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As someone who remembers well the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, and lived in Russia for a period during the tumultuous 90s, it's really sad to m
by hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
As someone who remembers well the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, and lived in Russia for a period during the tumultuous 90s, it's really sad to me how the hope of that era (despite the fact that it could easily be argued that what happened in the 90s really set the stage for today's government in Russia) has devolved into the autocratic dystopia that is present day Russia (and China, for that matter).
Sometimes I can't decide if Gen X in the US was the luckiest or unluckiest generation. On one handed we got to spend our teens and 20s during the 90s, one of the most hopeful/optimistic periods in human history (fall of the Iron Curtain, US budget surpluses, rise of the Internet), but on the other hand we got to see it all reverse in a scant 20 years: liberal democracy teetering across the globe, climate change not being some far off thing but an immediate concern, unimaginable wealth inequality, the rise of technology as a force used to destroy our social fabric, and just generally feeling so many people be angry/scared/depressed all the time. Hopefully "this too shall pass".
Edit: since many people seem to be misunderstanding what I was saying: yes, I know Russia was a complete, corrupt shit show in the 90s - I saw it first hand, and it was really, really sad. What I meant is that there was a ton of hope by many people (at least the Russians I knew/lived with in Moscow) when communism first fell that they would be able to transition to a successful democracy. Much of the sadness was that potential never came to fruition.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mushbino 3y agoHope in Russia in the 90's? That's not what you're saying is it? Yeltsin staged a coup with the help of the US, leading to the largest drop in life expectancy in recorded history, and a never before seen rise in crime, and massive inequality with the rise of the oligarchs thanks to the Chicago School economists who implemented shock therapy.
- FreshStart 3y agoThe killing fields of that ideology had ripe harvests.. Insane that people can still revive all that, while other hate crime ideologies stay dead one disproven.
- logdap 3y ago[dead]
- kspacewalk2 3y agoIf shock therapy was actually implemented, we'd see results similar to Poland. Instead, the requirements were pushed out and Russia became a mafia state.
- pydry 3y ago640% inflation and -10% GDP growth? Yeah, it wasn't far off that.
- FreshStart 3y agoIt's never real ism. But we can have it once all the resistance dies?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- stefan_ 3y agoWho gives a fuck, it secured the freedom of 150M others and guess what, they went on to eclipse Russia. Crime, oligarchs, Putin - they made their choice.
- 0xDEF 3y ago>Yeltsin staged a coup with the help of the US A blatant lie that keeps getting repeated. Yeltsin hired some American campaigners and advertisers because he wanted a loud Western-style election campaign. It's funny how Yeltsin having American campaign/advertising advisers has been spun into claims that the US did a coup in Russia.
- saiya-jin 3y agoEverything is a coup,conspiracy or similar if things are not to your liking... but yeah dealing with official russian news you'll get significantly more truth if you simply negate everything they say, lie is official tool and all sides understand that. One thing west didn't properly grok - russia was never your friend. Never, ever. There was no period where this was true, not even in 90s, not when we talk about people on top. Paranoid suspicion and fear of losing power to steal and control entire country was too much for those in power. Especially since now you could actually steal last bolt and nut, unlike during communism where everything was state owned by definition and you competed only for power trip and some basic benefits on top of what many others had.
- mushbino 3y agoThis is just an anti-Russia rant with no historical substance. Can you tell us the last time the news in the US spoke critically of a foreign war at the time?
- fractallyte 3y agoThe parent poster's statement is accurate, with ample evidence apparent from the current war in Ukraine. The Kremlin lies, period. And a government composed of people who lie, backstab, and cheat each other and their population to this extent - again, with ample evidence from history since 1917 - is NEVER to be trusted, and ALWAYS an enemy.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wkat4242 3y agoDid the US really help Yeltsin? I thought Gorbachev was highly praised by the west.
- mushbino 3y agoWe did. Yeltsin was basically a US puppet, hence the shelling of the Duma. Gorbechav started down the road to collapse with help from the West.
