To me the shocking thing about the collapse of the Eastern Bloc (both at the time and in hindsight) was that it was nearly bloodless, with events in Yugoslavia and Romania showing what easily might have been the outcome everywhere. Once it became clear that Gorbachev would not send tanks to reinforce fraternal bonds with the various people's republics, the wheels came off rapidly. But it would be hard to overstate the level of surprise in the region, where memories of 1956 (the invasion of Hungary), 1968 (Czechoslovakia), and 1981 (Poland [1]) were very much top of mind. It was simply expected that attempting to break with Moscow would result in a military crackdown.
I think subsequent events have proven that Soviet Russia had the capacity to retain at least some of its empire by force, especially if they coupled that with a de facto return to a market economy, the course that worked so well in China. But to his credit Gorbachev decided not to send in troops, and the coup that resulted was too ineptly planned to stick. Gorbachev was a complicated man, certainly no saint, but the decision to let the Soviet empire go merits him a statue or two.
[1] The Solidarity movement in Poland in 1981 was suppressed by the Polish army without foreign involvement, but the military junta all but said that the alternative was a Soviet invasion. Whether or not this is true is actively debated in Polish historiography, but was universally believed at the time.
It was not bloodless and Gorbachev did send tanks and army into breakaway republics [1][2][3], the soviet union was simply too weak to do anything to stop the movements to break away from Russia. Russia even lost the war with Chechnya in early 90s, which shows just how weak they were. It wasn't until the west helped rebuild Russian economy (mostly based on fossil fuels) that they were able to revive their imperialistic ways under Putin.
Unwinding a communist system is incredibly difficult and always yields a collapse in living standards, although temporary. Less extreme forms of it are often called "shock therapy" for this reason, but Russia's transition was handled especially badly and was especially extreme as the dissolution of the USSR wasn't a planned event.
If you look at opinion polls, a significant fraction of the Russian population does wish for a return to the Soviet system. You will also find some nostalgia in the former DDR. This isn't because they thought it was a perfect or good system, but the memory of the collapse and return to market competition is painful, and of course some of them are naturally left leaning anyway and liked a world where there was no competitive pressures.
> especially if they coupled that with a de facto return to a market economy, the course that worked so well in China
I think it would be much harder to do in the Soviet Union - it was much more ideologically committed to communism than China, such a pivot would probably not happen without major political turbulence.
I don't think this is true; it would be hard to compare China with the USSR in 1979 and come away with the impression that the latter was the more ideologically committed country. The PRC at the time was only three years out of the Cultural Revolution and Deng had to tread very carefully to avoid being ousted by powerful left factions in the party that had no counterpart in the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union.
I think it would have been very unlikely for a number of reasons, but specifically two main ones:
- The Soviet Empire never transformed into an assimilative empire and was always something of a post-war occupation state. If you look at other empires that managed to last longer, they almost always had an “absorbing” of the captive areas, adopting some of their cultural ideas, incorporating local elites into the state apparatus, etc. (think of the Romans in Greece, for example.) This didn’t really happen in Soviet member and client states and was more of a top-down promotion of particular individuals and parties.
- The existence of Poland. Soviet history really goes back to Russian Empire history, which includes the partitions of Poland and the numerous uprisings for independence during the 19th century. I don’t think it was ever realistic to think Poles would be happy in a Russian empire, and the continual existence of such a large, unhappy client state in the Soviet sphere seems like it was an inevitable weak spot. The Solidarity movement was key in bringing down the USSR, so that is essentially what happened.
The Soviet empire was very much assimilative, so successfully that people sometimes overlook it. Its greatest leader was Georgian, while three others were Ukrainian. Parts of it ("Western Ukraine", Kaliningrad) were annexed outright after World War II, while other areas continued a Russification program that started under the tsars.
As for Poland, the Solidarity movement was quite effectively suppressed in 1981 and ceased to be an effective political force until the Polish government badly miscalculated and allowed it to reconstitute itself eight years later. The biggest mistake the Soviets made in Poland was in giving a large degree of autonomy to the Catholic Church.
All of those areas other than Kaliningrad were assimilated primarily during the Russian Empire, not the Soviet Union.
As for Solidarity, I suggest reading about its influence on the Soviet bloc as a whole. Again, even if it didn’t work, it was just another example of a resistance movement in Poland. Another one would have likely occurred a decade or two later.
The west could have kept the Soviet Union alive. The Soviets were poor and an easy adversary to plan for. After witnessing what occurred in the 1991 Gulf War, they realized the writing was on the wall. The Soviet or Russian military would never be able to match what their "main adversary" had just demonstrated, a major ground incursion that took only a few days. 30 years on and over a trillion dollars of military spending, and Russia is still not capable of defeating one country in a three year struggle, and in the process destroyed most of its incompetent force.
> Russia is still not capable of defeating one country in a three year struggle
the counter-factual is that ukraine survived primarily due to western aid, without which they'd be defeated already and is more likely to have to adapt a gorilla war against russian occupation.
