The collapse of the USSR still doesn't make sense to me.3 faggots just get pens and say "The USSR no longer exists, we are willingly going to transform from an international superpower to a bunch of dysfunctional shitholes with decreased economic prosperity and kleptocratic rulers."Why?
>>16534816Because the faggots with pens would become the kleptocratic rulers you mentioned. The reason it doesn't make sense is because it was irrational and criminal, countless millions have suffered from the fallout of this decision.
>>16534816It’s strange how nobody considers the nationalistic aspect of its collapse. There were almost monthly anti Soviet protests with 100k+ people in most of the republics demanding secession, especially the Baltic and the Caucasus. These protests would sometimes garner sympathy from local Soviet officials and would paralyze the whole society for weeks. Such an occurrence was frequent by 1986 and the show of force usually exacerbated the problem
>>16534816The coup against Gorbachev absolutely destroyed the power and legitimacy of the government, while leaders of the republics especially Yeltsin rallied the public against the coup, which in turn consolidated his own power as the leader of Russia, not Gorbachev or the coup leaders.Basically in order to save the government Gorbachev would have had to send in the tanks when he was at his weakest politically, not able to control the party leaders, and when it was clear the public would not be as easily swayed by such tactics as they had in the past. And this isn't even yet considering whether Gorbachev could ever be the person to "send in the tanks".
>>16534816History is orchestrated by hidden occult powers.If it hasn't become obvious even to the most retarded moron, you are literally too stupid to live.
Fun fact:It was already a dysfunctional shithole, it was just all covered up
>>16534853Truly everyone who experienced the USSR fucking hated it. It must have been truly hell on earth.Imagine having to larp 24/7.
>>16534816Yes, men have agency.>THE MATERIAL CONDITIONS JUST DONT MAKE SENSE AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
>>16534860>Truly everyone who experienced the USSR fucking hated ithuh what happened in 1990?
>>16534860You can Remind me when we will have weekly protests of hundreds of thousands demanding the abolishment of the United States, often in multiple states simultaneously
>>16534833Zbigniew Brzeziński (aka Polack Kissinger) had been talking about Nationalism being the Achilles's Heel of the USSR since the 1960s.
>>16534908Bullshit who cares about the Baltic
>>16534913>who cares about the balticsOr Ukraine
>>16534913Or the Caucasus
>>16534913Or central asia
>>16534913Or Russia
>>16534936>>16534945>>16534948>>16534951Bodied that tankie freak
The moral of the USSR story is that one language, one people, is the only way to make socialism work. Look at China. The Han dominate the ethnic landscape (the meme of 55 minorities which together add up to 5% of the population notwithstanding) and Mandarin is pushed to take over all other languages. It works.
>>16535024Exactly this
>>16534816Because people are fucking retards and don't know what they fucking want. Boohoo, the west has consumerist shit, lets bring down the whole country and make others starve so se have consumerist shit. And the leaders want their chance to steal from it as well, that's why all the ex-commie niggers are still the top politicians now.Same shit happens all over the world in other systems. Honestly the USSR would have been better off if they just let all the whiny niggers to get the fuck out.
>>16534833How exactly did people become nationalist after nearly 100 years of union? I live in a third world shithole, I would never go die or protest for something as flimsy as a "nation", which end up being nothing but border conflict parties.
>>16535101did you ever play high school sports anon?
>>16535024>one language, one people, is the only way to make socialism work.literally any system with work with a pure population
>>16535101There were discussions about alternate models in the 1910s-20s, but the USSR basically reprised the Russian Empire albeit with a de jure federal-type structure featuring copies of the all-union organs of power. Especially for the Baltics, many of the minorities, having developed modern notions of nationalism in the 1800s/early 1900s, were only ever uneasily part of the USSR. Institutional and ideological decay, as well as the ever more apparent failure of the Soviet model to catch up with and surpass the West lowered any interest in the union, gave impetus /possibility to new nationalist visions, and degraded the ability of the center to hold the thing together.
>>16535107They wouldn't ever let me because I was slow and would cry if I got hit hard by the ball.
>>16535132Why did the union end up abruptly, why didn't they start splitting into patches of "socialist reservations" for whoever still wanted to live in communism? The whole point of communism is managing to live in a commune, which many other communities already do.
>>16534816It wasn’t really just an overnight occurrence. It had been undergoing decades of economic stagnation, was caught up in costly disasters like the Afghan war and Chernobyl, had an increasingly restless and dissatisfied population and its international power and standing was severely waning.
