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Every male adult had to serve 2 years in the military in the Eastern Bloc. Yet those regimes were pretty stable.
by nequo 2y ago
Every male adult had to serve 2 years in the military in the Eastern Bloc. Yet those regimes were pretty stable.
- sneed_chucker 2y agoNot that I believe that conscription causes revolution, but if by "The Eastern Block" you mean the Warsaw Pact countries in Central and Eastern Europe, those regimes lasted about 40 years before being overthrown by revolution... Not exactly what I would call "pretty stable"
- nequo 2y ago40 years is a really long time. For a lot of us, that covers the remainder of our lives.
- dragonwriter 2y agoA regime with a lifespan such that people entering young adulthood when it is founded also watch it fall has not lasted a really long time.
- sneed_chucker 2y ago40 years is not a "really long time" when talking about how long a system of government should survive. It's well under a lifetime, and is around the number of years people in the US expect to work before retirement. Taking just the GDR for example, statistically anyone who was born around the years of its founding went on to outlive that government by another 20-25 years. You can't really call a government stable if basically everyone born into it is expected to outlive it. https://database.earth/population/germany/life-expectancy#:~:text=Historic%20Life%20Expectancy%20in%20Germany,years%20of%20life%2C%20on%20average https://database.earth/population/germany/life-expectancy#:~.... And independently of the question of whether or not 40 years is a "long time", the fact also remains that Warsaw Pact Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia had large scale uprisings in the 1950s and 1960s which were violently put down by the Soviet military. Ergo, the East Bloc was not a stable system.
- hollerith 2y agoThose regimes lasted only 45 years -- and the leader (Ceaușescu) of one was executed along with his wife.