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UsefulNotes/JosefStalin (birthname Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) was born in Gori, Georgia on 18 December 1878. [[FreudianExcuse He had an unpleasant childhood.]] His [[AbusiveParents father beat him.]] When he went to school and later a seminary in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi (seminary was one of a few ways to get a free education in Russia at the time), he was forced to use Russian and mocked for his Georgian accent. Josef became a Georgian nationalist and a poet. He read a Georgian novel called ''The Patricide'', which starred a RobinHood style character called Koba. He adopted it as his first revolutionary pseudonym.\\\

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UsefulNotes/JosefStalin (birthname Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) was born in Gori, Georgia on 18 December 1878. [[FreudianExcuse He had an unpleasant childhood.]] His [[AbusiveParents father beat him.]] When he went to school and later a seminary in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi (seminary was one of a few ways to get a free education in Russia at the time), he was forced to use Russian and mocked for his Georgian accent. Josef became a Georgian nationalist and a poet. He read a Georgian novel called ''The Patricide'', which starred a RobinHood Myth/RobinHood style character called Koba. He adopted it as his first revolutionary pseudonym.\\\
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Gorbachev briefly returns to power at the head of a country that, in reality, has ceased to exist; by now, it is already referred to as "the former Soviet Union" by Western news agencies. He resigns from his leadership position in the communist party and orders it dissolved. He makes an attempt to preserve what's left, but the jig is up: the Baltic states are already internationally recognized as sovereign nations, Ukraine has just declared independence, Armenia and Azerbaijan are ''at open war with each other'', and even in Russia itself, Yeltsin has already usurped power, with the Russian [=SFSR=] taking control of Soviet assets and responsibilities.\\\

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Gorbachev briefly returns to power at the head of a country that, in reality, has ceased to exist; by now, it is already referred to as "the former Soviet Union" by Western news agencies.exist. He resigns from his leadership position in the communist party and orders it dissolved. He makes an attempt to preserve what's left, but the jig is up: the Baltic states are already internationally recognized as sovereign nations, Ukraine has just declared independence, Armenia and Azerbaijan are ''at open war with each other'', and even in Russia itself, Yeltsin has already usurped power, with the Russian [=SFSR=] taking control of Soviet assets and responsibilities.\\\
While it still exists on paper, Western news agencies can see where things are heading and have already begun to refer to the country as "the former Soviet Union."\\\
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The rest of December is spent formally transitioning to this new state of affairs. On Christmas Day, 1991, Gorbachev resigns and the Soviet flag is lowered in front of the Kremlin for ([[MakeTheBearAngryAgain probably]]) the last time. The Soviet Union was officially finished. The [[UsefulNotes/TheNewRussia Russian Federation]] had begun, with Yeltsin's first act to declare Russia to be the successor state to the USSR, thus allowing it to assume the USSR's place on the UN Security Council and other global responsibilities. The Supreme Soviet, meanwhile, stuck around for a little while longer, ultimately being forcibly dissolved after they attempted a coup against Yeltsin in 1993 in response to his attempts to replace the 1978 Soviet constitution. The coup ended with him shelling the Russian White House, pushing through the new constitution, and establishing the Federal Assembly as Russia's new legislative body, with the latter two remaining in place to this day. Though Christmas 1991 marked the end of the Soviet Union, the 1993 coup marked the final death of its last vestiges.\\\

to:

The rest of December is spent formally transitioning to this new state of affairs. On Christmas Day, 1991, Gorbachev resigns and the Soviet flag is lowered in front of the Kremlin for ([[MakeTheBearAngryAgain probably]]) the last time. The Soviet Union was officially finished. The [[UsefulNotes/TheNewRussia Russian Federation]] had begun, with Yeltsin's first act to declare Russia to be the successor state to the USSR, thus allowing it to assume the USSR's place on the UN Security Council and other global responsibilities. The Supreme Soviet, Soviet of Russia, meanwhile, stuck around for a little while longer, ultimately being forcibly dissolved after they attempted a coup against Yeltsin in 1993 in response to his attempts to replace the 1978 Soviet constitution. The coup ended with him shelling the Russian White House, pushing through the new constitution, and establishing the Federal Assembly as Russia's new legislative body, with the latter two remaining in place to this day. Though Christmas 1991 marked the end of the Soviet Union, the 1993 coup marked the final death of its last vestiges.\\\
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Gorbachev briefly returns to power at the head of a country that, in reality, has ceased to exist. He resigns from his leadership position in the communist party and orders it dissolved. He makes an attempt to preserve what's left, but the jig is up: the Baltic states are already internationally recognized as sovereign nations, Ukraine has just declared independence, Armenia and Azerbaijan are ''at open war with each other'', and even in Russia itself, Yeltsin has already usurped power, with the Russian [=SFSR=] taking control of Soviet assets and responsibilities.\\\

to:

Gorbachev briefly returns to power at the head of a country that, in reality, has ceased to exist.exist; by now, it is already referred to as "the former Soviet Union" by Western news agencies. He resigns from his leadership position in the communist party and orders it dissolved. He makes an attempt to preserve what's left, but the jig is up: the Baltic states are already internationally recognized as sovereign nations, Ukraine has just declared independence, Armenia and Azerbaijan are ''at open war with each other'', and even in Russia itself, Yeltsin has already usurped power, with the Russian [=SFSR=] taking control of Soviet assets and responsibilities.\\\
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The rest of December is spent formally transitioning to this new state of affairs. On Christmas Day, 1991, Gorbachev resigns and the Soviet flag is lowered in front of the Kremlin for ([[MakeTheBearAngryAgain probably]]) the last time. The Soviet Union was officially finished. The [[UsefulNotes/TheNewRussia Russian Federation]] had begun, with Yeltsin's first act to declare Russia to be the successor state to the USSR, thus allowing it to assume the USSR's place on the UN Security Council and other global responsibilities. The Supreme Soviet, meanwhile, stuck around for a little while longer, ultimately being forcibly dissolved after they attempted a coup against Yeltsin in 1993 in response to his attempts to replace the 1978 Soviet constitution. The coup ended with him shelling the Russian White House, pushing through the new constitution, and establishing the Federal Assembly as Russia's new legislative body, with the latter two remaining in place to this day. Though Christmas 1991 marked the end of the Soviet union, the 1993 coup marked the final death of its last vestiges.\\\

to:

The rest of December is spent formally transitioning to this new state of affairs. On Christmas Day, 1991, Gorbachev resigns and the Soviet flag is lowered in front of the Kremlin for ([[MakeTheBearAngryAgain probably]]) the last time. The Soviet Union was officially finished. The [[UsefulNotes/TheNewRussia Russian Federation]] had begun, with Yeltsin's first act to declare Russia to be the successor state to the USSR, thus allowing it to assume the USSR's place on the UN Security Council and other global responsibilities. The Supreme Soviet, meanwhile, stuck around for a little while longer, ultimately being forcibly dissolved after they attempted a coup against Yeltsin in 1993 in response to his attempts to replace the 1978 Soviet constitution. The coup ended with him shelling the Russian White House, pushing through the new constitution, and establishing the Federal Assembly as Russia's new legislative body, with the latter two remaining in place to this day. Though Christmas 1991 marked the end of the Soviet union, Union, the 1993 coup marked the final death of its last vestiges.\\\

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Brezhnev had also overseen some of the most brutal and repressive measures by the Soviet state yet. Domestically, the culturally liberal reforms of Khrushchev were rolled back as media became tightly controlled once more, and a light revival of Stalin-era repression policies was rolled out. If you protested the government, rather than sending you to a Siberian Gulag with only a vague pretext of some criminal act or a KangarooCourt, the Brezhnev regime would simply prefer to declare you "mentally unfit" and put you in a [[BedlamHouse Psikhushka]] instead. Their justification was that only an insane person would be opposed to socialism. However, the worst treatment was reserved for Eastern Europe, where rather infamously the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia, ''its ally'', because it sought to democratize. It wasn't even that they were declaring themselves bourgeois traitors either, as they were still socialist, just less authoritarian. In 1968, a the reformist Alexander DubÄŤek was elected First Secretary. He laid out a program for reform called, well, ''the Programme'', that would see Czechia and Slovakia be separated into two autonomous states united by a federation, open up freedom of the press, freedom of travel, and even establish multiparty democracy. It was beyond ambitious. DubÄŤek had stated that he wanted to create "socialism with a human face," to essentially dismantle the Marxist-Leninist State and rebuild it into a Democratic Socialist one, to make a state that was more fair and equitable to citizens. Not only did it have to be better than Marxism-Leninism was, it specifically had to be better than ''capitalism'', to prove that the socialist experiment could work. After all, that ''was'' the point of all this, right? To create a truly egalitarian, classless utopia?\\\