>>16535153Because it was a highly hierarchical bureaucratic centralized system and what you suggest is Amish lifestyle.
>>16535153>Why did the union end up abruptly,August Putsch and its aftermath. CPSU disbanded, hardliners and status quo-favorers demoralized and discredited, hopes for reform dashed (ironic echoes of 1917), separatists emboldened, opportunists flee the sinking ship.>The whole point of communism The Bolsheviks renamed themselves "the Communist Party" in 1918. Past that point, Communism was inherently tied to their party and their social/economic ideology. >why didn't they start splitting into patches of "socialist reservations"It couldn't be separated from the dying all-union organizations, whose power and resources passed into national hands, and who could then establish governmental power within their territories. Remaining ideological communists (few as they were) had nowhere to run, nobody to command, and nothing to fight with.
>>16534816Would you rather be an international superpower or not starve to death?
>>16535231The Russians began to starve when they were imposed capitalism buffoon. >muh lolodomorLiterally never happened.
People itt are conflating several separate things here. There is a difference between nations that were simply part of the East Bloc and ones that were actually part of the Union proper. The East Bloc nations like Poland wanted out of Russian vassalage. Most countries in the USSR itself though (with the exception of the Baltics) did not actually want the destruction of the Union. They actually wanted it preserved, just with liberalizing market reforms (no one agreed on how much or what kind though) the specific referendum that got overwhelming approval was worded thus:>Do you consider necessary the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedom of an individual of any nationality will be fully guaranteed?People voted 78% Yes on it. Splitting it up was basically a coup by Yeltsin and his American backers after Gorbachev was revealed to be powerless in the face of the prior military coup.
>>16534816local nationalismdisgust at the shitty system they lived under (70 years after the revolution, still nigh impossible to get toilet paper)anger at the afghan war (sound familiar?)also in the inner echelons of the military and the politburo the loss of face over the european socialist bloc collapsing and therefore buffer states against possible Western invasion
>>16535277But then you get into questions over what "equal sovereign" republics mean. Depending on how "sovereign" is defined, they're not really part of a country, but a multinational federation.>People voted 78% Yes on it.And people voted overwhelmingly for the Constituent Assembly, which also amounted to nothing.
>>16534816This guy claimed the fall of the Soviet Union, liberalization, perestroika, and glasnost was pre-planned long in advance.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoliy_Golitsyn
>>16534833Nationalism didn't play a significant role in most republics.
>>16535336The point is that everyone becoming their own shithole state was not what the people were agitating for. They wanted a seat at the table, instead the table was smashed and thrown in a furnace.
>>16535024>>16535076>>16535112It's just that nationalism is too strong of a force currently. Socialism can only work if you can truly convince the working class that they are more similar with other workers of different races than they are with their bosses of the same race, which is true but if you've been raised with nationalism it's a hard thing to shake off. It's a difficult problem.
>>16535101Dont be deluded by mono-cause morons.While there was a sense of nationalism in a couple of republics. The majority didnt have a strong sense of nationhood.
>>16534900I learned from this board that private property was invented around this time, so it was probably that.
>>16535101Not really. What caused the collapse was Yelstin banning the Communist Party which was the glue holding together the Soviet Union. Without the Party, local elites had no choice but declare independence.
>>16535352The people were never calling the shots, and events/factional maneuvering by mid and top levels overtook them. At the minimum, of course, a customs union and free-movement zone until 2000, with coordinated regulatory revolution toward European standards, would've been far better than OTL. Holding all else constant, inserting barriers where none existed before is going to cause no small amount of damage.
>>16535365Nationalism is any united sense of symbols, signs, communication,stories,and legacy. Nation building and synthesis is the only way communism can work.
>>16535378That's a strong case.
>>16535101Those hundred years of 'union' was nothing more than Muscovite oppression. Nobody actually LIKED them.
>>16534852Yeah. It was called the “Cold War” and when the “Cold War” was supposedly over in the late 80z, the Soviet Union collapsed. So we can infer that the Americans did in-fact win the so-called “Cold War.”
>>16535534Central Asia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova actually liked them. Muslim Causcasions and Balts didn’t like them.
