Mikhail Gorbachev has died

Of course Yeltsin was a big part of the problem too.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.)

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.

It was also about stabilising a war-torn continent’s economy. To keep them from going communist.

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.

A small part of the US footprint:

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

Russia was only a part of the USSR. Their main problem is that they, too, believe that they are the former USSR, and try to restore the former glory. Well, the state of the war in Ukraine (another part of the former USSR) clearly shows how wrong they are.

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

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.

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

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

I don’t know why anyone would call US ally anymore or even count on them.

Myanmar's another one. India's been restricting its people's rights lately.

Democracy takes a while to establish as a stable system and often fails.

Alexander the Great was granting (non-representative) democracies to cities in Asia Minor 2400 years ago, I wonder what he'd think of Erdogan.

The 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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

Where the politicians were less corrupt, the free market worked spectacularly well, like in Poland.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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-...

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.

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.

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

"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

Do you know how much Russian economy costed at the time?

This long history of democratic rule was not present in many modern attempts to establish democracies.

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

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.

> 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...

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.

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 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.

I'm not sure we now know a guaranteed way of how to deal with situations like that.

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

Best description of the cultural background i found so far was this:

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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...

Certain degrees of federalism are, I think, common across the political spectrum, not only describe Republicans.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

I think US did enough divide and conquer and meddling to help bringing back an authoritarian government.

Anyway, totalitarian has a specific meaning, not a random one, it's a government that holds total control on all powers in a country. Stalinist USSR and Nazi germany (modern eritrea and north korea) apply to that definition, Italian or spanish fascisms do not (in both the head of state was the king), even less Russia since it is a de jure democracy.

I 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...

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.

Which, uh, sounds a lot like anti-Semitic rhetoric not uncommon in, among other places, Russia.

Most republicans are not anarcho-libertarians. Asserting that any government is bad is fringe even among libertarians, and most republicans aren't even libertarians.

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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

Now we have a proto-facist regime copying some aspects the Nazi regime.

-Ronald Reagan

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

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.

Not to mention lack of evidence...

Also, now we have facebook.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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)

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.

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

--

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 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.

> got sold to Western companies

I'm shaking my head to when reading such obtuse propaganda on hacker news.

> Nobody had asked my parents, or us, who were mere kids and teenagers back then, if we were agreeing to the sacrifices that they were going to impose on us.

They did. Through numerous elections, in which Iliescu and his cronies managed to build a state within a state. But of course, that's also Washington's fault.

The response to the fall of the USSR was neither, but I recall breathless reports in the US press of how Harvard MBAs were going to Russia to help it transition to a free market economy, and ruefully thinking it would be better if they aimed for emulating Western European economies.

And, outside of the former USSR, Europe had the most to gain if this could have been effected - as is now all too clear. Insofar as anything might have helped, this was not only the US's bag.

Given the utter unmitigated disaster of the Russian economy in the 90s, I'd daresay that it certainly had the ability to influence it away from the hard swing towards strongman authoritarianism that followed.

The Washington Consensus was a disaster, and strongly soured the country on working with the West.

There were probably innumerable factors that went into it. But there are a lot of differences between that situation and the fall of the Soviet Union.

Capitalism is based on private property rights, and individual economic freedoms to buy and sell your labour or property. That means it’s fundamentally reliant on the robust rule of law to enforce those rights, the rights of those purchasing property and services, etc. It’s those rights that enable the trust required for a functioning market. Corporatist, oligarchic and cartel based systems are often described as capitalist, but they’re really not capitalist because they don’t respect individual rights over capital any more than communism does. Like communism they’re just stitch-ups.

The role played by the rule of law often gets down played or even criticised by libertarian free marketeers. They think it’s needless regulation and just government interfering in free markets. But without the rule of law you get bloody free for alls like in Russia in the 90s.

Absolutely agree with you. Long-term, I think the stable state for Russia is a deconstruction of the old empire and a global commitment to Marshall Plan the resulting republics into modernity.

The US is a respresentative democracy that is also a constitutional republic.

