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Alex2037

depressing - certainly, disrespectful - perhaps, but dumb? if instead of Gorbachev there had been another Stalin (or the current version of Putin), the empire would have endured that period of turbulence intact, and you would still be part of it.

also, the provinces that didn't fight for independence - Kazakhstan, for example - had got it anyway, whether they wanted it or not at the time.

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No your logic is fundamentally flawed because it assumes a job has to reach 100% completion to have an effect. What if soviet empire collapsed precisely because the resistance was too costly.

In Lithuania in particular sabotage was a constant reality of the country for bigger chunk of a century. People were breaking the empire not only via outside resistance and cultural identity preservation but also by sabotaging soviet operations in daily activities. The empire fundamentally became unsustainable and collapsed under it's own weight and no new glorious leader could have saved it.

So whether Lithuanians are free because of their own efforts or because it just so happens that soviet empire collapsed is a fundamentally flawed question as these two things are not only correlating but are causal as well.

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