fresh_42 said:
I do not speculate. I quoted the Ukrainian ambassador
I did not mean that in the usual context just meant to say that at this point it's he said she said.
russ_watters said:
I don't mean to minimize the people in the Soviet Union who ultimately made/were the collapse. The most difficult and important part of a revolution is the revolution. But this all happened as soon as Gorbachev loosened the USSR's grip (Glasnost and Perestroika were adopted in 1986). He loosened his grip because of the economic problems associated with communism and in particular the USSR's relationship with the West/US. The cold war related economic problems were the fertile ground, and the loosening of the restrictions was the seeds. In his words, when he stepped down:
"We’re now living in a new world. An end has been put to the Cold War and to the arms race, as well as to the mad militarization of the country, which has crippled our economy, public attitudes and morals."
https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/fall-of-soviet-union
Yes true but it's in fact a much slower and longer process, somewhat like a cancer, those changes took about 2 decades to come, with slow pivots here and there. I can understand Gorbachev somewhat taking the victory of defeating communism onto himself and the Americans feeling like they were the ones pulling the strings but in all honesty it was just the system itself, it was like a bomb it had to go off at some point, either with WW3 like back in the Cuban missile crisis or with slow agonizing economic change that eventually pitted the hardline "bolsheviks" aka the "old guard" VS the newer more rational people.
This is I think why China survived, they saw the "writing on the wall" and understood that you cannot simply murder millions and pile them up in a gulag like both had done before, so they did what is known to work - they gave people more money through accepting capitalism to an extent.
Truth be told if you asked someone here or outside in say 1987 whether the USSR will break apart in an almost miraculously peaceful way just 4 years on, people would tell you you are nuts, even experts did not believe this, apart from some who advocated such position long ago.
Here is an interesting summary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_of_the_collapse_of_the_Soviet_Union
Large empires especially ones that are ethnically diverse (arguably all of them) are very tough from an outside attack perspective but very fragile from within, in terms of socioeconomic factors, it's like thick glass with internal stresses, you might not brake it with a bullet but release that stress and it will shatter.
USSR had a major stress factor and that was the stubborn ideology to try to make everybody equal with planned economy. China went smarter and somewhat minimized this stress factor by allowing huge capital to flow in and kind of "disrespecting" the old Mao Zedong and his Karl Marx textbook on economy.
In a symposium launched to review
Michel Garder's French book:
L'Agonie du Regime en Russie Sovietique (
The Death Struggle of the Regime in Soviet Russia), which also predicted the collapse of the USSR,
Yale Professor Frederick C. Barghoorn dismissed Garder's book as "the latest in a long line of apocalyptic predictions of the collapse of communism." He warns that "great revolutions are most infrequent and that successful
political systems are tenacious and adaptive." In addition, the reviewer of the book, Michael Tatu, disapproved of the "apocalyptic character" of such a forecast and is almost apologetic for treating it seriously
Now looking back one could say he was partly right, some of those systems are adaptive some are not, the USSR did not adapt, China did, Putin is now doing the same , question is how much can he adapt and still keep his way before he unleashes some deadly inside forces that will tear him apart.
Putin's personal villa , one of many, more like a palace, was placed on youtube some time ago by some Russian activists. It's not like Russians are that easy with someone stealing from them, it's just a question of how much one has to anger and how large of a crowd before the pendulum swings.Ironically enough US faces some of the same inner stability problems but for different reasons, it seems to me US could be the first major empire/country in history to risk stability/existential issues for reasons that are effectively "minority issues" aka issues that concern a small minority of population but get amplified with time within a larger population group.
My personal opinion is that this fact just goes to show how well off on average the US people have been for the past say 50 years (living standard, freedom etc all things considered) as compared to the rest of the world with maybe few exceptions like Switzerland or Norway, but those are totally different cases, small homogeneous societies.
Because minority issues only become a "thing" in big countries if the majority of the population has enough free time on their hands to actually care about all those issues VS being hard at work to fight for their own matters.
Anyway pardon for my not entirely on topic post, I hope someone finds it interesting.
