Mikhail Gorbachev has died
reuters.com
reuters.com
It was the profit extractors that won the cold war.
Not what I would define as "winning", but ok.
“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
If the russians are not stopped in Ukraine, then there is no reason to believe that they wouldn't rinse and repeat in Baltic states, Kazakhstan, Moldova, and all other now independent former russian states. Including Alaska[4], should opportunity represent itself.
To truly secure Gorbachevs place in history, world must decisively say no to the russians agressions in Ukraine, and help Ukraine deliver a humiliating defeat to the russians and the dissolution of soviet union reach it's logical conclusion by stripping russia and their dreams off of any status as military, or world power.
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26769481 [2] https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/world-news/russia/957367/russ... [3] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/putins-en... [4] https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/03/19/does-russia-want-alas...
The Soviet Union ceased to exist in December 26, 1991 [0]. Russia is not the USSR, and it's almost impossible it will never be anything remotely close.
Most of the former USSR industrial capabilities where either abandoned, razed or looted.
Russia's modern industry (including military) depends heavily on European (now sanctioned and obtained via third countries) and Chinese imports. This means that most of their industrial machinery, oil/gas extraction sector, automotive industry, chips... is now strained. They've almost stopped producing cars.
Russia is mostly burning the gigantic former USSR reserves until they dry out. And Ukraine is way bigger than Abkhazia, Ossetia or Transnistria so it has the largest burn rate since Afghanistan.
Just look up at their modern attempts of modernization. The T-14 Armata was expected to have over 100 of them built before 2020 [1] but only a few experimental units can be seen in the wild. Even the Iskander is a USSR design.
The "humiliation" is happening on both sides every day as we speak. No one will either "win" or "lose" the Russia-Ukraine war. It's just an endless attrition warfare [2] were both sides consume their huge military storage (Ukraine using a mix of exUSSR and NATO material and Russia using exUSSR material).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Unio...
As far as I've understood it, the burn rate is way, way higher than in Afghanistan. Soviet-Afghan War took ten years. I don't think we've seen this burn rate anywhere in the industrialized world since WW2.
Heh, I doubt such a thing exists or has ever existed. Resource trade is a large part of their income.
edit: Ah, you meant military capacities...
He [Putin] became briefly close to President George W Bush - who even claimed to have glimpsed Putin's soul - until the Iraq War drove them apart. In Iraq, Putin insisted that international law must be upheld - no invasion could be allowed without approval from the United Nations Security Council, and that approval was not forthcoming.
This is also Putin and it is not singular. If you listen to his speeches, he often demands that international laws and treaties should be upheld and he became increasingly frustrated over the years that this was not done. Maybe you can argue that this was his only option out of a position of weakness, but never the less he did this.
Putin wanting to recapture and rebuild a past empire is a very new narrative without much supporting evidence over all those years.
This may be true, but I think it's more likely that he doesn't care about it at all. He is an opportunist, and back then the best opportunity was to criticize the U.S. and Europe by insisting on international law. Today, he is saying Europe is a fascist Nazi oppressor.
The tactic of "rules for thee but not for me" is as old as time. The implication that putin wants russia to actually be held to the same standards as he is trying to get other nations held to - all the while fomenting war on his borders and ignoring eight bajillion commitments and treaties - is laughable.
Part of those lies also was, to become as "spokesman" for all sorts of internal oppossition, left and right alike.
Especially with history in mind it is quite clear that Russia would take any right that former competitors took themselves. Having lost the cold war or not is secondary it seems. Of course any argument will be used to the largest opportunistic degree. Putin may have believed that invasions now always need to be sanctioned and there was a time where it probably looked like that.
That Putin wants to rebuild past empires is something he openly espouses himself now. Although I do believe this is directed towards the domestic population. I also think Russia did believe that the US tried to topple government in Ukraine and saw a need to react.
Putin only care about international law where it is in his own interests.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/10/putin-compares...
No reason? I can think of 1365 reasons, if Wikipedia is up to date.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crimea-gorbachev-...
After he retired from politics, he was featured in several advertisements:
- In 1994 for Apple Computer: https://www.upi.com/Archives/1994/10/07/The-first-advertisem...
- In 1998 for Pizza Hut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorbachev_Pizza_Hut_commercial
- In 2000 for the ÖBB, the Austrian railways: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLscz8kEg6c
- In 2007 for Louis Vuitton: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/business/media/05vuitton....
As humans, we gravitate toward personalities, identities, and stories, and these all matter for the people we keep close to us. In the public sphere, however, actions and legacy are what matter, for better or worse. For a major historical figure like Gorbachev, there is bound to be both better and worse, and to me the most valuable analysis is of those actions and legacy rather than personal character.
