Last night, stinger asked for more information on the causes of the breakup of the Soviet Union. Here’s a short summary of my understanding, with some references, not all (sorry!) links.
The Soviet economic system was faltering from the sixties on. The First Secretaries during that period were slow-moving, sick, and in no way capable of innovating out of that situation. It may have been inherently impossible in any case. Manufacturing of anything but weapons never was a significant part of the economy, which depended on oil exports.
The Soviet Union was made up of 15 Union republics. Some of those republics became part of the Soviet Union after World War II but had fought civil wars for independence from the Russian empire during and after the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Baltic States in particular, but other republics as well, were not happy members of the Union. Moscow went through waves of Russification, in which the Russian language was forced on populations for which it was not native. Social restrictions sometimes accompanied the language crackdowns.
Most of the rest of the world refused to recognize the Baltic republics as part of the Soviet Union. Token embassies were maintained in Washington and London.
By the 1980s, even the Soviets were beginning to realize they had a problem. The arms race with the United States had been partly tamed by the SALT arms control agreements, but an intermediate-missile race was burning. Building armaments was bleeding money and industrial capacity out of the economy. Mikhail Gorbachev, a newcomer with promise, was made First Secretary in March 1985.
Reactor #4 at Chernobyl blew up as a result of a poorly planned and executed safety experiment in April 1986, contaminating chunks of Ukraine and Belarus in particular. The secrecy and slowness of the Soviet system to respond convinced Gorbachev that something needed to be done quickly. That something included both industrial reform and increased transparency.
Industrial reform came first and was called perestroika. A little later came glasnost, openness. Opening up to criticism of industrial practices was necessary to build a better-working economy. Integrating that economy with the rest of the world after several decades of isolation was also necessary. Neither would be easy. Arguably, Gorbachev moved too fast, without sufficient planning.
Besides the republics, several countries were satellites of the Soviet Union: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and East Germany. Their governments were nominally independent, but in reality heavily directed from Moscow. With the Soviet Union, they made up the Warsaw Pact, a response to NATO. Hungary and Czechoslovakia had staged revolts in 1956 and 1968 but were harshly put down. Poland was engaged in a slow-motion revolt throughout the 1980s via the Solidarity organization, which had characteristics of both a labor organization and political party.
Political parties were banned within the Soviet Union, but once perestroika was announced, nationalists in the Baltic republics began organizing perestroika groups. For improving industry, they said, but those groups contained, deliberately, the seeds of political parties. The Baltic states had strong expatriate groups in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia that were willing to help.
Something that remains a mystery to me is how the Baltic republics managed to stack their Supreme Soviets with nationalists. But they did. After 1985, the Supreme Soviets began to legislate the primacy of local laws over Union laws, the legitimacy of national symbols like their flags, and eventually called themselves parliaments instead of Supreme Soviets. Demonstrations alternated with bursts of legislation. People were jailed.
Moscow had never bothered to understand what they called “the nationalities,” all those Soviet people who were not Russian. So the leadership missed a lot of what was going on in the satellites and republics. They paid more attention when secession was openly spoken of.
Gorbachev recognized that Moscow could no longer support the satellites, and their restlessness presaged a possible need for military action that he could not afford financially or in its public fallout. So in October 1989, he dissolved the Warsaw Pact and said that the satellites could go their own way in what he humorously called the Sinatra Doctrine. Additionally, he renounced the doctrine of proletarian revolution, which had underpinned Soviet expansionism.
Gorbachev felt that this, along with the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, would allow him to concentrate on reforming the Soviet economy. But he was not fully aware of the rebellions brewing in the republics.
In one of the internal moves toward reform, Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian Federated Soviet Republic, the largest of the Soviet republics. Yeltsin spent time with Baltic politicians to learn their tactics. Discussions continued with the republics on their constitutional duties toward the Union. Lithuania declared independence in March 1990. Soviet militia were sent in. Estonia and Latvia had come up to the edge of independence legislatively, but did not declare. Lithuania cooled its rhetoric but did not repudiate the declaration. In January 1991, Gorbachev insisted that Lithuania repudiate the declaration, sent in the military, and fourteen civilians were killed.
In August, a group of former military officers who felt that Gorbachev must be overthrown to preserve the Union held him prisoner at a Crimean resort. Boris Yeltsin took advantage of this to look powerful in Moscow. The plotters were turned back. Estonia and Latvia took the opportunity to declare independence. Moscow sent troops to seize television towers in Tallinn and Vilnius, and a press building in Riga, but they were withdrawn after confrontations with civilians.