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Brezhnev had also overseen some of the most brutal and repressive measures by the Soviet state yet. Domestically, the culturally liberal reforms of Khrushchev were rolled back as media became tightly controlled once more, and a light revival of Stalin-era repression policies was rolled out. If you protested the government, rather than sending you to a Siberian Gulag with only a vague pretext of some criminal act or a KangarooCourt, the Brezhnev regime would simply prefer to declare you "mentally unfit" and put you in a [[BedlamHouse Psikhushka]] instead. Their instead with a sham diagnosis of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia "sluggish schizophrenia,"]] a label not used or recognized by any physician outside the Eastern Bloc. Much like the "drapetomania" label used in 19th century America to pathologize runaway slaves, the Soviets' justification was that only an insane person would be opposed to socialism. Marxism–Leninism.\\\

However, the worst treatment was reserved for Eastern Europe, where rather infamously the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia, ''its ally'', because it sought to democratize. It wasn't even that they were declaring themselves bourgeois traitors either, as they were still socialist, just less authoritarian. In 1968, a the reformist Alexander DubÄŤek was elected First Secretary. He laid out a program for reform called, well, ''the Programme'', that would see Czechia and Slovakia be separated into two autonomous states united by a federation, open up freedom of the press, freedom of travel, and even establish multiparty democracy. It was beyond ambitious. DubÄŤek had stated that he wanted to create "socialism with a human face," to essentially dismantle the Marxist-Leninist State and rebuild it into a Democratic Socialist one, to make a state that was more fair and equitable to citizens. Not only did it have to be better than Marxism-Leninism was, it specifically had to be better than ''capitalism'', to prove that the socialist experiment could work. After all, that ''was'' the point of all this, right? To create a truly egalitarian, classless utopia?\\\



The first major test of this policy was UsefulNotes/{{Chernobyl}}. A reactor meltdown caused by an experiment that ignored dozens of safety rules, the initial response was the usual Soviet one -- cover it up. Radioactive sheep in Wales meant that policy could not really work, and Gorbachev himself had been a victim of the cover-up, being fed misinformation by his underlings that downplayed its seriousness. When he discovered this, he went on national television to give a speech acknowledging the disaster, using it to demonstrate the corruption and inefficiency in the Soviet system, and thus a need for reform.\\\

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The first major test of this policy was UsefulNotes/{{Chernobyl}}. A reactor meltdown in Ukraine caused by an experiment that ignored dozens of safety rules, the initial response was the usual Soviet one -- cover it up. Radioactive sheep in Wales meant that policy could not really work, and Gorbachev himself had been a victim of the cover-up, being fed misinformation by his underlings that downplayed its seriousness. When he discovered this, he went on national television to give a speech acknowledging the disaster, using it to demonstrate the corruption and inefficiency in the Soviet system, and thus a need for reform.\\\



Abroad, Gorbachev essentially ended the Cold War. He withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan (although the process took 4 years) concluded two arms treaties and then announced the [[Music/FrankSinatra "Sinatra Doctrine"]] [[Music/MyWay ("I did it my way")]], allowing the Warsaw Pact countries to determine their own internal polices. The 1989 Revolutions duly followed, with the beleaguered peoples of Eastern Europe finally seeing a way out from under the Bolshevik Boot. In Poland, the Catholic trade union ''Solidarity'', which was founded in 1980 and made its first bid to free Poland the following year, has repeatedly paralyzed the communist regime with mass, direct action, causing them to be utterly dysfunctional throughout the 1980s. In 1989, with it clear that they'd get no support from Moscow this time, the communist regime agreed to ''Soldarity's'' demands for free elections, which the trade union handedly won the following year. In Romania, the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown after an ill-fated attempt to crush nationwide protests resulted in his own military turning on him. Hungary had a largely peaceful transition where the communist regime met with the opposition and gradually rolled out democratization and freedom of travel, resulting in citizens from other Bloc states (particularly East Germany) to use it as a transit hub to escape to the West. This resulted in mounting pressure on Erich Honecker, leader of East Germany, to implement similar liberal reforms. Gorbachev himself urged this course of action, but Honecker refused, instead ordering the military to massacre pro-democracy demonstrators in Leipzig. When the military refused, Honecker knew he had lost control, and in his haphazard attempt to regain it, he accidentally gave orders to open travel with West Germany. He intended it to be tightly controlled by the state, but when Germans heard the news, they flocked to both sides of the Berlin Wall, and Honecker was too slow to act -- not that the military had any intention of enforcing his decision. On the night of November 9th, 1989, thousands of Germans gathered in Berlin, taking hammers and chisels to the Berlin Wall: a symbolic end to the Eastern Bloc, if not its complete demise. Czechslovakia followed a similar path as Poland, while in Bulgaria the regime instituted top-down reforms themselves that democratized the country (coincidentally, their communist party is the only one in the Eastern Bloc that survives in some form today while still enjoying high popularity, or high "popularity" depending on who you ask)\\\

