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Mikhail Gorbachev has died

(www.reuters.com)
970 points homarp | 4 comments | 30 Aug 22 20:37 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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bediger4000 ◴[30 Aug 22 20:56 UTC] No.32654941[source]▶
I was taught that Ronald Reagan ended the cold war and gave us the longest lasting economic boom.
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flavius29663 ◴[30 Aug 22 21:00 UTC] No.32654999[source]▶
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.
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woodruffw ◴[30 Aug 22 21:11 UTC] No.32655121[source]▶
There's a disconnect here: the US policy in question took place over decades, not the 8 years that Reagan was president.
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avmich ◴[30 Aug 22 21:15 UTC] No.32655185{3}[source]▶
It's easy to argue that it's USSR people, not Western, who benefited most from the end of the Cold War.
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romwell ◴[30 Aug 22 21:26 UTC] No.32655334{4}[source]▶
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.

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1. nradov ◴[30 Aug 22 22:18 UTC] No.32655880{5}[source]▶
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.
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2. romwell ◴[31 Aug 22 03:01 UTC] No.32657891[source]▶
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.

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3. nradov ◴[31 Aug 22 04:39 UTC] No.32658427[source]▶
Well so what? It's not like there was a better alternative at the time.
4. avmich ◴[31 Aug 22 05:54 UTC] No.32658862[source]▶
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.