A conference among the leaders of the Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian republics in Belarus produced a document dissolving the Soviet Union in early December. The remaining republics signed on, and the Soviet Union ended on December 25, 1991.
Was the missile race part of what took the Soviet Union down? It was one more straw in a succession of them. It played a part. But Ronald Reagan’s and Margaret Thatcher’s rhetoric was a much smaller part.
Reading:
Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire. Matlock was the US ambassador to the Soviet Union as it broke apart. His view tends to be Moscow-centric and shares the Kremlin’s vague point of view of the nationalities. But a good guide to what was going on in Moscow.
Anatol Lieven, The Baltic Revolution. Probably the best book available on the Baltic republics/states as they broke away from the Soviet Union.
As I write this, I am realizing how much of my information has been gained piecemeal from various sources, mainly Estonian ones. I thought for a while about writing a book about the process in Estonia, and maybe I still should.
The Singing Revolution is a film about some of the history and the role of culture in Estonia’s revolution. I’m in the photo of the audience at the 2004 Song Festival, if you can find me! It has some footage of protests that I didn’t realize exists.
The Estonica encyclopedia has a number of helpful articles in its history section.
stinger
Cheryl, thank you very much! It’s like I control Balloon Juice!
YOU SHALL OBEY
rikyrah
Thanks for the breakdown :)
the Conster, la Citoyenne
Flash forward and our grandchildren will be reading how the United States broke up starting in 2000 with the right wing coup abetted by SCOTUS.
TenguPhule
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
I think you’re overly optimistic that they’ll still be literate.
stinger
This supports what I thought I knew, as a series of isolated facts, but the Reagan worship in this country kept the pieces from coming together.
“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” And he did, so… proof of sainthood or something.
I’ll look for the resources you list (and for you, if I can find the film).
stinger
P.S. I will try to use my powers for good.
MORE LILY PICTURES
vhh
Cheryl–I hope you will write a Chapter 2 in which you describe the Yeltsin Years, during which much of the Russian economy was privatized into the pockets of the rising oligarchs (a fair number of whom were educated as physicists, btw). Life in Russia became increasingly chaotic, and Putin’s star rose as he promised to restore order. This cycle of authoritarianism, liberalization, chaos, and reversal toward authoritarianism has repeated frequenly throughout Russian history.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
I read all that hoping to learn what happened to Nadezhda and Mischa and came away disappointed.
Ian G.
Just a bit of clarification, Lithuania declared independence in March, 1990. The 14 civilians were killed when Soviet troops seized the TV tower in Vilnius in January, 1991.
My Lithuanian-American grandparents (RIP) are smiling at my knowledge of that little country’s history.
HeleninEire
Wait, what? What year was the breakup? I ask because at my Masters graduation from Columbia in 1998 they had a great speaker who talked snarkely about how smart he and his colleagues were; so sure they knew all about the Soviet Union. And then he retires and the fucking Soviet Union collapses and no one knew.
Cheryl Rofer
@vhh: I won’t do that Chapter 2 any time soon – too many other things I want to do. But if I wrote it, I would also include something that worked well and did a lot of good – the Lab to Lab program, where weapons scientists from the former Soviet Union and the United States worked together to get nuclear stuff under control. Here’s my little piece of that.
jl
@stinger: Hard to think of anything that the extremist reactionaries say that is true. Even the Reagan worship.
At the time, the lunatic GOPers accused Reagan of appeasing the Soviet Union by talking with Gorbachev and engaging in serious nuclear arms control negotiations. According to the lunatics, the fool Reagan had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and he had allowed the Soviet Union to survive another thousand millions years, and even if it didn’t, any apparent dissolution of the Soviet Union would be an obvious hoax designed to trick us.
So, now the lunatics have completely taken over the GOP. A capsule history of the degeneration:
Reagan gets briefing on nuclear weapons and he says “That is horrible. We need to do something about the nuclear threat to the world”
Trump gets briefed on nuclear weapons and says: “Why don’t we use them? Why can’t I use the nuclear?”
And capsule history of recent GOP presidents (as bad as they all were and are): Reagaon > Bush I >> Bush II >>>>>>>>>> Trump.
Cheryl Rofer
@Ian G.: Thanks! I will correct that upthread.