Denmark is a representative democracy that is also a constitutional monarchy.

Canada is a representative democracy that is also an unconstitutional monarchy.

Russia is a kind-of-if-you-squint-but-not-really-representative oligarchy-slash-autocracy that is also a constitutional republic.

Whether or not a country has a constitution, or is a republic has almost no bearing on how it is actually governed.

I feel this. It's not much fun being a end of Millennial. Maybe other generations felt this getting passed over but in general my friends who are older than me by a few years have fared a lot worse than those who are a few years younger than me. Some punk song summed it up

    Where we'll sell you dreams then make you work for free
    They handed us an economy thats destined us for poverty
    Then have the nerve to call us soft and lazy for complaining
    Cause they're from a generation where you could be what you wanted to be
   But baby I'm a 90's kid

Yes, many ascendants had contact with the West. It’s how they played the game so well at the start of shock therapy. In most cases, they hired the right consultants who helped them do things like hoover up shares from people who didn’t know better to build a controlling stake. But to get to that point, they’d already accumulated assets.

The West enabled the rise of Russia’s oligarchs. But it didn’t mint them.

On the one hand, in the scale of brutality, every nation in history is at least 1 level below the Imperial Japan in WWII.

On the other hand, after the decisive show of force, beaconed by the nuclear bomb, Japan realized that brutality is going to cause the doom of that nation. So they naturally bowed down. After that brutality is no longer necessary, like a beaten dog that would not really need a leash.

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

because a typical follow-up discussion usually starts with "so where's the popular vote?" and this diminishes the principle of fair representation of smaller states of the federal republic.

(not agreeing with them, just pointing to the fact)

I never claimed that. You are trying to address a non-existing point.

Aslo, being in minority has never been an indicator of wrong by default, so I don't see why you had to mention it. At least I know that the US embassy also finds it important to remind everyone about the difference [1].

> or that the term 'constitutional republic' says literally anything about how a country is governed. [...] Whether or not a country has a constitution, or is a republic has almost no bearing on how it is actually governed.

It does have a significant bearing on applicability of popular vote in a given federation.

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

From what I can tell from history, our successes involved US taking sovereignty and ruling absolutely for a period of years while setting up a government of our choosing to replace us. Our failures involved quickly setting up a local democracy and allowing self rule while we tried and failed to help. It seems we lost the stomach to use power after military victory and the incompetent governments we set up doom the countries involved to decades of failure.

I really don’t think we should continue getting involved in places we don’t have the guts to set up a military government for a decade. It is clear you have to force societal change on a place at gunpoint in order to get good outcomes, if you’re just going to topple governments and hope whatever rises from the ashes is nice, you might as well not bother.

No, this is purely wishful thinking. The Soviet System was one fundamentally incentivized and propagated corruption. Those who had previously been in control or had knowledge of the workings of the Soviet Economy were always going to profit significantly. The US had little control over this.

In fact the Chinese did manage to create a thriving democracy after the warlord era, which is still here today. But it's based in Taipei and the mainland Chinese leaders want to take it down because it undermines their narrative.

And the Russians having the easiest beginnings of democracy for a few months claiming they "tried it and it didn't work"? Never heard them say it but if they did it's just dogma.

That said, the former Soviet Republics that transitioned well are those that were smaller, already edging their way towards a market economy before the USSR collapse, and received substantial help from (and eventually joined) the EU (Baltics, Hungary, Poland, Czech Rep., Slovenia), and in the case of E.Germany, unification.

I don't think most of the others have fared that well. GDP/Capita is not a good measure because it doesn't take inequality into account.

The only two that come to mind for me are Korea and Japan (I could easily be overlooking some), and really the former happened as a part of the latter (Korea was ruled by Japan for the 35 years prior to WWII).

As I understand it South Korea was at least nominally under local democratic rule from the start.

I'm not sure that's a big enough sample set to be making generalizations from, and even if you are happy with a sample set of 2 I'm not really sure south korea fits the mold you're describing.

