Comment by nivenkos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nivenkos | Hacker News Reader

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Putin is the chosen successor of Yeltsin, who was backed by the USA. I wouldn't pin the current state of Russia on the USSR - the Orthodox Church, etc. have far more influence.

Your point is definitely true for the psuedo-occupied countries like Romania, Poland, the DDR, etc. though. My point wasn't to defend the USSR but that we need competition to drive progress.

For example now the EU has almost none of its own industry - Concorde failed, ARM was sold (and the UK left), there is no equivalent to Big Tech. There is almost no competition (literally the only major examples I can think of are AirBus and Volvo/VW/Renault, and then some industrial ones like ASML and Nordvolt).

China poses more competition because it's chosen to actively protect its own developing industries. So they do have Baidu, WeChat, Bytedance, Huawei, Xiaomi, etc.

I'm also not sure about an EU-led world - the EU isn't even democratic in its current form (the Commission makes most of the decisions, and there are no EU-wide elections). I think it's best if we don't have any leading nation at all but true competition.

>Yeltsin, who was backed by the USA

Russian victimhood is so tiring. You forget the part where they blame Bill Clinton for causing child prostitution in 1990s Russia.

The "US caused 1990s Russian chaos" narrative is based on an 1996 IMF loan and Yeltsin hiring American political marketers for his 1996 reelection campaign. But by 1996 Russia was already in utter chaos.

In 1996 Russia asked for a peanut $10 billion IMF loan and the US (being the biggest IMF contributor) were among the countries that approved the loan. Yeltsin was also impressed by big US-style political campaigns that he hired American political marketers.

I fail to see how either of that means the US backed Yeltsin or that the US caused the 1990s chaos in Russia.

Not exactly caused, but the voucher privatisation was under western influence.

However, the stage was set for total chaos already in the 80s when the komsomol money laundering loophole opened.

It feels like USSR / Russia took so many bad turns in the late 80s early 90s.

You can’t blame western yuppies for creating chaos when you explicitly import them to administer “shock therapy”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization_in_Russia

> the EU has almost none of its own industry

This is just wrong.

> there are no EU-wide elections

This is also wrong.

It's the Council that takes most of the decisions, and it's made up of the leaders of the national governments. They don't want it to be different, as that would mean giving up national power. The Commission is rather toothless in comparison, they can only carry out existing policy.

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