? Martin
The economic system never functioned at all. The central planners could never understand both sides of the supply and demand situation. They never knew if consumers would buy more bread if they baked it and they never knew if they could even bake more bread in the first place. And both producers and retailers were incentivized to heavily lie to the central planners to help the central planners look effective. Because the Soviet economy was relatively small (it was devastated by WWII and required significant rebuilding, all while it was expanding its reach in Europe and helping rebuild the Iron Curtain nations) it made almost no investment in productivity outside of military production. Being slightly behind the rest of the world in 1940 turned into being massively behind by 1970. The reason the military sector worked reasonably well is that the central planners were the consumer, so the demand side of that economic equation was easy and guaranteed. And since that was the only part of the Soviet economy that was outward facing, that was the only part that needed to look modern.
See North Korea for exactly the same dynamic today.
schrodingers_cat
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: This season was such a snooze fest. Paige and her eyebrow put me to sleep.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@schrodingers_cat:
Yeah, I thought the last half of the season was pretty slow too but I’m still looking forward to the final season.
SiubhanDuinne
Just saw a news alert (CNN) that the acting Ambassador to China has resigned in protest of Trump’s withdrawing from the Paris Accord on Climate Change.
Good for the Ambassador. And moar of this, please.
Edit: (Apologies, I know this is off topic but thought it was worth noting right away.)
Mike in NC
Putin has been in power for 17 years and shows no sign of going away. Trump is studying his methods closely: using bribery, intimidation, threats of violence/imprisonment, denouncing critics, etc. to maintain power and enact Bannon’s neofascist agenda.
jl
@? Martin: What I found interesting at the time, studying egghead econ and stats in college, was the misuse of statistics to hide the economic decline of the Soviet Union. As their economic system faltered, they had to devote an ever increasing proportion of their GDP to maintain their military and strain to keep up with the US and Europe. And reactionary war mongers spewed out endless BS statistics based on that phenomenon to argue that the Soviet Union was an economic powerhouse that was obvious preparing for a war to destroy Europe and US influence in the world.
Instead, a few years later, the Soviet Union collapsed with an exhausted superannuated frail wheeze.
Iowa Old Lady
@SiubhanDuinne: I think my governor (Branstad) is the official ambassador to China. I thought he was confirmed because his deputy governor has taken over. Was it him or someone else who resigned?
ETA: OK, I see it was not him.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@schrodingers_cat: yup
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: and yet, yup, also too
Camembert
@? Martin: The tyranny of demand is a really interesting lens through which to look at this. Thanks.
Mike in NC
@schrodingers_cat: Paige is Debbie Downer. Hopefully the series finale shows her in a Siberian labor camp.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Iowa Old Lady: Google says hearings were in early May and he was confirmed on the 22nd. I totally missed both.
HeleninEire
@SiubhanDuinne: Good. More of that please.
Rob Lll
Excellent and informative post, Cheryl. Thanks much. Having visited Estonia a few years back I was very much struck by the strong sense of cultural identity of the locals we met, as well as their friendliness to their American guests. Would love to hear more about your experiences.
NotMax
With all the decades of crowing about tractor production one would think people would have been tripping over them in the streets.
Striking was how many of those Russia installed at the time at the top of the republics and satellites (East Germany and Poland come immediately to mind) constantly wore dark glasses.
Not only willfully oblivious of the depth of what was transpiring but in an almost literal sense couldn’t see it.
Morzer
@SiubhanDuinne:
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/871702358941736961/photo/1
Things I never thought I would see.
jl
@Mike in NC: Luckily the results have been different here so far. In Russia, the media fell under government oppression and influence and the population learned to fear.
So far, in the US, the effect on the legitimate media (apart form the likes of Fox News, Breitbart and Infowars) has been limited. The NYT was already corrupt, and it seems to be selling more of its soul in exchange for laughable puff pieces on Kushner, Mulvaney, and other Trumpster lowlifes.
Looks like about two thirds of the population is protesting, resisting and laughing. Many state and local governments putting up a robust response to federal government BS.
Helps that Putin is shrewd, and knew how to harness the many authoritarian levers that remained from Soviet Union days, while Trump and his flunkies are complete fools.
HeleninEire
@SiubhanDuinne: Don’t worry about the off topic thing. I always say “i am doing a Raven”
Rand Careaga
Had Yeltsin followed his star turn atop the tank in 1991 by stopping a slug for the team in some vital organ, he’d be remembered today with deserved reverence. Instead, his sottish and erratic regime prepared the way for a return to the thuggish authoritarianism his predecessor had attempted to ameliorate. Has anyone read Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty? An extraordinary book.
schrodingers_cat
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: Especially if you compare it to season 4. IMO all that focus on teen Paige killed the show. Wheat plot was boring too. I miss Martha and Arkady at the Rezidentura. Moscow plot was slumbering as well.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
OT, or sort of on
Cheryl Rofer
@Rand Careaga: Definitely recommend Red Plenty.