That said, I could definitely be missing some examples that would make the argument more convincing.

It had been tried in many places already: Chile, Indonesia, the Philippines, and (before 1979) Iran. The data were clear: it had worked very well for capitalists, but very poorly for people in the countries affected. And it mostly has come to the US. There are remnants of the welfare state, but your employer can basically do whatever he wants because he calls himself "a job creator"... and education is debt-financed... and getting sick will wipe out everything you have... and we've transitioned away from productive investment to asset bubbles... and you better not end up in a lawsuit because the rich have the best lawyers and lobbyists and therefore effectively own the court system (you only have a shot if you can find a rich person who hates your adversary enough to back you). The EU has held out to an extent, for now, but it won't if the Davos people get their way. The "Great Reset" is their plan to implement extreme capitalism under a guise of ecological caution and "woke" multiculturalism [1].

The Marshall Plan was written by people who believed market systems were superior to central planning given the technological level and geographical complexities (e.g., general low trust between nations) of the time--they were capitalists, but not capitalist ideologues. Alas, the successes (for "business interests", meaning rich people in the US) in Santiago, Jakarta, and Manila led them to become more brazen, to the point of using the former USSR for some of their most aggressive experiments to that point.

----

[1] This is not to say ecological caution isn't important (it is). Nor is it to disparage the broader set of social movements classified by their detractors as "woke", most of which have nothing but the best intentions. The issue with "woke capitalism" is that it retrenches in identity politics in order to divide working people against each other for Capital's benefit, and that it is designed not to provide significant help to people in marginalized groups (most of whom are working class, and who will therefore not be helped) but to neuter a powerful, morally righteous leftist movement toward genuine and universal social justice.

I guess we'll never know. Because there was a remaking of Japanese society after the war in a democratic image. That just doesn't even appear as though it was attempted in post Soviet Russia.

I don't kmow the origins of why America departed from its usual course of propping up the traditional land owning and wealthy bourgeoisie classes in it' s occupation of Japan. I know FDR personally held very pro democracy and anti colonialist views. He had ambitions to remake America's relations with the developing world after the war though how far he would've progressed on that front is unknown. And of course he was dead by the end of the war and Japan was in the more conservative hands of Truman.

Perhaps the Japanese people ran with this program because of their cultural tenacity. Or perhaps because their defeat had been so total that they truly considered themselves defeated and simply wished to move on whatever with whatever power structure was presented.

Ultimately though, America began a campaign to turn the "subjects" of the Japanese Empire into "citizens" of a Japanese constitutional state. They did not undertake a similar project to turn "comrades" of the Soviet Union into "citizens" of a Russian Republic.

US did in fact do another Marshall Plan after WW2, catapulting China into 21st century. But that help came after a very deep strategic understanding between US's and China's ruling class. Again, nothing of the sort happened with Russia nor was it possible.

https://youtu.be/wnDxHTaeNX0

That might be what it writes in the link, it wasn't the case though, except if you mean after things stabilized 15 and 20 years later (and it's still bad in most places). Tons of conflict, forced migration, poverty, crime, sexual slavery, and so on...

I read recently that only in the 60s the German public opinion started moving towards "Nazis are bad", and that was because of an external effort to reeducate them (I had just assumed that after they lost the war, the population would automatically see the Nazis were bad).

No such effort happened with the Russians, so they're still trying to conquer Europe, as they have been since tsarist era.

There was lots of corruption in the Soviet Union. But we're talking about orders of magnitude difference here. Soviet corruption revolved around small bribes for services, lies on official documentation, etc. For 30 years now, Russia's resources have been looted to enrich several dozen people. We're talking about one of the largest shifts in wealth inequality in the history of the world.

The current crop of Russian oligarchs are generally not former communist party officials. They did gain their resources from former party members and largely by bribing these people.

Much of this could've been prevented however with an orderly transition away from the single party system. By outlawing the party, Russia broke the central disciplining and organizing structure of government, the economy and law. This left in place the people but without discipline or oversight which allowed the looting to take place.