- darthrupert 3y agohttps://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/06/26/russian-election-interference-meddling/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/06/26/russian-el... Well, kinda, but not in the way russian propaganda and delusions project. Clinton wantes to help Russia join the human civilization but Putin throwed all that to trash. And now Putin wants the human civilization to join barbarism, with the help of populist right.
- yieldcrv 3y agoOligarchs inspire me, its like so many random people in that society understood capitalism more than educated economists in the West The accounting gimmicks, the revenue streams, the segregated assets, I learn so much replaying what oligarchs did when the state had to divest of everything
- derriz 3y ago"The largest drop in life expectancy in recorded history"? Life expectancy dropped by 2.56 years between 1990 and 1999 in Russia. Not great but not even close to being historically significant. Life expectancy in the USA dropped by nearly 3 years in the space of 2 years between 2019 and 2021. More than the entire 1990s in Russia. Or if you want to see what an extreme drop in life expectancy looks like, it dropped by 16 years in between 1940 and 1945 in Germany.
- secondary_op 3y ago> autocratic dystopia that is present day Russia It is really funny when you read people experiences and memories from 90s extrapolated to modern 202x Russia. You do not know jack shit about modern Russia, and if you think you are(from 90s), you only fool yourself.
- kspacewalk2 3y agoThat doesn't make much sense, because in the 90s Russia was not the authoritarian dystopia it is now, so good how is one projecting experiences from the 90s by observing that obvious fact?
- dralley 3y agoIt should be noted that 90s Russia a bit of a dystopia for many, many other reasons, regardless of the temporary relaxation of authoritarianism in their government.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoAll your comments are blatant Russian propaganda, with vulgarities thrown in for good measure...
- secondary_op 3y agoWestern narratives are prevalent on this site. My arguments aim to question them, but labeling them as propaganda without providing substance or context is not constructive. It's an effective way to silence your opponent, unfortunately.
- mamonster 3y agoHope in Russia in the 90s: -Pay a policeman 250 bucks to bury the guy you killed and make up the paperwork -Oligarchs like Abramovich buying up privatization vouchers from poor grandmothers and factory workers who didn't know what a stock was and were starving. -Yeltsin being drunk 24/7 and fucking everything up. -Any big city being filled with gangs made up of disgruntled Afghan/Chechnya veterans. - The start of the massive HIV epidemic because all the healthcare and tracking went to shit (Russia has about 1-2% of the population that is HIV positive, which is 4-5x of most european countries).Also start of the turbo drug problems in Russia. 99% of the Russian population at the time did not understand what free markets/liberalism/democracy meant. Those that understood are now the guys you see on Forbes lists and in government.
- saiya-jin 3y agoThat's still a failure firmly within russia as a state. That its population was so utterly fucked up after 70 years of hardcore oppression, lacking any kind of critical thinking, self-sufficiency (tell me what to think and who to vote, I prefer drinking more vodka) is not a failure of west. The expectation that west would baby sit every single step this naive and messed up country would do is dangerously naive, since it wouldn't be possible for numerous reasons. Any direct help offered was promptly stolen without trace (we talk about billions to prevent bankruptcy of the state, IIRC something around 7 billions USD never to be seen again, and state went bankrupt of course).
- yhavr 3y agoNot 70 years, not oppression. Oppressed Ukraine had cossacks who even managed to make their own short-lived state in the middle ages. Oppressed Baltics joined EU after the USSR fell. The problem is, russian nation never had a (stable) democracy since the fall of Novgorod (~1500). It always quickly turned into an imperial autocracy where the russians were the titular nation who receives all the benefits.
