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Mikhail Gorbachev has died

reuters.com

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Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#441

Post by purecoolnesss »

bhupy wrote: post #288
paganel wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The transition to a market economy went very well for most of the former Soviet Republics except Russia. https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/03/16/the-transiti... A lot of Russia's issues stem from the way the government sold off their state owned corporations, which created artificial monopoly/oligopoly owners overnight — often insiders/cronies to begin with. This can be contrasted with traditional market econ…

yeah I would say maybe the baltics had it good but the rest of former republics had a hard time. Armenia and Azerbaijan had a war, Tajikistan was engulfed in a civil war. Most countries didn't have any real gdp growth till mid 2000s.

Central Asia has the same oligarchy as you would picture in Russia and probably much worse. All dictators only changing after the previous dies.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#442

Post by stakkur »

lapcat wrote: 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…

Russia didn’t ‘transition to democracy’. This seems to be a particularly American fantasy.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#443

Post by nl »

ghostwriter wrote: post #353
andrekandre wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 demo…

> 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.

Oh wow, so that's why this is seen as a left/right thing?

I'm not from the US (and therefore way left for the US) and I think assuring representation of the less populous states is very important.

I think the first-past-the-post voting system used in the US is a much bigger problem than this.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#444

Post by lapcat »

eternalban wrote: post #434
lapcat wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This notion is based on ignoring historic facts. No, it's not. Please refrain from this kind of personal comment. I wasn't suggesting that the US meddle in Russia's political system. Russia was already moving to democracy by itself. The point was to provide economic aid to support that existing, fledgling, fragile democracy. What happened, unfortunately, is that many Russians suffered heavily economically during th…

> No, it's not. Please refrain from this kind of personal comment. Pointing out (perceived) omission is a not a "personal comment".

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You should assume that any commenter will know that Germany and Japan were occupied after WW2. Of course I know that. I mean, I'm the one who brought up the Marshall Plan in the first place! You set up a straw man to criticize.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#446

Post by trhway »

lapcat wrote: 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…

>The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s.

it was a tough choice. To transition to democracy it was necessary to dismantle and punish for the most egregious crimes the KGB and the likes, to actually prohibit Communist Party and to deny the people directly associated with the totalitarian regime of USSR any positions of power for at least 10 to 20 years. East Germany, Baltic and some other East Europe countries did for example various elements of such a process. Such "de-communization"/"lustration" though carried risk of instability, and instead US chose stability because of USSR/Russia nukes, and thus US actually helped KGB to survive the 1991. Splitting Russia further would have also helped to dampen the anti-democratic imperial drive in Russia, yet that was coming with the chances to increase the number of nuclear armed countries, and this is again why US didn't support the breakup of Russia into smaller pieces. I think such smaller pieces would have had higher chances for democratic transition due to most of them losing the imperial drive.

Belarus has never did the "lustration", and is a lost cause for the foreseeable future. Ukraine also didn't do "lustration" back in 199x, and that resulted in the grave danger to the country in 2014 when a lot of army and government officers didn't want to defend their country. So Ukraine had to do such "lustration" in the years since 2014, and today its results are obvious in their successful fight against the invasion.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#447

Post by lumost »

paganel wrote: post #221
lapcat wrote: 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 agricultu…

One aspect that I never hear about in the collapse of the soviet union. To what extent did opening the markets to quickly break soviet industry? While by the 1990s Soviet industry was notoriously in-efficient compared to western counterparts - it still existed and functioned. Opening the flood gates seemed to result in everyone rapidly selling equipment for scrap and killed any existing supply chains.

Would the result have been different if Russia followed a Chinese model?

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#448

Post by nl »

ghostwriter wrote: post #260
8note wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The founders aren't very relevant anymore. Their system was bad, and the current one is better, though it keeps some of the old flaws they introduced as compromises for the time Based on your quote, they didn't understand that representative democracy is still democracy? The internet lessons the need for representatives, since we don't need to travel to talk to each other anymore.

> The founders aren't very relevant anymore. Their system was bad, and the current one is better, though it keeps some of the old flaws they introduced as compromises for the time The US embassy thinks otherwise: https://ar.usembassy.gov/education-culture/irc/u-s-governmen...

I'll just post this once instead of on every place you are posting that same link:

> The United States is a representative democracy.

https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/lesson-pl...

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#449

Post by hestefisk »

coldtea wrote: post #388
bhupy wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The transition to a market economy went very well for most of the former Soviet Republics except Russia. https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/03/16/the-transiti... A lot of Russia's issues stem from the way the government sold off their state owned corporations, which created artificial monopoly/oligopoly owners overnight — often insiders/cronies to begin with. This can be contrasted with traditional market econ…

> The transition to a market economy went very well for most of the former Soviet Republics except Russia That might be what it writes in the link, it wasn't the case though, except if you mean after things stabilized 15 and 20 years later (and it's still bad in most places). Tons of conflict, forced migration, poverty, crime, sexual slavery, and so on...

Exactly. Countries like Poland and Hungary have huge social issues and struggle with corruption. A lot of political research points to the recent rise in fascist nationalism in these two countries as caused by being thrown from one political ideology to another (e.g. “communism” to ironfisted neoliberalism / Washington Consensus). It’s pretty evident none of them worked. If anything the country that was LEAST worse off following the fall of the iron curtain was DDR / East Germany simply because they were already miles ahead any other former Warsaw Pact country in terms of productivity. However, if you compare them to West Germany they were quite poor, with some differences in wealth and relative household income still evident at least 10 years ago.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#450

Post by drpancake »

gpm wrote: post #371
colechristensen wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What successes are you thinking of? The only two that come to mind for me are Korea and Japan (I could easily be overlooking some), and really the former happened as a part of the latter (Korea was ruled by Japan for the 35 years prior to WWII). As I understand it South Korea was at least nominally under local democratic rule from the start. I'm not sure that's a big enough sample set to be making generalizations fro…

Post-WW2 Germany, too. Although that was a joint effort.
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