Mikhail Gorbachev has died

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.