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Abroad, Gorbachev essentially ended the Cold War. He withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan (although the process took 4 years) concluded two arms treaties and then announced the [[Music/FrankSinatra "Sinatra Doctrine"]] [[Music/MyWay ("I ([[Music/MyWay "I did it my way")]], way"]]), allowing the Warsaw Pact countries to determine their own internal polices. The 1989 Revolutions duly followed, with the beleaguered peoples of Eastern Europe finally seeing a way out from under the Bolshevik Boot. In Poland, the Catholic trade union ''Solidarity'', which was founded in 1980 and made its first bid to free Poland the following year, has repeatedly paralyzed the communist regime with mass, direct action, causing them to be utterly dysfunctional throughout the 1980s. In 1989, with it clear that they'd get no support from Moscow this time, the communist regime agreed to ''Soldarity's'' demands for free elections, which the trade union handedly won the following year. In Romania, the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown after an ill-fated attempt to crush nationwide protests resulted in his own military turning on him. Hungary had a largely peaceful transition where the communist regime met with the opposition and gradually rolled out democratization and freedom of travel, resulting in citizens from other Bloc states (particularly East Germany) to use it as a transit hub to escape to the West. This resulted in mounting pressure on Erich Honecker, leader of East Germany, to implement similar liberal reforms. Gorbachev himself urged this course of action, but Honecker refused, instead ordering the military to massacre pro-democracy demonstrators in Leipzig. When the military refused, Honecker knew he had lost control, and in his haphazard attempt to regain it, he accidentally gave orders to open travel with West Germany. He intended it to be tightly controlled by the state, but when Germans heard the news, they flocked to both sides of the Berlin Wall, and Honecker was too slow to act -- not that the military had any intention of enforcing his decision. On the night of November 9th, 1989, thousands of Germans gathered in Berlin, taking hammers and chisels to the Berlin Wall: a symbolic end to the Eastern Bloc, if not its complete demise. Czechslovakia followed a similar path as Poland, while in Bulgaria the regime instituted top-down reforms themselves that democratized the country (coincidentally, their communist party is the only one in the Eastern Bloc that survives in some form today while still enjoying high popularity, or high "popularity" depending on who you ask)\\\



In relation to the West, Gorbachev attempted a policy of detente, but he found US President UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan difficult to work with. None-the-less, the two managed to hammer out arms control treaties that, when combined with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, resulted in a considerable warming of relations between the two countries. Gorbachev himself became quite popular among the US public, at least for a Soviet leader, and to this day he enjoys far more approval from the American public than the Russian one, basically for the exact same reason (he is seen as dismantling the USSR: a good thing in America but a bad thing in Russia). He re-established ties with China, then under the leadership of its own reformer UsefulNotes/DengXiaoping. This relationship continues into the present, with Russia and China being close economic and military partners. In the rest of the world, Gorbachev withdrew the USSR's commitment to establishing communism internationally, and many a Moscow-backed regime was toppled (sometimes at the behest of the CIA, and sometimes organically). Despite the hawkish Reagan administration's attempts to portray the USSR as still an "evil empire," the days of Soviet interventionism were gone.\\\

Gorbachev had an incredibly high level of domestic support (initially), as you'd imagine, but he had two sources of consternation: communist hardliners and liberal radicals. The former were politically sidelined by Gorbachev but gradually gained political clout, as the "My Way" policy had resulted in the Warsaw Pact's disintegration. This was viewed by hardliners as a national security threat, as the Pact had been established with the intent of keeping the West away from Soviet borders. The hardliners viewed WorldWarIII as inevitable, as the capitalists would not tolerate the existence of a socialist state, so they wanted to ensure that the fighting would happen anywhere ''but'' Russia this time. Fears of NATO encroachment drove a resurgence in support for the hardliners at the end of the 1980s, but ironically it'd be the hardliners themselves who'd finally bring down the Soviet system. The liberals were broadly aligned with Boris Yeltsin, former Gorbachev protege-turned-enemy and future president of the Russian Federation. Yeltsin viewed Gorbechav's reforms as not being ambitious enough, and his supporters believed -- sometimes accurately and sometimes inaccurately -- that the reforms weren't really being carried out and were simply for PR.\\\

