Historically it's very unusual for someone with so much power to allow his regime to collapse so peacefully. And it's remarkable that Soviet politics, some of the most brutal and self-serving in history, would find such a figure at its head. God bless him and keep him.
Mikhail Gorbachev has died
351–360 of 971 posts
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#352This entire thread instantly devolved into political football humping. The problems within the new post-USSR Russia couldn't have been fixed by the US or the West. The roots of what Russia would become were already deeply set as the USSR collapsed. The main actors there just changed names and continued business as usual.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most people would not waste their time nitpicking the usage of such a widely accepted term. For some reason the US embassy still finds it important enough to broadcast the difference to the rest of the world: https://ar.usembassy.gov/education-culture/irc/u-s-governmen... Could you explain that?
i think you are being a bit pedantic, it says: While often categorized as a democracy, the United States is more accurately defined as a constitutional federal republic. notice the wording "more accurately" and not "mischaracterized" etc -- btw... whats the point in arguing the u.s isn't a democracy? are you trying to say that people shouldn't be able to decide their leaders?
it's the US embassy being very pedantic about the matter to the extent they find it important to dedicate the starting paragraph of the entire section about the US government, even though the difference is just about being more accurate. in fact, accuracy in founding principles of governing is as important as accuracy of long-distance ballistic motion planning.
> btw... whats the point in arguing the u.s isn't a democracy?
because a typical follow-up discussion usually starts with "so where's the popular vote?" and this diminishes the principle of fair representation of smaller states of the federal republic.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#354I thought the Mandela Effect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_Effect ) was a myth ... but now I experience it myself. I can so clearly remember reading Gorbachev's obituary a few years ago ... Did anyone else have a similar reaction? (Perhaps I read an article about him on his 90th birthday and assumed it was an obituary?)
This is because his death was misreported in the media a few times. I’m giving it a day before trusting this report of his death.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 m…
Big part of Putin's politics is to appeal to the older generation who remembers the Soviet Union and want it be back. So at least those people do no consider it as a poverty and they think it was better back then. Not even comparing to the modern Russia but comparing to the modern West.
(not agreeing with them, just pointing to the fact)
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#356The 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…
Selling off the communist factories was a huge mistake. Should have followed the Chinese model of slowly introducing capitalist things into the existing economy. Instead they laid everyone off and of course everything went to shit.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
They were minted in late 80s and 90s with the help and active involvement of the West. There were so many stories... Working at McKinsey in Moscow in 90s made you instantly into a multi-millionaire. US was sending planes full of dollars to Almaty. Chechen avisos were a CIA plot... and so on and so forth.
I'm interested in reading these stories, are there any particular links you can suggest?
The book Red Notice by Bill Browder discusses this period. I wish the Netflix movie of the same name was based on it instead!
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
that's good, as the US is a constitutional republic
You're in the small, but vocal minority of people who incorrectly believe that direct democracy is the only form of democracy that exists, or that the term 'constitutional republic' says literally anything about how a country is governed. The US is a respresentative democracy that is also a constitutional republic. Denmark is a representative democracy that is also a constitutional monarchy. Canada is a representativ…
> who incorrectly believe that direct democracy is the only form of democracy that exists
I never claimed that. You are trying to address a non-existing point.
Aslo, being in minority has never been an indicator of wrong by default, so I don't see why you had to mention it. At least I know that the US embassy also finds it important to remind everyone about the difference [1].
> or that the term 'constitutional republic' says literally anything about how a country is governed. [...] Whether or not a country has a constitution, or is a republic has almost no bearing on how it is actually governed.
It does have a significant bearing on applicability of popular vote in a given federation.
[1] https://ar.usembassy.gov/education-culture/irc/u-s-governmen...
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#359The 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…
Your comment makes it sounds like you believe the U.S. had the power to decide whether or not Russia would turn into a kleptocracy or not. Maybe I'm misinterpreting you, but if I'm not, I'm skeptical. Marshall plan notwithstanding, 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. L…
> I don't think the U.S. should take on the burden of developing other countries; going down that road has been a bad idea more often than not.
From what I can tell from history, our successes involved US taking sovereignty and ruling absolutely for a period of years while setting up a government of our choosing to replace us. Our failures involved quickly setting up a local democracy and allowing self rule while we tried and failed to help. It seems we lost the stomach to use power after military victory and the incompetent governments we set up doom the countries involved to decades of failure.
I really don’t think we should continue getting involved in places we don’t have the guts to set up a military government for a decade. It is clear you have to force societal change on a place at gunpoint in order to get good outcomes, if you’re just going to topple governments and hope whatever rises from the ashes is nice, you might as well not bother.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#360I was taught that Ronald Reagan ended the cold war and gave us the longest lasting economic boom.
Reagan didn't end the cold war. He applied economic pressure, which created the conditions that allowed the cold war to end. Gorbachev played the critical part. He let the East European satellite states go rather than sending troops to restore status quo. Within the USSR, his reforms gave the democratic opposition some room to breathe. Once Gorbachev's power started to fail, that allowed the opposition to win, rather…
Not just economic. Reagan believed that the Soviet Union itself should fall, and would fall. Neither was consensus among the politicians and diplomats in America, to say nothing of Europe. he applied economic, military, and diplomatic pressure to make it so. He understood what would happen when the soviets started to relax their control. Something Gorbachev didn't understand or couldn't fight.
Why do you think the key phrase of the end of the cold war is "Mr. Gobachev, tear down this wall!". Reagan challenged him to dismantle something that they both knew couldn't stand, and that would result in the eventual collapse of the GDR (it was, after all, built to save the GDR from all of its citizens voting with their feet to abandon communism and leave for the west). Ironically, the "domino theory" ended up being correct, but it was the east and the soviets that couldn't sustain the effects of satellite states being lost, not Asia and America.
Gorbachev gets a lot of credit for not behaving like his predecessors had, with violent crackdowns and marching armies whenever the rule of the party was threatened. Most say this was due to Gorbachev not understanding - but I think it's simpler. Gorbachev simply knew that the state could no longer do so - and in fact the one time he tried, it completely failed on him.
Gorbachev also lied (and changed his story) vis-a-vis NATO expansion something that Putin has used to build a "NATO betrayed us story" to justify his invasion of Ukraine much as Hitler used the "stab in the back".
Does that take away from Gorbachev? Maybe not, but Gorbachev was presiding over a failing state the second he took power. He simply rode it out, with as little violence as possible. That's something to be celebrated.
https://www.rferl.org/a/nato-expansion-russia-mislead/312636...