SiubhanDuinne
@Morzer:
Agreed. It’s pretty stunning to see. Welcome, but stunning.
Mike in NC
The Soviets did one thing that Republicans greatly admired: the Cult of Personality surrounding their dictators. Hence the ongoing veneration of Saint Reagan. At one time they even wanted him on the dime.
Frankensteinbeck
@Mike in NC:
I question the truth of this. Trump does not study anything. Everything you have described is instinctive to Trump because he’s an asshole. Nor are there any signs that, even if it were deliberate, he’s good enough at it to stage a coup. The damage Trump does to our country and systems will be entirely due to incompetence, with the proviso that I include ‘conservative embracing of incompetence.’
Quinerly
@Iowa Old Lady:
Branstat has been confirmed. The guy who has resigned is a career diplomat (since 1990) that was basically a placeholder until Branstat’s arrival.
SiubhanDuinne
@HeleninEire:
Unpossible, unless you end every post with “Fuck LBJ” ?
HeleninEire
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Irish broadcast nets (ITE) will show it here live too. BBC too.
SiubhanDuinne
@Quinerly:
So it’s more symbolic than substantive. That’s fine. I’m a fan of symbolic gestures, especially in a good cause, with the reasoning all spelled out.
HeleninEire
@SiubhanDuinne: LOL yeah there’s that.
stinger
@Iowa Old Lady: Not Terry. It was David Rank who resigned — he’s a career foreign service officer who held a senior position at the embassy and served as acting ambassador until Branstad was sworn in. He’s apparently resigned from his actual position, maybe from the service altogether.
ETA: Or what Quinerly said.
Agorabum
Lenins Tomb is also a great book on it all.
SiubhanDuinne
@HeleninEire:
Who ever wouldda thunk that a US Congressional hearing would attract international attention and coverage?
jl
One bright spot is that the SCOTUS seems to be blocking the most extreme attempts at GOP voter suppression.
IANAL nor a voting rights expert, so maybe I am misinterpreting. But I think I saw a news item that SCOTUS turned down another appeal this morning, and let another lower court decision against voter suppression stand.
Any BJ lawyers can clarify for me?
Quinerly
@SiubhanDuinne:
Totally unrelated and OT…did anyone just see Katy Tur’s interview with Sen Inhofe? She missed a couple of opportunities but he was stammering. I have hope that the hardcore are breaking under the chaos and confusion.
jl
Maybe a post on what happened to Boris and Natasha, and are Moose and Squirrel safe now?
trollhattan
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: @schrodingers_cat: @Mike in NC:
Y’all LEAVE PAIGE ALOOOOONE! So there.
My mind=blown theory is the Centre is developing Henry unbeknownst to the Jennings. The sudden academic achievement, the mysterious girlfriend, the out-of-state prep academy are inexplicable and all pry him from parental (and Stan) oversight. What, no way? Remember Jared.
Dmbeaster
The Soviet Union was always held together by terror. It would still exist if the leadership had been willing to continue in the Stalinist tradition. The most notable thing about the 1991 coup was the unwillingness to use terror, torture, murder and mass imprisonment to maintain the absolute control of the Communist Party. A lot of the leadership of that time had spent the last 40 years with the doctrine of Stalin’s excesses and the danger of the cult of personality, so I guess they just did not have it in them. But the abandonment of the terror regime led to the unraveling of all of the contradictions of the Soviet Union.
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_III_(film)
An interesting film from 1998 about if the KGB/Soviet military reactionaries had overthrown Gorbachev in 1989.
HeleninEire
@SiubhanDuinne: Yeah. I thought I would get away from American politics here. I came here thinking that I was tired of being responsible for everything American both good and bad. My bad.
