers to the fact that government in the United States is based on a Constitution which is the supreme law of the United States. The Constitution not only provides the framework for how the federal and state governments are structured, but also places significant limits on their powers. “Federal” means that there is both a national government and governments of the 50 states. A “republic” is a form of government in which the people hold power, but elect representatives to exercise that power."
Federalist No_14 also had a lot to say on the matter: “In a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, will be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region.”
I am not a zoomer and I agree with the commenter you are replying to. Most of the "west" has a form of government that is a representative democracy (most of them as republics, but quite a few as constitutional monarchies as well), including the US.
Most people would not waste their time nitpicking the usage of such a widely accepted term.
This is the PolySci equivalent of software engineers arguing about the type system in Python. It is a great source of debate and endless clarification... and term papers for undergrads.
it's the US embassy being very pedantic about the matter to the extent they find it important to dedicate the starting paragraph of the entire section about the US government, even though the difference is just about being more accurate. in fact, accuracy in founding principles of governing is as important as accuracy of long-distance ballistic motion planning.
> btw... whats the point in arguing the u.s isn't a democracy?
because a typical follow-up discussion usually starts with "so where's the popular vote?" and this diminishes the principle of fair representation of smaller states of the federal republic.
> because a typical follow-up discussion usually starts with "so where's the popular vote?" and this diminishes the principle of fair representation of smaller states of the federal republic.
Oh wow, so that's why this is seen as a left/right thing?
I'm not from the US (and therefore way left for the US) and I think assuring representation of the less populous states is very important.
I think the first-past-the-post voting system used in the US is a much bigger problem than this.
> because a typical follow-up discussion usually starts with "so where's the popular vote?" and this diminishes the principle of fair representation of smaller states of the federal republic.
thanks for clarifying.
just to be upfront, im not sure i agree, but in any case i think stating that upfront is better than debating words "democracy" vs "republic", people will miss the point (or not get what your trying to say)
The founders aren't very relevant anymore. Their system was bad, and the current one is better, though it keeps some of the old flaws they introduced as compromises for the time
Based on your quote, they didn't understand that representative democracy is still democracy? The internet lessons the need for representatives, since we don't need to travel to talk to each other anymore.
> The founders aren't very relevant anymore. Their system was bad, and the current one is better, though it keeps some of the old flaws they introduced as compromises for the time
The difference between "a democracy" and "a constitutional federal republic" seems to be a distinction without meaning.
There's a certain segment who seem very adamant that this is a very important argument to win against "the left". But I've never met any "leftist" who cares particularly - most seem to shrug, concede the label and move on.
I'm pretty much in agreement. The US is a democracy in the wide sense in that it uses a democratic process to choose government. It's also true that it's a representative democracy in that the process works by people choosing representatives. So sure - constitutional federal republic.
But why does anyone think this is particularly important, and why is this seen as something that there is any left/right distinction on is beyond me.
Which worries me about the USA, it's pretty hit or miss at the moment.
But there are also things that can affect who wants it, or what people think "it" is, or how they think you should get there. What people want is not an independent variable unaffected by anything else.
Republicans have long said that the federal government is structurally incompetent and unable to effectively administer a large country. They made a convincing argument with their performance in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I doubt Russia would have been much different.
That was a very different situation, those were states that were militarily invaded and then occupied by American forces, who were involved in reconstructing countries devastated by war.
Yea, and most young democracies are very vulnerable. You can look at the Arab Spring for examples of failed democracies, and the early United States (it took us 20 years to get off the Articles of Confederation and work on the Constitution we use today).
Myanmar's another one. India's been restricting its people's rights lately.
Democracy takes a while to establish as a stable system and often fails.
Alexander the Great was granting (non-representative) democracies to cities in Asia Minor 2400 years ago, I wonder what he'd think of Erdogan.
The Thirteen Colonies had a long history of democratic self governance. The revolution was mostly an independence movement. The revolutionary part was the Republican federation.
This long history of democratic rule was not present in many modern attempts to establish democracies.
I'm not sure the average Russian would have seen the situation much differently.
Look at the people today who decry chinese investment in the US economy? I'm not even saying those people are wrong.
All it takes is for one person or group in the country to poke us enough to the point where we feel the need to strengthen our security posture there (read: add more troops) and then some terrible situation like Abu Ghraib completely destroys any credibility we have with the local population and it just spirals into disaster.
I simply have no faith left in our government's ability to execute even a completely peaceful operation like the marshall plan (and similarly what we did in Japan).
Federalism is one of the core principles of the Republican party. I don't believe that's a controversial statement of fact, but I also didn't think vaccines or the shape of the Earth were controversial subjects, so I never know these days.
None of the people I know who voted Republican would come close to identifying themselves as federalists. In fact, it's an occasional discussion between some of us. It's almost like two parties aren't enough to describe the positions of everyone who is forced to identify with one of them.
> We believe our constitutional system — limited
government, separation of powers, federalism,
and the rights of the people — must be preserved
uncompromised for future generations.
That's from the preamble of the 2016 Republican platform (the most recent one since they declined to publish one in 2020 in lieu of just doing whatever Donald Trump said); literally their statement of values. But I've long believed that Republicans rely on voters who don't actually know what they're voting for, so your anecdote does strengthen that impression of mine.
The question here is - are Republicans actually those who they write in their documents they are? Or the Republicans are those who the majority of people considering themselves Republican and voting for them thinks?
Certain degrees of federalism are, I think, common across the political spectrum, not only describe Republicans.
Pushing vaccines and forcing them onto people is (or they lose their jobs).
Similarly, Democratic government forced many businesses to permanently close as they were deemed non-essential.
As a child I was compelled to take vaccinations in order to attend school. My buddy in the military tells me he was "voluntold" to give blood for his fellow soldiers, nevermind all the vaccines they were required to take. Back then, vaccine denial was a loony left fringe thing, and now it seems to be a mainstream conservative position. Times change I suppose, but I do remember the old days.
Reading about successes fighting polio with vaccines, or just remembering a standard practice in American health system to routinely vaccinate people - with rather few exceptions - shows a big difference with COVID-related vaccine controversy. What's that different?..
Also Polio vaccines are much, much more effective and even amongst these groups (i.e. children for Polio and seniors for Covid) Covid is much less dangerous.
Republicans have long said any government is bad. They want Big Business to be unrestrained, unregulated, pure democracy, at the expense of individual civil rights. I can't tell the difference between Republicans and anarchists, other than the sad fact that nearly all Republicans vote adversely to their personal economic interests to stifle economic opportunity, in order to keep the very richest the very richest, for that one future day when they are the richest of the richest. It makes no sense, because that day will never come because they are voting to stifle their own personal economic advancement for the sake of issues skew to economics, such as abortion and 2nd Amendment issues. Really... if you earn less than $325K/year, as nearly all Republicans do, it is insane to keep voting that way. If everyone always ignored all other issues, and voted solely in their personal economic interests, we'd never see another Republican elected until nearly everyone was rich.
> Republicans have long said any government is bad.
Most republicans are not anarcho-libertarians. Asserting that any government is bad is fringe even among libertarians, and most republicans aren't even libertarians.
Reagan was sufficiently before my time that I have very limited opinions on what he actually wanted, though I would certainly tend to agree with that. I have no idea what modern Republicans actually want or believe. Obviously their elite class wants power above all, but the rank and file never seem to get much other than grievance.
It's really strange to me that there was a decade where every Republican had to pledge allegiance to this guy (which ended when he married a Muslim woman).
I read "Gorbachev: His Life and Times" almost randomly five years ago. I'm going off of memory, but my primary takeaway from the book was your comment.
Gorbachev believed in Western ideals, maybe a bit too much. The Western leaders were extremely supportive of his reforms and promised to be with him. After the Wall fell, and Russian economy nose dived, no one was there for him. People were starving on the streets, Gorbachev asked for humanitarian aid, but nothing came.
I think he pleaded for $3B from Helmut Kohl in the end, but even that was too much. IIRC, the book ended with a bitter note on Western promises, what Russia could have become, along with a warning on consequences in the future.
> People were starving on the streets, Gorbachev asked for humanitarian aid, but nothing came.
Looks like some hyperbolization. There was a term "legs of Bush", referring to chicken legs from USA, sold in many places in at least some cities. There were "humanitarian" bags of rice, also available to some significant extent. This was in around 1994, so, Yeltsin times already, but before 1991 Soviet Union was somewhat more stable regarding food.
Maybe the reference is regarding a short period at the end of 1991, a few months between GKChP putsch and the dissolution of the USSR? This period is mentioned in a contemporary song ("Kombinatsiya", "Two pieces of sausage"), but it was short enough so that humanitarian help couldn't get to the country.
Yes, this could be hyperbole or my memory misleading me. I'm not Russian and it's hard to find good resources on this topic from the time.
I found the following article from the Associated Press. It looks like Gorbachev said that Soviet Union didn't expect famine, but would face food shortages. It's still sad that the humanitarian aid didn't come, leading to Gorbachev's resignation.
> In a letter last month to Jacques Delors, the EC commission president, the Soviets asked for millions of tons of food that it valued at $7.5 billion. The rest of the $14.7 billion in aid was requested from other Western nations.
The Kremlin’s request included 5.5 million tons of grain, 900,000 tons of sugar, 800,000 tons of meat, 350,000 tons of butter, 300,000 tons of vegetable fat, 300,000 tons of flour, 50,000 tons of tobacco, 50,000 tons of baby food and 30,000 tons of malt.
"The International Monetary Fund said today that it had approved a $10.2 billion loan for Russia. The move is expected to be helpful to President Boris N. Yeltsin in the presidential election in June. The three-year loan is the fund's second biggest, after a $17.8 billion credit granted to Mexico last year."
"The United States transferred over $13 billion (equivalent of about $115 billion[A] in 2021[B]) in economic recovery programs to Western European economies after the end of World War II." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
A "Marshall Plan" for Russia would have worked as well as the "Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan has worked over the last 20 years. You can't impose your system on people who don't want it. Do you think Russia would have handed control over to Westerners? And without control it's just an endless money sink. The oligarchs would just have become a little richer.
I wasn't suggesting imposing a system on Russia or taking control, any more than the US imposed a system or took control of the UK after WW2.
"The largest recipient of Marshall Plan money was the United Kingdom (receiving about 26% of the total). The next highest contributions went to France (18%)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
Moreover, Russia clearly did want and in fact received some economic aid under Yelstin.
Just to be certain, I'm sure the last 20 years put a long-lasting effect on Afghan people, won't be erased soon. We even see some effects in modern Iraq, where the period was shorter.
> There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War like there was after World War II. This was a huge mistake
This notion is based on ignoring historic facts. Germany (and Japan) in WWII were fully vanquished foes whose entire socio-political system was redrawn by the victors. Marshall plan executed in an environment of near total control over Germany. US simply was not in a position to do a Marshall Plan for ex-Soviet Union.
> The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s.
This is another nice sounding but entirely wrongheaded thought. Do you really think an outside force can come and force a nation with its historic trajectory and 'make them democratic'? Democracy, or whatever goes by that name in the West today, has its roots in Magna Carta! That's 1215 [yes, I watched Better Call Saul]. Read up on history of England, and how much bloodshed it took to go from there to a parliamentary system, with (important to note) its entire elite class on board with the political arrangement -- it was after all what they wanted after having their Glorious Revolution.
The idea that a bunch of Americans can waltz into Moscow and St. Petersburg and turn Russia in a "democratic nation" by some means of time compression squeezing in centuries of organic development into a couple of decades is frankly laughable.
> This notion is based on ignoring historic facts.
No, it's not. Please refrain from this kind of personal comment.
I wasn't suggesting that the US meddle in Russia's political system. Russia was already moving to democracy by itself. The point was to provide economic aid to support that existing, fledgling, fragile democracy. What happened, unfortunately, is that many Russians suffered heavily economically during the transition, and they started to look back with some fondness to the "good old days", because they were worse off financially than before. That's where the western world could have helped.
You should assume that any commenter will know that Germany and Japan were occupied after WW2. Of course I know that. I mean, I'm the one who brought up the Marshall Plan in the first place! You set up a straw man to criticize.
Not forgetting. Wartime allies, totally vanquished foes, and newly minted countries. Russia in 1991 was neither.
US did in fact do another Marshall Plan after WW2, catapulting China into 21st century. But that help came after a very deep strategic understanding between US's and China's ruling class. Again, nothing of the sort happened with Russia nor was it possible.
