Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has died at the age of 91, according to Russia's Interfax news agency.
He was known for ending the Cold War without bloodshed but failed to prevent the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Mr Gorbachev forged weapons reduction deals with the US and partnerships with western powers to remove the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since World War Two and bring about the reunification of Germany.
I put on some Russian TV that I have the ability to stream, to see if they liked him or not. Rossiya 24, the main Russian news channel which is known for its slavish adherence to the Kremlin line, has a line of text at the top of the screen saying he's dead, but the actual reporters seemingly aren't talking about it at all. I don't speak Russian, but they appear to be focused on pre-scripted reports about how everything is fine and they don't want to interrupt this with actual news.
I am also fuming that I took him off my celebrity death list that I play with a few friends each year. He was always someone who belonged on the list, but I often took him off because we're only allowed ten people and I prefer to pick weirder celebrities.
You know you've made it when communist Hungary's #1 pop star sings a song about you that is so poorly received by Hungarians that she later apologises for it.
I would imagine that to the people calling the shots inside the Kremlin today, he is just the former leader who caused the glorious Soviet empire to collapse. So they do little more than honour him with one line of ticker.
Having spent time with some Russians, apparently there are quite a few of them who think that everything was fine in the Soviet Union, and that Gorbachev then went and ruined it all. Not really in the younger generation who never experienced communism, but among people aged 50 and up.
It kind of gives you an idea why things are the way they are right now.
rt.com seems to take a lukewarm position on Gorbachev's passing today. They acknowledge that he was a reformer who guided the country through difficult times, but then one headline reads "...but he failed to save the Soviet Union".
Interestingly, their national news section is called "Russia and former Soviet Union". Which is a bit worrying.
He got absolutely fucked because he was surrounded by villains and idiots. It's miraculous someone of his calibre found himself as leader of the USSR at that time to begin with.
In fairness it's a good question if the survival of the Soviet Union (albeit a reformed one) would have been a better thing for the world.
China are hardly our best mates, but we have functional relations and they are a pretty respectable country in terms of advancing technology and manufacturing and all that. Whereas post-Soviet Russia just immediately descended into corruption and decay.
I do think the fall of the Soviet Union was a bad thing overall.
>>39184 Respectable country? Fuck where have you been? It's a civil liberties nightmare. Great Firewall, Uyghurs, Falun Gong, social credit score, I could go on?
I'm talking from the position of international relations and trade etc, not morality. Ultimately there's scarce few countries out there without blood on their hands, so all that stuff is kind of a given.
The Soviet Union fell largely because the U.S. was outspending the Russians many times over in the early 80s nuclear arms race. It was something that the Soviets just had no way of keeping up with. Add to that the debacle in Afghanistan, where the Soviets spent ten years accomplishing absolutely nothing and again only hemorrhaging military budgets, and you had a Soviet Union which had next to no funding to modernise its entire system. Which would have been badly needed, because the Communist Bloc and its satellite states were still greatly relying on heavy industries in a continuation of Stalin's doctrines, but had no money for innovation that would have ensured the competitiveness of Soviet products on the global market.
Also, the Soviet method of quelling dissent in its republics and its satellite states was on numerous occasions to send in troops and/or ratchet up political repression. Which was also no longer a possibility under its strapped finances. The peaceful revolutions in 1989 in the satellite states didn't just happen without Soviet military intervention because the Soviet Union suddenly would have taken a more benign view on them. Although you shouldn't put that idea past a man as moderate in character as Gorbachev. But really, they just couldn't afford to send troops into half a dozen satellite states all at once. It probably only would have accelerated the Soviet Union's downfall, which the Soviets must have known. The Soviets did try to intervene with their military in Lithuania in 1990 when the country pushed for independence, but it didn't turn out too well for the Soviets.
Is the world better off without the Soviet Union? If you ask many people in the former Communist Bloc, then probably yes. If you look at how other socialist or communist states have fared since then, they tend to have to keep up political repression and stagnation, while allowing their citizens just enough freedoms to keep them from revolting entirely, but they are not really free citizens as we in the West would understand it. Just look at China and the way it spies on its entire population. Countries like North Korea, on the other hand, have just simply put all of their efforts into repression, indoctrination and self isolation.
On the international level, it's probably problematic that after the implosion of the Soviet Union, the U.S. was able to brand itself as the only remaining superpower which had "won" the Cold War and was therefore God's chosen country to lead the world to bigger and greater things. Which comes with its own problems to this day in terms of the Americans' desire for global domination. A potent nuclear rival to NATO and the U.S. keeping close watch on the countries in its own sphere of influence could have kept the Americans more in check. But it would have come at the expense of making the risk of global nuclear war once again more likely. As we are seeing today, where Russia and the West are facing off against each other in a way not known since the mid-80s.
The state Russia has devolved into (and therefore the way we are currently facing off with them right now, because those things are directly connected) was pretty much the worst possible outcome. A sham democracy that's basically a dictatorship in all but name, just like the other global baddies.
The later years of the Soviet Union, while not without their problems (much like modern day China, or, frankly, America or Europe. Let's not pretend we live in complete freedom in a not at all dysfunctional democratic utopia either) could have continued moving in a more liberal direction if it hadn't collapsed first. I think the sentiment was there, at least.
It's not impossible to imagine a more open, modernised Soviet Union, while retaining the institutional strength to stop a bloke like Putin taking over and transforming the place into a complete oligarchy. A gradual "decolonisation" of the satellite states like Britain transitioning to the Commonwealth.
Russia has been described as a failed state in recent years, which is probably very true.
You also have to factor in that Russia has no democratic tradition. They had 70 years of communism, and before that, the Tsars ruled for centuries with varying degrees of an iron fist.
One of the reasons the Weimar Republic failed was that Germany, too, had had no democratic tradition. Yes, in some ways, Germany was democratic since 1871 when the German Empire was founded, but the Reichstag and its publicly elected members had no actual parliamentary powers as we know them today. On paper, it was a constitutional monarchy much like ours, but the Kaiser's power and that of the aristocracy close to him were near-absolute. Effectively, no laws could be passed by the Reichstag without the approval of the aristocracy, who could decide on a whim.
Having lost the monarchy as such after WWI probably didn't set up the Weimar Republic for failure in and of itself, but crucially, many citizens, including publicly elected officials, rejected the new parliamentary democracy with its deposed aristocratic class, because to them, it was a humiliating step down from Germany's former glory. Which in practice meant that many of the old cliques maintained their channels and networks, united by their disdain for the new democratic state. Add to that the fact that Germany was one of the hardest hit countries internationally by the 1929 Wall Street stock market crash, because the country was rebuilt extensively after WWI with the help of American banks, who then suddenly had to call in their loans from Germany companies. And so you suddenly had impoverished millions in a faltering young democracy, who felt like they had nothing to gain from the latter.
I think you see where I am going with this. Russia after the fall of communism had a fragile democracy where many of the old cliques were still dominant, including people like Putin. And many ordinary Russians who aren't part of the new money elite have complained for years that under communism, at least they had a steady job and always enough food on the table. It was kind of a shit life where you had few freedoms, but at least one where your most basic needs were met.
This has not been a good foundation for what is still a fledgling democracy with respect to the centuries that came before it. And similar to post-WWI Germany, it has been a breeding ground for totalitarianism and the dismantling of democratic structures and institutions. Putin didn't suddenly usurp power in what was until then a poster child of a newly democratic Eastern European country. He is the result of decades of democratic rot.
