301–310 of 971 posts
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Republicans? Man, some people just can't get past the "my party vs your party" mindset.
Federalism is one of the core principles of the Republican party. I don't believe that's a controversial statement of fact, but I also didn't think vaccines or the shape of the Earth were controversial subjects, so I never know these days.
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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, Go…
> People were starving on the streets, Gorbachev asked for humanitarian aid, but nothing came. Looks like some hyperbolization. There was a term "legs of Bush", referring to chicken legs from USA, sold in many places in at least some cities. There were "humanitarian" bags of rice, also available to some significant extent. This was in around 1994, so, Yeltsin times already, but before 1991 Soviet Union was somewhat m…
I found the following article from the Associated Press. It looks like Gorbachev said that Soviet Union didn't expect famine, but would face food shortages. It's still sad that the humanitarian aid didn't come, leading to Gorbachev's resignation.
https://apnews.com/article/a9a10bdf38d213033157d6d98c29e2c1
> In a letter last month to Jacques Delors, the EC commission president, the Soviets asked for millions of tons of food that it valued at $7.5 billion. The rest of the $14.7 billion in aid was requested from other Western nations.
The Kremlin’s request included 5.5 million tons of grain, 900,000 tons of sugar, 800,000 tons of meat, 350,000 tons of butter, 300,000 tons of vegetable fat, 300,000 tons of flour, 50,000 tons of tobacco, 50,000 tons of baby food and 30,000 tons of malt.
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it ended for 150 or so million people in Eastern Europe, that were freed from Russia.
In 1955, eastern europeans were so thankful to be free from Germany. 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.
Not sure which Eastern Europeans you mean, but I can assure you most of those 150 mil people were not happy they got conquered by nazis or commies, it was the same amount of genocide and societal damage from both sides.
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> 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 agricultu…
I thought most of the major assets got bought by connected oligarchs, sometimes by literally putting goons at the doors of the auction room to beat up anyone that tried to get in to bid against them. If the oils fields were actually owned by European companies, we’d be buying Russian oil from ourselves, not from Russia.
As the Russian, I'm of the opinion that Gorbachev is traitor. I hate communism, so it's good that he helped us to get rid of that. But why getting rid of communism had to include letting Americans to take reign in many government agencies of Russia? What would be your opinion of US president, if he goes to to retire in Russia? I'm reading some Russian news site, and almost universally Gorbachev is hated by Russians.
Did Gorbachev retire outside Russia? I wasn't aware of this. He died in Moscow. The last time I heard about him before this was when he attended an RT event in Moscow (which was also attended by Jill Stein and Michael Flynn). Where outside Russia did he retire? Why did he leave this place to die in a Russian hospital? Your comment leads one to infer he retired to the US.
> I'm reading some Russian news site, and almost universally Gorbachev is hated by Russians.
Russian news sites are notable lately for not allowing the free expression of Russian opinions, so what they show you may not be representative. I'm not saying you're wrong but that Russian news sites aren't great evidence that you're right.
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> 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…
Interestingly, South Carolina declared its independence December 20, 1860, and the US Civil War didn't begin until April 12, 1861, when the Confederate Army attacked Fort Sumter. It's an intriguing historical question what would have happened if Fort Sumter hadn't been attacked. Would the Union have eventually made the first move? Would peaceful negotiations have eventually resulted in some stronger guarantee in the…
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He did. It's just that leftists in the US won't accept that and pretend that the Cold War just "ended" one day, because of the goodwill of the Russians, not because the US policy forced them into bankruptcy.
There's a disconnect here: the US policy in question took place over decades, not the 8 years that Reagan was president.
RIP Gorbachev, one of the few genuinely good people in politics. After he retired from politics, he was featured in several advertisements: - In 1994 for Apple Computer: https://www.upi.com/Archives/1994/10/07/The-first-advertisem... - In 1998 for Pizza Hut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorbachev_Pizza_Hut_commercial - In 2000 for the ÖBB, the Austrian railways: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLscz8kEg6c - In 2007…
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> I would give credit to the people and government of Japan for their post-war success: it could easily have gone another direction, and the U.S. couldn't have stopped that from happening. I suggest you read more about the post war occupation of Japan. The U.S. put its thumb heavily on the scale forcing Japan to accept democratization throughout. Unusual for the U.S. this included pushing economic democracy by suppor…
> The U.S. put its thumb heavily on the scale More than a thumb. The Constitution of Japan was written by Americans. America stomped on the scale, and that time it seems to have worked.
Or maybe the post soviet Russia was dealt a bad hand. Hard to know (just like here, you can find infinite streams of contradictory arguments)