Actually US did a lot to help Yeltsin reelected, never stopped the expansion eastwards, attacked Serbia without UN approval, pushed for Kosovo referendum under Nato occupation, never stopped the military exercises and flights on russian border and tried its best to meddle in Russia's internal affairs and us economists were among those that most pushed Yeltsin for the shock transition towards a capitalist market which led to ghe 1998 default.
I think US did enough divide and conquer and meddling to help bringing back an authoritarian government.
Anyway, totalitarian has a specific meaning, not a random one, it's a government that holds total control on all powers in a country. Stalinist USSR and Nazi germany (modern eritrea and north korea) apply to that definition, Italian or spanish fascisms do not (in both the head of state was the king), even less Russia since it is a de jure democracy.
> I think US did enough divide and conquer and meddling to help bringing back an authoritarian government.
There is a phrase in Russia, :) "But in USA they lynch people". The idea is that in Russia it's often that discussion is interrupted by listing the ills of America, to avoid talking about Russia or for other reasons, so it's easy to justify pointing fingers to "the real evil".
I think you're wrong and your arguments are misplaced.
The phrase "never stopped the expansion eastwards" suggests that you don't see e.g. Slovenia as an interested party to join NATO, for whatever reason they chose, and instead see it as an evidence of guilt.
> Stalinist USSR and Nazi germany ... apply to that definition... even less Russia since it is a de jure democracy.
Current Russian laws mean little to define Russia de facto. Just like Hitler laws meant little at the time.
>Current Russian laws mean little to define Russia de facto.
There is a huge difference between real totalitarian state and present day Russia. In present day, there are less than 100 people have been imprisoned for "political" reasons (for violating foreign agent law or for violating army fakes law). It's widely discussed and criticised in Russian national media.
In 1937 alone something like 700000 people were executed by Stalin's NKVD, and millions were imprisoned. If I wrote comment like this, it surely leads to my imprisonment. That was totalitarian state, state when you are afraid to speak freely with your own family. Current Russian regime is nothing like that.
Yes. To be considered totalitarian government should claim TOTAL control on life of ordinary citizen, including his speech and mind.
Putin's regime is nothing like that.
I'm not sure what special powers you think the United States would have that could change the course of an entire culture that still seeems drawn to the strong-man archtype. These kinds of transformations have to come from within.
> The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s.
This wording implies an accident, or negligence. In fact, it was an intentional and explicit policy of "shock doctrine" economic deregulation and ultra-liberalisation that led to the absolute misery of the 1990s, and the kleptocracy that continues to this day.
You can't force democracy on people. US - as a state and as private persons (Soros in particular) invested a lot into trying to build up democratic institutions (at least as they understood them) in Russia. It didn't work, and in part it didn't work because Russians seemed not to value the same things Americans value. Now, I am talking in generic, in broad strokes - which is never 100% true for any society, it's always more complex. But you can identify the major tendencies and likelihood of certain ideas to win or wither.
At least significant part of Russians seems to be ok with having no free speech, no real elections and no independent judiciary or other democratic institutions - as long as they are reasonably safe, physically and economically, and the bad things only happen to those who speak up or somehow do something "wrong" (which includes demanding to have those institutions publicly). They have been living this way for decades, and they have been living in much worse way - where bad things happened to pretty much everybody, regardless of what you do - for decades before that. Looks like they developed some habits that make their society very atomized and politically inert. Couple that with significant resentment of formerly having great empire (it was nominally "Soviet", not "Russian", but everybody knew where the capital was - in Moscow, right?!) and now being forced to play by the rules they did not write - and you get the full Weimar picture, and you know where that leads. Not to the thriving democracy. I don't think any "Marshall Plan" would have helped - and Russian wouldn't accept this magnitude of intrusion anyway.
The Marshall Plan was economic recovery assistance, and it went to allies as well occupied territories.
"The largest recipient of Marshall Plan money was the United Kingdom (receiving about 26% of the total). The next highest contributions went to France (18%)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
Russia had already implemented its own elections after the fall of the USSR. The US didn't need to force that. The point is just to support Russia in its transition, not to force it.
You speak of the Weimar Republic. The lack of a "Marshall Plan" after WWI and the harsh conditions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles were a big factor in the failure of the Weimar Republic.
> At least significant part of Russians seems to be ok with having no free speech, no real elections and no independent judiciary or other democratic institutions
Yes, Russia briefly had free elections. Unfortunately, this did not result in a functioning democratic society - not because of lack of resources, but because of lack of desire to resist the oligarchical clique that managed to control, subvert and ultimately destroy the democracy. That wasn't the problem of the economy - in fact, Russian economy in a better shape now than it was in the 90s - it's a societal problem.
> This is true also in the United States
Sadly, true - but hopefully, it is still possible to avoid Russia's fate. Even though many institutions - including major part of technological leadership - are leading us to the same place, where expressing dissent is virtually impossible and any political action is only possible with approval from above - ironically under the slogans of "preserving democracy" and "fighting misinformation". We're not there yet, but the road has been built and we are marching along it. What works for us is we can see where this road ends, so maybe we can find in ourselves to stop and turn back before it's too late.
> Russian economy in a better shape now than it was in the 90s
It's too late, though. The 90s were a make-or-break time for democracy and freedom... and it broke. Initially there was a great deal of enthusiasm for the elimination of the Soviet Union, but ultimately democracy needs to produce results economically, and if it doesn't, then people will reject it.
> many institutions - including major part of technological leadership - are leading us to the same place
I find it amusing that we're talking about different groups. I have no love for big tech companies and would break them up, but I was actually talking about the people who want to establish a Christian theocracy in the United States, who recognize no separation of church and state, who refuse to accept the results of democratic elections, who are perfectly happy with minority rule via electoral college and gerrymandering, who refuse to even hold a vote on any Supreme Court nominee in the last year of one President's term but then ram through a Supreme Court nominee in the last year of the next President's term, who give dictatorial powers to Governors of their own party, but then take away those powers right after losing Gubernatorial elections, who have a laundry list of subjects they ban from discussion in schools via school boards and/or legislatures, etc.
Again, it did produce results economically - after a brief disarray period, the economical situation in Russia improved and the economical situation of average Russians universally became much better than under the USSR. Incomparably better one might say. Unfortunately, along with this improvement, there was ongoing process of consolidating power by the oligarchical clique, led by Putin, which was largely ignored by the society - in part precisely because it did not result (at least not directly) in any harm to an average citizen yet. If you don't make the waves and don't cross the wrong people, you'd be ok - you can have at least decent middle-class living, by Russian standards, and if you're lucky, maybe even a little rich (being really rich is entirely different game, which requires you to be part of the oligarchy). That's one of the reasons most of them didn't care - economical side was still good, and freedom - who needs freedom?
> I was actually talking about the people who want to establish a Christian theocracy in the United States
Ah, the imaginary theocrats. I'm not afraid of them, I must say. I am afraid of those who actively suppress debate important to society right now, right this moment. Imaginary Christian theocrats can't prohibit discussing important topics on 90% of internet platforms, can't suppress publication of vital information they think is politically inconvenient, can't fire me from my job for expressing a wrong opinion, can't force me to sign political statements as a condition of employment or getting education, can't introduce racial and gender quotas in education and employment, can't exclude people from educational opportunities for having wrong ethnic ancestry, can't reintroduce racial segregation and can't institute mandatory indoctrination programs - at least, I haven't seen them doing it anywhere yet. But I have seen other people doing just that, all over the nation. And those people I am afraid of - because they want to do this, and they can do this, and they are doing this - and much more - right now. If it ever comes to Christian theocrats doing these things - then they would be the dangerous group, but right now they're not even close.
> who refuse to accept the results of democratic elections,
Somehow the tradition of refusing to accept electoral loss only counts for the last election, not for all the elections that happened before that. Bush was accused of stealing an election for all his term (still occasionally accused now), but nobody remembers that anymore. Funny how it works.
> who are perfectly happy with minority rule via electoral college
You mean, like the one described in the founding documents of the state? It's a real shame people of the US still cling to stupid things like the US constitution. True democracy would require abandoning it of course. But only in case where it benefits the certain party - if it does not, the Constitution is sacred. Just look it up historically - if the electoral college favors party A, it's a sacred institution, if on the next election it favors party B - it's an outdated relic. But everybody is free to bloviate as they will, it's no problem. The problem starts when one of the parties tries to shut off the debate completely. And I know some very non-imaginary people working on it right now. Google just announced they'd boot any application that allows dissent (sorry, "misinformation") to be published from their platform. That scared me much more than imaginary theocrats - they don't have the thousandths of the power Google has.
> who give dictatorial powers to Governors of their own party
Er, what? Which Governor has dictatorial powers and how did they pull it off? I am not aware of any Governor that has any dictatorial powers, and US laws do not allow one to be "given" such power - of course, with the exception of when there's an "emergency" and you want to shut down the state and put everybody under house arrest. Then it's ok - but as I remember, those were not "theocrats" that did that, so we better not talk about it any more.
Unless by "dictatorial powers" you mean "he's doing something I don't like, despite being duly elected by the majority and widely supported by the population of his own state"? Then it happens all the time of course.
> have a laundry list of subjects they ban from discussion in schools via school boards
I may be ok with banning schools from discussing topics with kids that parents do not want to be discussed with their kids. Because they are kids. They are not adults yet - they may need certain measure of guardianship before they can approach adult subjects. Especially ones that can have permanent consequences. What I am very not ok with is when the same is applied to adults - without any age limit, forever, and when nobody is free to publish and discuss certain things without the approval from the Powers That Be.
I'd love to argue with you more, but this is already getting way off topic from Gorbachev, and I can see it becoming a massively long tangent into US politics. (I probably shouldn't have taken the bait in the first place.)
You realize it was the Americans under Yeltsin who basically destroyed Russian economy right ? I'm fairly sure Russian children weren't prostituting themself because the US "missed their mark" and were led astray by "corrupt Asiatics" (not being facile here; this is standard argument put out by Western "intellectuals" today - which says a lot about the deep hate for Asia.).
I imagine Russians slyly and sarcastically saying, to the typically non-ironically self-righteous Westerner, "oh the Americans did plenty; plenty indeed; we really wish they didn't".
Much of the global south holds much the same opinion IMO. Frankly, I'm shocked at the state of disconnect in the West. The kind of petulant idiocy displayed by the usual eminences when the majority of the world did not play along - much like they didn't play along when the US-West attacked god-knows how many countries now - was less suitable even of a pouty teenager.
What serious intellectuals in the West are making statements about "corrupt Asiatics" today? This is clearly taken directly from some kind of propagandist talking sheet because anyone making this claim clearly understands nothing about the West of today.
It's ironic that we can talk about Western petulance but ignore the petulance of the Russian Federation when their outrageous demands were not met by their neighbours.
Unless you happen to understand Finnish, subtitles are mandatory (and very accurate AFAICT). There is a link to a dubbed version in the comments if that is preferred.
The US meddled, and it did a lot. The OP is saying the US meddled wrong and could have meddled beneficially. If the US had decided not to meddle in the USSRs affairs, the world would have gone quite differently.
Actually the British are more to blame for that, as they are the ones who deliberately drew the borders of modern middle east with the explicit goal to cause maximum instability.
Don't think lack of Marshall plan is to blame. Russian economy was totally dependent on oil and gas exports since 1970s. Very low oil prices in 1990s contributed to widespread poverty and allowed few oligarchs to scoop all the assets very cheaply. Putin's rise to power coincided, by chance only, with dramatic oil price recovery. So people learned to correlate good life with a strong leader, and poverty - with democracy.
> Russia today is a faint ghost of the former USSR.
Russia was only a part of the USSR. Their main problem is that they, too, believe that they are the former USSR, and try to restore the former glory. Well, the state of the war in Ukraine (another part of the former USSR) clearly shows how wrong they are.
> Well, the state of the war in Ukraine (another part of the former USSR) clearly shows how wrong they are.
I assume you mean "Russia believe that they are the former USSR".
It's interesting to note that Russia in 1990-s focused on economic modernization - and while it went through highly criminal years, they built a good market economy by 1999 - while Ukraine was mostly (more) doing political reform - and they had established presidential changes. Now more economically robust Russia with autocratic ruling fights with still quite corrupt, but politically much more democratic Ukraine - and shows that, yes, it's better to be a poor democracy, than a rich autocracy, because autocracy will get you in the end... or maybe it's a too hasty conclusion.
It's smaller all right. But it is also much more robust.
Late USSR was the kind of society where most everything was in short supply and which has even failed to feed itself. Yes, it had a lot of hardware and people. All of that was for no good, given the awful system in place.
I'd point out that USSR was much more self-reliant than Russia - you couldn't really put sanctions on Eastern block of countries, they produced everything, with certain things so good they are still competitive. Yes, market economy does greatly improve Russia's agility, but special services can't stop ruin most of what they can touch, so even market economy has limited net benefits now - while at the time of USSR they had a good counterbalance in the form of the Communist Party.
USSR wasn't bankrupt for many decades - until the end, of course, but it's silly to compare unstable USSR in 1991 going through destructive transformations with Russia, which still "just" losing the was against the West - so far. You should compare USSR of 1980 with Russia today (or rather before February 24 this year) - and USSR will win in capabilities, despite the lack of market economy.
> USSR was defunct. Its communist party was also defunct.
USSR was relatively stable for decades, with all its great shortcomings.
I don't think China plays significant enough role in today's events.
How much? E.g. in early 1992 monthly stipend of a student - something which he could somehow survive for a month (not quite, too low, but somewhat close) was about 60 roubles. And the USD-RUR course was 100 roubles for a dollar. So a person was barely - very barely - surviving on 7 dollars 20 cents a year.
Do you know how much Russian economy costed at the time?
Marshall plan was tied to occupation though whereby U.S. could direct and correct the first steps of the young post-war German democracy. Nothing like that would be allowed by post-Soviet elites, no matter how much economic help U.S. would offer.
Selling off the communist factories was a huge mistake. Should have followed the Chinese model of slowly introducing capitalist things into the existing economy. Instead they laid everyone off and of course everything went to shit.
That really worked out for China didn't it. Under Xi Jinping there's a resurgence of Communist ideology and not at all the gradual acclimation to Western style democracy everyone had expected.
The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s.
If anyone is interested why the US get involved in other countries affairs, just look to comments like this.
I'm not sure why the US has any responsibility for helping Russia transition to a democracy. And I'm not sure why, when the US does provide assistance, when the country fails to become democratic, it's because "the US didn't do enough".
It's pretty clear it's a no win situation. The US gets blamed for "doing nothing, or not enough" and then when it does something it gets blamed for "interfering with another nations affairs".
I'm starting to see why the founding fathers were such isolationists and the US as a whole was isolationist until WW1. There is nothing good that can come out of getting involved.
We are also dealing today with blowback from the perceived claim that "Not One Inch" [1] of NATO expansion to the East could be expected as Western policy. The Partnership for Peace program may have started off in the right direction, but, as the military hawks took policy control like good generals the only thing they actually cared about was "securing the nukes". And expanding NATO to the East.
Ps I worked with a guy who was in Russia for IBM in those days and he said they needed armed guards and dummy trucks to deliver a Mainframe.
Ah the old "there's only two sovereign nations, USA and Russia, and everyone in between are just puppets" line of thought that seems so entrenched in the Russian Federation, presumably because the Soviets could not conceive the common people of any country wanting anything without being agitated through propaganda (after all, when you have near total control over the media, independent thought does seem like an aberration).
What people who complain about NATO expansion seem to forget is that the countries being "expanded into" still have living memory, within one generation, of Soviet tanks rolling through their streets to put down any attempts at independence in governance. There was Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland... the US didn't coërce these countries to join NATO, these countries were practically begging to be included.
Then the Russian Federation made the demand at the beginning of 2022 for NATO to remove its troops and equipment from Central/Eastern Europe as if they ruled over those nations. The gall to think to dictate the international military security policy for a population totalling twice the size of their own is astounding.
Suggesting the US wanted to go to nuclear war is a rather colourful reimagining of the whole Cuban missile crisis. In fact the crisis demonstrated the complete opposite, that neither side wanted full out nuclear war. Both the USSR removed their nuclear warheads from Cuba and the US removed theirs from Turkey and Italy as concessions. Soviet military presence didn't end in Cuba nor did US military presence end in Turkey and Italy.
> There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War l
There was such a plan, at least in the twisted minds of the people behind the Washington Consensus. They were calling it privatization or price liberalization or some other non-sense like that, thing is the common people got the very, very short stick (like my parents, who lost their jobs, their city apartment and who had to resort to literally subsistence agriculture in a matter of 4-5 years maximum; I'm not from Russia, but still from the former communist space) while some lucky ones from amongst us became entrepreneurs and business leaders. Also, most of the really juicy assets (like almost of all our banking sector, our oil resources etc) got sold to Western companies, but that was a given if we wanted to become part of the European Union and of the West more generally speaking.
Yes, I've started to become more and more bitter as the years have gone by, I'm now almost the same age as my dad was in the mid-'90s, when all hell started to economically unravel. Nobody had asked my parents, or us, who were mere kids and teenagers back then, if we were agreeing to the sacrifices that they were going to impose on us.
A lot of Russia's issues stem from the way the government sold off their state owned corporations, which created artificial monopoly/oligopoly owners overnight — often insiders/cronies to begin with. This can be contrasted with traditional market economies where large corporations start off as small companies and become dominant through innovation, growth, and generally meeting consumer demands.
>The transition to a market economy went very well for most of the former Soviet Republics except Russia
That might be what it writes in the link, it wasn't the case though, except if you mean after things stabilized 15 and 20 years later (and it's still bad in most places). Tons of conflict, forced migration, poverty, crime, sexual slavery, and so on...
Exactly. Countries like Poland and Hungary have huge social issues and struggle with corruption. A lot of political research points to the recent rise in fascist nationalism in these two countries as caused by being thrown from one political ideology to another (e.g. “communism” to ironfisted neoliberalism / Washington Consensus). It’s pretty evident none of them worked. If anything the country that was LEAST worse off following the fall of the iron curtain was DDR / East Germany simply because they were already miles ahead any other former Warsaw Pact country in terms of productivity. However, if you compare them to West Germany they were quite poor, with some differences in wealth and relative household income still evident at least 10 years ago.
How is that evident, though? It’s actually pretty clear that the quality of life has drastically improved in most of these countries. Of *course* you can always find some group who is suffering. But there is no way I would want to live in 1980s Poland, Estonia, etc vs 2020. For example:
It has improved significantly in the last 20 years. But the 90’s were as bad if not worse than in Russia in most places. And Russia was on an upwards trend until the 2010’s as well, e.g. if we look at average income levels the Baltic states only overtook Russia around ~2014.
And if we only focus ex-USSR countries, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia seem more like the exceptions than the rule. Basically every single country besides them did much worse than Russia (unless like it they had a large amount of natural resources)
Well close to 300 million people lived in the USSR. Only 8 million of them lived in the Baltic states.
I still personally think the (mostly) peaceful dissolution of the USSR was probably one the best things that happened in the past 100 years. But transition to capitalism was extremely mismanaged, even in the “successful” countries.
Washington consensus-style capitalism / Reaganite neoliberalism was not good for most countries. A good example is how the Russian economy responded to excessive privatisation instead of building a strong public sector that builds and supports private enterprise (similar to the US, although neoliberal scholars don’t like admitting it). The track record is the same in a lot of Latin-American countries where IMF and WTO imposed similar doctrines. I’m mostly for free markets etc, but it wasn’t appropriate to expect countries such as Poland with a “plastic” economy (political economy as the communist like labelling it) to succeed with a neoliberal anti-government “libertarianism” ideology overnight. It just doesn’t work that way. Stiglitz even wrote a book on the topic.
The DDR/BDR wealth/income divide is still significant, even today and in spite of the government's fairly aggressive taxes explicitly earmarked to develop the former DDR.
And if you compare current eastern Germany as opposed to the DDR, current inhabitants have it so much better. Another group that did not improve are the stans (Kazakstan and related countries).
Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are doing great really, even if the Polish government is anti-EU sometimes. According to latest statistics Estonia has better education system, economic growth and birth rate than Finland. The rate at which these countries have catch up is amazing.
What I'm most worried of now are old, historically rich countries in decline, like Italy and Spain.
I was in Poland in the late 90s and there were fairly large economic issues with a lack of job projects for many people. This in turn resulted in fairly high rates of crime as it was one of the more guaranteed ways to make a living if you were young. Many other people left the country to make money which in the long turn led to some of the Brexit issues. I literally didn't meet a single person, including myself, who wasn't burglarized or mugged at least once. Four point locks and steel doors were the norm for apartments and houses (and that didn't always help).
It's probably worth adding that this is no longer the case.
Live in Poland, muggings aren't really a thing, and according to the "what worries the world" monthly polls of ipsos[0], poles are the nation that least worries about violence and crime (it was surprising for me to see the effect is that strong), with only 5% worrying about it.
I live in Lithuania and I guess it was the same here, as all apartments have thick steel doors with multiple locks, and ground floor apartments of older buildings often have bars.
Now though it's nothing like that. I'm originally from the UK and I feel much safer being here. Not only personal safety (I don't feel there's any 'bad parts' of the city you 'shouldn't go') but also private belongings. I've never heard of anyone in recent times being burgled or having their car broken into.
It wasn't only for the rich and wealthy (or those who had anything valuable at all) even in the slightest in some of the Eastern European countries at that time.
If you look at houses in Compton and see metal bars on the windows, you don't instantly think "man, they must have lots of expensive stuff to steal". Kind of the same deal here.
Do you genuinely believe that people in eastern europe at the time were so oblivious and naive? I can bet you that on average, they were way more cautious and aware of their surroundings than modern people living in the west are.
For once, I don't think that they would consider leaving all of their valuables in front of the front door where everything is visible. Unless installing the front door includes rummaging through the entire apartment, all while the person living there is just standing and smiling. Which, I assure you, isn't how it usually goes.
And I am not trying to make it as some attack on people living in the west, I am one of them now myself. It speaks more about how safe and comfortable the modern western life can be, compared to what it was in those eastern european countries back then, that we can afford to be so oblivious to our surroundings and so much less cautious.
I see oblivious and naive people everywhere all the time (eg phone scams)
> they were way more cautious and aware of their surroundings than modern people living in the west are
Thanks for assuming I'm just a stupid guy from the West.
> all of their valuables in front of the front door where everything is visible
Of course not, but there is a lot of things what can tell you there could be valuables there. Ruined flat in a commie block is one thing, but a freshly renovated flat in that commie block is another thing.
If you think a little you can, probably, understand why I know that.
the people you are incorrecting and are arguing with?real experience or living in a high crime environment.
Maybe it's worth taking their points seriously instead of arguing. Nobody has flimay wooden american-style doors in Russia, everyone installs steel doors, thats the norm.
This isn't the west where you worry about a small percentage of semi-professional burglars. This was a pretty massive number of fairly amateur burglars who did it simply because it was easy. If you did nothing then you'll get robbed by them due to sheer numbers. Guaranteed. If you do something then you'll face the much smaller percentage of more professional burglars. Then you're only somewhat likely to get robbed.
Yeltsin is very much to blame. Russia would have transitioned much better if Gorbachev had been the head of the post-USSR Russia instead of Yeltsin.
That said, the former Soviet Republics that transitioned well are those that were smaller, already edging their way towards a market economy before the USSR collapse, and received substantial help from (and eventually joined) the EU (Baltics, Hungary, Poland, Czech Rep., Slovenia), and in the case of E.Germany, unification.
I don't think most of the others have fared that well. GDP/Capita is not a good measure because it doesn't take inequality into account.
> much better if Gorbachev had been the head of the post-USSR Russia
Gorbachev wanted to keep USSR intact. He didn't want a post-USSR Russia. He initiated referendums to that end. But USSR was already on the train to dissolution and nothing was going to stop it.
He wanted to keep the USSR intact but also understood that was no longer an option. I'm sure he would have accepted to be PM of Russia but he was considered part of the "communist regime" and wasn't the one standing on the tanks (lets ignore the fact that Yeltin was also part of the communist regime), so that didn't happen.
Indeed. He didn't weigh in on the current debacle but he praised Putin's seizure of Crimea.
He was a product of his upbringing and honestly he always seemed like a weak player to me -- but really I have no idea how difficult it might have been to bring off the reforms he did under Andropov, Chernenko and then his own premiership.