He was 14 when the war ended. “Our generation is the generation of wartime children,” he said. “It has burned us, leaving its mark both on our characters and on our view of the world.” -- Quote from the WAPO article on this.
700+ injured and 14 dead doesnt sound like something "genuinely good person" does.
> Mikhail Gorbachev only appears because his secretary was familiar with the movies of Wim Wenders and was a great admirer. She talked Gorbachev into giving up a couple of hours to do the cameo as he was on a trip to Germany anyway.
[1] https://imdb.com/title/tt0107209/mediaviewer/rm1602489600
Not sure where you were back in the 80s, but he is one of the etalons of a horrible, corrupt politician.
And perhaps his own reluctance to follow the Chinese model. He prefered to do political reforms before economic ones, while the Chinese prefered the economic reforms first and foremost.
He ended the war in Afghanistan. He was more keen on Nuclear disarmament than Western leaders: Western leaders dragged their feet on that matter, and ultimately we didn't get no where near Nuclear disarmament.
He ushered in reforms. See the Soviet films of the period to see a very different picture from cold war era Hollywood depictions.
I guarantee you that people existed before money, and that people create(d) money. People are the root cause.
I always thought it was the other way. The Chinese saw what Gorbachev did and didn't like the results. June 4th (this was 1989, where Gorbachev's reforms were well on their way) was the turning point where the CCP decided collectively to conclusively reject political reforms and crack down on those who insisted on them. I think the hardliners in CCP felt vindicated when USSR disintegrated a short while after believing they dodged a similar bullet by the crackdowns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huQL5SHpFJ0
Now we're right back in the Cold War, tensions right up around Able Archer level, ready to torch much of the world on another misunderstanding. No, you won't hear about it on social media but I bet all the nuclear submarine commanders have been doing extra drills lately, what?
As far as economics, what did Russia ever have that China didn't? An absence, that's what China had. An absences of lucrative fossil fuel reserves to sell to Western countries, isn't that the Russian resource curse model? What if Europe stops buying Russian gas? But China never had any gas to sell, just rice. Now, what, we'll all be buying Chinese silicon instead? Why didn't Russia develop modern tech, while China did?
Putin would have got on just fine with Wall Street, like Mohammed Bin Bone Saw Sultan did, but he didn't sign up for petrodollar recycling, so war. Not much more to it than that, really. Same with Qadafy, Sadam, etc. Old dying empires are so ugly on their way down aren't they?
I played through it and it requires juggling the various factions in Soviet Russia. I ended up getting couped by the military but just reading the various prompts and choosing where to put resources gave me a better understanding of the dilemmas anyone in power in the USSR might have been going through.
I can't attest to whatever bias might have been embedded in the game mechanics but it was interesting. Actually I only played the 2017 re-make. I didn't realize there was an original game from 1991. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_in_the_Kremlin
I caught this movie at the Tribeca Film festival: https://tribecafilm.com/festival/archive/meeting-gorbachev-2...
It was very sympathetic toward him. And I don't think it is a "great" film in any sense. But I did feel like I got a taste for who he was. And I also felt he was a fundamentally decent person.
Then he started finally some of the common sense reforms needed.
His intention was never to drop communism or let the soviet block to disintegrate, but things got out of hand. His greatest act was let it happen even when it was against everything he had worked for.
Politically and in terms of press freedom, maybe.
Economically it was a disaster that ruined an already stagnating growth and turned it into recession.
Economic reforms were trash, the Chinese did them better. Political reforms broke the system. The Chinese avoided doing them and look at them today.
That was not the outcome he wanted. People often paper over that he was a true believer in Marxism-Leninism, unlike his predecessors.
It is too bad that in his later years he kinda regretted it, and kept saying "I should have kept going until the end". Perhaps it is natural to regret past decisions wondering if an alternative decision might have led to a better outcome. Hope that before he died he realized that had he pursued that alternative path he'd end up like Putin.
In summary -- Mr. Gorbachev was one of the most decent politicians and upstanding people in general that ever lived.
(Perhaps I read an article about him on his 90th birthday and assumed it was an obituary?)
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/false-story-about...
The state-run news agency RIA Novosti in Moscow that published the erroneous story for just 5 minutes blamed it on hackers. But the false news spread widely from there.
The only person that I remember that my grandfather had really negative feelings for was Gorbachev.
I never learned why.
Or did he sympathise with communism? Gorbachev arguably accelerated it's decline.
