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Adam Curtis' documentary on the fall of the Soviets and 10 year aftermath is the deep dive on this topic.
Part 1 of 4. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ke600MgW1F0&t=3s&pp=2AEDkAIB
Excellent documentary. While it has been criticized for factual errors and omissions, it is by a wide margin the best documentary conveying the feeling of living through that time: the emptiness of not knowing where you are and what you should do to reach any kind of normal, stable, predictible life.
Many people in the west nowadays believe that they are living in end times because they are overwhelmed by the many things changing around them. That documentary shows the opposite. The silence that arrives when the music stops. You are hungry, stores are empty, no one knows when and if ever they'll be restocked. Society just grinds to a halt and stops functioning. Completely unimaginable situation for modern people who are used to abundance.
Excellent. Thanks for sharing this. Just finished part one. I really like the way it was made, just fragments of the daily soviet life.
Interesting how two Americans who were present in Moscow provide similar analyses but come to completely different conclusions.
"How the Neocons Chose Hegemony Over Peace Beginning in the Early 1990s"
https://www.jeffsachs.org/newspaper-articles/bfsmbpe4plx7cc6...
Extending an olive branch in the 90s could have cemented a better Russia today.
Instead, the country went straight to shit, Make Russia Great Again reactionaries won the vote, and have spent the next two decades carrying out their agenda (Which has managed to pull the country out of the hole it's been in, but as with any fascist movement, require an external enemy).
From the perspective of any sane Russian who lived through the cold war, and then the 90s, entering the 00s and expecting the West to act as a partner, as opposed to an adversary would be absolute lunacy. Fool me once, shame on me, and so forth... So the reformists got all the blame, and the hardliners took over.
The seeds of war get sown in peacetime. But hey, every one of those seeds had some pretext or other for it...
What kind olive branch would you have wanted to see? There was a lot going on at the time.
The parent poster's link describes the complete disinterest in engaging with it on economic aid. Reformists actually succeeding in their transition from communism might have nipped the problem in the bud.
With aid come strings, those strings could have been used to softly steer the internal political clusterfuck in a better direction.
I don't think that is true for all the nations involved and I think there was a poor understand on how and why things would not work out.
In fact the west was acting as a partner and NS2 was a physical manifestation of that any sane russian could not have ignored.
NS2 work started in 2011, Russia needed help twenty years earlier.
But yes, alt history is bullshit, and nobody knows what would have if-only, if-only, if-only, but we can observe and shoot the shit about what did happen. And what did happen did not win many friends in it.
There's no shortage of blame to go around within Russia. Yeltsin was a walking autocratic disaster, and handed the country right over to Putin.
You mean in the early 90ies? And what kind of? Does the Budapest Memorandum qualify as „help“ or is it only vasts amout of cash that count?
We were talking about economic aid, but if you want to talk about broken promises...
I'm sure if you dig just a bit further you might find some other agreements that have been made, and then broken (by NATO nations), prior to the start of the war in Lugansk/Donetsk/Ukraine as a whole.
Gorbachev - one of Russia's few non-shitty statesmen, after his resignation, took a lot of issue with those violations of them, and you're going to have a hard time describing him as either an expansionist warhawk, or an enemy of the West. (The guy spent spent the last three decades of his life trying to patch up east-west relations, and was appalled and devastated by the war in Ukraine. If he thinks that there's something rotten about how NATO behaved in the late-90s and 00s, listen to him.)
Combined with large parts of NATO starting (for the first time in it's history) a string of offensive operations (some on good pretenses, and some on absolutely terrible, illegal ones), and even a dove will start getting security anxieties.
I'm sure if you dig just a bit further you might find some other agreements that have been made, and then broken (by NATO nations), prior to the start of the war in Lugansk/Donetsk/Ukraine as a whole.
Except you can't, because no (legal) "agreements" as such were ever made.
Meanwhile the Budapest Memorandum is an agreement with treaty status, and it was unequivocally violated by Russia starting with the 2014 invasion.
Jello Biafras take:
World War I & we won! But did we bother to win the peace? Make ’em suffer! Let ‘em starve! Led direct to the Nazis
After World War II, we learned Rebuilt Germany and Japan But when the Soviet Union fell Where was our Marshall Plan?
We created Putin We created Putin We created Putin, yeah!
Real James Bond villain We lost! See him prancing, half naked On his horse Side saddle, the blushing bride Clings with those little hands Stared into his eyes We saw his soul He saw how dumb our leaders are We’ll hack and ruin everything we want 'til your democracy’s a joke Like ours
We created Putin We created Putin We created Putin, yeah!
Capitalism has failed Mob corruption everywhere Not true comrade, can’t you see It’s working perfectly
https://songtextes.de/songtexte/jello-biafra-we-created-puti...
We’re more like russia every day
Oligarchs steal everything
Crime families like Kushner and Trumps
To Koch&Head, Zuckergoogle and Bezos chumps
Loot the country, loot the banks
Cook up another ’08 crash
Barrack and Biden chickened
No one went to jail
Kleptocracy’s too big to fail
We created Putin!
I remember listening that informative piece from The Economist on the end of soviet union https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2021/12/20/what-we-though...
Dennis Quaid is Reagan, in theaters now. https://www.reagan.movie/
I highly recommend this movie if only because it's a hilarious combination of excellent production value, terrible acting, and some of the most boring and openly delusional film you'll ever witness.