The data doesn't support your point about inequality. The other former Communist eastern European countries generally don't have particularly high Gini index values. Other countries have much more income inequality.
And the GDR still got the best deal of all of the ones you mentioned. But there's massive inequality, massive unemployment. (And as a result, extremism, political fatigue, corruption, etc)
pointing out problems that places have after they've experienced 45-70 years of domination by Soviet style authoritarian regimes (and before which they were neither democracies on a shining hill) is not at all making a case that the post soviet transitions were flawed, just that they were not miraculous.
to be convincing you have to point out things that the transitioners could have done that would have worked better, but even the best experts in the world did not know any better than what was tried, so that's going to be a tough case to make.
Nonsense. A lot of things sound nice in paper but - all the human data I’ve seen (enormous amounts of anecdotes and counter histories) the entire post soviet transition was recklessly managed by Master of the Universe / Friedman types who created one of the great economic catastrophes in human history.
One day the real history of those times will be written, but this is not it. Economism is faith based, not a science.
That article determines a "positive transition" based upon the raw percent growth in unadjusted GDP since 1995, which is dubious. The "value" of that metric is illustrated by referencing one of the 6 Soviet Republics that page "forgot" about: Moldova. Moldova is Europe's poorest country and suffers from widespread poverty, rampant corruption, and is a major source of things like human trafficking of which the government is involved. Yet it's seen an increase of said metric in 250%, so the article must conclude it's been one of the most successful transitions. Handy instance to suffer a bout of amnesia on.
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<tangent>
I've started to become increasingly jaded about economic indicators not only because of articles like this, but because of how they are used in general. We seek data on things like economies not because those numbers matter whatsoever, but because those numbers are supposed to reflect of an objective measurement of the quality of life of people living under that economy. In effect, it's an effort to create objective metrics to try to impartially answer subjective questions.
But it ultimately fails, because subjective determination is going to be based on a practically infinite number of metrics, many of which may be immeasurable. So why not simply ask the people? Should we not be aiming to maximize e.g. contentedness/capita instead of GDP/capita and just hoping it leads to the former, somehow? Of course that's a far harder metric to maximize, but that's the whole point. Just doing everything to maximize one metric's value and then waving a "Mission Accomplished" banner clearly is not getting the job done.
</tangent>
Tell that to people in Belarus or Ukraine (not talking about the situation since 2014), Kazakhstan etc. Not sure about the situation in the others. A post talking about "GDP per capita" rather than what people's lives are like is kind of a joke.
You can add Moldova to the list. Yes, now the people have well wealthier lifestyles than during he soviet period, and overall the direction seems optimist. But going from a postcard republic of sorts, to literally the poorest country in Europe, the transition has heavily bruised many people's faiths.
> This can be contrasted with traditional market economies where large corporations start off as small companies and become dominant through innovation, growth, and generally meeting consumer demands.
yeah I would say maybe the baltics had it good but the rest of former republics had a hard time. Armenia and Azerbaijan had a war, Tajikistan was engulfed in a civil war. Most countries didn't have any real gdp growth till mid 2000s.
Central Asia has the same oligarchy as you would picture in Russia and probably much worse. All dictators only changing after the previous dies.
Did you just explain to someone from a communist-bloc country, who had just said how badly the transition went in their country, that the transition had actually gone well?
This is a cousin to both mansplaining and gaslighting, and if we want good, lively discussion on HN we should try to be careful to avoid it. The gp comment gave some very specific and relevant comments about economic upheavals in the late Gorbachev period and deserves better than a well-actually.
"Did you just..." is the phrase to avoid when you want a good, lively discussion.
OP offered a link and an explanation for some of Russia's trouble: the formation of government-backed oligarchies that prevented a healthy market economy to develop. Not the entire picture, maybe a wrong conclusion, but a valid point nevertheless.
What’s crazy is the minds behind the Washington Consensus favored a form of extreme capitalism that no western democracy would ever tolerate such a system on their own soil.
Some ultra-capitalist die-hards have even retreated away from
Liberalism in general as they found it too restrictive for their extreme ideology (they know their economic regime could never gain sustained popular support; it would need to be imposed)
Case in point: at one point during the Greek crisis the IMF was the ones telling the EU and Germany that they were being too severe, and they pretty much initiated the Washington consensus
What’s crazy is the minds behind the Washington Consensus favored a form of extreme capitalism that no western democracy would ever tolerate such a system on their own soil.
It had been tried in many places already: Chile, Indonesia, the Philippines, and (before 1979) Iran. The data were clear: it had worked very well for capitalists, but very poorly for people in the countries affected. And it mostly has come to the US. There are remnants of the welfare state, but your employer can basically do whatever he wants because he calls himself "a job creator"... and education is debt-financed... and getting sick will wipe out everything you have... and we've transitioned away from productive investment to asset bubbles... and you better not end up in a lawsuit because the rich have the best lawyers and lobbyists and therefore effectively own the court system (you only have a shot if you can find a rich person who hates your adversary enough to back you). The EU has held out to an extent, for now, but it won't if the Davos people get their way. The "Great Reset" is their plan to implement extreme capitalism under a guise of ecological caution and "woke" multiculturalism [1].
The Marshall Plan was written by people who believed market systems were superior to central planning given the technological level and geographical complexities (e.g., general low trust between nations) of the time--they were capitalists, but not capitalist ideologues. Alas, the successes (for "business interests", meaning rich people in the US) in Santiago, Jakarta, and Manila led them to become more brazen, to the point of using the former USSR for some of their most aggressive experiments to that point.
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[1] This is not to say ecological caution isn't important (it is). Nor is it to disparage the broader set of social movements classified by their detractors as "woke", most of which have nothing but the best intentions. The issue with "woke capitalism" is that it retrenches in identity politics in order to divide working people against each other for Capital's benefit, and that it is designed not to provide significant help to people in marginalized groups (most of whom are working class, and who will therefore not be helped) but to neuter a powerful, morally righteous leftist movement toward genuine and universal social justice.
> Nor is it to disparage the broader set of social movements classified by their detractors as "woke", most of which have nothing but the best intentions.
To me it seems like they have the best intentions in the same way that religious extremists have the best intentions. But otherwise I agree with you.
I thought most of the major assets got bought by connected oligarchs, sometimes by literally putting goons at the doors of the auction room to beat up anyone that tried to get in to bid against them. If the oils fields were actually owned by European companies, we’d be buying Russian oil from ourselves, not from Russia.
That was one way. Another was not paying salaries for months ("company has no money" was a common case) until employees sell their "vauchers" to those who wanted to buy.
I've heard variations of this story a lot. Common people and workers received a share of the company they work for, but times were so dire most people sold them to those with money for a pittance. So foreseeable, why was it allowed to happen?
Some people chose to put their assets to work for later and others to sell their assets for cash right now. Why shouldn't people be allowed to make those decisions?
Shock therapy transition to capitalism plan meant people did not do the first choice. There were no choice, literally. Workers got shares in the companies they worked for without any alternative (get your share or continue receiving your salary).
Ditto for the goons. If your main skill is sociopathic violence and physical strength, why not use those your talents to intimidate and exploit the workers for your boss’s benefit?
Do you really, genuinely believe that these people had credible options, and were not deliberately coerced and engineered into desperate economic conditions in order to squeeze them into selling their shares for a pittance?
One aspect that I never hear about in the collapse of the soviet union. To what extent did opening the markets to quickly break soviet industry? While by the 1990s Soviet industry was notoriously in-efficient compared to western counterparts - it still existed and functioned. Opening the flood gates seemed to result in everyone rapidly selling equipment for scrap and killed any existing supply chains.
Would the result have been different if Russia followed a Chinese model?
That's kind of a moot question because a slower transition was never even an option. The USSR was rapidly collapsing into anarchy. Especially in the outer areas, the security forces stopped obeying orders. In a lot of factories, workers simply left and looters hauled away everything of value. Industry ceased to function in a matter of months.
I'd be interested in understanding the "rapid collapse" more. Do you have any good resources on this? Was this due to the USSR being dependent on coerced demand/supply from other communist block nations?
I rarely mention this these days, but people basically don’t believe me in the US when I describe how we survived the 90s by subsistence framing our little dacha plot. We got good at it too and helped neighbors survive couple winters. It’s hard to explain to someone that hasn't lived it what happens when government institutions truly collapse and nothing works. Part of me still wants to plant some potatoes because the store bought ones just don’t taste the same…
There was no such plan, there was the pillaging of Russia. Something so blatant even the small amounts of US capital used to facilitate it were stolen by Andrei Shleifer and the rest of the Harvard Board:
>In August 2005, Harvard University, Shleifer and the Department of Justice reached an agreement under which the university paid $26.5 million to settle the five-year-old lawsuit. Shleifer was also responsible for paying $2 million worth of damages, though he did not admit any wrongdoing.[10][16]
Cut the crap, paganel (lasa vrajeala). You're completely off topic and just wrong. The transition to the market economy for Romania was indeed painful in the 90s but that's primarily because the exact same communist apparatus was still leading the country and they held the reins on Romania's western connections. However, in the long run, I don't think I'm the only person to say it was successful and you can have a decent life in modern day Romania. Way better life than in Russia. And your attempt to blame Washington for how Romania's transition to capitalism unfolded in the 90s is just wrong.
> got sold to Western companies
I'm shaking my head to when reading such obtuse propaganda on hacker news.
> Nobody had asked my parents, or us, who were mere kids and teenagers back then, if we were agreeing to the sacrifices that they were going to impose on us.
They did. Through numerous elections, in which Iliescu and his cronies managed to build a state within a state. But of course, that's also Washington's fault.
> Yes, I've started to become more and more bitter as the years have gone by.
I feel this. It's not much fun being a end of Millennial. Maybe other generations felt this getting passed over but in general my friends who are older than me by a few years have fared a lot worse than those who are a few years younger than me. Some punk song summed it up
Where we'll sell you dreams then make you work for free
They handed us an economy thats destined us for poverty
Then have the nerve to call us soft and lazy for complaining
Cause they're from a generation where you could be what you wanted to be
But baby I'm a 90's kid
Male life expectancy at birth in Russia fell by six years between 1991 and 1994. A drop that fast was practically unprecedented in developed economies. It’s not fun being a Millennial, as I know firsthand, but nothing comparable to 90s Russia in the aggregate.
For sure, I was just commenting that it seems like sometimes generations get skipped. Pre-fall russians reminisce about the good times, people who skipped it entirely might see the better post soviet times, someone who got smacked in the early money making part of their career... less so.
Would it have been better if sovjet union would have ended? In the 80s sovjet union was in a very bad place economically, and it might also have collapsed if it didn't end.
> most of the really juicy assets (like almost of all our banking sector, our oil resources etc) got sold to Western companies
You're painting an incomplete picture. The assets got sold only after being looted by former regime cronies who enriched themselves in the process. It's entirely our own fault for failing to prevent this 32 years after the USSR collapse.
Russians mistakenly fault Gorbachev for the USSR collapse. He only saw the writing on the wall and made a soft landing. The USSR was going to collapse anyway.
Russian citizen here, and one with enough self-honesty to talk about 199X without selling self-pity, unlike my compatriot here.
> The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s. There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War like there was after World War II.
Total bullshit. The West did put in nearly as much money as part of GDP in aid to early 199X Russia as US did in Europe after 1945. US aid was pouring from every hole up until mid-late nineties.
I would argue America went too much Marshal on Russia, and you are reaping the results of this folly now. It was a giant mistake not to finish off the beastie, and not to SCALE UP the pressure after the USSR collapse to force genuine reforms.
The West is responsible for much of CPSU's comeback happening in 200X, repeating how USA saved early CPSU from total collapse from food riots in early 192X out of pity. A giant mistake.
US humanitarian aid was stolen many times over, sold again, stolen, and resold, giving a headstart to CPSU elements turning to banditry. It was totally unsupervised. US totally failed to empower the right kind of people back then with its aid.
Subsequent entries by Western multinationals funded much of 200X mess in Russia, rise, and legitimisation of early Putin's mob regime. The first Western supermarket in Russia was literally inaugurated by the mob boss of Moscow.
Much of Kremlin's current denizens owe their meteoric rises to megabribes they got from Western MNCs in early 200X, which they used to fund their political ascensions.
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Other post-USSR countries which did have their economies opened up, and claimed by the Western capital yearly on were super lucky to have the West "rob" them like that.