The culmination of Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika was the Fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the more memorable historical moments of the 20th century and one which gave a lot of hope to young people who grew up under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. If you watched "The Day After Tomorrow" on American television in the 1980s, you might know the feeling.
However, in retrospect that was a high point in terms of hopes for peace and prosperity. The Soviet Union went rapidly from communist authoritarian to oligarch kleptocracy during the Yeltsin era, and NATO wasn't disbanded like the Warsaw Pact was but instead started bombing Europe (Yugoslavia), and the steady downhill progression has continued ever since. Putin threw out or jailed the oligarchs Washington preferred by 2005 or so, and since then it's been a steady return to full on Cold War proxy wars and gas and oil pipeline control conflicts (Georgia, Syria, Azerbaijan, Ukraine) stretching from the Middle East to Northern Europe.
It's ridiculous that after all those peace efforts in the late 1980s, we're back to early 1980s levels of nuclear tension. As far as who to blame, there's plenty to go around - oil corporations wanting more profits, arms dealers wanting more wars, authoritarians wanting more power, empires wanting more control of resources, etc.
And before someone tries to draw a false equivalence between the USSR's role in the Warsaw Pact and the USA's role in NATO, those were hardly the same. NATO members were free to leave at any time without fear of a US invasion. France actually did withdraw from the NATO command structure for a while and nothing happened to them.
The post war equilibrium was decided in Yalta explicitly defining how Europe would be split with zero input from continental Europeans.
Yeah, but some EE countries managed to regain their freedom.
that’s not completely accurate. e.g. Romania even publicly condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia. They didn’t support Russian foreign policy that much in the 70’s and 80’s either with no direct consequences.
While obviously it was Moscow keeping the communists in charge, the local dictators supported the suppression of the reforms in Cezhoslovakia largely out of self-interest.
Do we think it would have been better if we let the socialists in Yugoslavia enact their genocide against the Albanians?
Of all the NATO interventions to criticize, starting by criticizing the one that prevented a genocide seems sorta odd.
"Even when Mr Gorbachev accepted the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany and ultimately its membership of NATO, Mr Bush would play to Mr Gorbachev’s weakness for wanting to be lionised, but felt no obligation to help Russia financially or accommodate him politically. “To hell with that! We prevailed. They didn’t. We can’t let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat,” he said to Helmut Kohl, Germany’s chancellor. This triumphalism was misplaced and would later backfire on America.
Mr Taubman argues that those in power in the West lacked the vision and will to extend a Marshall-type plan to Mr Gorbachev’s Soviet Union (and later to Yeltsin’s Russia). Those who had it were no longer in power. In 1991 Mrs Thatcher appealed to Mr Bush: “We’ve got to help Mikhail…Just a few years back, Ron and I would have given the world to get what has already happened here.” If the West did not come to Mr Gorbachev’s aid, she argued, “history will not forgive us.”" [1]
At least he only sent tanks in to suppress peaceful protests and killed a few people in a handful of EE countries and not all of the Eastern Bloc.
In the hindsight it seems like it was impossible to devastate a country to such an extent even intentianally. Getting out of this shit strongly correlated with Putin.
Recently, I saw the hour-long documentary of Werner Herzog interviewing Mikhail Gorbachev and it was not only riveting television but also one of the saddest and most upsetting I've seen in a long while.
I'm not going to go into details as I don't think I could convey the tone and atmosphere of the conversation and do it justice. All I can say is that if you haven't seen it then you should make an effort to do so.
YouTube doesn't have the full video but there are a few short excerpts from it of a minute or two in length.
https://www.rferl.org/a/lithuania-soviet-crackdown-1991-krem...
You seem to comment to better inform readers, yet your comment distorts the truth.
Even the article you linked talks about Lithuania declaring independence from the USSR, not asking for democratic reforms.
Despite what your article says, if you read the story on Wikipedia, Lithuania did in fact unilaterally declare independence from the USSR in March 1990.
Just as an example, check what Spain did in 2017 when Catalonia tried to declare independence after a popular vote. If Catalonians decided to resist, there is no doubt that the Spanish state would have used violence to suppress them. Try to imagine what the USA would do if any of its states tried to declare independence.
I'm sorry but it's not, and I already stated why with reason. They were not asking for "democratic reforms", but for independence.
Call it self-determination if it makes you feel better. Debate my comparisons, fair enough, I just tried to put things in perspective.
It's an intriguing historical question what would have happened if Fort Sumter hadn't been attacked. Would the Union have eventually made the first move? Would peaceful negotiations have eventually resulted in some stronger guarantee in the continuance of slavery and an end to secession? Would the Union have eventually dissolved amicably?