- fractallyte 3y agoAgain (as elsewhere in this discussion) saiya-jin nails what Russia was, and is. Communist Russia - the 'glorious' Soviet Union - was the epitomy of oppression for seven decades. It created the stereotype for the idea of 'dystopia' that embedded itself in popular cultures around the world. That's a staggering achievement - built on human misery and lies. Don't belittle that. And only now, while the Russian Federation is burning itself up in Ukraine, is this truth trickling through into the Russian consciousness. If Russia can be comprehensively defeated (as it must be), I hope that the full truth utterly guts the population for generations to come, as it did with the descendants of Nazi Germany.
- lucubratory 3y ago"Hope of that era" is an unusual way to describe the largest single spike in deaths of despair in human history.
- 0xDEF 3y ago>the largest single spike in deaths of despair in human history 1990s Eastern Europe was bad but this is extreme revisionism and exaggeration. The despair and famines caused by Stalin, Hitler, Mao all caused far more deaths.
- lucubratory 3y ago"Deaths of despair" is a defined term that includes three causes of death: suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease. 1991 was the largest spike in deaths of despair in human history and the whataboutism and borderline Holocaust revisionism of implying Hitler's genocide was primarily drug overdoses, alcoholic liver disease, or suicide (!) is morally abhorrent. You could have just looked up a term you didn't understand rather than rushing to argue, and in the process arguing that Hitler's victims killed themselves.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shakow 3y ago> The despair and famines caused by Stalin, Hitler, Mao all caused far more deaths. That's true, but if you take the demographic residue, the fall of the USSR is the only time, safe for the worst year of the stalinist purges, to make it dive into the negatives : https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/burckina_faso/26952019/74305/74305_original.jpg https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/burckina_faso/26952019/74305... It's hard to visualize how big of an impact it had on Russian society as a whole.
- yhavr 3y ago> during the 90s > one of the most hopeful/optimistic periods in human history I first thought that you were American, but then I read more carefully > and lived in Russia Sorry, but how can you combine "90s" and "optimistic" if you witnessed it by yourself? For post-soviet people it was a nightmare, it was a total collapse of their world, with oligarchy, banditry, miserable salaries (or no salaries at all). I was a kid during that time, but I'm pretty sure nobody was giving a flying duck about US budged surpluses, and people wasn't able to admire the rise of internet, because they got it only in 00s.
- nine_k 3y agoWhy, the 1990s were the time when Communism finally fell, and something closely resembling a Western system (if you squint just right) was being built. Also, times of tumult like the 1990s are always times of opportunity for those who has the energy and connections. Huge businesses have been built in Russia during 1990s, and many of them were built honestly, so to say, not by plundering some Soviet-era resources. Some obvious examples familiar for the IT crowd would be Yandex, Kaspersky, ABBYY.
- yhavr 3y agoThe system wasn't even close to the Western one. On the opposite, it was raise of lawlessness and crime. Yes, people had connections, connections with mafia. Either for paying racket, or even participating in their business. It was extremely hard to be a fair player (western style) that time.
- nine_k 3y agoBut look! A parliament, with actual-looking elections! Actual-looking (though of course rigged) presidential elections! Free to open your own business! (Well, subject to dealing with mafia and corrupt police.) The influx of the Western merchandise, and of the Western media! And the Communist rule most obviously gone! It was quite different from Soviet times, different enough to keep an illusion of things going in the right general direction in a sufficient number of people, especially in large cities, despite impoverishment and wars. The powers that were pushed the idea that it's either these transient problems, or the Communist rule back! (Which was ironic since many of them used to be high-ranking Communist leaders.) After that, the mafia and KGB have completely overtaken the dominant heights, including the president office, so they strangled non-systemic local corruption. Oil prices also helped. The economy was growing. Some time in 2005, life in Russia might look genuinely attractive, if you happened to live in Moscow. Much like life in Shanghai might look fantastic, rich and free in 2005, too, compared to the times of the Great Leap. But the authoritarianism bomb kept ticking.
- jacquesm 3y agoYes, indeed. Assholes continue to have a disproportionately large effect on the course of history, and yet, we seem to be unable to create methods of governance that do not select for assholism.