6 ms·

The collapse of the Soviet Union as it was was inevitable. Gorbachev recognized it and tried to do something about it. Given the gargantuan challenge, Gorbachev

The collapse of the Soviet Union as it was was inevitable. Gorbachev recognized it and tried to do something about it. Given the gargantuan challenge, Gorbachev's odds of success were not great to begin with. At least he was wise enough to shepherd its demise peacefully. In any case, the world without the Soviet Union is undoubtedly a better place.

tehjoker 2y ago
[flagged]
- krapht 2y ago
  It's really easy when you can talk to living people today who experienced the ussr in the 80s and compare to the average Western experience at the same time.
  - tehjoker 2y ago
    tell me more about the western experience in mississippi or a burned out husk of a town outside of an urban center. the west isn't just what's on TV shows and the rich area of new york city
    - simion314 2y ago
      >tell me more about the western experience in mississippi or a burned out husk of a town outside of an urban center. the west isn't just what's on TV shows and the rich area of new york city Answer this if you know so well how bad Mississippi had it 1 Do people there have food in stores? Because in communist times you might have money but could not buy food since the shelves were empty and there were rations. 2 Do neighbors there rat you out to the authorities if they did not like you with accusations like "my neighbor listens to illegal radio post" so you would get beaten and then send to gulag without any evidence? 3 were the border closed so people do not leave the state/country ? (do you wonder why if communist countries were a paradise there was a need to close the borders and shoot the people that try to ecape the paradise? and why so many wanted to escape ?
    - dh2022 2y ago
      I lived in Romania in the 80s. I also visited Huntington, WV. At that time it was one of the poorest cities in the US. Believe me: quality of life in Huntington was in order of magnitude better than Romania in the 80s. I visited the most happening place in Huntington: an all you can eat buffet. Poor people in America eat all sorts of food from all over the world. In the 80s Romania we ate chicken feet (tacimuri) or pigs feet (adidasi). Poor people in America have electricity and heating. In 80s Romania we had neither.
- bad_user 2y ago
  I'm from Romania, and IMO the comparisons with the US make no sense, as the actual comparison should be what happened to the countries in the Warsaw Pact before and after USSR's collapse. Well, those that entered the EU are now far better off by all the metrics that count, and you can take your pick from GDP, income or life expectancy. This didn't happen for all the countries under USSR, depending on whether they stayed within Russia's influence. Obviously, when you have Russia invading a country or threatening to invade, that country won't do well. But even in countries left out of the EU, such as the Republic of Moldova, you can see progress and a strong opposition to regional Russian influence. And Russia does what Russia always did. But it's pretty telling that Eastern European countries like Poland or Romania now have a higher GDP per capita than Russia, lower poverty and higher quality of life included. In defense of the US, I will say that the Marshall Plan has rebuilt Western Europe after WW2, while USSR's response, the Molotov Plan, was designed for extracting resources. And that Pax Americana did the West, at least, a lot of good is an understatement. ALAS, it appears that world is ending, helped in no small part by the changing views of western citizens, “informed” by the Internet, and guess what will happen next. Anyway, it's baffling to me to see such a changing tide in opinions on HN, now that the US administration has changed. I mean, I've seen stupid opinions denying reality on HN before, but now it's on a whole new level. I get it, we had cancel culture and all that, but such opinions don't change overnight, so I'm amazed at how many uneducated cowards the world has, even on HN.
  - mlinhares 2y ago
    I think the main difference is that if you were a US friend in Europe or Asia it would be an improvement, if you were so in Latin America or Africa it would be pretty bad.
    - simion314 2y ago
      >I think the main difference is that if you were a US friend in Europe or Asia it would be an improvement, if you were so in Latin America or Africa it would be pretty bad. Romania was a neighbor of USSR and was part of the Europe that was under USSR domination, so countries that were not neighbors with USSR like India might cry about USSR death while all ex-USSR countries are still in danger from Ruzzia's imperialist dreams. OP is right, you can be very objective here because you can observe countries that look West and enter EU and NATO and countries that looked East, the former are better economically the later a poor, corrupt, and with territories occupied by Ruzzia. And if you really want to study this area of the world try to see the puzzeling Ruzzian mind, where they pretend USSR was the best democracy in history and they pretend that there is ZERO motives the exUSSR countries hate imperialist Ruzzia.