American consultants were instrumental in organizing the massive selloff of state assets, and quite a few of them turned around and used their knowledge of the system they created to become quite rich. Andrei Shleifer said as much in an interview on the topic, though I can't find it now.

edit: it seems like someone else posted the same link while I was looking for the interview.

> lie spread by the sympathizers of the current regime in Moscow

Please respect the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41294-021-00169-w

Please don't make assumptions about what other people have or haven't studied.

> They also have a long, long history of authoritarianism.

You could say the same about the Axis powers in WW2.

Gorbachev wanted to keep USSR intact. He didn't want a post-USSR Russia. He initiated referendums to that end. But USSR was already on the train to dissolution and nothing was going to stop it.

Because whose who installed them of course now knew where are someone with something worth protecting with a steel doors.

No, it's not. Please refrain from this kind of personal comment.

I wasn't suggesting that the US meddle in Russia's political system. Russia was already moving to democracy by itself. The point was to provide economic aid to support that existing, fledgling, fragile democracy. What happened, unfortunately, is that many Russians suffered heavily economically during the transition, and they started to look back with some fondness to the "good old days", because they were worse off financially than before. That's where the western world could have helped.

Anyways even with that kind of power, the prevailing economic ideology at the time the Soviet Union fell was of extreme neoliberalism, so I doubt it would have helped anyway.

Do you have a citation for that?

"The United States transferred over $13 billion (equivalent of about $115 billion in 2021) in economic recovery programs to Western European economies after the end of World War II." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan

And the GDR still got the best deal of all of the ones you mentioned. But there's massive inequality, massive unemployment. (And as a result, extremism, political fatigue, corruption, etc)

Ditto for the goons. If your main skill is sociopathic violence and physical strength, why not use those your talents to intimidate and exploit the workers for your boss’s benefit?

Live in Poland, muggings aren't really a thing, and according to the "what worries the world" monthly polls of ipsos[0], poles are the nation that least worries about violence and crime (it was surprising for me to see the effect is that strong), with only 5% worrying about it.

[0]: https://www.ipsos.com/en/what-worries-world-july-2022

Or when the govt sells off public assets ...

If you look at houses in Compton and see metal bars on the windows, you don't instantly think "man, they must have lots of expensive stuff to steal". Kind of the same deal here.

Pointing out (perceived) omission is a not a "personal comment".

Afghanistan and Iraq are weak states dominated by sectarian violence. Vietnam is and was a strong state.

There's a certain segment who seem very adamant that this is a very important argument to win against "the left". But I've never met any "leftist" who cares particularly - most seem to shrug, concede the label and move on.

I'm pretty much in agreement. The US is a democracy in the wide sense in that it uses a democratic process to choose government. It's also true that it's a representative democracy in that the process works by people choosing representatives. So sure - constitutional federal republic.

But why does anyone think this is particularly important, and why is this seen as something that there is any left/right distinction on is beyond me.

To me it seems like they have the best intentions in the same way that religious extremists have the best intentions. But otherwise I agree with you.

It's not implausible though. There've been a handful of concerts as large as 3 million apparently. That just boggles my mind. Can you imagine standing on a stage like that?

Central Asia has the same oligarchy as you would picture in Russia and probably much worse. All dictators only changing after the previous dies.

Oh wow, so that's why this is seen as a left/right thing?

I'm not from the US (and therefore way left for the US) and I think assuring representation of the less populous states is very important.

I think the first-past-the-post voting system used in the US is a much bigger problem than this.

You should assume that any commenter will know that Germany and Japan were occupied after WW2. Of course I know that. I mean, I'm the one who brought up the Marshall Plan in the first place! You set up a straw man to criticize.

it was a tough choice. To transition to democracy it was necessary to dismantle and punish for the most egregious crimes the KGB and the likes, to actually prohibit Communist Party and to deny the people directly associated with the totalitarian regime of USSR any positions of power for at least 10 to 20 years. East Germany, Baltic and some other East Europe countries did for example various elements of such a process. Such "de-communization"/"lustration" though carried risk of instability, and instead US chose stability because of USSR/Russia nukes, and thus US actually helped KGB to survive the 1991. Splitting Russia further would have also helped to dampen the anti-democratic imperial drive in Russia, yet that was coming with the chances to increase the number of nuclear armed countries, and this is again why US didn't support the breakup of Russia into smaller pieces. I think such smaller pieces would have had higher chances for democratic transition due to most of them losing the imperial drive.

