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Mikhail Gorbachev has died

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Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#221
post #22

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…

> There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War l

There was such a plan, at least in the twisted minds of the people behind the Washington Consensus. They were calling it privatization or price liberalization or some other non-sense like that, thing is the common people got the very, very short stick (like my parents, who lost their jobs, their city apartment and who had to resort to literally subsistence agriculture in a matter of 4-5 years maximum; I'm not from Russia, but still from the former communist space) while some lucky ones from amongst us became entrepreneurs and business leaders. Also, most of the really juicy assets (like almost of all our banking sector, our oil resources etc) got sold to Western companies, but that was a given if we wanted to become part of the European Union and of the West more generally speaking.

Yes, I've started to become more and more bitter as the years have gone by, I'm now almost the same age as my dad was in the mid-'90s, when all hell started to economically unravel. Nobody had asked my parents, or us, who were mere kids and teenagers back then, if we were agreeing to the sacrifices that they were going to impose on us.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#222
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The locals in power have to want to do it too. As soon as enough don’t want it, it is over. I’m skeptical of the idea that you can impose Democracy.

You can't impose democracy, but if democracy and associated ideas such as the free market spectacularly fails the people – as it did in the 90s – then that certainly doesn't help. We probably could have done a thing or two to make it fail less . Would that have made a meaningful difference? Hard to say for sure, but it would have been worth to try.

For young democracies - like Russia in 1992 - it's possible to get captured by populists, who, instead of solving tough problems and laying out the groundwork for the subsequent development, promise some doubtful, in retrospect at least, things, point fingers towards convenient scapegoats etc. In this sense Russia was unlucky. Yes, people didn't know much, and were led to believe etc... so the guilt is spread of course, and many are involved. Everybody should have tried to do the best in their place, then the possibilities are larger - but in this case, it turned out to be not enough.

I'm not sure we now know a guaranteed way of how to deal with situations like that.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't invalidate the point that the US has created incredible amounts of instability around the world.

Actually the British are more to blame for that, as they are the ones who deliberately drew the borders of modern middle east with the explicit goal to cause maximum instability.

Yes they are, but we overthrew a government from half of the Latin American countries in the same time period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not "ideas" failed the people, but the implementers - which turned out to be straight up robbers, dividing past empire's industrial base amongst them, like western idol Khodorkovsky or Berezovsky. Where the politicians were less corrupt, the free market worked spectacularly well, like in Poland.

So it wasn't real capitalism?

It was not really a base for capitalism to take hold and effect. It needs a basic rule of law and democracy to work. All it got was brief window of chaos, before the kleptocracy returned.

Best description of the cultural background i found so far was this:

https://youtu.be/f8ZqBLcIvw0?t=76

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#225
post #135

For those unfamiliar with what happened in Lithuania, in 1991 Gorbachev used military force to kill 14 Lithuanian civilians who were demonstrating for democratic reforms. https://www.rferl.org/a/lithuania-soviet-crackdown-1991-krem...

> who were demonstrating for democratic reforms. You seem to comment to better inform readers, yet your comment distorts the truth. Even the article you linked talks about Lithuania declaring independence from the USSR, not asking for democratic reforms. Despite what your article says, if you read the story on Wikipedia, Lithuania did in fact unilaterally declare independence from the USSR in March 1990. Just as an e…

The parent comment is correct, Lithuanians were demonstrating for the right to self-determination. The Baltic States were forcibly annexed to the Soviet Union in 1940; the comparison to Catalonia or US states is specious. Over two million people participated in peaceful protests in 1989 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Way), the Soviet decision to suppress this movement by force is a black mark on Gorbachev's legacy.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#226
post #22

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…

On the contrary, the "shock therapy" approach that Russia took in the Yeltsin years was, in many ways, prescribed by the West, and ended up being a complete disaster for both your average Russian person, and for capitalism and democracy as a whole, because most people just learned to associate these things with the kleptocracy that occurred in the 90s.

> [Western-driven reconstruction was] complete disaster for both your average Russian person

I think that's overstating the case. In fact the "average Russian person" was living in destitute poverty through most of the cold war, and none of that meaningfully changed with the advent of a market economy. Except that Russians of the 2000's could get eat better food and watch (much) better TV.

It's absolutely true that most of the western aid ended up hurting and not helping. But the bar was very, very low to begin with.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#227

"Arsenals of Folly" By Richard Rhodes is one of the best records of the Gorbachev era with respect to negotiations over arms reductions with Reagan (which resulted in a highly fractured US administration, with opponents (Cheney etc.) fighting advocates (Shultz etc.) over what policy Reagan should support), the immense effect of the Chernobyl disaster on the Soviet Union (something many nuclear energy proponents still…

I won't attempt to defend NATO interventions in other countries, but disbanding it like the Warsaw Pact was never a real option so long as Russia continued to maintain a significant military capability including nuclear weapons. The Warsaw Pact was never a real thing to begin with. It was a total fiction, not a voluntary alliance of (somewhat) equal sovereign states like NATO. All of the other Warsaw Pact members were under military occupation by the USSR and had zero real decision making authority. Any attempt to go their own way was immediately, violently crushed. So dissolving the Warsaw Pact when the USSR disintegrated meant nothing.

And before someone tries to draw a false equivalence between the USSR's role in the Warsaw Pact and the USA's role in NATO, those were hardly the same. NATO members were free to leave at any time without fear of a US invasion. France actually did withdraw from the NATO command structure for a while and nothing happened to them.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#228
post #189
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me tell you why I think this is an inappropriate comment: The point of it seems not to be collaboratively extending the line of thought proposed by the original post or the parent comment, but to make the parent commenter feel some kind of personal shame or stupidity. Good commenting is more like a team sport than a martial art.

Perhaps, but equally that's a route to a monoculture - can we not question Reagan? Americans love to glibly propitiate to Reagan's spirit (in heaven I'm assured), there's no way they could be doing so out of ignorance of the more controversial aspects of his presidency?

Of course we can question Reagan but when it comes to political/ideological flamebait, it's best to (a) avoid it and (b) stay on topic.

Whimsical off-topic stuff can be ok, but flamewar off-topic stuff isn't, and a greatest-hits of bad Reagan is definitely that.

This is in the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and there's lots of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., though you might have to scroll through boilerplate to get to the more substantial explanations.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#229
post #22

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 read "Gorbachev: His Life and Times" almost randomly five years ago. I'm going off of memory, but my primary takeaway from the book was your comment.

Gorbachev believed in Western ideals, maybe a bit too much. The Western leaders were extremely supportive of his reforms and promised to be with him. After the Wall fell, and Russian economy nose dived, no one was there for him. People were starving on the streets, Gorbachev asked for humanitarian aid, but nothing came.

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/23/world/gorbachev-pleads-fo...

I think he pleaded for $3B from Helmut Kohl in the end, but even that was too much. IIRC, the book ended with a bitter note on Western promises, what Russia could have become, along with a warning on consequences in the future.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#230
post #22

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…

Democracy does not imply friend of or aligned with the West. Russia has historically been an imperial power and seeks to further its own power and perceived interests, and they certainly refuse to be under foreign/Western/American domination. A democratic government could mean less reckless actions but it wouldn't necessarily mean friendlier actions.

> Democracy does not imply friend of or aligned with the West.

It seems like it does, though? I mean, no, it's not like India or Brazil are subjugated client states of the US or Germany or whatever, but they know where their natural allies are and which direction the wind blows in international relationships. Market democracies are going to stick together, if for no other reason than because they'll end up poorer if they don't, and they don't like that.

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