- arp242 2y ago
  You're seriously bringing on Afghanistan as an example here? Because the Soviet Union has completely clean hands here...? And no, the United States is not perfect. No country with that amount of power is. But for all its flaws, it's vastly better than the Soviet Union ever was, but for the people living there and internationally. This is the old "the United States is horrible and has done terrible thing, so let's for a country that ... has done even worse and is completely unrepentant about it". Like, wut?
  - tehjoker 2y ago
    My point was that the US went on and on with operation cyclone as it tried to turn Afghanistan into the Soviet Union's Vietnam and then did it to ourselves a few decades later. Incredible self-own.
    - pqtyw 2y ago
      Unlike the Soviets US didn't try to impose a "colonial" style administration in Afghanistan. They had no long-term plan and the local Afghan government they were propping up was exceptionally corrupt and incompetent. Militarily US didn't much better than the Soviets and could've won relatively easily if they used similar methods and comparable goals.
- rat87 2y ago
  Are you saying the world isn't better for the collapse of the soviet union?
  - tehjoker 2y ago
    that's right. its fall was a world historic tragedy that unleashed the worst instincts of the capitalist class.
    - simion314 2y ago
      >that's right. its fall was a world historic tragedy that unleashed the worst instincts of the capitalist class. I though USSR already genocided the capitalists, anyway I don't think today Ruzzia killed more people and more Russians then USSR , so is better for the world and maybe worse for some regions in Ruzzia and worse for the Zeds ego.
    - pqtyw 2y ago
      That's really funny.
UncleOxidant 2y ago
> In any case, the world without the Soviet Union is undoubtedly a better place. Is it, though? Putin's Russia is no better than the Soviet Union - in some ways worse. It's essentially a mafia state run by one thug. One could imagine a different scenario where Gorbachev would have been able to land the plane in a bit more of a controlled fashion and stayed around to transition to something that would look more like a European democracy - but of course, things got way too chaotic for him to stay on.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  Imagine if the US hadn't gone in and come up with 'voucher privatization' which essentially created the oligarchs (and which in my mind seems to have been designed so that investment groups could take over but the mechanism got co-opted by the oligarchs).
  - Muromec 2y ago
    That happened in all other countries too. Ukraine had oligarchs, Chezchia and Romania have them. Its just russian oligarchs got hold on infinite money glitch which is oil production and the country overcorrected by going full dictatorship
- euroderf 2y ago
  > in a bit more of a controlled fashion The guiding intellectual principle in the US at the time w.r.t. the economy of the ex-USSR was "You can't cross a canyon in two leaps". This was what passed for intelligent thought.
- darthrupert 2y ago
  For those who lived in the occupied areas like Poland, it certainly is.
- Muromec 2y ago
  It transitioned into a demicracy a-okay, the problem was -- russians never had any kind of democracy and it quickly descended into oligarchy, from which they overcorrected to dictatorship quite willingly. Every other ussr and soviet-aligned country got it going somehow.
fuzzfactor 2y ago
Gorbachev said that one of the things that shocked and demoralized him was when he visited Houston and took a trip to one of the typical supermarkets, a locally owned one not part of any nationwide chain or anything. When he saw that average Americans were enjoying consumer choices well beyond anything the highest echelons in the USSR could attain, he was never quite the same after that.
- throw-the-towel 2y ago
  Are you sure that was Gorbachev and not Yeltsin? There's even a famous photo of the latter at an American store.
- ido 2y ago
  I believe you are thinking about Yeltsin (unless both visited a Texas supermarket and were surprised to discover how well stocked it was). https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/trending/article/food-town-radnalls-boris-yeltsin-20030224.php https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/trending...

