Mikhail Gorbachev has died

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.

We are also dealing today with blowback from the perceived claim that "Not One Inch" [1] of NATO expansion to the East could be expected as Western policy. The Partnership for Peace program may have started off in the right direction, but, as the military hawks took policy control like good generals the only thing they actually cared about was "securing the nukes". And expanding NATO to the East.

Ps I worked with a guy who was in Russia for IBM in those days and he said they needed armed guards and dummy trucks to deliver a Mainframe.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57615585-not-one-inch

Ah the old "there's only two sovereign nations, USA and Russia, and everyone in between are just puppets" line of thought that seems so entrenched in the Russian Federation, presumably because the Soviets could not conceive the common people of any country wanting anything without being agitated through propaganda (after all, when you have near total control over the media, independent thought does seem like an aberration).

What people who complain about NATO expansion seem to forget is that the countries being "expanded into" still have living memory, within one generation, of Soviet tanks rolling through their streets to put down any attempts at independence in governance. There was Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland... the US didn't coërce these countries to join NATO, these countries were practically begging to be included.

Then the Russian Federation made the demand at the beginning of 2022 for NATO to remove its troops and equipment from Central/Eastern Europe as if they ruled over those nations. The gall to think to dictate the international military security policy for a population totalling twice the size of their own is astounding.