Mikhail Gorbachev has died

Note that in Russian doctrine as tought in universities, the Cold War never ended.

I was taught that Ronald Reagan ended the cold war and gave us the longest lasting economic boom.

Paraphrasing President Reagan:

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!"

I laughed so loud at this my wife yelled at me from across the house, "What's so funny?!"

I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle, in the sense that it never ended. It only took a back seat in the media while Russia was disorganized.

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

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.

it ended for 150 or so million people in Eastern Europe, that were freed from Russia.

Seems accurate to me. It never completely ended.

There's no way that comment wasn't sarcasm, right?

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.

Dang, good move to force a whole country into bankruptcy.

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

Eastern _and_ Western Europe.

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.

Ended or postponed?

Seems to be working for China, as well.

RIP Gorbachev, one of the few genuinely good people in politics.

After he retired from politics, he was featured in several advertisements:

- In 1994 for Apple Computer: https://www.upi.com/Archives/1994/10/07/The-first-advertisem...

- In 1998 for Pizza Hut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorbachev_Pizza_Hut_commercial

- In 2000 for the ÖBB, the Austrian railways: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLscz8kEg6c

- In 2007 for Louis Vuitton: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/business/media/05vuitton....

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.

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.

that is pretty funny.

long live trickle-down economics! /s

The first driver was a KGB agent named Putin

There's a disconnect here: the US policy in question took place over decades, not the 8 years that Reagan was president.

There was an earlier anecdote about Brezhnev on this topic…

Was the absence of Marshall plan happened because of the West or because of Russia's decision?

> Sadly, it seems that Gorbachev's efforts were mostly for naught.

Russia today is a faint ghost of the former USSR. The events in Eastern Europe show that to an extent.

You can lead a horse to water; but you can't make it drink. It wasn't the US' responsibility, it was the Russian peoples'.

Should I have been taught Ronald Reagan did that as well?

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).

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.

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.

»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!‹«

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.

The Cold War has definitely ended for Eastern Europe.

I once heard someone say that any country needs two attempts until democracy works out properly. Maybe it’s the same here.

He ended, Trump sorta suspended?

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.

It's easy to argue that it's USSR people, not Western, who benefited most from the end of the Cold War.

Werner Herzog’s interview/documentary with him just a couple of years ago was very interesting, and I recommend watching.

> On the contrary

I agree with everything you said, so I don't take it as contrary to what I said.

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.

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.

/s, I assume? (you never know!)

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.

Anyone interesting in learning more about Gorbachev's life, I recommend watching Werner Herzog's Meeting Gorbachev.

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.

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.

The locals in power have to want to do it too. As soon as enough don’t want it, it is over.

I’m skeptical of the idea that you can impose Democracy.

> not because the US policy forced them into bankruptcy

what?!

It was pretty much the USSR policies that forced them into bankrupcy.... as it did in every other socialist state.

source: am from another former socialist country, that also doesn't exist anymore.

I think this talk shows that it's probably a bit more complicated than that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF9KretXqJw

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.

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.

Quebec was also bragging about their asbestos export not too long ago either. This isn’t really something unique to Soviet Union.

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.

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.

People are complicated beings. He was a part decent man, part criminal and part coward.

Gorba, the Chief.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNoBstt8uYM

I guess it feels so good when you get all the benefits and somebody else foots the failures.

Well, 2022 is a year of boomerang.

I suggest you look at the external debt of China vs other nations, you may be surprised with what you find.

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.)

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.

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.)

As the Russian, I'm of the opinion that Gorbachev is traitor.

I hate communism, so it's good that he helped us to get rid of that.

But why getting rid of communism had to include letting Americans to take reign in many government agencies of Russia?

What would be your opinion of US president, if he goes to to retire in Russia?

I'm reading some Russian news site, and almost universally Gorbachev is hated by Russians.

I meet your skepticism with a video of him telling the joke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQh6q9gNCIQ

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.

> The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s.

Some how people manage to blame everything on the United States.

> but Gorbachev seemed like a fundamentally decent man

I caught this movie at the Tribeca Film festival: https://tribecafilm.com/festival/archive/meeting-gorbachev-2...

