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Great post and it sparks in me a question.
How inevitable was the collapse of the Soviet Union? Let's say instead of Gorbachev you get a hardliner. What happens then?
I think we often look back at history with an idea that things had to happen just the way they did. But if Gorbachev wasn't chosen, I think it's possible the USSR exists today. The Venezuelan government still stands after all.
The USSR would probably still exist without Gorbachev's efforts to reform it.
No, it wouldn't have, because the other SSRs wanted independence, and to keep them all in would have required a incredible amount of bloodshed that no Russian leader was capable or willing to do at the time. The Soviets were poor and backwards and would have fell ever further behind if they remained Communist. Think how poor Russians are now, and imagine them - even poorer - stuck with technologies from the 1970s: an international pariah from all the ethnics they'd have to messily put down with the army.
Could they have staggered along, like a North Korea or a Cuba? Maybe. But it would have destroyed the Russian people completely and utterly.
But none of this means that the USSR couldn't still exist.
Regarding the part on independence, let's be more precise. Out of all SSRs, it was the three small Baltic ones which had significant independence movements, and this happened years after Gorbachev created an atmosphere where political dissent was normalized. He wasn't willing to do any bloodshed to keep the USSR together indeed, at least not to an impactful degree, precisely because his entire political line hinged on the assumption that he needed to capture the West's goodwill in order to have his reforms implemented and secure foreign loans, and he believed this all could only work without bloodshed. Outside the Baltics, the fact was that independence movements were rather weak or nonexistent, even in Ukraine, for that matter.
The independence movements of non-USSR Warsaw pact countries was written on the walls, no hardliner could have managed those. With those revolutions kicking off its impossible for me to imagine there SSR’s not following suit.
But they in fact weren't, except for the Baltic states.
Why do you think Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania weren’t bound to happen?
I was commenting on the SSRs of the USSR, not the other Warsaw Pact / COMECON member states.
? I think you have misread my first comment then.
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