Going by what happened during the Nullification Crisis, the answer is likely a "Yes".
I was there. They used violence anyway.
Of course, USSR constitution declared many things that were far from truth. But ultimately words on paper do make a difference, even in totalitarian regimes.
The Bolsheviks wrote a constitution providing for a "union state". I doubt the framers of the Soviet Constitution actually meant what they said – it was essentially propaganda to present the Soviet Union as some kind of "voluntary association", despite the reality that there was nothing voluntary about it. While it was a federation on paper, its substance was much closer to that of a unitary state.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the seceding union republics used their constitutional status to justify their secession as legitimate - they took the constitution's pretence literally. But, imagine in an alternative timeline, the Soviet constitution had been written without this pretence–would that have stopped the Baltic states from seceding? I really doubt it. Would it have made any difference to the legitimacy of their secession? Only on meaningless paper.
Even with the Soviet Constitution we actually had – why did the Union as a whole break-up, but not the RSFSR? That question is better answered in terms of real world power structures, than legal formalities. Chechnya fought for independence, and if Moscow had been weaker, they could have won. Even now, some would say that Ramzan Kadyrov rules Chechnya as his own quasi-independent fiefdom, and is just biding his time for the right moment to officially claim independence (maybe, if Putin were to suddenly die without a clear successor). If Chechnya were to successfully secede, that could inspire other parts of Russia to seek to emulate its example.
Meanwhile USSR constitution had such article. Which was used by Lithuania when declaring independence.
The Moscow police are notoriously strict when it comes to speeding. One day, Gorbachev and his driver are going to a meeting, and they are running late. Gorbachev admonishes the driver to go faster, but his driver refuses.
Finally, Gorbachev says, "Fine! Pull over! I will drive."
Gorbachev starts speeding through the streets of Moscow with his driver in the back seat. They are pulled over by the police.
The first officer gets out of the car and walks to Gorbachev's car. They talk for a moment, then the officer returns, as white as a sheet.
"Well? Was it someone important?" says the second officer.
The first officer replies, "Important?! You have no idea! Gorbachev is his driver!"
Well, 2022 is a year of boomerang.
May future generations know your name good Sir.
I remember the news coverage (WashPost et al.) expressing surprise and bafflement. I think the power structure in the US did not expect such an outpouring of obvious hunger from the man on the street for an end to all the Cold War madness. "More popular than Reagan ?!"
Mikhail Gorbachev requiet in pacem.
pacem would be the accusative[0] vs the ablative[1] - the difference being him being peaceful in rest, vs his rest being peaceful.
Nonetheless, I echo your sentiment.
"Requiet in pacem" is what I usually see on teh interwebz, which proves absolutely nothing.
FWIW I quit Latin in 10th grade.
I hate communism, so it's good that he helped us to get rid of that.
But why getting rid of communism had to include letting Americans to take reign in many government agencies of Russia?
What would be your opinion of US president, if he goes to to retire in Russia?
I'm reading some Russian news site, and almost universally Gorbachev is hated by Russians.
I haven't heard of Americans taking on leadership roles in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Do you have any examples, or sources about this?
Did Gorbachev retire outside Russia? I wasn't aware of this. He died in Moscow. The last time I heard about him before this was when he attended an RT event in Moscow (which was also attended by Jill Stein and Michael Flynn). Where outside Russia did he retire? Why did he leave this place to die in a Russian hospital? Your comment leads one to infer he retired to the US.
> I'm reading some Russian news site, and almost universally Gorbachev is hated by Russians.
Russian news sites are notable lately for not allowing the free expression of Russian opinions, so what they show you may not be representative. I'm not saying you're wrong but that Russian news sites aren't great evidence that you're right.
There is no one in Russia who wouldn't piss on his grave if given the chance.
Wow. Such a claim. I'm sure you have mountains of examples of this happening just one time.
> What would be your opinion of US president, if he goes to to retire in Russia?
Lumpen population hates what they don’t understand, news at 11.
It was unbelievable how he managed to end the iron curtain and come closer to the west at a time at which it was thought to be impossible.
Trurely commendable. It is sad to see how Putin nullifies all of his effort and that he had to witness it now shortly before his death.
May he rest in peace.
For example, racism was kinda considered "normal" before Hitler, but after Hitler, even people like Putin don't want to be deemed racist. Right now dictatorship is kinda considered "normal" too b/c so many countries still have dictators, but perhaps after Putin, no politician will want to be deemed a dictator.
Absolutely not.
But also don't forget Khrushchev, whom much of his legacy was built on.
