Mikhail Gorbachev has died

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.

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

Seems to be working for China, as well.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.)

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.

> 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?

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.

> 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.

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...

> 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.

Yeah, USSR should have kept all the occupied countries!

/sarcasm

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.

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.

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

The US did the opposite with China. Instead of trying to bankrupt China, the US opened up trade in hopes of creating a liberal democracy in China.

I was trying to say that there was a way forward for the Cold War to end without the dissolution of the USSR — not that it'd be great for the occupied countries (or people of USSR in general) for USSR to continue existing.

The dissolution could have happened afterwards, in an organized manner, as a process — not a cataclysm.

That way we could have ended up with the new countries not having old apparatchiks as little tsars. Maybe we'd have an independent Yakutia, Siberia, Tatarstan too

I'm saying that a catastrophic decomposition through a coup that left most of the Soviet apparatchiks in power (Lukashenko, Yeltsin/Putin, etc) is barely better than nothing at all.

The problems it caused to people in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and many other former Soviet republics aren't minor by any account — and they are a direct reason for why Putin managed to hold power for so long.

The way in which the USSR dissolved itself is why we have a war in Ukraine now.

Hindsight is 20/20, sure, but the 90s were a time where a lot of people didn't have anything to eat, a time where everyone's life savings turned to dust overnight, a time where many people ended up homeless, a time where highly educated people became unemployed without warning (or couldn't get salaries for years on end) and were better off sweeping streets than working at science institutes...

And that set a basis for Putin being revered in early 2000s for bringing in "stability".

The war in Ukraine is an outgrowth of that.

I'm not saying that Gorbachev's ideals were flawed. It's the approach he took to putting them in place.

In a way, he was putting "the human face" on socialism in the same hamfisted manner that the "should be done" socialism was pushed down people's throats before.

His bright idea to solve the alcoholism problem by having a Prohibition 2.0 is a prime example.

What with the oil prices? Forget that, look at the vodka prices.

That's solely on Gorbachev. And it worked as well as you'd expect.

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/08/27/world/soviet-liquor-price...

Well so what? It's not like there was a better alternative at the time.

Dissolution as it did was quite organised. Especially when you take into consideration that the society could barely function in market economy after decades of living sovietism. And economically it was a mess with too much focus on military complex. The rest being terribly inefficient.

The only way to stay away from the old apparatchiks would have been management by occupational forces for several decades. And that occupational forces should have kept USSR market closed instead of pushing their own produce. Which is hardly possible.

> but the 90s were a time where a lot of people didn't have anything to eat, a time where

True, it was a quite big transformation of lives for everybody - fortunately without a major civil war, though with many lesser wars in less centralized regions. Yet the result was an improvement on average, in Russia it started to feel in 1999, and even earlier in Baltic countries. Wouldn't be sure about Asian countries though.

I'd agree that the population of Russia was willing enough to believe the officer of secret service for their own detriment. However - while it lasted in 2000 - the life of many Russians was improving, quite a bit, and not much animosity towards the West was there. It's only when things got tougher - with international crises and oil price plunging - when things had to change, and the way to change them by that time was such that autocrat had to remain in power, so the frustration was targeted elsewhere.

>The way in which the USSR dissolved itself is why we have a war in Ukraine now.

Agree.

Right. I'd add that it was, judging by historical parallels, rather happy dissolution - not perfect, as GP mentions, but hardly a cause for too much annoyance.

Well, for the annoyances part, Russia did great work to setup future annoyances that they're now exploiting. Rebel republics in Georgia that were exploited in 2008. Nagorno karabach in Armenia is hot since late 80s and probably will stay such in foreseeable future. Then Moldova's Padniestre is ripe and would have been next after Ukraine. Crimea with special status of Sevastopol was perfect setup too.

Here in Lithuania we narrowly avoided a similar issue as well with an attempt to establish an „autonomous republic“ in early 90s.

Sure, but 8 years of turmoil without a "major" civil war (but two Chechen wars with massive destruction and causlties) is a very, very low bar.

Yeah, and it seems to be working for China -- not on. The US opened up trade with China, and since then China has managed to have the West dismantle its industrial base. It's working great for China! (Except hopefully the rest of the world is finally waking up to what's going on).

This is somewhat ahistorical: Carter's initial policy towards the USSR was a continuation of the "detente" policy pursued by multiple administrations, beginning in the 1960s. But it quickly shifted towards a much more aggressive policy, following the USSR's engagement in Afghanistan. If anything, Reagan continued his predecessor's aggressive policies.

Reagan was instrumental in the USSR's final years and even more instrumental in the policies that built the oligopoly that followed it. But singling him out for laurels does not accurately reflect either the USSR's internal politics or the 50 years of US foreign policy that brought us to 1991.

It's not like China forced the west to dismantle its industrial base. The west was happy to do it! And now we're living in a globalized world, where the worker has won less than their masters.