Thanks! The acting/direction does incorporate sort of a plastic style. Perhaps they meant to really convey that this is all fictionalized history. I agree that it's a transparent hagiography. But American history is replete with hagiographies, and no patriot is repulsed by stories of President Washington and the cherry tree, or Paul Revere's heroicism, Betsy Ross's project, Susan B. Anthony's defense of women and children, or Abe Lincoln's bold proclamations. I mean, today we're not. In the moment, there were certainly plenty of dissenters and grumblers, but bro, history is written by winners, and President Reagan won many elections and established a library. There's nothing delusional about winning!
By the way, I read a compilation of letters, I believe the title was, "I Love You, Ronnie" and it became clear that Mrs. Nancy was the driving force in his White House. She cared for him in many ways despite his profound incapacity (perhaps like Dr. Jill Biden today) and First Ladies have been ever more emboldened to use very real influence and femininity to complement the Executive branch. Nancy's role was quite downplayed in the film, but any admirer of Jackie or Michele would need to acknowledge the First Lady's accomplishments.
Despite funding the CIA with many billions of dollars every year there are many surprises.
This isn't because the CIA is incompetent. No politicians don't want want to hear what the CIA has to say. The US intelligence services isn't run by some tinker tailor spy spy master. It's just another Washington bureaucrat playing politics.
They train people who speak the language and absorb the culture and their reports are ignored.
The collapse of the Soviet Union started the moment Stalin got rid of Lenin's New Economic Policy.
By the time they realized the rot,it was too late and the Soviet Union could not be saved .
Had the leaders reintroduced NEP after Stalin's death in the early 50s ,the Soviet Union would still be around with a GDP of 10 or 15 trillion dollars . China is a Soviet Union with NEP
A collapse that goes on for 60 years and includes and survives a massive invasion of the own land with over 20 million dead .. is a different definition of collapse than I would use.
Partly true. Stalinist planned economy (aka Socialism in One Country: as opposed to waiting for world revolution) excelled in macro matters, and was particularly vital to the Soviet war effort and post war rebuilding. However Soviets could never really solve micro matters, like empty supermarket shelves. Gorbachov reforms nominally tried to solve these problems.
China is a Soviet Union with NEP minus exporting world revolution.
> The collapse of the Soviet Union started the moment Stalin got rid of Lenin's New Economic Policy.
What? The Soviet economy grew like crazy under Stalin, and he even pushed the Germans back to Berlin. Workers from depression racked Western Europe moved to Russia for work in the 1930s.
It was when Khrushchev took over that the economy began to sink.
It was when Khrushchev took over that the economy began to sink.
My understanding was that the Soviet economy actually boomed from the mid 50s to the late 60s (Khruschev's tenure from 1953-1964) -- but that once Brezhnev took over, that's when it started hitting the brakes.
The economy didn't sink under Khruschev. It just grew slower than capitalist nations (and public expectations of growth of QOL).
Over the decades, this difference in growth compounded, until you hit Brezhnev where growth in friction, inefficiency, and corruption exceeded growth in productivity.
And then you had a lot of, uh, degrowth with Yeltsin's shock therapy.
"As the Soviet Union came to an end, American anxiety yielded to an odd euphoria. Americans hadn’t expected revolution and disintegration. And yet many were now speaking with confidence about what must follow: a durable capitalist equilibrium would bring with it democracy and freedom."
Yeah, yeah. I do not think the neocons would be happy about a democratic Russia with an economy of the size of the U.S. and oil payments settled in rubles.
What nonsense.
Russian economy was nowhere near the size of the American one in the real world.
I grew up in late stage Communism; the only thing that the dying regimes were reliably producing were impressive, and completely fraudulent, statistics.
On paper, we were all economic tigers, but in the street, people queued in front of the shops whenever something rare, such as washing machines, was promised to be delivered.
And the Soviet Union was even less developed than Czechoslovakia. Plus, the more developed regions like the Baltics didn't want to stay subjugated to Russia.
Russia proper was underdeveloped. No surprise for a country whose access to the sea is limited and distances are absolutely vast. Such places tend to be underdeveloped everywhere - Kazakhstan, inner Congo, inner Brazil, Australian outback, even many places in the flyover US.
Of course, hence the "what must follow" in the quoted text. These were predictions by the people who publicly always talk about bringing democracy and freedom. What they say in private is a different matter.
The dissolution of Soviet Empire and power grab that happened afterwards was definitely a catastrophe for newly formed states and a huge miss for western powers.
Those states could’ve been part of western block and now big chunk of them is slowly drifting to China.
I have been travelling to the Baltics since 2000, and the development associated with their Western re-orientation is just massive. Nowadays, Riga or Tallinn feel like Nordic metropolises again. Not as rich as Copenhagen yet, but on their way.
In the immediately post-Soviet era, they were just ghastly.
It is another story in Moldova or Armenia.
The baltic story is nuanced:
"Between 2004 and 2016, one out of five Lithuanians emigrated, primarily due to insufficient income for residents." (Wikipedia)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1016444/total-population...
This statistics looks shocking at the first glance, but many Balts are coming back from their Western jobs and building nice houses back home. Some migration is temporary. The idea that you make a lot of money in the West and come back home is fairly widespread in Central and Eastern Europe. IDK how many Poles worked abroad, but at the height of their exodus, there were several magazines just specializing in advertising foreign jobs. It didn't hurt Poland that much, though. Much of their money flew home as remittances and helped build the country.
I was just in Vilnius and I completely agree. It’s fantastic and seems like a great place to live.
Which states are you referring to? Kazakhstan? Turkmenistan?