Mikhail Gorbachev has died

I was taught that Ronald Reagan ended the cold war and gave us the longest lasting economic boom.

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.

There's a disconnect here: the US policy in question took place over decades, not the 8 years that Reagan was president.

It's easy to argue that it's USSR people, not Western, who benefited most from the end of the Cold War.

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.

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.

> 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.