Russia, or Central-Asian states were saved from such "robbery," and their economies at large stayed with the CPSU mobsters instead.
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"Russian Liberals" == Total intellectual dishonesty. They share as much the blame for Russian devolution into North Korea 2.0 as Putin himself.
> short stick (like my parents, who lost their jobs, their city apartment and who had to resort to literally subsistence agriculture in a matter of 4-5 years maximum;
Good for them! They did live in apartment, unlike the 80% of Bloc's population, who lived in wooden barracks from fourties. They likely had a white collar job, and been on good terms with communist authorities.
Not living in an apartment for 5 years is by far not a life breaking event, nor is anywhere close to worst shit happening to less elite people back then.
> to SCALE UP the pressure after the USSR collapse to force genuine reforms
Reforms such as? The countru had new borders, new constitution, new everything. There isn't a legal reform that would have magocally solvednthe problem.
> US totally failed to empower the right kind of people back then with its aid.
Wouls it be realistic and possibpe for a US obserber to know who the right people are?
The sheer size of Russia combined with hyper centralization in Moscow is not sustainable.
Russian Federation is RSFSR left intact with its borders and regional partition.
Crushing parliament with tanks in 1993 left the country without any checks to presidential power.
Yeltsin constitution gave enormous power to president. For example he can introduce general attorney (the only one who can open investigation on president). Or judges of supreme and costitutional courts (that can introduce changes to constitution itself). Once you've got a puppet parliament, you're free to go, unchecked power.
All regions besides Moscow (or hyper loyal enclaves like Chechnya) are ruled by capital as colonies.
It's evident not only in Russian regions but also occupied territories of Ukraine and Crimea. The assets are quickly divided between Moscow, Chechen and local gangs. Dissent is crushed and voices are forever silenced.
This should be the top comment. As a Russian myself I totally agree.
The USSR should've been broken up until a number of sustainably small republics left. Let Islamic regions go that themselves wanted out (and Russians wanted and still want them out as well) and which resulted in bloody wars on Caucausus.
What actually happened is a quiet takeover by party apparatchiks. The "dissolution" of USSR was performed by three major communist party members so that most important asset Russia (de facto RSFSR left intact) was not broken up.
The power was still centralized in Kremlin as well. The first and last actually elected parliament (elected back under Gorbachev) was crushed in 1993 by Kremlin.
KGB was allowed to regroup as FSB, hide a lot of crimes and then run for power in 1999.
Putin even said at some point he could imagine joining NATO. I believe the last 20 years of diplomacy destroyed formerly successes in the late 20th century. It was a real slaughter.
>The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s.
it was a tough choice. To transition to democracy it was necessary to dismantle and punish for the most egregious crimes the KGB and the likes, to actually prohibit Communist Party and to deny the people directly associated with the totalitarian regime of USSR any positions of power for at least 10 to 20 years. East Germany, Baltic and some other East Europe countries did for example various elements of such a process. Such "de-communization"/"lustration" though carried risk of instability, and instead US chose stability because of USSR/Russia nukes, and thus US actually helped KGB to survive the 1991. Splitting Russia further would have also helped to dampen the anti-democratic imperial drive in Russia, yet that was coming with the chances to increase the number of nuclear armed countries, and this is again why US didn't support the breakup of Russia into smaller pieces.
I think such smaller pieces would have had higher chances for democratic transition due to most of them losing the imperial drive.
Belarus has never did the "lustration", and is a lost cause for the foreseeable future. Ukraine also didn't do "lustration" back in 199x, and that resulted in the grave danger to the country in 2014 when a lot of army and government officers didn't want to defend their country. So Ukraine had to do such "lustration" in the years since 2014, and today its results are obvious in their successful fight against the invasion.
Or May be that was the US master plan all along. I mean when has US ever had a marshal plan? Anyone who has followed US foreign policies after war, there are multiple examples come to sight where they just straight up help the country go into deep chaos so much so that the local people hope they were better off with pre war dictatorship. Look at Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan.
I don’t know why anyone would call US ally anymore or even count on them.
The upside of claiming nothing is set until the 3rd time, is that it takes 40-80 years for each try, and that gives plenty of time to be right.
Democracy is fragile, chaotic and dirty. The French started democracy with beheading the people that the French would have elected (Louis XVI wasn’t killed until 1793, because he tried to organize a referendum for him, which he was sure to win, and the parliament people couldn’t let that happen). Then the French elected Napoleon, which is the opposite of democracy too in its processes. Then Napoleon was demoted and a few years went by and he came back in Juans Les Pins, and conquered Paris with huge crowds growing at each village.
The whole story of democracy in each country is often a farce ending with a happy power balance, while we often turn a blind eye to blatant violations of democracy when it’s in our favour.
So there’s no first or second attempt at democracy. There are errands that countries do, and sometimes they become democratic despite having a kind at the head, sometimes they look democratic and aren’t, and sometimes the negative forces win. Lest we live in the good days.
The Articles of Confederation were a failure, so we tried a second time, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, the result of which was the Constitution under which the American government has been operating since.
The West was and is about capitalism, not democracy. Democracy in the Third and Second World often gets in the way for the West since it brings with itself problems like nationalization of resources (i.e. closing off resources to Western corporations). Probably other problems as well.
Maybe it's because Russia as it currently exists is not a viable country? Moscow's delusions of adequacy really become apparent when the Russian Army is stealing washing machines en masse from its poor neighbor.
I think it more remarkable that The Marshall Plan happened than that other opportunities are squandered. The frequency at which such chances are missed is so high that it is very much the normal state.
The USA put Yeltsin into power with a coup. Then Yeltsin turned over the reins to Putin. To say that the USA "didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s" is incredibly ignorant. The USA had no interest in promoting democracy in 90's post-USSR.
Gorbachev was a fool who believed that the USA and the west would not rape his country. We'll never know how many former citizens of the USSR died because of 90's shock therapy.
It's not that they did too little. On the contrary, it's that they did too much. They got everything they wanted, including "shock therapy" neoliberalism, Yeltsin as president (unhobbled by parliamentary constraints after the 1993 shelling of the Duma, which Clinton personally praised), and a continued enemy for budgetary purposes.
It's naive to think that a Western-style democracy could've been instilled in Russia just through some extra effort.
The fact that it works elsewhere doesn't mean it's a suitable model for other countries. Especially when there's a lot of prior baggage of being ruled by a single person, be it a tzar or a head of Politburo.
> Especially when there's a lot of prior baggage of being ruled by a single person, be it a tzar or a head of Politburo.
This describes Hungary, Czech Republic, Romania and Poland, all former Soviet bloc countries. They've all had varying levels of success transitioning from communism to democracy and from a planned economy to market.
So it can happen. Could it have happened for Russia? Who knows? Based on the above, I lean towards yes.
> This describes Hungary, Czech Republic, Romania and Poland, all former Soviet bloc countries. They've all had varying levels of success transitioning from communism to democracy and from a planned economy to market.
Yes, but neither the Baltics nor Warsaw Pact countries want anything to do with communism in the first place. It was forced onto them. So transitioning back to a democracy and market economy was far more straightforward.
It's interesting to think about nations as individual people with both innate and learned characteristics. The latter can override the former in some cases, but it usually takes a lot of effort and/or extreme circumstances.
A nation's innate characteristics wouldn't be gene based as would an individual though. It would stem from the circumstances of its beginning and its history that forms the ethos of a people and is passed down from generation to generation. In that way, it is gene like.
Democracy does not imply friend of or aligned with the West.
Russia has historically been an imperial power and seeks to further its own power and perceived interests, and they certainly refuse to be under foreign/Western/American domination.
A democratic government could mean less reckless actions but it wouldn't necessarily mean friendlier actions.
> Democracy does not imply friend of or aligned with the West.
It seems like it does, though? I mean, no, it's not like India or Brazil are subjugated client states of the US or Germany or whatever, but they know where their natural allies are and which direction the wind blows in international relationships. Market democracies are going to stick together, if for no other reason than because they'll end up poorer if they don't, and they don't like that.
Germany is dominated by the US since WWII (having been invaded and occupied) in the same way Japan is.
India is neither aligned nor allied with the US. They share interests particularly when it comes to containing China. But again India's interests on this have nothing to do with being a democracy or with China not being a democracy.
The US are of course heavily involved in Brazil, including by supporting the military coup there in 1964... following which the military government was unsurprisingly completely aligned with the US.
I think that there is a 'survivor' bias here because most countries are not strong enough to resist the US so either they are 'friendly' or something might happen to them... Iran did democratically elect a President once but he was not 'friendly' so was promptly replaced by a friendly dictator.
To assume shared geopolitical interests only because two countries are superficially "market democracies" sounds rather naive.
> India is neither aligned nor allied with the US. They share interests
Which is pretty much what I said, no?
> particularly when it comes to containing China. But again India's interests on this have nothing to do with being a democracy or with China not being a democracy.
But... it is. India can trust the US, to be blunt, not to shit in the bed of international commerce and trade. India can trust, on balance[1], that if it provides valuable exports that the US will consume them and that if the US has a product on the market India will be able to buy it. India can not trust China or Russia to operate in the same kind of good-faith/mutual-interest paradigm.
And the reason is that the US government is constrained by its populace, who don't like it when stuff gets expensive. Putin and Xi are not so constrained (to different extents, Putin is far more of a rogue actor), and are free to take actions in direct contravention of international norms if they think it's in their "long term" best interests. Democracies can't do that.
[1] Yes, there are always exceptions. But they don't involve "lemme just outlaw all your products and invade my neighbor, 'K?"
The problems between India and China have nothing to do with any of what you mention. It's about regional influence and, especially, border disputes actually created by the British, none of which would change if China suddenly became a democracy (in fact public opinion is quite nationalistic of both sides so beware).
In fact it's India that has played the "lemme outlaw your products" card against China recently.
On the other hand, India has very good relations with Russia. Russia supplies half of India's military equipment.
Let's not get into invading others as the US would certainly NOT look good, including or especially compared to China...
So, again, your view seems rather superficial and naive.
Americans seem unaware of the movement of armies by Western European Imperial powers through eastern Europe, very particularly British Imperialists, in the historical shadow of the horse-lords in centuries earlier. The talk is like everyone is innocent except the current government, that the USA opposes; so far from true.
I don't think it's that simple. Unlike post war Germany, the Russia that emerged from the cold war wasn't a functioning democracy but more of a kleptocracy. Yeltsin got put in power by a military that saw him as a convenient stooge.
And with Yeltsin, corruption and nepotism flared up almost immediately. So any kind of Marshall plan would have deteriorated into providing billions to oligarchs. Which is of course what happened in any case. And of course eventually the KGB and Putin took over with all their institutional paranoia regarding the west. Allegedly, Putin might actually be the richest person on this planet at this point. It's hard to estimate his exact wealth but he's not a poor man, to say the least.
You are also forgetting, that Russia was still a powerful nuclear capable force after the wall came down. There was no military defeat. And there were plenty of olive branches in terms of investments and collaboration. But, the Russians weren't exactly open to the US dictating them how to run their country. Germany had no choice in the matter. It was occupied by the allied forces and ruined by WW II.
In hindsight, that's directionally correct even though it was not that obvious back then. Only freaks mentioned the nukes in the 90s for example. Now it's crystal clear that their stockpile alone should have justified much higher engagement from the first world. Possibly all the way to literally buying most of it. All kinds of things were possible in the early 90s.
We can definitely blame the US for forcing Ukraine to relinquish its nukes. We can blame the US for insisting for a long time on preserving the USSR (during the Gorbachev era). We can blame the US for not paying enough attention to the other two Slavic former republics early. We can blame America for not penalizing Yeltsin's regime when they started to veer off the original course.
But we need to remember that it was the West in general, not just the US. The EU is equally to blame. And even though the last 20 years are a direct result of the 90s not that much was done in those 20 years either. Not in 2008, not in 2014, not even when President Trump told the Germans to cut the pipelines and spend on the military.
It very well could be the case that destroying the Evil Empire was an unprecedented affair which was too hard for anybody. Where by hard I mean impossible in the Velvet Revolution style. Or at all. They had to perform multiple simultaneous transitions (Totalitarianism -> Democracy, central planning -> market economy, empire -> nation state). With a population impoverished by 70 years of Communism and three generations not knowing any other life (not the case in the Eastern Europe).
