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Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's easy to argue that it's USSR people, not Western, who benefited most from the end of the Cold War.
Are you responding to the right comment? That's sort of unrelated to the GP's remark (that Ronald Reagan can be credited with ending the Cold War). (It's also hard to assert that generally: Russia is by many metrics worse off than it was under the USSR, while most of the rest of Central and Eastern Europe is better off.)
I was adding to your comment, perhaps too tangentially - the GP remark may suggest that USA benefited more than USSR.
> It's also hard to assert that generally: Russia is by many metrics worse off than it was under the USSR
Economical, cultural, political environment were greatly improved as the direct consequences of the end of the Cold War, up until ~2010, so I'm not sure why do you think the Russia is worse off. What metrics do you choose?
The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s. There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War like there was after World War II. This was a huge mistake, and we see the consequences now, with Russia having turned back toward totalitarianism and imperialism. Sadly, it seems that Gorbachev's efforts were mostly for naught. But it was courageous at the time to open up the Soviet…
I think the big difference is the oligarchs. The USSR had already been transitioned to a resource state, and there was no actual rebuilding that needed to happen. The Marshall plan was almost easy because you could tally up all the broken bridges and say “itll cost us $X to fix”. What’s the equivalent for post USSR? What ended up happening was oligarchs swooped in to take over from the central planners, and it’s not…
The oligarchs were minted in the late 80s and 90s. They weren’t a preëxisting power structure. Putin came to power with their and the FSB’s help. (He was also popular for not being incompetent.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle, in the sense that it never ended. It only took a back seat in the media while Russia was disorganized.
it ended for 150 or so million people in Eastern Europe, that were freed from Russia.
In 1995, eastern europeans were so thankful to be free from Russia.
In 2035, you can expect eastern europeans to be thankful again. Not sure who'd it be this time.
Note that in Russian doctrine as tought in universities, the Cold War never ended.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems like needless pedantry at least for a conversation outside of school. The USSR (with whom the Cold War was being fought) was dissolved and Germany was reunified. For all intents and purposes it did end, just a new conflict (now with Russia) began.
Andrei Piontkovskiy, in addition to two known World Wars, considers the Cold War as the World War III and the current war in Eastern Europe as the World War IV. His parallels are that WWII was fought by Germany dissatisfied by the results of WWI, and WWIV is fought by Russia dissatisfied by the results of WWIII.
The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s. There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War like there was after World War II. This was a huge mistake, and we see the consequences now, with Russia having turned back toward totalitarianism and imperialism. Sadly, it seems that Gorbachev's efforts were mostly for naught. But it was courageous at the time to open up the Soviet…
Then he started finally some of the common sense reforms needed.
His intention was never to drop communism or let the soviet block to disintegrate, but things got out of hand. His greatest act was let it happen even when it was against everything he had worked for.
The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s. There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War like there was after World War II. This was a huge mistake, and we see the consequences now, with Russia having turned back toward totalitarianism and imperialism. Sadly, it seems that Gorbachev's efforts were mostly for naught. But it was courageous at the time to open up the Soviet…
If you've never seen this footage, definitely look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W7wqQwa-TU
1.6 million people in an airfield at a free concert that lasted all day. There's a documentary about it but I've not watched it.
It's so disappointing the world couldn't bring that optimism to fruition, and instead kleptocrats took over.
The culmination of Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika was the Fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the more memorable historical moments of the 20th century and one which gave a lot of hope to young people who grew up under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. If you watched "The Day After Tomorrow" on American television in the 1980s, you might know the feeling.
However, in retrospect that was a high point in terms of hopes for peace and prosperity. The Soviet Union went rapidly from communist authoritarian to oligarch kleptocracy during the Yeltsin era, and NATO wasn't disbanded like the Warsaw Pact was but instead started bombing Europe (Yugoslavia), and the steady downhill progression has continued ever since. Putin threw out or jailed the oligarchs Washington preferred by 2005 or so, and since then it's been a steady return to full on Cold War proxy wars and gas and oil pipeline control conflicts (Georgia, Syria, Azerbaijan, Ukraine) stretching from the Middle East to Northern Europe.
It's ridiculous that after all those peace efforts in the late 1980s, we're back to early 1980s levels of nuclear tension. As far as who to blame, there's plenty to go around - oil corporations wanting more profits, arms dealers wanting more wars, authoritarians wanting more power, empires wanting more control of resources, etc.