Sorry, did not see you responded, responding late. >Gorbachev's devolution worked about 15 times better than Mountbatten's. Oh, I'm not arguing about that. I

Sorry, did not see you responded, responding late. >Gorbachev's devolution worked about 15 times better than Mountbatten's. Oh, I'm not arguing about that. I was making more of an objective case, sorry if it wasn't clear, I think the British decolonialization was handled horribly. But Gorbachev already had the benefit of hindsight and he was kind of the initiator of a whole lot of it, whereas Mounbatten was basically handed a hot potato by Atlee(and here Churchill escapes criticism even though some of his behavior throughout his carrier made the Labor rapid decolonization inevitable). >US and USSR would have converged on something closer to a western european social democratic model There is a very interesting book kind of related to this, The Affirmative Action Empire by Terry Martin. A lot of parallels between the US and USSR in terms of what actually happened. >current Tsar might lack for Cossacks without Chechens? The unfortunate reality of the Ukraine War seems to be(according to Russians I keep in contact with) that the Varangian Guard/Swiss Mercenary thesis for Chechens, which was sold and shilled by pro-Putin mouthpieces for the last 20 years as part of the reconciliation, is completely destroyed for the ordinary russian. Akhmat and all other "commandos" are viewed as tiktokers by the majority of russians, it seems. There will be a lot of ethnic tension due to that, I think. >I'd say that the USSR owed its existence to the German Empire and the British Empire The classic Russian historiographical view(i.e most Russian historians) is that some sort of civil war was basically inevitable in some capacity after the loss in the Russo-Japanese War(and the absolutely horrible way it was conducted), but it could've maybe ended up in a highly depowered monarchic system without WW1, instead of outright communism. >Did Yeltsin really get handed a bad situation, or did he grab one? Yeltsin did grab it with both his hands, the comment was more about how pathetic Gorbachev's behavior was during that time. As soon as he left office he basically set up shop doing historical revisionism with the Gorbachev foundation about how "actually here is why perestroika was awesome" whilst everything went to shit around him(on the basis largely of his own policies and his dilapidation of the Soviet state).