>>16535365The USSR wanted to have both worlds, their "re-indigenouisization" policies and the whole idea of creating Soviet Republics was a blatant self-sabotage in terms of actually creating a unified Soviet identity. You can't "re-indigenize" a place like Georgia or Armenia and expect them to NOT because nationaly conscious and clamoring for independence from Moscow. Russification was the only real solution and they rejected it already in the 1920s
>>16536161The problem is that Russification would go against socialist ideals. They thought it would be a heckin imperialism, basically. They should have done it anyway since Stalin was willing to commit even worse deviations from Marxism in pursuit of modernizing the country.
>>16536161>>16536182Stalin model of creating a nation not unlike Russian Federation of today, where RSFSR absorbs all other SR in 1922 was the only way the nation can survived in the long term.
>>16535101nobody wants to have Russian dick in their mouth, retardGrįžkite namo, rusų kareiviai!
>>16536475stick to cleaning toilets retard
>>16534913Baltic people, mostly
>>16534816It makes sense only in so far as you worship the state and then you follow its' edicts. There is no USSR except as a mass hallucination.
>>16536161>>16536182"Re-indigenouisization" was half-assed and by 1950s no one really cared about it. The problem was that the Russians were buck-broken and turned into new Soviet people, the Russian culture was destroyed and replaced with Socart slop. Russification wouldn't matter, you had (and kind of still have) millions of Russians in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, tens thousands in Baltic states. And what did they do when the Union collapsed? Fucking nothing. In comparison Bosnian and Croatian Serbs took up arms and stood for thenselves and the country they believed was theirs.
>>16535024>The moral of the USSR story is that one language, one people, is the only way to make socialism work.Market socialism, somewhat.North Korea is still hell on earth, after all, as pure as they are, while Vietnam is also decent.But then again, the capitalist versions of those asian states are better, so let's just stick to tempered capitalism, without immigration, instead.
>>16534833>There were almost monthly anti Soviet protests with 100k+ people in most of the republics demanding secession, especially the Baltic and the Caucasus. I can't find it now, but there's a documentary that follows a Russian-speaking American college debate team around the USSR in the 1980s doing public debates with selected Soviet teams, must have been during perestroika, and they struggled a lot with the crowds in Russia. (There was one Russian team in particular that was very sharp.) Then they get to Lithuania and the crowd was totally on their side. Soviet repression played a role in inflaming Baltic nationalism. It's worth remembering the Baltic states were invaded and occupied by the USSR in 1940 even though recognizing the independence of the Baltic states had been a fundamental act of the USSR until then post-1919. The U.S. never recognized that, if you look at American atlases of the USSR during the Cold War, they frequently had the Baltic states marked as occupied territory.>>16535277>Most countries in the USSR itself though (with the exception of the Baltics) did not actually want the destruction of the Union. Mark Ames talked about being there when the crackup was going on and the attitude of people on the street was that they had no idea what the hell was going on.>>16535024>The moral of the USSR story is that one language, one people, is the only way to make socialism work. Look at China. >>16535365>It's just that nationalism is too strong of a force currently. Well look at the European Union. The USSR was kind of like that but if it was controlled by a single party that controlled a European military. More utopian was the idea that socialism would eventually become a global system in a similar kind of way to liberal internationalists who think every country will eventually become a liberal democracy.
>>16536475And Slava CCCP to you too, tovarisch.
>>16535153>why didn't they start splitting into patches of "socialist reservations" for whoever still wanted to live in communism?The only reason why Communism was the government for that whole time was because it was a one-party state. There is still a Communist party in Russia today but it has to contend with other parties. When actually contending with other parties, it turns out Communism isn't that popular.
>>16534816It makes sense when you realize that the national parliaments were voted full of nationalists after Gorbachevs reforms. After this it was downhill to the gutter.
>>16535243>Literally never happened.Yeah it was da kooolaks and muh CIA.Nothing bad ever happened in the glorious workers paradise of the soviet union.
>>16534816>, we are willingly going to transform from an international superpower to a bunch of dysfunctional shitholes with decreased economic prosperity and kleptocratic rulers.It was never a superpower. It was a lie that only existed as an outlet for hatred of "capitalists" with no real goals.That's WHY it was so weak that a strike of the pen and free press managed to destroy the entire farce.
>>16534816Because the USSR was held together via state violence. Once the State could no longer maintain it's grip on the populace using fear and violence then it came crashing down like a house of cards.
>>16537423>That's WHY it was so weak that a strike of the pen and free press managed to destroy the entire farce.On one hand you claim that this is the most totalitarian government to ever repress man. On the other, it respects states rights.
