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Mikhail Gorbachev has died

(www.reuters.com)
970 points homarp | 12 comments | | HN request time: 1.188s | source | bottom
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lapcat ◴[] No.32655071[source]
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. This was a huge mistake, and we see the consequences now, with Russia having turned back toward totalitarianism and imperialism. Sadly, it seems that Gorbachev's efforts were mostly for naught. But it was courageous at the time to open up the Soviet Union to glasnost and perestroika.

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

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paganel ◴[] No.32655805[source]
> There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War l

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.

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bhupy ◴[] No.32656096[source]
The transition to a market economy went very well for most of the former Soviet Republics except Russia.

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.

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1. insane_dreamer ◴[] No.32656514[source]
Yeltsin is very much to blame. Russia would have transitioned much better if Gorbachev had been the head of the post-USSR Russia instead of Yeltsin.

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.

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2. starik36 ◴[] No.32656784[source]
> much better if Gorbachev had been the head of the post-USSR Russia

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.

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3. groby_b ◴[] No.32656858[source]
You're aware that the "much better" transition of the GDR was still a giant disaster, yes?(https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15487733.2020.1...)

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)

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4. insane_dreamer ◴[] No.32656892[source]
He wanted to keep the USSR intact but also understood that was no longer an option. I'm sure he would have accepted to be PM of Russia but he was considered part of the "communist regime" and wasn't the one standing on the tanks (lets ignore the fact that Yeltin was also part of the communist regime), so that didn't happen.
5. nradov ◴[] No.32657208[source]
The data doesn't support your point about inequality. The other former Communist eastern European countries generally don't have particularly high Gini index values. Other countries have much more income inequality.

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

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6. nsajko ◴[] No.32657308[source]
Correction: Poland and Czechoslovakia weren't Soviet Republics, and Slovenia (Yugoslavia) wasn't even in the USSR sphere of influence.
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7. jlbbellefeuille ◴[] No.32657764[source]
USSR Sphere of Influence > Yugoslavia > Slovenia < Yugoslavia < USA

(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!

8. gumby ◴[] No.32658175[source]
> Gorbachev wanted to keep USSR intact.

Indeed. He didn't weigh in on the current debacle but he praised Putin's seizure of Crimea.

He was a product of his upbringing and honestly he always seemed like a weak player to me -- but really I have no idea how difficult it might have been to bring off the reforms he did under Andropov, Chernenko and then his own premiership.

9. fsckboy ◴[] No.32658564[source]
pointing out problems that places have after they've experienced 45-70 years of domination by Soviet style authoritarian regimes (and before which they were neither democracies on a shining hill) is not at all making a case that the post soviet transitions were flawed, just that they were not miraculous.

to be convincing you have to point out things that the transitioners could have done that would have worked better, but even the best experts in the world did not know any better than what was tried, so that's going to be a tough case to make.

10. insane_dreamer ◴[] No.32664408[source]
Yes, of course, I was thinking East Bloc and wrote Soviet Republics instead.
11. insane_dreamer ◴[] No.32664412[source]
Correction: "East Bloc", not "Soviet Republics"
12. insane_dreamer ◴[] No.32664426[source]
I wasn't saying that they have high inequality, just that GDP/Capita isn't necessarily a good measure of prosperity