Edit: downvoted by ignorant americans, imagine that!
Of course Yeltsin was a big part of the problem too.
If you've never seen this footage, definitely look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W7wqQwa-TU
1.6 million people in an airfield at a free concert that lasted all day. There's a documentary about it but I've not watched it.
It's so disappointing the world couldn't bring that optimism to fruition, and instead kleptocrats took over.
Near the end of the book, George HW Bush tries to convince the US government to provide economic aid to stabilize the fledgeling Russian state but this fails. Earlier in the book there is talk of a "Grand Bargain", a theory that for $100 billion the US could convert the USSR from an enemy into a friend similar to how the Marshall Plan and Berlin Airlift converted the Germans into close US allies. Japan is another example of this. After WW2, instead of razing Japan and Germany as Rome did to Carthage, the US raised them from their knees. It helped rebuild and rehabilitate these countries.
There was no Marshall Plan for Russia. Many of the Russian politicians and economists expected significant economic aid from the West. This aid did not materialize, at least not in the form and magnitude that was expected. The transition from state socialism to capitalist market economy was traumatic; during the USSR the poverty rate was 30%, after the collapse the poverty rate was 80%. The average lifespan of a Russian man was 66 during the USSR, after the collapse it was around 55.
The loss of super power status, of territory, and of economic strength created significant political backlash in the years following the collapse. These conditions promoted nationalism, populism, and authoritarianism which Putin used to seize control. Russia does not have a cultural history of democracy so maybe this was inevitable, but perhaps greater Western support would have avoided it?
I’m skeptical of the idea that you can impose Democracy.
Gorbachev believed in Western ideals, maybe a bit too much. The Western leaders were extremely supportive of his reforms and promised to be with him. After the Wall fell, and Russian economy nose dived, no one was there for him. People were starving on the streets, Gorbachev asked for humanitarian aid, but nothing came.
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/23/world/gorbachev-pleads-fo...
I think he pleaded for $3B from Helmut Kohl in the end, but even that was too much. IIRC, the book ended with a bitter note on Western promises, what Russia could have become, along with a warning on consequences in the future.
I think if you dig into the history a bit more closely, you'll quickly find that the United States did in fact do plenty[0][1].
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/27/world/10.2-billion-loan-t...
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-07-09-mn-22423-...
This notion is based on ignoring historic facts. Germany (and Japan) in WWII were fully vanquished foes whose entire socio-political system was redrawn by the victors. Marshall plan executed in an environment of near total control over Germany. US simply was not in a position to do a Marshall Plan for ex-Soviet Union.
> The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s.
This is another nice sounding but entirely wrongheaded thought. Do you really think an outside force can come and force a nation with its historic trajectory and 'make them democratic'? Democracy, or whatever goes by that name in the West today, has its roots in Magna Carta! That's 1215 [yes, I watched Better Call Saul]. Read up on history of England, and how much bloodshed it took to go from there to a parliamentary system, with (important to note) its entire elite class on board with the political arrangement -- it was after all what they wanted after having their Glorious Revolution.
The idea that a bunch of Americans can waltz into Moscow and St. Petersburg and turn Russia in a "democratic nation" by some means of time compression squeezing in centuries of organic development into a couple of decades is frankly laughable.
I think US did enough divide and conquer and meddling to help bringing back an authoritarian government.
Anyway, totalitarian has a specific meaning, not a random one, it's a government that holds total control on all powers in a country. Stalinist USSR and Nazi germany (modern eritrea and north korea) apply to that definition, Italian or spanish fascisms do not (in both the head of state was the king), even less Russia since it is a de jure democracy.
This wording implies an accident, or negligence. In fact, it was an intentional and explicit policy of "shock doctrine" economic deregulation and ultra-liberalisation that led to the absolute misery of the 1990s, and the kleptocracy that continues to this day.
At least significant part of Russians seems to be ok with having no free speech, no real elections and no independent judiciary or other democratic institutions - as long as they are reasonably safe, physically and economically, and the bad things only happen to those who speak up or somehow do something "wrong" (which includes demanding to have those institutions publicly). They have been living this way for decades, and they have been living in much worse way - where bad things happened to pretty much everybody, regardless of what you do - for decades before that. Looks like they developed some habits that make their society very atomized and politically inert. Couple that with significant resentment of formerly having great empire (it was nominally "Soviet", not "Russian", but everybody knew where the capital was - in Moscow, right?!) and now being forced to play by the rules they did not write - and you get the full Weimar picture, and you know where that leads. Not to the thriving democracy. I don't think any "Marshall Plan" would have helped - and Russian wouldn't accept this magnitude of intrusion anyway.