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In relation to the West, Gorbachev attempted a policy of detente, détente, but he found US President UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan difficult to work with. None-the-less, Nonetheless, the two managed to hammer out arms control treaties that, when combined with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, resulted in a considerable warming of relations between the two countries. Gorbachev himself became quite popular among the US public, at least for a Soviet leader, and to this day he enjoys far more approval from the American public than the Russian one, basically for the exact same reason (he is seen as dismantling the USSR: a good thing in America but a bad thing in Russia). He re-established ties with China, then under the leadership of its own reformer UsefulNotes/DengXiaoping. This relationship continues into the present, with Russia and China being close economic and military partners.partners (despite Sinophobia being entrenched in the ideology of modern Russia's far-right leadership). In the rest of the world, Gorbachev withdrew the USSR's commitment to establishing communism internationally, and many a Moscow-backed regime was toppled (sometimes at the behest of the CIA, and sometimes organically). Despite the hawkish Reagan administration's attempts to portray the USSR as still an "evil empire," the days of Soviet interventionism were gone.\\\

Gorbachev had an incredibly high level of domestic support (initially), as you'd imagine, but he had two sources of consternation: communist hardliners and liberal radicals. The former were politically sidelined by Gorbachev but gradually gained political clout, as the "My Way" policy had resulted in the Warsaw Pact's disintegration. This was viewed by hardliners as a national security threat, as the Pact had been established with the intent of keeping the West away from Soviet borders. The hardliners viewed WorldWarIII as inevitable, as the capitalists would not tolerate the existence of a socialist state, so they wanted to ensure that the fighting would happen anywhere ''but'' Russia this time. Fears of NATO encroachment drove a resurgence in support for the hardliners at the end of the 1980s, but ironically it'd be the hardliners themselves who'd finally bring down the Soviet system. The liberals were broadly aligned with Boris Yeltsin, former Gorbachev protege-turned-enemy protégé-turned-enemy and future president of the Russian Federation. Yeltsin viewed Gorbechav's reforms as not being ambitious enough, and his supporters believed -- sometimes accurately and sometimes inaccurately -- that the reforms weren't really being carried out and were simply for PR.\\\



The rest of December is spent formally transitioning to this new state of affairs. On Christmas Day, 1991, Gorbachev resigns and the Soviet flag is lowered in front of the Kremlin for ([[MakeTheBearAngryAgain probably]]) the last time. The Supreme Soviet voted itself out of existence, and the Soviet Union was officially finished. The [[UsefulNotes/TheNewRussia Russian Federation]] had begun, with Yeltsin's first act to declare Russia to be the successor state to the USSR, thus allowing it to assume the USSR's place on the UN Security Council and other global responsibilities.\\\

to:

The rest of December is spent formally transitioning to this new state of affairs. On Christmas Day, 1991, Gorbachev resigns and the Soviet flag is lowered in front of the Kremlin for ([[MakeTheBearAngryAgain probably]]) the last time. The Supreme Soviet voted itself out of existence, and the Soviet Union was officially finished. The [[UsefulNotes/TheNewRussia Russian Federation]] had begun, with Yeltsin's first act to declare Russia to be the successor state to the USSR, thus allowing it to assume the USSR's place on the UN Security Council and other global responsibilities. The Supreme Soviet, meanwhile, stuck around for a little while longer, ultimately being forcibly dissolved after they attempted a coup against Yeltsin in 1993 in response to his attempts to replace the 1978 Soviet constitution. The coup ended with him shelling the Russian White House, pushing through the new constitution, and establishing the Federal Assembly as Russia's new legislative body, with the latter two remaining in place to this day. Though Christmas 1991 marked the end of the Soviet union, the 1993 coup marked the final death of its last vestiges.\\\
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Russia and many other ex-Soviets were also left with another crisis: demographic decline, as decades of abuse, mass murder, political repression, and economic mismanagement left many of the Soviet republics with a broken demographic structure due to a combination of poverty, crime, alcoholism, suicide and sheer despair over the future. In a phenomenon known as the UsefulNotes/TheRussianCross, Russia and the other ex-communist states saw birth rates surpass death rates for several years, which was only made worse due to the economic and social collapse of the 1990s.\\\
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The most visible legacy of the USSR internationally, at least today, is its [[RedsWithRockets gobsmackingly large weapons market]], which saw Kalashnikovs, [=BMPs=], T-55s, and Hind helicopters be ubiquitous stables of every third world military. The Soviets were incredibly fond of handing out mass weapons shipments to fellow communists, something the capitalist bloc was way more hesitant to do (at least until you offered to buy them for a huge sum). As such, Soviet weaponry can be found across the globe, especially in the global south, where weapons dating back to ''World War II'' continue to play important roles in conflicts and insurgencies. The UsefulNotes/ColdWar may be over, but Soviet weaponry is still killing Americans, and many others, the world over.\\\