It's poetically fitting that Mr Gorbachev died the same year his entire legacy was erased. He was not perfect, he was an idealist, but he gave freedom to the people. It was him who opened the border and let millions escape.
The US actively supported Yeltsin and paved the way for Putin.
This is what they wanted.
And it's working wonders now - the US will make a fortune off of LNG and arms sales, whilst completely destroying competing European industry which suffers gas shortages and uncompetitive energy prices.
This is how every conspiracy starts I think. Others believing that people in power have these plans laid out several decades in advance. Where in reality their plans (in democratic world) only spans several years (their active mandate).
Nobody can foresee the future. US supported Yeltsin because that was something that made sense in a given time for them. They didn't do this because they expected to make ton of money in 2022 of LNG and arms sales.
Now they were given opportunity to make some $ which also coincidence with their own interests.
But they are not able to tell what impact will this have in another 20-30 years. They do it because it makes the most sense now. Not because they have this super masterful long term play.
I hope that if Putin's regime falls that the West will welcome the next Russia with open arms and such a Marshall Plan with far more commitment, scale, realism, and humility than before.
Not sure how a Marshall plan would have worked since, unlike Germany, we were not occupiers. Our ability to reshape their system was limited. Not that we didn’t bubble things.
"Somewhat more aid per capita was also directed toward the Allied nations, with less for those that had been part of the Axis or remained neutral. The largest recipient of Marshall Plan money was the United Kingdom (receiving about 26% of the total). The next highest contributions went to France" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
Capitalism isn't the entirety of US ideology, and I would hardly say Russia was aligned given how vastly different their outcomes were compared to other eastern European nations.
You can't make it drink, but you can back a corrupt drunk who will shell the parliament and make sure that the Russian people know that America will never be on their side.
If you study geopolitics and history, you might come to the conclusion that Russia was never going to be a democratic ally of the West regardless of how much economic aid they were given.
Russia at the end of the cold war had geopolitical imperatives such as a warm water ports, buffer states and desire for Russian hegemony that would have existed regardless of their economic state. They also have a long, long history of authoritarianism.
I think it's pretty clear that many people here lack historical and geo political context.
"Can you believe Russia would invade to get a warm water port?!"
Yes, I would.
Btw your analogy of "why isn't germany authoritarian" is off the mark, because the Russians and NATO completely dismantled the existing power structures post ww2 through force. We did not do anything close to that post cold war. In fact the communist party still exists today in Russia.
Another point is that the US made it clear it would not tolerate an openly authoritarian government in Western Europe but would tolerate far right groups for its own purposes against communism.
No. And your comment is blatantly violating the guidelines.
> you're violating them at least as much as anyone else
Nothing nearly as bad as your comment. Also, even if you believe that someone else is violating the guidelines, that doesn't justify your own violations, unless you have complete disregard for them.
> > They weren't. Please don't put words in others' mouths.
> They were.
Nope. "If you study geopolitics and history, you might come to the conclusion that Russia was never going to be a democratic ally of the West regardless of how much economic aid they were given" is only a prediction of one likely result of an action.
It's only a commentary on one's person if one is the kind of person who thinks everything is about them.
A later comment in reply to your accusation. And you're surprised you got it reflected back at you? Ah, maybe you didn't realise how well-deserved that was.
> > And quit whining about the guidelines
> No. And your comment is blatantly violating the guidelines.
Oh, not only violating, but blatantly violating, eh? Sez you.
> > you're violating them at least as much as anyone else
> Nothing nearly as bad as your comment.
You would think so.
I don't.
> Also, even if you believe that someone else is violating the guidelines, that doesn't justify your own violations, unless you have complete disregard for them.
The ideologies and power structures of the axis powers ceased to exist as a result of the outcome of WW2. This was not the case when the Russian Federation took on the mantle of the inheritor of the legacy of the USSR. Therefore it does not make sense to equate the history of authoritarianism in these places.
Gorbachev wanted Russia to be a part of the Europe, and many say he was also assured of the same by the west (this is obviously contested now). But obviously this is against US political interests, as a stronger Europe weakens its hold on world power. And the US might have been right that Russia in Europe may have tilted Europe against it in the future, and the cold war would have continued perhaps in a milder form.
What do you mean, like when Clinton and the US Congress cheered Yeltsin bombing Russia's elected parliament (Duma). Then Yeltsin appointed Putin and here we are. The US has positioned Russia exactly where it wants it - it has positioned the Ukraine exactly where it wants it too.
I've been thinking about the 'success' of the Marshall Plan relative to the massive failures of the various attempts to repeat it that spent significantly more money (off the top of my head: Vietnam, Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq) and I've come up with a few things that seem like they were present in the Marshall Plan but not in the later, failed copies.
A) Rebuilding democracy versus building it. Most obviously, it is easier to get everyone to end up in a place when they have already been there. Konrad Adenaur, for example, was first elected Mayor of Koeln under the Wilhelmine Empire, and had first won an election 40 years before becoming Chancellor (with a dozen year interregnum, spent in obscurity during the Nazi era). Similar story w.r.t Japan (Yoshida Shigeru was a diplomat rather than an elected official, but had the same sort of career, right down to the big hole where he had no official job during the war). The main Axis nations had been reasonable democracies within the past 15-20 years, whereas Afghanistan and Iraq were farther from that (and their initial leaders were refugees rather than people who had stayed, which is an enormous difference that I think US leaders missed). The USSR obviously was a lifetime since the last real, multiparty elections in 1917.
B) Many nations working together. The Marshall Plan aid was distributed across most of Europe, and in a way that emphasized international cooperation (with 25% going to the UK, 18% to France, and 11% going to West Germany, it truly was split among many nations). This helped to rebuild international trade that truly cemented the nations together. This is plausible for a USSR modernization, so long as the Russians are willing to admit that the other nationalities are truly independent. (The most successful of these attempts, in the Balkans, largely did manage to tie the international knots together. The others not so much. But how much of that was that Slovenia and Croatia are great vacation trips for Europeans, in a way that going to Moscow was simply much more distance?)
C) Continuing presence of US troops. Japan's economic growth really dates to the Korean War, when the US military suddenly energized and needed local production to supplement weapons and goods shipped across the Pacific. Similarly, from roughly that point to the end of the Cold War the US had a quarter-million men in Germany alone (more in the UK, Italy, etc.). Those men needed goods and services, and had dollars to spend. This is basically impossible to imagine for the fUSSR. (In Vietnam/Iraq/etc. the US military obviously had a continuing presence for a long time, but it largely provided its own food and supplies, rather than depend on the local economy. Lots of money did leak into the local economies, but not in economically beneficial ways- read much of it was captured by graft.)
D) Humiliation: this is important point that is something of a combination of A and C- there was a complete and total defeat, with most of the country smashed down to rubble, which made the democratic history seem attractive, and a massive continuing US presence, which seems to have prevented Dolchstoss narratives and backsliding from taking hold. This seems incredibly unlikely for the fUSSR to me. Even at their lowest, they were an independent country with a massive nuclear arms cache and quite a bit of (well-justified) pride in, e.g. Yuri Gagarin, Sputnik, and Sergei Korolev.
Basically, this isn't about money: the US spent about as much on civil reconstruction (excluding military expenses) in Afghanistan alone, as it did on the entire Marshall Plan in all of Europe adjusted for inflation (using CPI-U, the most common gauge). So there has to be more than just money, and I'm skeptical that the US had significant power to make the former USSR outcomes better.
Certainly, any discussion of a successful fUSSR Marshall Plan would have to start with why the Baltics outcomes are so much better than Russia, and I don't have much of a story for that.
Russian citizen here, and one with self-honesty to talk about 199X without self-pity, unlike many of my compatriots here.
> The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s. There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War like there was after World War II.
Total bullshit. The West did put in nearly as much money as part of GDP in aid to early 199X Russia. US aid was pouring from every hole up until mid-late nineties.
I would argue America went too much Marshal on Russia, and you are reaping the results of this folly now. It was a giant mistake not to finish off the beastie, and not to SCALE UP the pressure after the USSR collapse.
The West is responsible for much of the CPSU comeback happening in 200X, just like USA rescued early CPSU from total collapse through food riots in early 192X out of pity. A giant mistake.
US humanitarian aid was stolen many times over, sold again, stolen, and resold, giving a headstart to CPSU elements turning to banditry. It was totally unsupervised.
Subsequent entries by Western multinationals funded much of 200X mess in Russia, rise, and legitimisation of early Putin's mob regime. The first Western supermarket in Russia was literally inaugurated by a mob boss of Moscow.
Much of Kremlin's current denizens owe their meteoric rises to megabribes they got from Western MNCs in early 200X, which catapulted then into power.
> The West did put in nearly as much money as part of GDP in aid to early 199X Russia.
Do you have a citation for that?
"The United States transferred over $13 billion (equivalent of about $115 billion in 2021) in economic recovery programs to Western European economies after the end of World War II." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
Also, there was no effort to dezombify the Russian population.
I read recently that only in the 60s the German public opinion started moving towards "Nazis are bad", and that was because of an external effort to reeducate them (I had just assumed that after they lost the war, the population would automatically see the Nazis were bad).
No such effort happened with the Russians, so they're still trying to conquer Europe, as they have been since tsarist era.
The world had already A/B tested "damage the economy so that it would never be a threat again" and "help transition to democracy" with Germany. The latter worked better.
If I had to guess, it's because George Soros is often used as synecdoche for "the vast Jewish conspiracy" by anti-Semites, so your comment sounds an awful lot like "the Jews are responsible for ruining Russia".
Which, uh, sounds a lot like anti-Semitic rhetoric not uncommon in, among other places, Russia.
Completely missing the point, which is that transitioning from totalitarianism/communism to democracy/capitalism is an extremely difficult task for any country, and they could use the help. Just like other countries could use the help recovering from WW2. It's indisputable that many Russian people suffered economically during the transition.
What the US (and Europe) should have done was to take away the nukes from Russia, and let Ukraine have their nukes after the fall of USSR. Russia definitely has more history of imperialism than Ukraine (which has none of that)
In hindsight it seems it would have been a futile wasted effort - there are many books that have been written about Russia and the psyche of it's people and why they would never succeed with democracy.
Now we have a proto-facist regime copying some aspects the Nazi regime.
He might be a decent human, but he's woefully bad at his job.
He might be able to salvage the Soviet Union into something else, but instead most of it turned into multiple heaps of dumpster fire, which after burning and destroying, was then commandeered by thugs, mafia and oligarchs.
> He might be able to salvage the Soviet Union into something else, but instead most of it turned into multiple heaps of dumpster fire...
Wasn't he essentially removed from power by Yeltsin -- who did so by breaking up the Soviet Union?
My history isn't that great. But my understanding is that Yeltsin was the president of Russia, while Gorbachev was leader of the Soviet Union. By breaking up the union, Yeltsin put Gorby out of a job and essentially became the leader.
Yes, this is accurate. But underneath these formalities, just as the parent mentioned, was a weak, gullible and incompetent man who lost control of the country and caused a lot of real pain (90s were hell on earth). He is widely despised by his own people now, despite all the official bs.
That saying needs to die, or you need to point out exactly how Aperocky will learn and at what approximate age.
Otherwise you're just saying "I only have my personal experience to judge from, with no solid argument, but I'll project that into you with utter confidence and no room for disagreement"
I mean, are you even sure you're older than Aperocky ?
»A Soviet man is waiting in line to purchase vodka from a liquor store, but due to restrictions imposed by Gorbachev, the line is very long. The man loses his composure and screams, ›I can’t take this waiting in line anymore, I HATE Gorbachev, I am going to the Kremlin right now, and I am going to kill him!‹ After 40 minutes the man returns and elbows his way back to his place in line. The crowd begin to ask if he has succeeded in killing Gorbachev. ›No, I got to the Kremlin all right, but the line to kill Gorbachev was even longer than here!‹«
This is not a joke. I was in Russia during the Gorby era (and early Yeltsin) and people indeed hated Gorby for his attempt to crack-down on drunkenness by limiting the purchase of vodka.
I'm having a real hard time thinking of a leader who wasn't liked by at least some of the people, and it's surely impossible to find any leader liked by literally all people in their country. So clearly it's all shades of gray.
The worst leaders in history, the Hitlers and Stalins, have enjoyed substantial if not majority popular support in their time. Biden and Trump both have millions of Americans who like them. Even Caligula was popular with the general Roman population, if only because he lowered taxes and threw money around. Maybe Ceausescu was close to universally hated, but everybody was afraid to say anything until the preference cascade occurred? But probably even he had genuine supporters.
good riddance. he was an uneducated idiot, who is indirectly responsible for the millions that were killed in Afghanistan, in 1992.