SRW1
I think one piece of the puzzle you left out was the blunder of the Afghanistan invasion. Devastated the reputation of the political and military leadership.
vhh
@Cheryl Rofer: That’s a good story with a happy ending. There were other projects, too. All of them a pretty good bargain in my book. The US govt was worried about poorly paid (or unpaid, as many labs welshed on salary) Soviet scientists going to work on weapons for the likes of Qaddafi, so lab-to-lab research support arrangements were encouraged. I was able to help keep a lab of some 30 scientists and engineers running for $25K/yr. On a trip there in ~1994, I worked with a DOE team to negotiate a model contract for such endeavors—this involved a long discussion about what constitutes valid overhead expenses, a touchy topic because the researchers considered their management to be thieves and wanted every contract dollar to appear in their paychecks—but what about utilities for their labs? There was no term for “overhead” in Russian back then, so we had to invent one and get agreement on its definition. Eventually, Soros et al developed a fund to do this kind of thing on a larger scale. Unfortunately, in recent years, the Putin administration has limited the operation of NGOs in Russia because of suspicions that they would interfere with their domestic politics. (Ironic, that). The post-Cold War failure of the US and Russia to develop a proper, mutually respectful, if not always harmonious, relationship is a missed opportunity with potentially tragic consequences.
JDM
I think it’s important to note that the Soviet Union had major problems with agriculture, and agricultural science (biology in general) from their earlier embrace of Lysenko’s nonsensical ideas and suppression of dissent (1940s and on). They lost agricultural ability and scientists as well. What’s particularly critical is the lesson we should be able to draw from it, that suppressing science some of us don’t like (ie., climate change, evolution, for two) is potentially disastrous. We end up unprepared for the future and with fewer people who are prepared to get us back up to speed on the academic studies that underlie such preparation.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@trollhattan: Y’all LEAVE PAIGE ALOOOOONE! So there.
I think she’s a really good actress, but I think the writers wrote her (and themselves) into a corner with the big reveal and Pastor Tim, and they went down a few too many roads to nowhere this season. I miss Arkady and female agent at the Rezidentura. And Margo Martindale teased in an interivew she’d be up to some boss shit this season, and really wasn’t. I thought she and Gabriel were going to mirror E and P, the true believing revolutionary vs the worn-out and disabused pragmatist.
SiubhanDuinne
@Iowa Old Lady:
I knew Branstad had been nominated but had missed anything and everything about his confirmation hearing and vote on confirmation. But the CNN headline I cited did say “acting” Ambassador. Not sure how long it’s likely to take before Branstad arrives in Beijing and takes over, but I would think in the normal course of things, acting Ambassador Rank would stay on for a while to provide advice and context and thorough briefings on the country and key players. That would appear to be not happening now, at least not from the seniormost US diplomat to China.
Cheryl Rofer
@SRW1: Good point. I left out a lot of things, but that is perhaps the biggest of what I left out. Like the missile race, it cost a lot of money and further disillusioned people with the regime.
geg6
In college, I had two concentrations within my major of polisci: American electoral politics and foreign relations. I minored in history and took a bunch of Russian and Eastern European history classes. My hope was to become a Soviet specialist working for the government. Obviously, that didn’t work out. But it gave me a great background to understand what was happening with Gorbachev and Yeltsin, which occurred just a few years after I graduated. It’s always driven me nuts that Reagan gets the credit for the fall of the Soviet Union. He had nothing to do with it. Internal factors were what made it all crumble. And most of those factors were decades in the making. Just one of the many reasons I will despise the memory of that fucking bastard Reagan. I saw Putin for what he was from the start. He longs to be a Stalin. And he’s almost there.
Tom Levenson
I’d add to the reading David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb — a book of reportage rather than analysis, but full of material on the experience of living through the years of collapse. (He came to Moscow in 1988, and he had serviceable Russian, so he wasn’t entirely dependent on the language ability of others.)
Cheryl Rofer
@vhh: There were a great many projects. Sig Hecker estimates that 500 Americans were involved in the Lab-to-Lab program. It was the best thing I’ve ever done.
zhena gogolia
@Mike in NC:
Everything Trump does is from the Putin playbook. Even “Make America Great Again.”
geg6
@vhh:
Yes, this exactly.
SiubhanDuinne
@HeleninEire:
I guess it goes with the territory. If you carry a US passport you are automatically an expert on, and responsible for, every single thing the US government does. Kind of like how President Obama was expected to opine on anything and everything that even remotely involved black people, race relations, slavery, or the African continent.
zhena gogolia
@jl:
It took a long time for the media to be brought under state control. The year 2003 was a big watershed, when he arrested Khodorkovsky. All downhill from there.
PJ
@Mike in NC: The writers can’t think of anything for her to do but whine (does she have friends? interests?), but at least they write more for her than Henry, who shows up every few episodes, relegated to hanging out at Stan’s house and a sudden desire to go to prep school.
geg6
@Rand Careaga:
Great book. Second the recommendation.
Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho
@HeleninEire and SiubhanDuinne: As raven is wont to note, “every thread is an open thread.”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@PJ: and was Matthew in the next room when Stan told Henry he was greatest kid in the world? (and that was just weird).
trollhattan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Good point contrasting Claudia and Gabriel–I think his one conversation with Martha back home was a deep blow to an already faltering belief in the mission. OTOH Claudia and Elizabeth have basically tried to kill one another and I don’t believe she’s leveling with the Jennings as to their options.
NotMax
@Tom Levenson
Overheard in the Borscht Belt: “Lenin’s tomb is a communist plot.”
;)
geg6
@trollhattan:
Can you illuminate the rest of us who have no fucking clue what the hell you’re talking about?
zhena gogolia
@geg6:
I believe we’re caught in an inside-baseball discussion of a show I don’t watch, The Americans.
burritoboy
The Marxist revolution was never intended to happen in economically peripheral places before it happened in the cores of the global economy. Until 1917, most Marxist theorists thought it might happen in one of the very central core regions of the world economy – Germany, the UK, possibly France, etc.
Russia being the first country to successfully have a Marxist revolution astonished most Marxists worldwide.
The Pale Scot
@vhh:
That chapter 2 needs to cover the legions of supply side morons that right wing think tanks sent to Russia to advise them on how to create a functional economy.
1st step (only step) Privatize Everything Immediately! The magic of the markets will allocate resources to where it’s needed (the pockets of western banks). The courts and rule of law that is required for private property to exist? Waves hand “”””, mere details, and not really necessary.
If a court of reconciliation ever becomes in this country, those fuckers should admit their stupidities and beg forgiveness. Because after the USSR desolved, a minute but real chance for civilization to take a step forward was there, and we turned our back on it grasping for the “peace dividend” and listening to neocons demanding that this was the time to squeeze Russia and make it obsequent.
Old saying, “Russians don’t feel Russian unless they have their boot on someone’s neck” and the first time in a millennium? that Russia is without supernational influence, the jackals come out of the woodwork.
Great job bill and dave and sue.
zhena gogolia
@burritoboy:
You need some scare quotes on “Marxist” and “revolution.”
trollhattan
@geg6:
The Amernicans. A show about Soviet spies living as an American family in Virginia during the Reagan years. Captures the era perfectly, ala Mad Men, and certainly worth binge-watching for those with the stamina to do so. One season left in the run.
schrodingers_cat
@trollhattan: May be T will nominate Stan as the FBI director! Russians have been pulling wool over his eyes for 5 years now.
Frankensteinbeck
@jl:
IANAL, but I read a law blog about this issue. Apparently the conservatives aren’t quite as crazy as they look about voter suppression. In particular, gerrymandering may be in for a shakeup, because the court has a consistent opinion about race-based gerrymandering that is… weird and technical. The VRA apparently allows race-based gerrymandering under the theory that it’s required to get minorities elected. If whites are willing to vote for the same candidates minorities want in anything close to electorally competitive numbers, the Supreme Court views this argument void and race-based gerrymandering illegal. Times have changed, and liberal whites and minorities at least roughly support the same candidates. Thus, the Supreme Court is exercising its consistent view, and striking down gerrymanders. As long as they can be demonstrated as race-based, this is likely to continue.
burritoboy
While this history above is true of the Baltics, it’s not quite the same picture for the vast bulk of the remaining republics. (And, yes, it was the Baltics that precipitated the collapse of the USSR).
Quite a few of those republics benefited from being in the USSR. Some of them quite substantially. Most had literally no democratic history, and most had very limited experience of ever being even independent states (some had once been independent states, but only many centuries before). In a practical sense, if they hadn’t been ruled from Moscow, they would have either become nasty little dictatorships or incorporated by Western colonial powers and then split into provinces of the countries Western powers later constructed. That, since the USSR’s breakup, they have gone on to become nasty little dictatorships tells you something.
That they were part of a (sometimes nominally) Marxist political regime was beneficial, I think. Most were and are resource extraction economies. Without the Marxism, many of them would have spent that time being pushed around while (primarily) West companies simply stole the resources. It’s true that the USSR did this to an extent, but the (again, sometimes nominal) Marxism of the regime meant that some of that was returned to those republics.
zhena gogolia
@burritoboy:
Очень, очень интересно! Расскажите дальше.