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.

That's a very serious claim, could you please provide some citations?

I think there's a lot of historical support for this view. Here's a summary from 1998:

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/harvard-boys-do-russ...

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.

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.

Thanks for a link to a site labeled "free propaganda". It really rang true here, it is propaganda, and it is free?

Do read the comments on youtube.

My late grandfather was a really good and kind man. He never argued or blamed people.

The only person that I remember that my grandfather had really negative feelings for was Gorbachev.

I never learned why.

[Remove the two spaces before the link to make it clicky.]

> 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.

(Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

> 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.

Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCO9BYCGNeY

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.

Some did, some didn't, the way it happened.

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.

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.

So like telling "jokes" at Russia's expense by a man of questionable ethics?

what is the point of his joke, if not to mock another country?

The OP posted a quote, and i posted one too?

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.

> Are you responding to the right comment?

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?

> the big difference is the oligarchs

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.)

In 1955, eastern europeans were so thankful to be free from Germany.

In 1995, eastern europeans were so thankful to be free from Russia.

In 2035, you can expect eastern europeans to be thankful again. Not sure who'd it be this time.

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.

This analogy doesn't hold for "WWIII" though, right? By this analogy, I would call the current crisis "Cold War II".

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.

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.

The huge metal show in Moscow shows just how much optimism there was in that moment.

If you've never seen this footage, definitely look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W7wqQwa-TU

1.6 million people in an airfield at a free concert that lasted all day. There's a documentary about it but I've not watched it.

It's so disappointing the world couldn't bring that optimism to fruition, and instead kleptocrats took over.

"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.

'On the contrary' can have flexible scope, in this case it seems to mean 'contrary to any idea of a Marshall plan...'

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.

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.

Sometimes you have to work in the constraints of your time as he did. You'll learn that when you get older.

> 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.

A peer comment reminded me of the name 'shock therapy', the think tank was called 'Harvard institute for international development'.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/22/1087654279/how...

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/harvard-boys-do-russ...

My original comment has been flagged. I'd like to know why. If I'm wrong I'd like to be corrected.

Am I the only one surprised he was still alive?

The US manages to meddle and create problems all over the world.

A small part of the US footprint:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

I'm not the one who needs convincing.

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.

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

Have you heard about a single moment in time when people liked the leader of their country?

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.

> But why getting rid of communism had to include letting Americans to take reign in many government agencies of Russia?

Wow. Such a claim. I'm sure you have mountains of examples of this happening just one time.

> 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.

Republicans? Man, some people just can't get past the "my party vs your party" mindset.

> There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War like there was after World War II

Well, kinda https://www.thenation.com/article/world/harvard-boys-do-russ...

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. "

Exporting this wasn't unique to the Soviets.

My bad! I understand now.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

Man, what people will do for alcohol.

If you wanna act like a superpower, then you're going to get judged like a superpower.

There is a saying in Russian that can be translated as "That one died. This one will follow".

> As soon as enough don’t want it, it is over.

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.

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".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warlord_Era

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Russian_constitutional_cr...

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.

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.

Probably the most relevant sentence from that article:

> The role of Mikhail Gorbachev in the January events remains disputed.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.rferl.org/a/lithuania-soviet-crackdown-1991-krem...

You can't be self-reliant when you are bankrupt and all basic neccesities are in short supply.

USSR was defunct. Its communist party was also defunct.

Russia is lucky to have China which produces enormous assortment of items as well as trade surplus.

Aren’t we all?

> I mean when has US ever had a marshal plan?

That's kind of a silly question, as the answer is in the name.

And people like Larry Summers are still around giving economic "advice", failing upward.

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).

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

Ah yes, the world was such a utopia before the US.

That has little to do with the USSR as those lands were conquered by the Russian Empire in 18th century from the Ottomans.

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.

What is "disputed"? It says right there, under Commanders and leaders: Mikhail Gorbachev. Such is the nature of the deal; power for responsibility.

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.

Sure, who among us did not massacre an uprising or two.

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.

Propagandistic anecdotes deserve a little bit of ridicule. But just a little bit.

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.

You couldn’t impose democracy on many parts of the USA if it were suddenly removed, let’s face it.

Usually the most beloved are also the most hated.

> 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.

They had democracy of a Ryazan sugar flavor. Nothing compared to real one.

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.

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.

That doesn't invalidate the point that the US has created incredible amounts of instability around the world.

> Republicans have long said that the federal government is structurally incompetent and unable to effectively administer a large country.

To be fair, things probably work better when you don’t put people with that ideology in charge of said government.

It’s like picking a flat-Earther as an astronaut.

Comedy is subjective.

Try telling a sexually charged joke at your place of employment and see what happens.

World leaders freely slandering other countries like this is shameful, and not what you expect from a "world leader".

Plus there was also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_January

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?

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?)

Russia–US relations have been pretty cold for most of these decades so why not.

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.

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 still think the gp's question is relevant:

> What would be your opinion of US president, if he goes to to retire in Russia?

that's good, as the US is a constitutional republic

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.

Soviet military can't do nothing. It's not Latin America or Myanmar.

They will just sit there and wait for orders to come.

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.

Why step into a conversation as if everybody else is arguing that there's heaven on earth? Are you going to ask people if they love Saddam next?

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.

[Thank you, edited]

Who would pay for Marshall Plan?

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.

> The United States didn't do enough

I think if you dig into the history a bit more closely, you'll quickly find that the United States did in fact do plenty[0][1].

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/27/world/10.2-billion-loan-t...

[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-07-09-mn-22423-...

We did enough. See https://www.thenation.com/article/world/harvard-boys-do-russ...

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.

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.

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?

In that case there'd be no need to mention reagan at all? most of the "Soviet" jokes people tell seem to be made up anyhow.

> "jokes" at Russia's expense

I'm not seeing it. That joke could just as easily be told for any other national leader and it would still work.

> 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.

> 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.

So it wasn't real capitalism?

Democratic republic, which is what everyone means when we say democracy.

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.

Somebody pays eventually. We are all paying for it right now, plus interest.

> The US manages to meddle and create problems all over the world.

Huh? The OP is accusing the US of NOT meddling. Talk about damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Yeah, USSR should have kept all the occupied countries!

/sarcasm

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.

"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

It was flagged for not sufficiently praising the awful behavior of the US during and after the fall of the USSR.

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

Absolutely. And we will likely pay for similar situations with Hungary, Turkey, China...

> The West has embraced Russia's democracy right after the fall of the iron curtain.

Right like Clinton and the US congress cheering Yeltsin bombing Russia's elected parliament.

> 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.

Was he Lithuanian by any chance? Gorbachev killed protestors there, arguably the biggest stain on his otherwise surprisingly decent record.

Or did he sympathise with communism? Gorbachev arguably accelerated it's decline.

He was Greek and yes, he was with the communist party in his youth. So probably that's why...

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.

https://metalheadzone.com/lars-ulrich-clarifies-the-myth-tha...

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.

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.)

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

p.s. I don't think the joke was mean-spirited.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32654981.

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).

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

Yes they are, but we overthrew a government from half of the Latin American countries in the same time period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

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:

https://youtu.be/f8ZqBLcIvw0?t=76

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.

> [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.

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.

Of course we can question Reagan but when it comes to political/ideological flamebait, it's best to (a) avoid it and (b) stay on topic.

Whimsical off-topic stuff can be ok, but flamewar off-topic stuff isn't, and a greatest-hits of bad Reagan is definitely that.

This is in the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and there's lots of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., though you might have to scroll through boilerplate to get to the more substantial explanations.

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.

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/23/world/gorbachev-pleads-fo...

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.

> 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.

That joke was told about many of the soviet leaders...

I understand the activation but please let's keep internecine punctuation conflict off HN.

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?

What's your proposition then? How it's best to go forward from where we are, if you don't trust the current organization abilities?

> 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).

> The parent comment is correct

I'm sorry but it's not, and I already stated why with reason. They were not asking for "democratic reforms", but for independence.

Call it self-determination if it makes you feel better. Debate my comparisons, fair enough, I just tried to put things in perspective.

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.

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.”