Belarus has never did the "lustration", and is a lost cause for the foreseeable future. Ukraine also didn't do "lustration" back in 199x, and that resulted in the grave danger to the country in 2014 when a lot of army and government officers didn't want to defend their country. So Ukraine had to do such "lustration" in the years since 2014, and today its results are obvious in their successful fight against the invasion.

Would the result have been different if Russia followed a Chinese model?

> The United States is a representative democracy.

https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/lesson-pl...

I those elected choose to be corrupt, undemocratic, I'm not sure much could be done from the outside.

Search Term : Result

Life expectancy Russia 1990 : 68.89

Life expectancy Russia 2019 : 73.08

For reference, in the US:

Life expectancy US 1990 : 75.21

Life expectancy US 2019 : 78.79

I dunno nothing really stands out. It looks like Russians benefited a little bit more, but Americans were starting from a higher baseline so it makes sense that gains would be harder to come by.

2019 was selected rather than 2021 for obvious reasons.

For once, I don't think that they would consider leaving all of their valuables in front of the front door where everything is visible. Unless installing the front door includes rummaging through the entire apartment, all while the person living there is just standing and smiling. Which, I assure you, isn't how it usually goes.

And I am not trying to make it as some attack on people living in the west, I am one of them now myself. It speaks more about how safe and comfortable the modern western life can be, compared to what it was in those eastern european countries back then, that we can afford to be so oblivious to our surroundings and so much less cautious.

>In August 2005, Harvard University, Shleifer and the Department of Justice reached an agreement under which the university paid $26.5 million to settle the five-year-old lawsuit. Shleifer was also responsible for paying $2 million worth of damages, though he did not admit any wrongdoing.[10][16]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Shleifer#Scandal

I don't know what you call it when a country loses 10% of it's population, like Ukraine did, but decimation is the dictionary definition.

You argue that the capitalist system presupposes these rights and the rule of law; I would say that historically speaking capital itself (more importantly its production process) presupposes these rights and capitalism presupposes capital.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI

This is the PolySci equivalent of software engineers arguing about the type system in Python. It is a great source of debate and endless clarification... and term papers for undergrads.

Maybe it's worth taking their points seriously instead of arguing. Nobody has flimay wooden american-style doors in Russia, everyone installs steel doors, thats the norm.

'Afghanistan' is barely a state, it never really was a nation. It's a 'border' around a chaotic gaggle of tribes living in the past. They'll ebb and flow given different kinds of leadership, most of which won't have anything to do with anything happening outside urban limits anyhow.

Iraq was a deeply corrupted and broken state, again, difficult to rebuild to, but possible. Absent ethnic tensions it probably would have gone a little bit better, and paradoxically, US forces were more of a stabilizing factor than not. Literally the day that US forces withdrew and US lost it's leverage in Iraqi politics, PM malaki basically launched a kind of political civil war. That scared the Sunnis who 'allowed' ISIL to come in, believing they were a better option than the Shia dominate government, unrestrained from American influence.

S. Vietnam was a bit incoherent, but it could have worked fine were the US to have been able to provide security. They did not, largely due to the historical insanity of refusing to attack the North. As Op. Linebacker I and II eventually demonstrated (but way too late), North Vietnam could be handily decimated at will with direct strategic bombing. Were those ops to have happened in 1965 instead of 1972, the war would have had a different outcome. It's unlikely that S. Vietnam would quite look like S. Korea, but it would be more like it. Instead, we have an ultra authoritarian entity that did some vastly horrible things in the past, but which has settled down a bit in subsequent decades.