PJ
@trollhattan: For me, it doesn’t really capture the era except in the broadest sense. Verisimilitude on the 80’s, particularly vis a vis the DC area, and the tastes and attitudes of the kids, is not good. It’s someone-who-didn’t-live-though-the-80’s’ idea of what the 80’s were like.
dm
@Rand Careaga: I’ll be the third or fourth to chime in on recommending Red Plenty. For those who might be interested, it is a (lightly) fictionalized retelling of the history of Operations Research, its dreams of promise and its reality of failure told through they experiences of mathematicians, biologists to fixers and go-betweens (people who knew someone who knew where you could find the thousand kilos of ball-bearings that your factory needed to churn out its quota of mining machines). Plus a late night visit to the room full of 3×5 cards that traced the flows of the Soviet economy in the 1950s.
With just the smallest of nudges, it might turn into an alternate history where the Soviet economy starts churning out consumer goods in the 1960s, but it doesn’t go there.
Even though fictional, the book helps you understand the psychology of Gorbachev, who, faced with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, told his generals that he couldn’t face sending in the tanks again.
NotMax
At least partial culpability insofar as Eastern Europe and the Baltics are concerned goes back to Curzon, Namier and Molotov.
SH121
@Rand Careaga: I have followed along on an online discussions of Red Plenty. It is on my to buy list along with Francis Spufford’s new book Golden Hill. Henry over at Crooked Timber has an interesting write up about it and caught my attention with this paragraph.
“The most striking continuity between the old pre-Revolutionary America and the new is racism, which the book suggests (if I read it right) is more fundamental to American identity than independence. It may seem odd to compare an apparently light-hearted historical novel to the arguments of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the tradition he represents, but, when read through carefully and read again, Golden Hill isn’t particularly light – it’s looking to make a very serious point.”
Definitely a must read for me.
geg6
@SH121:
Oooooo, that Golden Hill sounds like my perfect road trip/beach read. Gonna order that and Al Franken’s new book.
Cheryl Rofer
@burritoboy: Many of the factors operating in the Baltics also were operating in the Central Asian republics, for example. Russification of Kazakhstan, which continued under the Soviet Union, destroyed the nomadic culture. It’s not at all clear that Marxist colonization was better than Western colonization would have been. As to resource extraction, that has been the basis of the Soviet and Russian economy to this day.
Ukraine’s and Georgia’s concerns were similar to those of the Baltics. Being republics of the Soviet Union tamped down violence between Armenia and Azerbaijan, it is true.
But Russification and forced social structures like collective farming were imposed across the Soviet Union, leading to serious antipathy to Moscow.
The conference in Belarus in December 1991 featured the countries most unhappy about splitting up the Union. A number of structures to keep those countries connected, like the Commonwealth of Independent States, have been proposed. None has prospered.
Gin & Tonic
@zhena gogolia: Ha!
Jeffro
I really can’t recommend “winter is coming” by Gary Kasparov enough – Great history of the break up of the Soviet Union with a focus on Putin specifically
Jay Noble
As a Rotary exchange student to Finland, I got to make a trip to Leningrad in ’78 and then in college I kinda sorta minored in Soviet studies. Nope, Reagan wasn’t responsible for the fall. The Centralized Planning mentioned earlier certainly was. Our group fell in love with of all things their pre-packaged ice cream cones. They were cheap and everywhere. But for love or money you could not get a glass of milk in a restaurant. Bread was like a nickel a loaf, again good stuff. But bubble gum? Every kid above the age of 4 would unabashedly beg for it from tourists. Levi’s anyone?
The best story came from a professor who had visited around ’83. They were being chauffeured around Moscow when it started raining. ALL the cars pulled over and someone got out of each one to put on the wiper blades. Seems the planners had only planned for 1 set per car.
2 things that also contributed to the unrest, especially the Baltic states were the tourists and Broadcast media – the Soviets couldn’t jam it all. The question was “If we are better than the West, why can’t we have these trinkets and baubles”?
So I went through the 80’s with a very skeptical attitude about being done in by the USSR.
burritoboy
Cheryl,
I have to disagree a bit here. Returning to their former independent status was very central to the Baltics. But it wasn’t such a uniformly strong desire among the rest of the republics. The Baltics had been reasonably successful as independent states in the 1920s and the 1930s. Many of the other republics had been disasters as independent states during the Civil War. Most notable is the experience of the Ukraine, which essentially proved to itself that self-rule was ruinous, at least for the foreseeable future. This was much more typical of the other republics’ short experiences of independence, rather than the Baltics, which became quite similar to other Scandinavian countries in short order, both in the 1920s and 1930s, and from 1990-today (at least, for Latvia and Estonia.)
