I was taught that Ronald Reagan ended the cold war and gave us the longest lasting economic boom.
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(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.)
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
>The way in which the USSR dissolved itself is why we have a war in Ukraine now.
Agree.
Here in Lithuania we narrowly avoided a similar issue as well with an attempt to establish an „autonomous republic“ in early 90s.