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It doesn't matter what I feel, personally I'm just as against American economic imperialism as most people who see how evil it is. However, you previously said

It doesn't matter what I feel, personally I'm just as against American economic imperialism as most people who see how evil it is. However, you previously said it was against the will of millions, while the opposite was true: the millions marched against communism. Millions went on the streets against the old system, and same gave their life. Does anyone want the return of communist Russia? Based on the polls, not really. Even the radical left would never suggest such a thing. > Unless your will is to further American interests, RFE was against your will. No more, no less. I'm sorry, to me it's look like a semantic error. Maybe you meant "against your interests"? Because the term "will" has a precise meaning - if I want something, this is my will. In order to have a fruitful discussion, it is necessary to adhere to the generally accepted meaning of terms, otherwise everything becomes moot.

sudosysgen 5y ago
You're setting up a false dichotomy. The choose was between Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Between the two, the majority preferred Gorbachev. Compared to the people killed by Yeltsin economic tyranny, the people that died in the collapse were a rousing error. Even nowadays, if you poll those who were adults during the fall of the USSR, the majority would have preferred it not to fall. The will of RFE is to further American dominance. If that's what you want, it follows it, otherwise it doesn't.
- dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
  OK, I see where the difference comes from. What happened in the Eastern block is very different from the events in Russia. In the bloc, most people were anti-communist to the core, and the anti-Russian sentiment was very vivid, because they were the occupants. In the end people were marching shouting "Ivan go home". These things obviously couldn't happen in Russia. In the bloc, it was double liberation: from communism and from Russian influence. In the end some people got rich, some got poor, but for the first time we saw the middle class, people who were able to spend a bit more than they earn. Also the value of freedom is something you can't appreciate unless it's taken from you. In Russia, things were vastly different. What happened in the 90s is very often compared to treason. People, normal people were left to themselves; the state was unable (or unwilling) to deal with poverty and rising crime. Not just ordinary crime but organized on an enormous scale. The satellite countries drifted off. Now Putin is feeding on the longing of some for the imperial past. I'm sorry to say that the Russian people have had very bad luck with their leaders over centuries. Sure, this happened in other countries too, and the French Revolution shows clearly how the poor masses felt about their rulers. The Russian Revolution did the same, albeit later, also killing a lot more folks on the way. When Stalin rose to power, the terror was even worse. You'd think that after Stalin's death people will finally start living in a relaxed way, but the communist system was still suffocating people, in this way or another. The Gorbachev/Yeltsin moment was a great chance to finally break this bad chain and have a truly free country. Russian people are wonderful, they also have many extremely smart personalities, some of them completely unknown in the West, some - like Grigori Perelman - known only in a small part and only because living in our times. I believe that through common effort Russians could construct an excellent form of government bringing benefit to everyone. But of course, with the current oligarchy system, it's way too late.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    There is a lot more to the eastern block than countries that successfully westernized. What I'm describing isn't just Russia, it's also the reality in places like Bulgaria, where massive looting of capital led to deaths and economic destruction, which was then exploited by foreign countries. Same goes for Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and pretty much every country that was in the USSR. Rather, the countries that transitioned without leading to some kind of oligarchy and looting are the small minority. The majority of countries ended up like Russia. Yeltsin did not break the chain. The oligarchy is every bit as oppressive as the Soviet system and in many ways even worse. The only hope for the chain to be broken for the majority of the USSR was to follow through with Gorbachev instead of giving in to the corruption. Putin isn't living off a desire for an imperial past. Putin lives off the oligarchs he is in a symbiotic relationship with. The main reason people support him is because he made the degeneracy of the Yeltsin days better, and in fact Putin is a better leader than Yeltsin, which is an extremely low bar. The imperial ideation is a pure creation of Putin himself, he did not use it to climb to power. If we want to look empirically we can simply see the results of the referendum on the dissolution of the USSR. If we take the republics that had a low turnout, to be against, we still find that the vast majority were against the dissolution of the USSR. Therefore we can confidently say that the events of the 1990s were not any kind of realization of the popular will, and indeed they were against the interests and wishes of the vast majority of the people. Instead they were the doing of corrupt party officials and that caused privatization, privately profiting from it and many becoming oligarchs.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
      OK, I see your point. Then again, we can't do A/B testing on history. It's very hard to say "what if" (the USSR didn't fall apart). Knowing the history of Russia, it's not hard to imagine someone much worse than Putin could appear. Also, almost all republics had surprisingly high turnout in the referendum - Nakhchivan and Checheno-Ingushetia aside, all the rest had the turnout of at leas 2/3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum

sudosysgen 5y ago

You're setting up a false dichotomy. The choose was between Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Between the two, the majority preferred Gorbachev. Compared to the people killed by Yeltsin economic tyranny, the people that died in the collapse were a rousing error. Even nowadays, if you poll those who were adults during the fall of the USSR, the majority would have preferred it not to fall. The will of RFE is to further American dominance. If that's what you want, it follows it, otherwise it doesn't.

dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
OK, I see where the difference comes from. What happened in the Eastern block is very different from the events in Russia. In the bloc, most people were anti-communist to the core, and the anti-Russian sentiment was very vivid, because they were the occupants. In the end people were marching shouting "Ivan go home". These things obviously couldn't happen in Russia. In the bloc, it was double liberation: from communism and from Russian influence. In the end some people got rich, some got poor, but for the first time we saw the middle class, people who were able to spend a bit more than they earn. Also the value of freedom is something you can't appreciate unless it's taken from you. In Russia, things were vastly different. What happened in the 90s is very often compared to treason. People, normal people were left to themselves; the state was unable (or unwilling) to deal with poverty and rising crime. Not just ordinary crime but organized on an enormous scale. The satellite countries drifted off. Now Putin is feeding on the longing of some for the imperial past. I'm sorry to say that the Russian people have had very bad luck with their leaders over centuries. Sure, this happened in other countries too, and the French Revolution shows clearly how the poor masses felt about their rulers. The Russian Revolution did the same, albeit later, also killing a lot more folks on the way. When Stalin rose to power, the terror was even worse. You'd think that after Stalin's death people will finally start living in a relaxed way, but the communist system was still suffocating people, in this way or another. The Gorbachev/Yeltsin moment was a great chance to finally break this bad chain and have a truly free country. Russian people are wonderful, they also have many extremely smart personalities, some of them completely unknown in the West, some - like Grigori Perelman - known only in a small part and only because living in our times. I believe that through common effort Russians could construct an excellent form of government bringing benefit to everyone. But of course, with the current oligarchy system, it's way too late.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  There is a lot more to the eastern block than countries that successfully westernized. What I'm describing isn't just Russia, it's also the reality in places like Bulgaria, where massive looting of capital led to deaths and economic destruction, which was then exploited by foreign countries. Same goes for Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and pretty much every country that was in the USSR. Rather, the countries that transitioned without leading to some kind of oligarchy and looting are the small minority. The majority of countries ended up like Russia. Yeltsin did not break the chain. The oligarchy is every bit as oppressive as the Soviet system and in many ways even worse. The only hope for the chain to be broken for the majority of the USSR was to follow through with Gorbachev instead of giving in to the corruption. Putin isn't living off a desire for an imperial past. Putin lives off the oligarchs he is in a symbiotic relationship with. The main reason people support him is because he made the degeneracy of the Yeltsin days better, and in fact Putin is a better leader than Yeltsin, which is an extremely low bar. The imperial ideation is a pure creation of Putin himself, he did not use it to climb to power. If we want to look empirically we can simply see the results of the referendum on the dissolution of the USSR. If we take the republics that had a low turnout, to be against, we still find that the vast majority were against the dissolution of the USSR. Therefore we can confidently say that the events of the 1990s were not any kind of realization of the popular will, and indeed they were against the interests and wishes of the vast majority of the people. Instead they were the doing of corrupt party officials and that caused privatization, privately profiting from it and many becoming oligarchs.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
    OK, I see your point. Then again, we can't do A/B testing on history. It's very hard to say "what if" (the USSR didn't fall apart). Knowing the history of Russia, it's not hard to imagine someone much worse than Putin could appear. Also, almost all republics had surprisingly high turnout in the referendum - Nakhchivan and Checheno-Ingushetia aside, all the rest had the turnout of at leas 2/3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum