Mikhail Gorbachev has died

To anyone interested in this topic, I highly recommend "Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union" by Vladislav M. Zubok. This comment reminded me of one of my notes:

Near the end of the book, George HW Bush tries to convince the US government to provide economic aid to stabilize the fledgeling Russian state but this fails. Earlier in the book there is talk of a "Grand Bargain", a theory that for $100 billion the US could convert the USSR from an enemy into a friend similar to how the Marshall Plan and Berlin Airlift converted the Germans into close US allies. Japan is another example of this. After WW2, instead of razing Japan and Germany as Rome did to Carthage, the US raised them from their knees. It helped rebuild and rehabilitate these countries.

There was no Marshall Plan for Russia. Many of the Russian politicians and economists expected significant economic aid from the West. This aid did not materialize, at least not in the form and magnitude that was expected. The transition from state socialism to capitalist market economy was traumatic; during the USSR the poverty rate was 30%, after the collapse the poverty rate was 80%. The average lifespan of a Russian man was 66 during the USSR, after the collapse it was around 55.

The loss of super power status, of territory, and of economic strength created significant political backlash in the years following the collapse. These conditions promoted nationalism, populism, and authoritarianism which Putin used to seize control. Russia does not have a cultural history of democracy so maybe this was inevitable, but perhaps greater Western support would have avoided it?

I see this claim pop up pretty frequently but I think it ignores a rather important factor and that was that those countries suffered complete defeat at the hands of the US, that meant the US could impose any ideology they wished on the country. This was never the case with Russia. Now for sure, the USSR ended its life as a failed economic state, and the Russian Federation that emerged may have been willing to accept any economic ideology imposed on it... but capitalism needs more than this to work.

For example it needs the firm rule of law to be established, yet it is not clear there's anything the US could have done to prevent the divvying up of state resources amongst clever individuals who appropriated vast wealth, through usually dishonest means, becoming today's oligarchs. Nor could the US do anything to eliminate the Russian pride that remained in their former empire, which placed fairly unique pressures on Russia's leaders ("we may be poor but at least everyone else is afraid of us" was not as much of a fringe attitude among the common people as one might think).

So I don't think the conditions were at all similar between Germany and Japan on the one hand, and the Russian Federation on the other, and I don't think any kind of Marshal plan could have ever worked without these missing conditions.

After all, for decades we thought of China that if we just made them all rich, they'd all see the benefits of Western democracy and become more like us ideologically. So the West encouraged open trade with China and... the end result was a country which now had the resources to reäffirm their state ideology. Today we see a China pushing to strengthen the Maoist values it was founded on, rather than dismantling them.

Unfortunately, without utter national humiliation that completely breaks the people's belief in their former state ideology, I just don't think ideological transformation in any kind of short period of time is possible.

You may be right that "unconditional surrender" and occupation are prerequisites for the sort of transformation that Germany and Japan underwent. But the collapse of empire as experienced by Russia vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact may have been sufficiently traumatic that such a transformation could have been triggered.

The tragedy of not having a "Marshall Plan" for the former communist bloc is that we will never know if it would have worked. There was no guarantee, but at this point, to me it seems like a terrible lost opportunity.

But perhaps, as China's dominance becomes increasingly uncomfortable for Russia, things in time may change. A reformed Russia integrated into the "western" alliance... one can still dream, however faintly.

The EU didn't have to conquer the Eastern Europe to enforce lots of its legislation (as well as support programs) on its new member states. And compared to other post-Soviet states, the EU members are doing pretty well. So I think there is a counterexample in your claim that you need to conquer. It was a failure of neoliberalism.

Your thesis assume that Eastern European countries were fully on board with Soviet ideology until the fall of the Soviet union. In fact, most of the Eastern European nations had been forced into the Soviet sphere of influence against their people's will. Multiple popular protests that were brutally crushed by Soviet aligned militaries suggests the discontentment never went away. So I don't think the ideology in those Eastern European states needed to shift significantly after that fall of the USSR. The EU didn't need to conquer Eastern Europe because their people wanted to align themselves with Western Europe all along.