There’s no real way to tell whether USSR / Russian control or colonial domination by the West would have been better. But there was, both at the time and now, a lot of people in those republics who felt that USSR / Russian domination was the way to go, even if they recognized it wasn’t anywhere near ideal. The political maturity of their populations was often extremely low, their economies were very primitive, and so on. (None of which applied to the Baltics.)They often saw the forced Russification as a double-edged sword – they didn’t like it on the one hand, but it came in a package of modernization. That modernization they saw as being opposed to nasty local dictatorships (no modernization) or Western domination (only limited modernization for the minimum necessary to extract resources).
sm*t cl*de
Yay you!
Friends in Tallinn are very proud of the Singing Revolution and insisted that I visit the Song Festival Grounds. Perhaps in 2019.
sm*t cl*de
@The Pale Scot:
I remember an Opinion Piece in the Economist, circa 1995. The gist of it was “Well, yes, privatisation has turned out not entirely as promised, with the state’s assets now in the hands of a new class of well-placed pirates, and the general population worse-off than they were before. But looking forward, not back, the best the West can do now is to *legitimise* the pillage of an empire, so that those pirates will see the advantages of a smooth-running level-playing field economy, and participate in it like everyone else. Then the stolen resources will return into circulation and all will be sunshine and unicorn farts.”
It might have been written by Megan McArgle, for all I know.
JustRuss
I would have gone with the Fleetwood Mac Accord personally, but that works too.
Earl
It’s worth reading _Collapse of Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia_ by Yegor Gaidar; he was a soviet economist and briefly acting PM of Russia. The thesis is the collapse of oil prices is the proximate cause. Now obviously the book is biased (he’s widely loathed for economic reforms he pushed through), but it’s still deeply interesting to read a primary source.
Dev Null
Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia, published 2007
I don’t seem to have gotten the link tags right, but it’s at Amazon under the title posted.
Gaidar was Acting Prime Minister of Russia in 1992.
Translator not fluent in English, but not hard to read.
Dev Null
@Earl: @Earl: goddamn. fsckin’ 4 minutes …
workworkwork
@schrodingers_cat: I liked it. I’m a sucker for the relationship stuff and I’d watch that cast read the phone book.
Your Mileage May Vary, of course.
workworkwork
@schrodingers_cat: I do miss Arkady. He was the Man.
Aaron
Dont leave out Yuri Andropov! He was a hardcore KGB prick in the same mold as Putin. They put him in as leader of the Soviet Union. But then he dies after only a year-and-a-half in office. As a result he was never able to fill up the ranks of the Soviet leadership with similarly minded hardcore Prix. Then Gorbachev took office and he was far more mellow. The story of the collapse of the Soviet Union would have been much different had andropov not died prematurely. He likely would have ramped-up Z repression.
Also don’t forget the Saudis started pumping more oil. As a result the price of oil fell and the hard currency income that the Soviet Union relied on Fell as a result. As a result of that the Soviet Union was not able to buy the food imports that it was relying on to feed its population.
JGabriel
@jl:
I think future versions of that diagram (assuming order by who did the best job of those four, not chronological):
Bush 1 >>>>>>>>>> Reagan > Bush 2 >>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Trump
Cheryl Rofer
@sm*t cl*de: I highly recommend the Song Festival. Thirty thousand people on stage, singing together, is something to experience!
Cheryl Rofer
@burritoboy: I’m very wary about making generalizations about “what people wanted,” particularly in highly-controlled states. I also love gaming out alternative histories, but that takes more than a comment at Balloon Juice allows. And “better”/”worse” is not a judgment I find useful for analysis. It’s clear that some of the republics were more ready to leave the Union than others. The ones that weren’t put up a brave show of unity. But it hasn’t lasted. Belarus remains close to Russia, but even they make separatist noises from time to time.
vhh
@Aaron: Yup. Oil price dropped factor of 2-3 in 1980s, cutting USSR hard currency income by 30-50%. People had gotten used to buying things like oranges, better clothes, cars, and computers, and they did not like this one bit.
Stan
@geg6:
You said it, brother. I agree 100%.
Seems like we should be thanking our lucky stars that it was Gorbachev in power when he was.
burritoboy
Cheryl,
We are mostly in agreement. However, it’s important to recognize that the fall of the USSR was due to separatism, but also due to colonial pullback into the imperial center for the imperial center’s own reasons.
Methodologically, in a highly authoritarian state, it’s hard to say anything about public opinion. But there was a public opinion, and we do have some markers.