tehjoker 2y ago

[flagged]

krapht 2y ago
It's really easy when you can talk to living people today who experienced the ussr in the 80s and compare to the average Western experience at the same time.
- tehjoker 2y ago
  tell me more about the western experience in mississippi or a burned out husk of a town outside of an urban center. the west isn't just what's on TV shows and the rich area of new york city
  - simion314 2y ago
    >tell me more about the western experience in mississippi or a burned out husk of a town outside of an urban center. the west isn't just what's on TV shows and the rich area of new york city Answer this if you know so well how bad Mississippi had it 1 Do people there have food in stores? Because in communist times you might have money but could not buy food since the shelves were empty and there were rations. 2 Do neighbors there rat you out to the authorities if they did not like you with accusations like "my neighbor listens to illegal radio post" so you would get beaten and then send to gulag without any evidence? 3 were the border closed so people do not leave the state/country ? (do you wonder why if communist countries were a paradise there was a need to close the borders and shoot the people that try to ecape the paradise? and why so many wanted to escape ?
  - dh2022 2y ago
    I lived in Romania in the 80s. I also visited Huntington, WV. At that time it was one of the poorest cities in the US. Believe me: quality of life in Huntington was in order of magnitude better than Romania in the 80s. I visited the most happening place in Huntington: an all you can eat buffet. Poor people in America eat all sorts of food from all over the world. In the 80s Romania we ate chicken feet (tacimuri) or pigs feet (adidasi). Poor people in America have electricity and heating. In 80s Romania we had neither.
bad_user 2y ago
I'm from Romania, and IMO the comparisons with the US make no sense, as the actual comparison should be what happened to the countries in the Warsaw Pact before and after USSR's collapse. Well, those that entered the EU are now far better off by all the metrics that count, and you can take your pick from GDP, income or life expectancy. This didn't happen for all the countries under USSR, depending on whether they stayed within Russia's influence. Obviously, when you have Russia invading a country or threatening to invade, that country won't do well. But even in countries left out of the EU, such as the Republic of Moldova, you can see progress and a strong opposition to regional Russian influence. And Russia does what Russia always did. But it's pretty telling that Eastern European countries like Poland or Romania now have a higher GDP per capita than Russia, lower poverty and higher quality of life included. In defense of the US, I will say that the Marshall Plan has rebuilt Western Europe after WW2, while USSR's response, the Molotov Plan, was designed for extracting resources. And that Pax Americana did the West, at least, a lot of good is an understatement. ALAS, it appears that world is ending, helped in no small part by the changing views of western citizens, “informed” by the Internet, and guess what will happen next. Anyway, it's baffling to me to see such a changing tide in opinions on HN, now that the US administration has changed. I mean, I've seen stupid opinions denying reality on HN before, but now it's on a whole new level. I get it, we had cancel culture and all that, but such opinions don't change overnight, so I'm amazed at how many uneducated cowards the world has, even on HN.
- mlinhares 2y ago
  I think the main difference is that if you were a US friend in Europe or Asia it would be an improvement, if you were so in Latin America or Africa it would be pretty bad.
  - simion314 2y ago
    >I think the main difference is that if you were a US friend in Europe or Asia it would be an improvement, if you were so in Latin America or Africa it would be pretty bad. Romania was a neighbor of USSR and was part of the Europe that was under USSR domination, so countries that were not neighbors with USSR like India might cry about USSR death while all ex-USSR countries are still in danger from Ruzzia's imperialist dreams. OP is right, you can be very objective here because you can observe countries that look West and enter EU and NATO and countries that looked East, the former are better economically the later a poor, corrupt, and with territories occupied by Ruzzia. And if you really want to study this area of the world try to see the puzzeling Ruzzian mind, where they pretend USSR was the best democracy in history and they pretend that there is ZERO motives the exUSSR countries hate imperialist Ruzzia.
arp242 2y ago
You're seriously bringing on Afghanistan as an example here? Because the Soviet Union has completely clean hands here...? And no, the United States is not perfect. No country with that amount of power is. But for all its flaws, it's vastly better than the Soviet Union ever was, but for the people living there and internationally. This is the old "the United States is horrible and has done terrible thing, so let's for a country that ... has done even worse and is completely unrepentant about it". Like, wut?
- tehjoker 2y ago
  My point was that the US went on and on with operation cyclone as it tried to turn Afghanistan into the Soviet Union's Vietnam and then did it to ourselves a few decades later. Incredible self-own.
  - pqtyw 2y ago
    Unlike the Soviets US didn't try to impose a "colonial" style administration in Afghanistan. They had no long-term plan and the local Afghan government they were propping up was exceptionally corrupt and incompetent. Militarily US didn't much better than the Soviets and could've won relatively easily if they used similar methods and comparable goals.
rat87 2y ago
Are you saying the world isn't better for the collapse of the soviet union?
- tehjoker 2y ago
  that's right. its fall was a world historic tragedy that unleashed the worst instincts of the capitalist class.
  - simion314 2y ago
    >that's right. its fall was a world historic tragedy that unleashed the worst instincts of the capitalist class. I though USSR already genocided the capitalists, anyway I don't think today Ruzzia killed more people and more Russians then USSR , so is better for the world and maybe worse for some regions in Ruzzia and worse for the Zeds ego.
  - pqtyw 2y ago
    That's really funny.

UncleOxidant 2y ago

> In any case, the world without the Soviet Union is undoubtedly a better place. Is it, though? Putin's Russia is no better than the Soviet Union - in some ways worse. It's essentially a mafia state run by one thug. One could imagine a different scenario where Gorbachev would have been able to land the plane in a bit more of a controlled fashion and stayed around to transition to something that would look more like a European democracy - but of course, things got way too chaotic for him to stay on.

_DeadFred_ 2y ago
Imagine if the US hadn't gone in and come up with 'voucher privatization' which essentially created the oligarchs (and which in my mind seems to have been designed so that investment groups could take over but the mechanism got co-opted by the oligarchs).
- Muromec 2y ago
  That happened in all other countries too. Ukraine had oligarchs, Chezchia and Romania have them. Its just russian oligarchs got hold on infinite money glitch which is oil production and the country overcorrected by going full dictatorship
euroderf 2y ago
> in a bit more of a controlled fashion The guiding intellectual principle in the US at the time w.r.t. the economy of the ex-USSR was "You can't cross a canyon in two leaps". This was what passed for intelligent thought.
darthrupert 2y ago
For those who lived in the occupied areas like Poland, it certainly is.
Muromec 2y ago
It transitioned into a demicracy a-okay, the problem was -- russians never had any kind of democracy and it quickly descended into oligarchy, from which they overcorrected to dictatorship quite willingly. Every other ussr and soviet-aligned country got it going somehow.

fuzzfactor 2y ago

Gorbachev said that one of the things that shocked and demoralized him was when he visited Houston and took a trip to one of the typical supermarkets, a locally owned one not part of any nationwide chain or anything. When he saw that average Americans were enjoying consumer choices well beyond anything the highest echelons in the USSR could attain, he was never quite the same after that.

throw-the-towel 2y ago
Are you sure that was Gorbachev and not Yeltsin? There's even a famous photo of the latter at an American store.
ido 2y ago
I believe you are thinking about Yeltsin (unless both visited a Texas supermarket and were surprised to discover how well stocked it was). https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/trending/article/food-town-radnalls-boris-yeltsin-20030224.php https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/trending...