'Marshall Plan' works where the Marshall Plan can be taken advantage of.

The IMF has tried similar things elsewhere after WW2, it didn't work out so well, because, well, Nigeria and Indonesia are not at all like Germany or Japan.

Russia has been 'backwards' forever, it's like part of their identity to be 50 years behind everyone but still antagonist about it i.e. aggressors and victims at the same time. I can't see how it will change.

Russians will happily exchange their own prosperity to save face to themselves, and live in a kind of delusion of their own making. They will literally lose the war in Ukraine, but believe they have 'won'. They will declare Ukraine 'denazified', have a parade about it, and 50% of the population will fully believe it, the other 50% will know the truth and go about their daily business, unable to really speak publicly about it.

I imagine Russians slyly and sarcastically saying, to the typically non-ironically self-righteous Westerner, "oh the Americans did plenty; plenty indeed; we really wish they didn't".

Much of the global south holds much the same opinion IMO. Frankly, I'm shocked at the state of disconnect in the West. The kind of petulant idiocy displayed by the usual eminences when the majority of the world did not play along - much like they didn't play along when the US-West attacked god-knows how many countries now - was less suitable even of a pouty teenager.

Reforms such as? The countru had new borders, new constitution, new everything. There isn't a legal reform that would have magocally solvednthe problem.

> US totally failed to empower the right kind of people back then with its aid.

Wouls it be realistic and possibpe for a US obserber to know who the right people are?

The oligarchs didn't swoop in and ruin everything. The Russian government did not want their resources and industry controlled by foreign share holders, so they were dead set on privatizing the economy by selling to Russians only.

With this constraint, the handful of Russians who were able to raise capital in such a short time, without foreign counter bids, got the privatized businesses far below market prices as a result. This is what made them billionaires, and turned them into the oligarchs.

South Korea has recieved as much ecobomic aid as all of Africa combined in the 20 years after its formation.

One day the real history of those times will be written, but this is not it. Economism is faith based, not a science.

Please respect the HN guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> next you're going to tell me the US is also to blame for the collapse?

No, it's actually the Ronald Reagan fans who believe the US is responsible for the collapse of the USSR.

So even with the US stomping the scale, it still didn’t make it some kind of European multi partisan parliamentary democracy.

How is that evident, though? It’s actually pretty clear that the quality of life has drastically improved in most of these countries. Of *course* you can always find some group who is suffering. But there is no way I would want to live in 1980s Poland, Estonia, etc vs 2020. For example:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS?location...

The continued existence of problems does not mean things have not worked. It’s important to look at whether those problems are improving over time.

Now though it's nothing like that. I'm originally from the UK and I feel much safer being here. Not only personal safety (I don't feel there's any 'bad parts' of the city you 'shouldn't go') but also private belongings. I've never heard of anyone in recent times being burgled or having their car broken into.

  > because a typical follow-up discussion usually starts with "so where's the popular vote?" and this diminishes the principle of fair representation of smaller states of the federal republic.

just to be upfront, im not sure i agree, but in any case i think stating that upfront is better than debating words "democracy" vs "republic", people will miss the point (or not get what your trying to say)

(It wasn’t exclusively in the USSR sphere of influence, but it was in their sphere of influence.)

That’s how the USA imported the Yugo!

If anyone is interested why the US get involved in other countries affairs, just look to comments like this.

I'm not sure why the US has any responsibility for helping Russia transition to a democracy. And I'm not sure why, when the US does provide assistance, when the country fails to become democratic, it's because "the US didn't do enough".

It's pretty clear it's a no win situation. The US gets blamed for "doing nothing, or not enough" and then when it does something it gets blamed for "interfering with another nations affairs".

I'm starting to see why the founding fathers were such isolationists and the US as a whole was isolationist until WW1. There is nothing good that can come out of getting involved.

I see oblivious and naive people everywhere all the time (eg phone scams)

> they were way more cautious and aware of their surroundings than modern people living in the west are

Thanks for assuming I'm just a stupid guy from the West.