[1] https://ar.usembassy.gov/education-culture/irc/u-s-governmen...

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.

Don't forget Putin was a darling of the US and the West for a long time. Read the praises The Economist sung of him.

I wonder how all of this played into Alfa's decision not to kill protestors in service of the August 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt.

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?

What would the US's second attempt be in its history ?

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.

> letting Americans to take reign in many government agencies of Russia?

I haven't heard of Americans taking on leadership roles in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Do you have any examples, or sources about this?

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?..

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.

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.

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)

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.

I'm interested in reading these stories, are there any particular links you can suggest?

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 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_Confederation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shays%27_Rebellion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_Convention_(Uni...

> 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.

FDR after he gave up to the requests of the communists and created the largest welfare program in US history?

> 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 US embassy thinks otherwise: https://ar.usembassy.gov/education-culture/irc/u-s-governmen...

> 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.

> 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.

Everyone should read The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.

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.

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.

Check life expectancy of russians… it is not the same… it has gone worse.

If the cold war did end, why didn't NATO dissolve as well? It was born exactly to contain the USSR! Instead NATO kept expanding east...

The us helped that happen, if anything.

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?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treuhandanstalt

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.

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.

Good point. Except you're forgetting Marshal plan wasn't only for Germany and Japan.

Wry and karmic, but nevertheless an unrealistic expectation.

> Hardly everyone, but left zoomers

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.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200215230538/https://ourworldi...

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> Most people would not waste their time nitpicking the usage of such a widely accepted term.

For some reason the US embassy still finds it important enough to broadcast the difference to the rest of the world: https://ar.usembassy.gov/education-culture/irc/u-s-governmen... Could you explain that?

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.

> The U.S. put its thumb heavily on the scale

More than a thumb. The Constitution of Japan was written by Americans. America stomped on the scale, and that time it seems to have worked.

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.

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.

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.

> common sense reforms

Politically and in terms of press freedom, maybe.

Economically it was a disaster that ruined an already stagnating growth and turned it into recession.

The transition to a market economy went very well for most of the former Soviet Republics except Russia.

https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/03/16/the-transiti...

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

> “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'"

-Ronald Reagan

Perhaps you know that Reagan didn't really mean it, but it seems like many people believed him anyway.

> The OP is saying the US meddled wrong and could have meddled beneficially.

How are you getting that from the Original Post? The Original Post only mentions what the US didn't do, not what it did do.

In Poland that same "shock doctrine" led to quite good results, quite soon.

Not to mention lack of evidence...

The biggest difference is Polio crippled kids and they were vaccinating kids, whereas COVID mostly kills grandparents and leaves most kids unscathed.

Also, now we have facebook.

> 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.

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.

> Perhaps you know that Reagan didn't really mean it

I think you surely know it too, Reagan was all too eager to use government power and his supporters were happy to see him do it.

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.

------------

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.

------------

"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.

federalism is an excuse to reduce regulation and continue stealing money from the lower classes

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.

https://apnews.com/article/a9a10bdf38d213033157d6d98c29e2c1

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

don't get the downvotes; do people here actually believe in trickle-down economics or just fail to recognize the sarcasm?

I’m not sure your specific speculation is on the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_alternate_h...

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.

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.

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)

Spain isn't a union state

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

> 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.

You cite no evidence for this conspiratorial claim.

> 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 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.

i think you are being a bit pedantic, it says:

  While often categorized as a democracy, the United States is more accurately defined as a constitutional federal republic. 

notice the wording "more accurately" and not "mischaracterized" etc

--

btw... whats the point in arguing the u.s isn't a democracy?

are you trying to say that people shouldn't be able to decide their leaders?

The US military defeated Japan and was an occupying power.

The US had the power to dictate whatever terms.

Japan was on it's back.

Russia in 1992 was it's own entity. Still a nuclear power. Making it's own decisions.

Not only would Russia not have tolerated US intervention, I'm extremely doubtful there could have been such a thing on any terms.

As it stands, much of the money used by Oligarchs to buy up Natural Resources firms was from the US private banking system.

Russia is Russia, they are 100% responsible for their own problems, and those have been roiling through history for 100's of years.