Dissolution of the USSR

Soviet Union ceased to exist 30 years ago today

https://tass.com/society/1372631

They probably thought they could do better on their own... which is ironic because I think it is Russia that seems to be doing the best and it was what they all blamed for holding them back and it appears to be more a case of they were holding Russia back.

I have probably posted this before, but it bears repeating. The failure of communism was its authoritarian core. It was predicated
on a false dichotomy. All or nothing social engineering of homo sovieticus (Trotskyist woke retardation) or bourgeoise decadence.
Social welfare did not require any destruction of the fabric of society and gulags. Russia today is showing the proper way. Elected
government that sets the tone over the economy. People can call this state capitalism until they are blue in the face and have a
stroke, but it is superior to Soviet communism and western capitalism. The latter is just an oligarchic toilet that spends all of its
time leeching the planet with colonial rape. The rabid reaction to Russian economic advances over the last 20 years proves this.
All the yapping about competition and freedom of this and that is for idiots to consume.

The concentrated power in the Party in the USSR created the conditions for the failure of the system. The rot would eventually
prompt the nomenclatura to dream of capitalist decadence and that is exactly what they did and engineered the collapse of the
system from within. In what must be poetic justice, these maggots only got about 10 years of good times (which Navalny sings
the praises of) and their fest was ruined by the professional faction concentrated in the defense and intelligence services that
has been tagged as "siloviki". Putin and others saw through the oligarch toilet system and figured out that some sort of return to
control was needed to restore sanity. It is really absurd how assorted "experts" try to paint Putin as part of an oligarchy. That
would be what the western system is, don't get them confused.

So Russia is an "existential" threat to the west. It presents a system model that undermines the western one. So naturally western
propaganda paints a totally false picture of the state of Russia today.

Soviet Union could have survived as Union of Sovereign States - Gorbachev

The Soviet Union’s first president, Mikhail Gorbachev believes that the Soviet authorities had underestimated the scale of inter-ethnic problems in the Soviet Union and the need for reforming the country. He is certain that the country could have survived even after the August 1991 government coup attempt as a Union of Sovereign States.

https://tass.com/politics/1380829

If Yeltsin and Gorby could have worked together they might have made a go of it, but honestly I think Russia is much better off without most of them anyway.

The Baltic States were always going to leave, and their financial position now should be a lesson to other countries thinking of leaving economic or political groupings... the port traffic through those Baltic States was their lifeblood and they could have retained most of it without being petty and childish towards its neighbours... resulting in the former traffic going through those ports now going through Russian ports instead.

Not sure if this the right place but it seems to be. Some articles:

https://apnews.com/article/europe-russia-ukraine-poland-moscow-3dfb565a7e65ce7b110c806df12869f9

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/belarusalert/belarus-is-a-reminder-that-the-ussr-is-still-collapsing/

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/no-putin-isn-t-trying-to-bring-the-soviet-union-back

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/12/25/world/meanwhile-in-america-december-22-intl/index.html

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/12/26/britains-ussr-sympathisers-ignoring-regimes-horrors/

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.rbth.com/history/334556-what-after-ussr-breakup/amp

Putin famously called it the greatest geopolitical disaster of the century

If the US managed to convince the countries of the EU to break up then I am sure a few Germans and French and others would say it was the end of the world... but for most of the rest of the world it would be just one less bully being destroyed by another bully.

The US had enormous fun demanding European empires be broken up after WWI... they only empire they didn't break up was the Russian Empire and that had to wait till the 1990s.

GarryB wrote:If the US managed to convince the countries of the EU to break up then I am sure a few Germans and French and others would say it was the end of the world... but for most of the rest of the world it would be just one less bully being destroyed by another bully.

The US had enormous fun demanding European empires be broken up after WWI... they only empire they didn't break up was the Russian Empire and that had to wait till the 1990s.

The US wants a unipolar world

@ Guest


A friend of mine once said , after the collapse of the Soviet union : " .....oh , this will set back the causes of socialism for another 200 years ! " . Then I said : " ...But 200 years is a short time in historic terms " . What we want is irrelevant .