I imagine Russians slyly and sarcastically saying, to the typically non-ironically self-righteous Westerner, "oh the Americans did plenty; plenty indeed; we really wish they didn't".
Much of the global south holds much the same opinion IMO. Frankly, I'm shocked at the state of disconnect in the West. The kind of petulant idiocy displayed by the usual eminences when the majority of the world did not play along - much like they didn't play along when the US-West attacked god-knows how many countries now - was less suitable even of a pouty teenager.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF9KretXqJw
Unless you happen to understand Finnish, subtitles are mandatory (and very accurate AFAICT). There is a link to a dubbed version in the comments if that is preferred.
Some how people manage to blame everything on the United States.
> Sadly, it seems that Gorbachev's efforts were mostly for naught.
Russia today is a faint ghost of the former USSR. The events in Eastern Europe show that to an extent.
If anyone is interested why the US get involved in other countries affairs, just look to comments like this.
I'm not sure why the US has any responsibility for helping Russia transition to a democracy. And I'm not sure why, when the US does provide assistance, when the country fails to become democratic, it's because "the US didn't do enough".
It's pretty clear it's a no win situation. The US gets blamed for "doing nothing, or not enough" and then when it does something it gets blamed for "interfering with another nations affairs".
I'm starting to see why the founding fathers were such isolationists and the US as a whole was isolationist until WW1. There is nothing good that can come out of getting involved.
Ps I worked with a guy who was in Russia for IBM in those days and he said they needed armed guards and dummy trucks to deliver a Mainframe.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57615585-not-one-inch
There was such a plan, at least in the twisted minds of the people behind the Washington Consensus. They were calling it privatization or price liberalization or some other non-sense like that, thing is the common people got the very, very short stick (like my parents, who lost their jobs, their city apartment and who had to resort to literally subsistence agriculture in a matter of 4-5 years maximum; I'm not from Russia, but still from the former communist space) while some lucky ones from amongst us became entrepreneurs and business leaders. Also, most of the really juicy assets (like almost of all our banking sector, our oil resources etc) got sold to Western companies, but that was a given if we wanted to become part of the European Union and of the West more generally speaking.
Yes, I've started to become more and more bitter as the years have gone by, I'm now almost the same age as my dad was in the mid-'90s, when all hell started to economically unravel. Nobody had asked my parents, or us, who were mere kids and teenagers back then, if we were agreeing to the sacrifices that they were going to impose on us.
it was a tough choice. To transition to democracy it was necessary to dismantle and punish for the most egregious crimes the KGB and the likes, to actually prohibit Communist Party and to deny the people directly associated with the totalitarian regime of USSR any positions of power for at least 10 to 20 years. East Germany, Baltic and some other East Europe countries did for example various elements of such a process. Such "de-communization"/"lustration" though carried risk of instability, and instead US chose stability because of USSR/Russia nukes, and thus US actually helped KGB to survive the 1991. Splitting Russia further would have also helped to dampen the anti-democratic imperial drive in Russia, yet that was coming with the chances to increase the number of nuclear armed countries, and this is again why US didn't support the breakup of Russia into smaller pieces. I think such smaller pieces would have had higher chances for democratic transition due to most of them losing the imperial drive.
Belarus has never did the "lustration", and is a lost cause for the foreseeable future. Ukraine also didn't do "lustration" back in 199x, and that resulted in the grave danger to the country in 2014 when a lot of army and government officers didn't want to defend their country. So Ukraine had to do such "lustration" in the years since 2014, and today its results are obvious in their successful fight against the invasion.
I don’t know why anyone would call US ally anymore or even count on them.
Well, kinda https://www.thenation.com/article/world/harvard-boys-do-russ...
Russia was and will always be a superpower. No need for humiliating "pats on the back" by Anglo-Saxons. They always wanted to see them fall.
Tough luck though.
Gorbachev was a fool who believed that the USA and the west would not rape his country. We'll never know how many former citizens of the USSR died because of 90's shock therapy.
The fact that it works elsewhere doesn't mean it's a suitable model for other countries. Especially when there's a lot of prior baggage of being ruled by a single person, be it a tzar or a head of Politburo.
Russia has historically been an imperial power and seeks to further its own power and perceived interests, and they certainly refuse to be under foreign/Western/American domination.
A democratic government could mean less reckless actions but it wouldn't necessarily mean friendlier actions.
And with Yeltsin, corruption and nepotism flared up almost immediately. So any kind of Marshall plan would have deteriorated into providing billions to oligarchs. Which is of course what happened in any case. And of course eventually the KGB and Putin took over with all their institutional paranoia regarding the west. Allegedly, Putin might actually be the richest person on this planet at this point. It's hard to estimate his exact wealth but he's not a poor man, to say the least.
