Despite all the really shady stuff that went on under his leadership, I think it's a fair statement to say that Russia/Soviet Union was a more prosperous, happier and more ethical state under his leadership than it is currently.
Mikhail Gorbachev has died
611–620 of 971 posts
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#612RIP. I did my college essay on Gorbachev. Still think the Cold War was the greatest urgent threat to humanity and welcome any moves to end it, failures and all
I guess it feels so good when you get all the benefits and somebody else foots the failures. Well, 2022 is a year of boomerang.
Boomerang of what? West economies are stronger than ever. They survived COVID for 2 years and now survive bootleg Cold War while Russia is spinning into 90s again.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#613Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can add Moldova to the list. Yes, now the people have well wealthier lifestyles than during he soviet period, and overall the direction seems optimist. But going from a postcard republic of sorts, to literally the poorest country in Europe, the transition has heavily bruised many people's faiths.
Yeah, Moldova is an order of magnitude worse-off now: https://youtu.be/wnDxHTaeNX0
Fraud and incompetence are the reason as much as political changes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Moldovan_bank_fraud_sca...
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#614Earlier 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.
If the cold war did end, why didn't NATO dissolve as well? It was born exactly to contain the USSR! Instead NATO kept expanding east...
> Instead NATO kept expanding east...
You mean Eastern countries wanted to join NATO.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#615The 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 it more remarkable that The Marshall Plan happened than that other opportunities are squandered. The frequency at which such chances are missed is so high that it is very much the normal state.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#616"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…
> Yugoslavia
Do we think it would have been better if we let the socialists in Yugoslavia enact their genocide against the Albanians?
Of all the NATO interventions to criticize, starting by criticizing the one that prevented a genocide seems sorta odd.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#617I 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.
I wanted to find out how the media could mess up a simple factual story on whether or not a famous person had died. It proved to be quite difficult to google for "Gorbachev death/died/dead misreported/erroneous/false" and lots of other variations; I kept getting hits on current news. But I finally found a report from 2013 here:
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/false-story-about...
The state-run news agency RIA Novosti in Moscow that published the erroneous story for just 5 minutes blamed it on hackers. But the false news spread widely from there.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#618RIP 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…
I saw that Pizza Hut commercial earlier today and I can't stop thinking about it. It has so much going on. It's the victory of capitalism over Soviet communism, the rise of neoliberalism to global hegemony, and the "End of History" in the form of a 30-second ad for pizza.
That is indeed a loaded symbol
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#619As 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.
> I'm reading some Russian news site, and almost universally Gorbachev is hated by Russians.
Lumpen population hates what they don’t understand, news at 11.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#620RIP 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…
Good ? What about sending tanks against Lithuanians and you know...killing people. How good is this ?
700+ injured and 14 dead doesnt sound like something "genuinely good person" does.