Putin was referring to the consequences of the collapse. His words are twisted by western lie factory media.
Putin is not a communist revanchist. He has stated on numerous occasions what sort of disastrous policies were
implemented by the Bolsheviks and their successors. But he is not a moron who will self-flagellate and accept Russian
"guilt" over the USSR period. Russians remember the good aspects of life before 1990. These good aspects were there
as a result of their sacrifice and hard work. They were not gifted to them by the Party and the ideology.

The western view of Russia is a projection. It does not even go skin deep. I see so-called American right wingers engage
in full bore apologia for the insanity coming out of 1930s Germany, but apply a totally different standard to Russia as
if communist excesses are a genetic inferiority.

This is why I generally dislike the west. It is a collection of sanctimonious, ignorant hypocrites who have been the bane of
humanity for centuries. This is why they are so busy virtue signalling 24/7 with their phony moral superiority.

Guest wrote:Putin famously called it the greatest geopolitical disaster of the century

The economic damage to Russia from the collapse of the USSR was TWICE as great as the losses in World War II.

Demographic losses in Russia alone range from 18 to 31 million people. In the countries of the former USSR, this is up to 60 million in total. In total, the Eastern bloc lost up to 85 million people due to excessive mortality, a drop in the birth rate, and mass migration.

I am not aware of a larger geopolitical catastrophe not only in the XX century. I am not aware of a larger geopolitical catastrophe in at least the last thousand years.

From Wlison Center Digital Archive page

https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/chancellors-helmut-kohls-meeting-russian-president-yeltsin-thursday-21-november-1991

it is obvious that there were plans for USSR to be maintained as a confederation of some states (New Union Treaty) at least after the collapse of communism (maybe with a different name)

President Yeltsin replies that Ukraine wanted full independence. He wanted to share something with the Chancellor in confidence that he had not even told Gorbachev: There were ideas for a unification of the three Slavic republics – namely, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus – which would have the effect that the previous center under Gorbachev would be entirely abandoned.

In addition, the Central Asian – Islamic – republics would integrate, namely Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan und Azerbaijan. Fundamentalism gained increasing influence in these counties, whereby Iran obviously played a role as its representatives were present on-site.

The question in this constellation was about Russia’s role. Russia could, of course, take the lead of the Slavic group. But the Central Asian republics essentially could not survive without Russia. Just Russia generated surpluses whereas the others were primarily living on subventions. Seen from this perspective, it would be good for Russia’s citizens to have a complete separation. But, at the same time, one would not do this as it implied the destruction of the union. Thus, he and Gorbachev tried to bring the Slavic and the Islamic groups together in the union. This meant, specifically, that all except Ukraine were ready to sign the union treaty.

If Ukraine did not sign, this would be a severe hit for Russia as well. When the Baltic Republics introduced their own currencies, it did not have major effects on the Rubel. If Ukraine did the same thing, however, it could result in the collapse of the entire Rubel system.

and more specifically here

President Yeltsin says that the plan was for each republic to have its own currency and that one wanted to introduce an accounting unit according the lines of the ECU in the EC. At the same time, one had to think about other variants, as well, whereby the three Slavic republics would merge. This variant had advantages.

Summing up, he wanted to say there were three variants:

a. Seven republics merged, forming a union without Ukraine.

b. The three Slavic republics merged on the one hand and five Islamic republics on the other. This would the union’s end and this was not endorsed by Russia.

c. Seven republics merged, forming a union including Ukraine. This would be the formation of a truly powerful state.

here more info on New Union Treaty and Union of Sovereign States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Union_Treaty

it seems a political union of Russia along
Byelorussia (Byelorussian SSR)
Azerbaijan (Azerbaijan SSR)
Kazakhstan (Kazakh SSR)
Kirghizia (Kirghiz SSR)
Tajikistan (Tajik SSR)
Turkmenia (Turkmen SSR)
Uzbekistan (Uzbek SSR)

could be viable

I seem to remember someone in the 1990s talking about the dangers of a new Soviet State using superior western management techniques and of course supercomputers and western social and economic models to create a super state.

I seem to remember that this same guy feared Japan and Russia sorting out their differences and the Japanese management and robots etc together with the educated and skilled Russian labour force and their aerospace technology would create a threat to the dominance of the western world.

He mentioned the performance of Japanese aircraft and navy during WWII and how if they sorted their codes better the Americans would have had rather more problems than they did.