A Desert Storm equivalent would have won the war before any substantial aid could arrive. The fact that the US could carry out such an operation on the other side of the planet, and Russia can’t even do it on its own border, really casts doubt on this idea of Russia as the world’s second military power.
The hard part of counterfactuals is that the result of a counterfactual is often an entity that shares only a name in common with the real historical entity. Could the Soviet Union have survived? Sure, maybe, if it didn't look anything like the Soviet Union that actually existed. Could the Chernobyl accident have been avoided? Sure, if the reactor hadn't been designed for better weapons production, if the crew hadn't been pushed to perform an unusually risky procedure, or if the crew had the initiative to avoid the problems they encountered. But the Soviet Union that actually existed was overly militarized and had a culture where obedience was more important than safety, and if it didn't have those traits then it wouldn't have been the Soviet Union that actually existed
There are a lot of ways to break crowds up into 2 groups. One of them is the people who believe reality is more important vs. people who are convinced that The Narrative is more important. Really interesting debate - the narrative people are usually right and they certainly have the numbers but when the reality people have a point it is rather overwhelming. Narratives cannot overcome economics.
This article seems to be a narrative person's perspective. Once the Communists gave up control of the media, blam. Game over. The realist argument would probably be that reforming to a justice system with some integrity and adopting some policies to score consecutive years of 10% growth was all they needed to keep treading water. People do make reference to their actual real-world experiences when pushing for change in government.
> In fact, in 2006, Gorbachev pinpointed Chernobyl and the resulting media fallout as the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I just struggle to accept that Gorbachev was being intellectually honest with this one. Is that really where he assigned the blame? The USSR had real economic and legal problems. The US had spent decades showing up just how bad Soviet policies were.
The USSR had real problems but something like Chernobyl exposed the out in the open. Had it been a chemical event, the Soviets might have still gotten away with it. But a nuclear event with thousands of eye witnesses and even more people responsible for clean-up? And fallout that spread across the entirety of Europe?
We kind of saw a similar process in the beginning of COVID, when China was actively suppressing information internally. But it may not have had the same results because of deeper state centralization and information control, as well as other countries having to bother with the same issue. Yet it still sparked a number of protests across China, due to directly or indirectly being affected by COVID-19.
Narrative people vs reality people maps quite well to the left/right split.
Gorbachev probably did assign blame to Chernobyl. The USSR collapsed not due to internal revolution but because the people at the very top of the system became so demoralized they basically gave up on it. Key people just stopped fighting to defend the system, and the event that demoralized them was a bit different for each.
If you look at the career trajectory of Yeltsin, who never gets enough credit for the ending of the USSR, then it's a very clear case of someone at the top levels of the Soviet system suddenly realizing just how far ahead the US was in its provision of consumer surplus. The USSR was very effective at censoring information, including from people very high up the ladder. He visited a Randalls supermarket as part of a diplomatic mission to NASA and after realizing it wasn't staged or fake, it changed him forever. He became an outspoken critic of the system from the inside, which destabilized the regime. He was exiled from power and the pressure nearly killed him as part of this, but the other Soviets never did put a bullet in his head in the way they might have done in an earlier era.
Why not? Well, perhaps because the experience of dealing with Chernobyl had sapped their confidence so much. It's easy to overlook what an absolutely massive drain on the USSR's resources and time of senior party officials it was. And because everyone knew, and everyone knew everyone knew, it dealt a huge blow to their own ability to shape the view of the Soviet system. They suddenly had to divert vast resources and years of time to cleaning up a huge disaster of their own making. Undoubtably this demoralized Gorbachev significantly, and many others.
> The realist argument would probably be that reforming to a justice system with some integrity and adopting some policies to score consecutive years of 10% growth was all they needed to keep treading water.
"all they needed" - as if that's easy to achieve consistently for decades.
In the end what killed it was the combination of stagnation and the ability to freely talk about it.
Readit News
I think subsequent events have proven that Soviet Russia had the capacity to retain at least some of its empire by force, especially if they coupled that with a de facto return to a market economy, the course that worked so well in China. But to his credit Gorbachev decided not to send in troops, and the coup that resulted was too ineptly planned to stick. Gorbachev was a complicated man, certainly no saint, but the decision to let the Soviet empire go merits him a statue or two.
[1] The Solidarity movement in Poland in 1981 was suppressed by the Polish army without foreign involvement, but the military junta all but said that the alternative was a Soviet invasion. Whether or not this is true is actively debated in Polish historiography, but was universally believed at the time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_Events#January_13 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_January [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Barricades
not to people like putin, who claim that the dissolution is the greatest mistake in russian empire's history.
"Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains"
https://aforisimo.ru/30185.html
Unwinding a communist system is incredibly difficult and always yields a collapse in living standards, although temporary. Less extreme forms of it are often called "shock therapy" for this reason, but Russia's transition was handled especially badly and was especially extreme as the dissolution of the USSR wasn't a planned event.