> all of their valuables in front of the front door where everything is visible

Of course not, but there is a lot of things what can tell you there could be valuables there. Ruined flat in a commie block is one thing, but a freshly renovated flat in that commie block is another thing.

If you think a little you can, probably, understand why I know that.

A) Rebuilding democracy versus building it. Most obviously, it is easier to get everyone to end up in a place when they have already been there. Konrad Adenaur, for example, was first elected Mayor of Koeln under the Wilhelmine Empire, and had first won an election 40 years before becoming Chancellor (with a dozen year interregnum, spent in obscurity during the Nazi era). Similar story w.r.t Japan (Yoshida Shigeru was a diplomat rather than an elected official, but had the same sort of career, right down to the big hole where he had no official job during the war). The main Axis nations had been reasonable democracies within the past 15-20 years, whereas Afghanistan and Iraq were farther from that (and their initial leaders were refugees rather than people who had stayed, which is an enormous difference that I think US leaders missed). The USSR obviously was a lifetime since the last real, multiparty elections in 1917.

B) Many nations working together. The Marshall Plan aid was distributed across most of Europe, and in a way that emphasized international cooperation (with 25% going to the UK, 18% to France, and 11% going to West Germany, it truly was split among many nations). This helped to rebuild international trade that truly cemented the nations together. This is plausible for a USSR modernization, so long as the Russians are willing to admit that the other nationalities are truly independent. (The most successful of these attempts, in the Balkans, largely did manage to tie the international knots together. The others not so much. But how much of that was that Slovenia and Croatia are great vacation trips for Europeans, in a way that going to Moscow was simply much more distance?)

C) Continuing presence of US troops. Japan's economic growth really dates to the Korean War, when the US military suddenly energized and needed local production to supplement weapons and goods shipped across the Pacific. Similarly, from roughly that point to the end of the Cold War the US had a quarter-million men in Germany alone (more in the UK, Italy, etc.). Those men needed goods and services, and had dollars to spend. This is basically impossible to imagine for the fUSSR. (In Vietnam/Iraq/etc. the US military obviously had a continuing presence for a long time, but it largely provided its own food and supplies, rather than depend on the local economy. Lots of money did leak into the local economies, but not in economically beneficial ways- read much of it was captured by graft.)

D) Humiliation: this is important point that is something of a combination of A and C- there was a complete and total defeat, with most of the country smashed down to rubble, which made the democratic history seem attractive, and a massive continuing US presence, which seems to have prevented Dolchstoss narratives and backsliding from taking hold. This seems incredibly unlikely for the fUSSR to me. Even at their lowest, they were an independent country with a massive nuclear arms cache and quite a bit of (well-justified) pride in, e.g. Yuri Gagarin, Sputnik, and Sergei Korolev.

Basically, this isn't about money: the US spent about as much on civil reconstruction (excluding military expenses) in Afghanistan alone, as it did on the entire Marshall Plan in all of Europe adjusted for inflation (using CPI-U, the most common gauge). So there has to be more than just money, and I'm skeptical that the US had significant power to make the former USSR outcomes better.

Certainly, any discussion of a successful fUSSR Marshall Plan would have to start with why the Baltics outcomes are so much better than Russia, and I don't have much of a story for that.

Ps I worked with a guy who was in Russia for IBM in those days and he said they needed armed guards and dummy trucks to deliver a Mainframe.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57615585-not-one-inch

"The largest recipient of Marshall Plan money was the United Kingdom (receiving about 26% of the total). The next highest contributions went to France (18%)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan

Moreover, Russia clearly did want and in fact received some economic aid under Yelstin.

It's interesting to think about nations as individual people with both innate and learned characteristics. The latter can override the former in some cases, but it usually takes a lot of effort and/or extreme circumstances.

A nation's innate characteristics wouldn't be gene based as would an individual though. It would stem from the circumstances of its beginning and its history that forms the ethos of a people and is passed down from generation to generation. In that way, it is gene like.

10% is "one in every ten"