In 1989, when he pulled the red army out of Afghanistan--he also cut all aid to the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. the then-president of DRA went to Moscow to persuade Garbageoff to not to do so, predicting that the terrorist zealots would overrun his government leading to chaos in the region.
Garbageoff dismissed him, and did not even go to the airport to receive him. In the ensuing two years, the DRA fought the terrorists to the last bullet, until food became scarce and defenses crumbled. The terrorists entered Kabul and began fighting each other (they were self-labeling themselves "Mujahedeen" then).
In the carnage that followed, Kabul was destroyed, millions died and became refugees. I was an 11-yo boy who witnessed my neighbors getting torn to pieces by the rockets fired by the terrorists. I barely survived the rockets myself, and we fled and became refugees in Pakistan.
Not to dimish your experience in any way, there are only a few things tgat are worse than that. Blaming all of it on Gorbatshev is too easy so. We cannot forget the US meddling in Afghan affairs, nor the fact the long term intervention of the West led to similar results. Nor wad the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan very kind on the Afghan people in general.
Well, since today we hear about Garbageoff, so I discussed my opinion from THIS side of things. For sure, many other "players" are also to blame for a lot of the mess my people have found themselves in.
Which makes absolute sense. Gorbachev is held in such high regard in the West, rightly so IMHO, that it is easy to ignore and forget the other points of view.
it's you again, the "committee" man. actually, since Garbageoff did not do well in school and he was admitted to the universities in Leningrad on the strength of a medal he had won that was given to him based on the large amount of crops he had harvested (he was a "machinist"). There he wrote to his family members that the studies were "grueling", meaning he merely winged it and because he was not cut out for education, he was sent back to his village to do more of crop-harvesting.
So yeah, he did go to school but he was not what you call truly educated (just like other self-important, arrogant people suffering from Dunning-Kruger effect). That he was an idiot can also be seen from his posing in advertisements while his countrymen were starving in the long lines for bread--something unthinkable during any USSR year.
It is easy for you to judge not having experienced the cruelty of the war and communisism and central-planning. He saw a problem and lead people to fix it.
it is easy for you to speak for me, not having experienced war and famine directly. Also, on that Russian score you are wrong: after what he did, the ex-USSR population suffered devastating poverty. And you have the cheek to defend him. Are you a troll?
No, after what he did Russia and the eastern bloc were more prosperous in the 90s than they were in the 80s. I do not recall bread lines and famine in former USSR countries in the 90s. I didn't know he required defending all that money that went into an arms race went back to the people, the greatness and pompous image of the soviet union ended,that's about it. Nostalgia is deceptive, USSR in the 80s was not better off than 90s.
Westerners benefited directly from the downfall of the USSR. Gorbachev prolonged the American liberal world order at the expense of his people, to the West that makes him a great hero
So you put all of that on just a single person - Gorbachev?
How about Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin, two Afghans? The Soviets only sent troops after multiple requests by Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin and President Nur Mohammad Taraki. Do they not share proportionate responsibility?
If that were truly the case, the red army should not have entered Afghanistan in the first place and kept their little claws to themselves. Now that they entered and created chaos and conditions for civil war, it was on them to clean up the mess.
Moreover, red army was not really shedding all that much blood. They were sending Afghan army to the dangerous fronts--basically to die (my father was one and he told me how the Russians sent them off to an ambush. When the Afghan army halted because they knew they were gonna die, the Russians began shelling them in order to push them forward.).
In any case, the problems were created by Russians and it became their responsibility to fix it. Moreover, they had agreements and treaties and Garbageoff reneged on those.
To the little boy who lost his childhood and future because of his strategic stupidity he is guilty of deceit, incompetence and inhumanity and I will not stop praying that he continues to burn in hell for it.
This seems like needless pedantry at least for a conversation outside of school. The USSR (with whom the Cold War was being fought) was dissolved and Germany was reunified. For all intents and purposes it did end, just a new conflict (now with Russia) began.
Seeing as the Cold War was a framework for conflicts, not a conflict in itself, I find it extremely illuminating to consider the view of the opposing party. Not a technicality in the slightest.
Andrei Piontkovskiy, in addition to two known World Wars, considers the Cold War as the World War III and the current war in Eastern Europe as the World War IV. His parallels are that WWII was fought by Germany dissatisfied by the results of WWI, and WWIV is fought by Russia dissatisfied by the results of WWIII.
World wars involve many countries, and Cold War definitely qualify. Today's war is a pretty active, quite large "hot" war, which also involves many countries - even though most fight by proxy.
I also think "Cold War II" for the current situation is more fitting.
I think if there is any useful distinction between "hot" and "cold" world wars then it's most likely whether super powers are in direct military conflict with each other or whether military confrontation is "only" through proxy wars.
Note that the original cold war wasn't very "cold" for much of the world either - the only thing that didn't happen was direct millitary confrontation between the US and USSR. Nevertheless there were lots of local conflicts and proxy wars where each bloc was backing a faction.
In the today's war in Ukraine one country - Russia - fights directly, not from proxies, and the other side - mostly USA, but also other Western countries - supply weapons, volunteers, intelligence services, training. It is comparable with Vietnam war, right, but not already with Afghan war of 1980-s, or small conflicts around the world. The scale of war is also quite large, the level of directly fighting forces is much more comparable.
Should we admit that world wars don't need to involve superpowers - or at least only superpowers? The term wasn't that much applicable before end of WWII.
So here we can argue that in WWIV a non-superpower fights - Ukraine, on its territory, a superpower - USA, merely - but with principal results - supporting Ukraine, and the rest of the West. We may not call it a proxy war - I agree, it's a rather poor comparison - but for WWIV term it is another matter.
World wars don't need to involve superpowers, but they need to involve large part of the world. Russian invasion on Ukraine doesn't, and it's unlikely to escalate - Russia can't, because they have neither people, hardware, or allies, and the defending countries don't have a reason to.
From another perspective all of it is a continuation of the Great Game, the Anglosphere/Russia conflict dating back to the 1800s that never really stopped, and was merely put on pause for a few years a couple times (mostly when the Anglos felt that other continental Europeans were consolidating enough power to be an even greater threat than Russia.)
You make it sound like NATO was unilaterally pushing for this. Eastern European countries were begging to join NATO. All of them had been independent multiple times over the centuries, always ending up under Russian control. NATO offered a plausible mechanism to end the historical cycle--an historical cycle for which Russia, in 2022, is proudly nostalgic and not afraid to go to war to continue.
Moreover, national security is expensive, especially for small countries who cannot benefit from scale--they need to spend much more for even minimal deterrence. For newly independent nations, NATO provides leverage for their security expenditures. More importantly, it also motivates peaceful resolution of conflict among neighboring NATO states, which makes NATO a keystone institution for peace in Europe, Russia notwithstanding.
What British and France interests were served when they agreed to sign an alliance with Poland and even went to war with Germany over it (eventually)? It's the same basically, except that this time, I hope, the alliance is more credible and Russia is not willing to test it.
There are plenty of economical and political reasons due to which is it beneficial to keep Latvia and by extension the entirety of Eastern Europe outside of direct or indirect Russian control.
Ukraine is a pretty good example of a country which was mostly ignored both by NATO and the EU so as not to antagonize Russia. It remained a failed state until 2014 and I assume we all know what happened afterwards.
Based on my count of how many hair-trigger alert nuclear weapons are pointed from east to west, and vice versa, I'd say that the Cold War only ended in name.
It is not a sarcasm: thanks to a well intentioned but too trusting politician, NATO moved to East and Russia has to fight for survival against vastly superior opponent.
If you are interested, we could look at the map, compare some numbers (weapons, population, media control, the number of countries bombs, etc)
If you are interested, as a Russian native speaker who lived in Ukraine until 2003 (and has been there as recently as July of this year), I can tell you how the "fight for survival" you speak of is a load of propaganda bollocks, going from primary sources in Russian.
Looking at his comment history, no, he looks to 100% believe poor, innocent Russia is fighting a defensive war in which it has been easily rolling over Ukraine.
Why has Ukraine rarely lost power, water or internet? Why isn't Russia destroying civilian infrastructure en masse? Because it's not a war in the same way the US went to war with Iraq, for example (one of the first things the US did was target civilian infrastructure).
You're just a clueless American without the basic background knowledge to see this situation for what it is: a preemptive defensive strike against an ever-expanding, finance-capital-backed NATO.
> Why has Ukraine rarely lost power, water or internet? Why isn't Russia destroying civilian infrastructure en masse? Because it's not a war in the same way the US went to war with Iraq, for example (one of the first things the US did was target civilian infrastructure).
They have lost all off these things throughout the war at different times.
> You're just a clueless American without the basic background knowledge to see this situation for what it is: a preemptive defensive strike against an ever-expanding, finance-capital-backed NATO.
Yes Russia has to commit genocide again Ukraine, Russia absolutely must rape, torture and murder civilians because of NATO. Russias action lie solely on Russia, Russia is the entity that decided to invade.
Having read a couple of Cold War histories, most recently Tony Judt's excellent Postwar, I learned that what's often missing from American pop-level summaries is the work put in by the people behind the Iron Curtain to bring it down -- for examples, the Polish Catholics and union members, and the Czech dissidents such as Vaclav Havel.
Generally American pop-level accounts like to emphasize American agency in what happened.
Reagan didn't end the cold war. He applied economic pressure, which created the conditions that allowed the cold war to end.
Gorbachev played the critical part. He let the East European satellite states go rather than sending troops to restore status quo. Within the USSR, his reforms gave the democratic opposition some room to breathe. Once Gorbachev's power started to fail, that allowed the opposition to win, rather than the hardliners who attempted a coup.
With another kind of leader on the opposite side, Reagan's policies could have won but not ended the cold war. The USSR could have become something like North Korea, but much bigger. It would have been stable but no longer a global superpower. (That may also be where Russia is headed today, as there are no viable alternatives to Putin's regime.)
Not just economic. Reagan believed that the Soviet Union itself should fall, and would fall. Neither was consensus among the politicians and diplomats in America, to say nothing of Europe. he applied economic, military, and diplomatic pressure to make it so. He understood what would happen when the soviets started to relax their control. Something Gorbachev didn't understand or couldn't fight.
Why do you think the key phrase of the end of the cold war is "Mr. Gobachev, tear down this wall!". Reagan challenged him to dismantle something that they both knew couldn't stand, and that would result in the eventual collapse of the GDR (it was, after all, built to save the GDR from all of its citizens voting with their feet to abandon communism and leave for the west). Ironically, the "domino theory" ended up being correct, but it was the east and the soviets that couldn't sustain the effects of satellite states being lost, not Asia and America.
Gorbachev gets a lot of credit for not behaving like his predecessors had, with violent crackdowns and marching armies whenever the rule of the party was threatened. Most say this was due to Gorbachev not understanding - but I think it's simpler. Gorbachev simply knew that the state could no longer do so - and in fact the one time he tried, it completely failed on him.
Gorbachev also lied (and changed his story) vis-a-vis NATO expansion something that Putin has used to build a "NATO betrayed us story" to justify his invasion of Ukraine much as Hitler used the "stab in the back".
Does that take away from Gorbachev? Maybe not, but Gorbachev was presiding over a failing state the second he took power. He simply rode it out, with as little violence as possible. That's something to be celebrated.
> Why do you think the key phrase of the end of the cold war is "Mr. Gobachev, tear down this wall!".
That's a very American perspective. I mostly associate that quote with Civilization V, because it wasn't a big deal at the time, at least in Finland. The speech itself didn't receive that much attention in 1987. When the Berlin Wall fell, the scene that really grabbed people's attention was people breaking the wall with hammers. And if had to choose a single scene to symbolize the end of the cold war, it would be Yeltsin giving a speech on top of a tank.
Applying diplomatic and military pressure to break the Soviet block was not a new thing in the 1980s. The closest it came to succeeding was in 1968. Reforms and the protests didn't lead anywhere at the time, because the USSR had the will and the resources to respond decisively. The situation was different in the late 1980s, thanks to Gorbachev's reforms and Reagan's economic pressure.
> In 1955, eastern europeans were so thankful to be free from Germany.