You are also forgetting, that Russia was still a powerful nuclear capable force after the wall came down. There was no military defeat. And there were plenty of olive branches in terms of investments and collaboration. But, the Russians weren't exactly open to the US dictating them how to run their country. Germany had no choice in the matter. It was occupied by the allied forces and ruined by WW II.
We can definitely blame the US for forcing Ukraine to relinquish its nukes. We can blame the US for insisting for a long time on preserving the USSR (during the Gorbachev era). We can blame the US for not paying enough attention to the other two Slavic former republics early. We can blame America for not penalizing Yeltsin's regime when they started to veer off the original course.
But we need to remember that it was the West in general, not just the US. The EU is equally to blame. And even though the last 20 years are a direct result of the 90s not that much was done in those 20 years either. Not in 2008, not in 2014, not even when President Trump told the Germans to cut the pipelines and spend on the military.
It very well could be the case that destroying the Evil Empire was an unprecedented affair which was too hard for anybody. Where by hard I mean impossible in the Velvet Revolution style. Or at all. They had to perform multiple simultaneous transitions (Totalitarianism -> Democracy, central planning -> market economy, empire -> nation state). With a population impoverished by 70 years of Communism and three generations not knowing any other life (not the case in the Eastern Europe).
It's poetically fitting that Mr Gorbachev died the same year his entire legacy was erased. He was not perfect, he was an idealist, but he gave freedom to the people. It was him who opened the border and let millions escape.
This is what they wanted.
And it's working wonders now - the US will make a fortune off of LNG and arms sales, whilst completely destroying competing European industry which suffers gas shortages and uncompetitive energy prices.
It's a masterful long-term play.
Russia at the end of the cold war had geopolitical imperatives such as a warm water ports, buffer states and desire for Russian hegemony that would have existed regardless of their economic state. They also have a long, long history of authoritarianism.
A) Rebuilding democracy versus building it. Most obviously, it is easier to get everyone to end up in a place when they have already been there. Konrad Adenaur, for example, was first elected Mayor of Koeln under the Wilhelmine Empire, and had first won an election 40 years before becoming Chancellor (with a dozen year interregnum, spent in obscurity during the Nazi era). Similar story w.r.t Japan (Yoshida Shigeru was a diplomat rather than an elected official, but had the same sort of career, right down to the big hole where he had no official job during the war). The main Axis nations had been reasonable democracies within the past 15-20 years, whereas Afghanistan and Iraq were farther from that (and their initial leaders were refugees rather than people who had stayed, which is an enormous difference that I think US leaders missed). The USSR obviously was a lifetime since the last real, multiparty elections in 1917.
B) Many nations working together. The Marshall Plan aid was distributed across most of Europe, and in a way that emphasized international cooperation (with 25% going to the UK, 18% to France, and 11% going to West Germany, it truly was split among many nations). This helped to rebuild international trade that truly cemented the nations together. This is plausible for a USSR modernization, so long as the Russians are willing to admit that the other nationalities are truly independent. (The most successful of these attempts, in the Balkans, largely did manage to tie the international knots together. The others not so much. But how much of that was that Slovenia and Croatia are great vacation trips for Europeans, in a way that going to Moscow was simply much more distance?)
C) Continuing presence of US troops. Japan's economic growth really dates to the Korean War, when the US military suddenly energized and needed local production to supplement weapons and goods shipped across the Pacific. Similarly, from roughly that point to the end of the Cold War the US had a quarter-million men in Germany alone (more in the UK, Italy, etc.). Those men needed goods and services, and had dollars to spend. This is basically impossible to imagine for the fUSSR. (In Vietnam/Iraq/etc. the US military obviously had a continuing presence for a long time, but it largely provided its own food and supplies, rather than depend on the local economy. Lots of money did leak into the local economies, but not in economically beneficial ways- read much of it was captured by graft.)
D) Humiliation: this is important point that is something of a combination of A and C- there was a complete and total defeat, with most of the country smashed down to rubble, which made the democratic history seem attractive, and a massive continuing US presence, which seems to have prevented Dolchstoss narratives and backsliding from taking hold. This seems incredibly unlikely for the fUSSR to me. Even at their lowest, they were an independent country with a massive nuclear arms cache and quite a bit of (well-justified) pride in, e.g. Yuri Gagarin, Sputnik, and Sergei Korolev.