If you look at opinion polls, a significant fraction of the Russian population does wish for a return to the Soviet system. You will also find some nostalgia in the former DDR. This isn't because they thought it was a perfect or good system, but the memory of the collapse and return to market competition is painful, and of course some of them are naturally left leaning anyway and liked a world where there was no competitive pressures.
I think it would be much harder to do in the Soviet Union - it was much more ideologically committed to communism than China, such a pivot would probably not happen without major political turbulence.
- The Soviet Empire never transformed into an assimilative empire and was always something of a post-war occupation state. If you look at other empires that managed to last longer, they almost always had an “absorbing” of the captive areas, adopting some of their cultural ideas, incorporating local elites into the state apparatus, etc. (think of the Romans in Greece, for example.) This didn’t really happen in Soviet member and client states and was more of a top-down promotion of particular individuals and parties.
- The existence of Poland. Soviet history really goes back to Russian Empire history, which includes the partitions of Poland and the numerous uprisings for independence during the 19th century. I don’t think it was ever realistic to think Poles would be happy in a Russian empire, and the continual existence of such a large, unhappy client state in the Soviet sphere seems like it was an inevitable weak spot. The Solidarity movement was key in bringing down the USSR, so that is essentially what happened.
As for Poland, the Solidarity movement was quite effectively suppressed in 1981 and ceased to be an effective political force until the Polish government badly miscalculated and allowed it to reconstitute itself eight years later. The biggest mistake the Soviets made in Poland was in giving a large degree of autonomy to the Catholic Church.
As for Solidarity, I suggest reading about its influence on the Soviet bloc as a whole. Again, even if it didn’t work, it was just another example of a resistance movement in Poland. Another one would have likely occurred a decade or two later.
That's a very odd adjective choice to apply to the Georgian one.
The other 3 are usually cited as Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Chernenko, but the former two were of Russian ancestry.
That leaves us with Stalin and Chernenko in our multicultural icon set. The latter having of course served but a year, mostly as a walking corpse.
the counter-factual is that ukraine survived primarily due to western aid, without which they'd be defeated already and is more likely to have to adapt a gorilla war against russian occupation.
Dang..
I didn't actually register one, but they quoted a price of $28.31 for the first year then $63.98/year afterwards.
Very interesting page, reminds me of old internet in it's writing style.
https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/su.html
This article seems to be a narrative person's perspective. Once the Communists gave up control of the media, blam. Game over. The realist argument would probably be that reforming to a justice system with some integrity and adopting some policies to score consecutive years of 10% growth was all they needed to keep treading water. People do make reference to their actual real-world experiences when pushing for change in government.
> In fact, in 2006, Gorbachev pinpointed Chernobyl and the resulting media fallout as the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I just struggle to accept that Gorbachev was being intellectually honest with this one. Is that really where he assigned the blame? The USSR had real economic and legal problems. The US had spent decades showing up just how bad Soviet policies were.
We kind of saw a similar process in the beginning of COVID, when China was actively suppressing information internally. But it may not have had the same results because of deeper state centralization and information control, as well as other countries having to bother with the same issue. Yet it still sparked a number of protests across China, due to directly or indirectly being affected by COVID-19.
Gorbachev probably did assign blame to Chernobyl. The USSR collapsed not due to internal revolution but because the people at the very top of the system became so demoralized they basically gave up on it. Key people just stopped fighting to defend the system, and the event that demoralized them was a bit different for each.
If you look at the career trajectory of Yeltsin, who never gets enough credit for the ending of the USSR, then it's a very clear case of someone at the top levels of the Soviet system suddenly realizing just how far ahead the US was in its provision of consumer surplus. The USSR was very effective at censoring information, including from people very high up the ladder. He visited a Randalls supermarket as part of a diplomatic mission to NASA and after realizing it wasn't staged or fake, it changed him forever. He became an outspoken critic of the system from the inside, which destabilized the regime. He was exiled from power and the pressure nearly killed him as part of this, but the other Soviets never did put a bullet in his head in the way they might have done in an earlier era.
Why not? Well, perhaps because the experience of dealing with Chernobyl had sapped their confidence so much. It's easy to overlook what an absolutely massive drain on the USSR's resources and time of senior party officials it was. And because everyone knew, and everyone knew everyone knew, it dealt a huge blow to their own ability to shape the view of the Soviet system. They suddenly had to divert vast resources and years of time to cleaning up a huge disaster of their own making. Undoubtably this demoralized Gorbachev significantly, and many others.
"all they needed" - as if that's easy to achieve consistently for decades.
In the end what killed it was the combination of stagnation and the ability to freely talk about it.
Gorbachev could have acted more skillfully.
"Deng Xiaoping thought Mikhail Gorbachev was an idiot."
A more competent new edition of Brezhnev could have prolonged the misery for a few decades.