Not sure which Eastern Europeans you mean, but I can assure you most of those 150 mil people were not happy they got conquered by nazis or commies, it was the same amount of genocide and societal damage from both sides.
I'm not trying to be contrarian here but I'd say their cold war just began when the soviet union disintegrated. Because now their new cold war was Russia exerting influence over them and manipulating their governance.
Which is what Ukraine has suffered these last 30+ years.
what do you mean by "their" ? Because Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria managed to properly free themselves from Russia and are now solidly in the EU and NATO
"Properly" glosses over a lot of the intricacies of their politics. Like I said, Russia was disorganized at the time but you should not make the mistake of thinking they gladly released all of their buffers without a fight.
We have glaring evidence of their struggle to maintain power over their old buffer countries like Chechnya and Ukraine, so one can only imagine what they must have done to the others.
Edit: Just one example of how the transition wasn't without opposition is the January 1991 events in Lithuania when Gorbachev tried to re-establish soviet rule and this ended in 14 Lithuanian citizens dead.
Aren't their countries still filled with Soviet era (or even more recent?) environmental hazards, like ubiquitous asbestos and who knows what else?
When i took Russian, we watched a Soviet propaganda film : it bragged about asbestos exports as a sign of Soviet strength, and i think the teachers (one native Russian speaker) perhaps showed it to emphasize what a disaster had already been created (this was shortly pre 2000).
Many countries are still stranded with "cold war" environmental problems.
The US has many "superfunds" dedicated to cleaning up "cold war radioactivity" issues.
A bit more info on the Quebec asbestos issues. Canada didnt stop exporting it until 2012.
"
Canada led world production of asbestos before the country’s two largest mines (both in Quebec) halted operations in 2012. The closure marked the suspension of the country’s asbestos production for the first time in 130 years.
"
I dont think it really ended. Shifted. But there is a reason the US is funding fission and new Moon rockets, there is a reason the US is concerned about Taiwan. I think we're still deep in it.
I was also taught this and then I actually had something more than a school textbook. Lech Waleska started the fall of the Soviet Union, the Autumn of Nations finished it. Stop acting like the US is important.
He did. It's just that leftists in the US won't accept that and pretend that the Cold War just "ended" one day, because of the goodwill of the Russians, not because the US policy forced them into bankruptcy.
of course it was a decades long policy, but Reagan takes the laurels because his predecessor was appeasing USSR and Reagan did the exact opposite, bringing about the downfall of the USSR. If a new Carter would have been in power, I am not sure 1989 would have happen when it did.
This is somewhat ahistorical: Carter's initial policy towards the USSR was a continuation of the "detente" policy pursued by multiple administrations, beginning in the 1960s. But it quickly shifted towards a much more aggressive policy, following the USSR's engagement in Afghanistan. If anything, Reagan continued his predecessor's aggressive policies.
Reagan was instrumental in the USSR's final years and even more instrumental in the policies that built the oligopoly that followed it. But singling him out for laurels does not accurately reflect either the USSR's internal politics or the 50 years of US foreign policy that brought us to 1991.
Are you responding to the right comment? That's sort of unrelated to the GP's remark (that Ronald Reagan can be credited with ending the Cold War).
(It's also hard to assert that generally: Russia is by many metrics worse off than it was under the USSR, while most of the rest of Central and Eastern Europe is better off.)
I was adding to your comment, perhaps too tangentially - the GP remark may suggest that USA benefited more than USSR.
> It's also hard to assert that generally: Russia is by many metrics worse off than it was under the USSR
Economical, cultural, political environment were greatly improved as the direct consequences of the end of the Cold War, up until ~2010, so I'm not sure why do you think the Russia is worse off. What metrics do you choose?
I was thinking of life expectancy and the generally high overall mortality rate in Russia, some of which is attributable to rising alcoholism. But it looks like their life expectancy has also improved somewhat over the last decade, so I can't claim that unequivocally.
The Cold War wasn't a good thing, but it didn't have to end with the dissolution of the USSR, and the dissolution of the USSR didn't have to end with a coup, followed by chaos, which nevertheless kept all the appartchiks in charge.
30 years later, we can see how the people who were in charge of the USSR are the reason if fell apart: because they are still running Russia, and are running it into the ground (Putin, Shoigu, Lavrov, etc are all USSR apparatchiks).
Thieves and criminals, the whole lot of them.
The USSR ate itself, because it didn't succeed in figuring out a way to refresh the power structures. And so that fish rotted starting from its head.
> The Cold War wasn't a good thing, but it didn't have to end with the dissolution of the USSR, and the dissolution of the USSR didn't have to end with a coup, followed by chaos, which nevertheless kept all the appartchiks in charge.
We may almost always wish things were better than they actually were. For example, USA went through a minor recession at the end of the Cold War - was it necessary? In case of USSR things could be much worse - some argue we pass now through the violent ending of that Cold War, in a form of actual "hot" war, partially because some Soviet people didn't reflect enough on the events of XX century.
Hindsight is 20/20, sure, but the 90s were a time where a lot of people didn't have anything to eat, a time where everyone's life savings turned to dust overnight, a time where many people ended up homeless, a time where highly educated people became unemployed without warning (or couldn't get salaries for years on end) and were better off sweeping streets than working at science institutes...
And that set a basis for Putin being revered in early 2000s for bringing in "stability".
> but the 90s were a time where a lot of people didn't have anything to eat, a time where
True, it was a quite big transformation of lives for everybody - fortunately without a major civil war, though with many lesser wars in less centralized regions. Yet the result was an improvement on average, in Russia it started to feel in 1999, and even earlier in Baltic countries. Wouldn't be sure about Asian countries though.
You can't seriously claim that the USSR should have been held together as a single empire, contrary to the wishes of most people who lived outside of Russia. The dissolution of the USSR was absolutely, unambiguously a positive event for the human race despite the minor problems which resulted.
I'm saying that a catastrophic decomposition through a coup that left most of the Soviet apparatchiks in power (Lukashenko, Yeltsin/Putin, etc) is barely better than nothing at all.
The problems it caused to people in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and many other former Soviet republics aren't minor by any account — and they are a direct reason for why Putin managed to hold power for so long.
The way in which the USSR dissolved itself is why we have a war in Ukraine now.
I'd agree that the population of Russia was willing enough to believe the officer of secret service for their own detriment. However - while it lasted in 2000 - the life of many Russians was improving, quite a bit, and not much animosity towards the West was there. It's only when things got tougher - with international crises and oil price plunging - when things had to change, and the way to change them by that time was such that autocrat had to remain in power, so the frustration was targeted elsewhere.
>The way in which the USSR dissolved itself is why we have a war in Ukraine now.
I was trying to say that there was a way forward for the Cold War to end without the dissolution of the USSR — not that it'd be great for the occupied countries (or people of USSR in general) for USSR to continue existing.
The dissolution could have happened afterwards, in an organized manner, as a process — not a cataclysm.
That way we could have ended up with the new countries not having old apparatchiks as little tsars. Maybe we'd have an independent Yakutia, Siberia, Tatarstan too
Dissolution as it did was quite organised. Especially when you take into consideration that the society could barely function in market economy after decades of living sovietism. And economically it was a mess with too much focus on military complex. The rest being terribly inefficient.
The only way to stay away from the old apparatchiks would have been management by occupational forces for several decades. And that occupational forces should have kept USSR market closed instead of pushing their own produce. Which is hardly possible.
Right. I'd add that it was, judging by historical parallels, rather happy dissolution - not perfect, as GP mentions, but hardly a cause for too much annoyance.
Well, for the annoyances part, Russia did great work to setup future annoyances that they're now exploiting. Rebel republics in Georgia that were exploited in 2008. Nagorno karabach in Armenia is hot since late 80s and probably will stay such in foreseeable future. Then Moldova's Padniestre is ripe and would have been next after Ukraine. Crimea with special status of Sevastopol was perfect setup too.
Here in Lithuania we narrowly avoided a similar issue as well with an attempt to establish an „autonomous republic“ in early 90s.
Yeah right, because the USSR had never before gone through hardship, and it's the "bankruptcy" that led to ousting of Gorbachev in a coup after his reforms (including a de-facto Prohibition, in Russia of all places!).
Let's also ignore that little thing that Russia is now doing in Ukraine, and put up a "mission accomplished" banner on the clusterfuck that happened in 1991.
The USSR didn't fall apart because of any goodwill, but it did fall apart because Gorbachev fucked up.
Reagan deserves as much credit for this as Obama does for the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceleand in 2010.
If you disagree, note that the burden of proof is on you here; and you're welcome to point out which specific effects of actions of Reagan's administration caused the collapse of the USSR, along with an explanation why much more severe hardships experienced by people of the USSR in the earlier decades did not.
> Yeah right, because the USSR had never before gone through hardship, and it's the "bankruptcy" that led to ousting of Gorbachev in a coup after his reforms (including a de-facto Prohibition, in Russia of all places!).
Hardship is something USSR went through many times - until it didn't. And there were many reasons, on many levels, why the situation in late 1980-s was bleak. What was with the oil prices at the time?
> The USSR didn't fall apart because of any goodwill, but it did fall apart because Gorbachev fucked up.
One of his phrases was "socialism with a human face". Before Gorbachev, Andropov tried to "rule as it should be done", but, as a popular joke states, "has proven that if you rule seriously, you can't live longer than a year". Stalinist times have ended, and more soft, Brezhnev-like ruling turned out to be too incapable. Gorbachev managed to do few mistakes, while trying to rule mostly well - and ended up with opening the country, in the form of many states, to the beneficial external world.
I'm not saying that Gorbachev's ideals were flawed. It's the approach he took to putting them in place.
In a way, he was putting "the human face" on socialism in the same hamfisted manner that the "should be done" socialism was pushed down people's throats before.
His bright idea to solve the alcoholism problem by having a Prohibition 2.0 is a prime example.
What with the oil prices? Forget that, look at the vodka prices.
That's solely on Gorbachev. And it worked as well as you'd expect.
US definitely were helping to bankrupt... but then just before the putsch in August 1991 USA got really worried that USSR will split in parts, and the nightmare of managing relations with multiple nuclear states led them to support Gorbachev and USSR, until it actually broke. Then the work of gathering all nuclear armaments into one state - Russia - was going on, along with support of Russian scientists (lest them go to places like Iran and help them with their projects). That's one of the big reasons we have ISS now...
Maybe you're not aware how much the USSR was spending on defense, espionage, space programs...By the end of the decade they ended up spending 14% of the GDP on military, trying to keep up with the US
Yeah, and it seems to be working for China -- not on. The US opened up trade with China, and since then China has managed to have the West dismantle its industrial base. It's working great for China! (Except hopefully the rest of the world is finally waking up to what's going on).
It's not like China forced the west to dismantle its industrial base. The west was happy to do it! And now we're living in a globalized world, where the worker has won less than their masters.
Because he is a traitor to his people. I know not a single person so universally hated by his own people but Gorbachev. He caused collapse of great country, sold it for dollars and cola. The fact that he’s praised by western people further solidifies it.
There's no paper with Gorbachev's signature. Which is pretty usual to Soviets - leave no paper trace was modus operandi since the establishment of USSR.
The last missing puzzle piece is pretty clear when looking at the full picture. Maybe now that he is gone, nobody will prevent from stating it officially.
It's pretty clear that he was aware and gave orders. There're testimonies that next time Alfa unit asked for written orders. Guess when Alfa unit was given unwritten orders and who could give them such orders? If they acted without orders, why no heads roll back then?
If I remember correctly, that was the case, according to some high officials at the time. Alfa asked for written orders but they were refused.
Regarding Lithuania's January events, other units did refuse to operate even back then. IIRC Pskov airborne unit was given unwritten order to fly to Vilnius, but the commander refused.
Let me tell you why I think this is an inappropriate comment: The point of it seems not to be collaboratively extending the line of thought proposed by the original post or the parent comment, but to make the parent commenter feel some kind of personal shame or stupidity. Good commenting is more like a team sport than a martial art.
Perhaps, but equally that's a route to a monoculture - can we not question Reagan?
Americans love to glibly propitiate to Reagan's spirit (in heaven I'm assured), there's no way they could be doing so out of ignorance of the more controversial aspects of his presidency?
The author of the joke doesn’t really matter here; the point is that it’s funny, period. I’m not sure how you can see a mockery of any country in a joke that would work with literally any important person in any country.