Basically, this isn't about money: the US spent about as much on civil reconstruction (excluding military expenses) in Afghanistan alone, as it did on the entire Marshall Plan in all of Europe adjusted for inflation (using CPI-U, the most common gauge). So there has to be more than just money, and I'm skeptical that the US had significant power to make the former USSR outcomes better.
Certainly, any discussion of a successful fUSSR Marshall Plan would have to start with why the Baltics outcomes are so much better than Russia, and I don't have much of a story for that.
> The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s. There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War like there was after World War II.
Total bullshit. The West did put in nearly as much money as part of GDP in aid to early 199X Russia. US aid was pouring from every hole up until mid-late nineties.
I would argue America went too much Marshal on Russia, and you are reaping the results of this folly now. It was a giant mistake not to finish off the beastie, and not to SCALE UP the pressure after the USSR collapse.
The West is responsible for much of the CPSU comeback happening in 200X, just like USA rescued early CPSU from total collapse through food riots in early 192X out of pity. A giant mistake.
US humanitarian aid was stolen many times over, sold again, stolen, and resold, giving a headstart to CPSU elements turning to banditry. It was totally unsupervised.
Subsequent entries by Western multinationals funded much of 200X mess in Russia, rise, and legitimisation of early Putin's mob regime. The first Western supermarket in Russia was literally inaugurated by a mob boss of Moscow.
Much of Kremlin's current denizens owe their meteoric rises to megabribes they got from Western MNCs in early 200X, which catapulted then into power.
I read recently that only in the 60s the German public opinion started moving towards "Nazis are bad", and that was because of an external effort to reeducate them (I had just assumed that after they lost the war, the population would automatically see the Nazis were bad).
No such effort happened with the Russians, so they're still trying to conquer Europe, as they have been since tsarist era.
You mean like how they "helped" countries like Iraq and Afghanistan transition to democracy? Leaving behind millions dead and diplaced?
It's astounding how some people in the West think they reached enlightenment.
Now we have a proto-facist regime copying some aspects the Nazi regime.
He might be able to salvage the Soviet Union into something else, but instead most of it turned into multiple heaps of dumpster fire, which after burning and destroying, was then commandeered by thugs, mafia and oligarchs.
Wasn't he essentially removed from power by Yeltsin -- who did so by breaking up the Soviet Union?
My history isn't that great. But my understanding is that Yeltsin was the president of Russia, while Gorbachev was leader of the Soviet Union. By breaking up the union, Yeltsin put Gorby out of a job and essentially became the leader.
(Please correct me if I'm wrong.)
In 1989, when he pulled the red army out of Afghanistan--he also cut all aid to the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. the then-president of DRA went to Moscow to persuade Garbageoff to not to do so, predicting that the terrorist zealots would overrun his government leading to chaos in the region.
Garbageoff dismissed him, and did not even go to the airport to receive him. In the ensuing two years, the DRA fought the terrorists to the last bullet, until food became scarce and defenses crumbled. The terrorists entered Kabul and began fighting each other (they were self-labeling themselves "Mujahedeen" then).
In the carnage that followed, Kabul was destroyed, millions died and became refugees. I was an 11-yo boy who witnessed my neighbors getting torn to pieces by the rockets fired by the terrorists. I barely survived the rockets myself, and we fled and became refugees in Pakistan.
May Garbageoff rot in hell.
We think we fared better than the Soviets did.
The above statement is not true based on any number of authoritative accounts.
By saying that you have undermined any value your comment otherwise may have had.
How about Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin, two Afghans? The Soviets only sent troops after multiple requests by Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin and President Nur Mohammad Taraki. Do they not share proportionate responsibility?
See:
Having read a couple of Cold War histories, most recently Tony Judt's excellent Postwar, I learned that what's often missing from American pop-level summaries is the work put in by the people behind the Iron Curtain to bring it down -- for examples, the Polish Catholics and union members, and the Czech dissidents such as Vaclav Havel.
Generally American pop-level accounts like to emphasize American agency in what happened.
Gorbachev played the critical part. He let the East European satellite states go rather than sending troops to restore status quo. Within the USSR, his reforms gave the democratic opposition some room to breathe. Once Gorbachev's power started to fail, that allowed the opposition to win, rather than the hardliners who attempted a coup.
With another kind of leader on the opposite side, Reagan's policies could have won but not ended the cold war. The USSR could have become something like North Korea, but much bigger. It would have been stable but no longer a global superpower. (That may also be where Russia is headed today, as there are no viable alternatives to Putin's regime.)
With this conviction he was able to defuse tensions. He was a great, if flawed, president (and as a Latino, Im on the receiving end of his mistakes)