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The most visible legacy of the USSR internationally, at least today, is its [[RedsWithRockets [[UsefulNotes/RedsWithRockets gobsmackingly large weapons market]], which saw Kalashnikovs, [=BMPs=], T-55s, and Hind helicopters be ubiquitous stables of every third world military. The Soviets were incredibly fond of handing out mass weapons shipments to fellow communists, something the capitalist bloc was way more hesitant to do (at least until you offered to buy them for a huge sum). As such, Soviet weaponry can be found across the globe, especially in the global south, where weapons dating back to ''World War II'' continue to play important roles in conflicts and insurgencies. The UsefulNotes/ColdWar may be over, but Soviet weaponry is still killing Americans, and many others, the world over.\\\
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Many people were either shot, sent to TheGulag or deported internally. Precisely how many people died as a result of "dekulakisation" and the resulting famine is subject to [[http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm#Stalin historical debate]] -- the number could be as low as 3.5 or as high as 6 million. The problem is that it's not as if anyone signed death warrants or shot every single person that died; the majority of deaths were caused by the conditions that resulted from the famine. Nutrition disorders were not as well understood as they are now, and anyone who died of such illnesses or starvation would be put down as having died of natural causes. So estimating the number of victims requires estimating how many deaths by natural causes can be blamed on the policies of Stalin's government. Good luck with that...

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Many people were either shot, sent to TheGulag or deported internally.internally, [[UsefulNotes/TheHolodomor with an especially severe famine, or deliberate genocide by starvation, hitting Ukraine especially hard]]. Precisely how many people died as a result of "dekulakisation" and the resulting famine is subject to [[http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm#Stalin historical debate]] -- the number could be as low as 3.5 or as high as 6 million. The problem is that it's not as if anyone signed death warrants or shot every single person that died; the majority of deaths were caused by the conditions that resulted from the famine. Nutrition disorders were not as well understood as they are now, and anyone who died of such illnesses or starvation would be put down as having died of natural causes. So estimating the number of victims requires estimating how many deaths by natural causes can be blamed on the policies of Stalin's government. Good luck with that...
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This also led to a Civil War, in which the Allied powers, including the Americans joined in. It was mainly "Red" versus "White" and very nasty, with massacres everywhere; the one that shows up most often in fiction is the murder of the entire Romanov royal family, although that was an event of minor importance at the time. The civil war was hardly two-sided, as the nation was filled with dozens of small nationalist factions fighting for independence and a confusing rainbow of smaller armies such as the Blacks (anarchists), Blues (peasants rebelling against the Reds), and Greens (desperate peasants fighting everybody just for survival). If you want a glimpse of what happened at the time, ''Literature/DoctorZhivago'' is best at describing the whole situation. Western powers like the US, Britain and France sent some troops to help the Whites (because they were fighting against communism, and [[EnemyMine the enemy of my enemy is my friend]]). This mostly served to make the Whites look like puppets of foreign capitalists and imperialists, which didn't help with their street cred. Thanks to Trotsky and the state seizing control of the entire Soviet economy to feed the Red Army (which became highly organised and disciplined -- the commissars shooting people certainly helped), the Bolsheviks ended up the ultimate victors. The Whites were [[WeAREStrugglingTogether disunited]], rather disorganised, and had difficulty mobilizing people to fight for their unclear vision, being forced to rely on Cossacks as soldiers who themselves wanted independence from Russia, Red or White -- not to mention that they had no idea what to do with Russia if they won, since they were a wide alliance of anti-communist forces (ranging from non-Bolshevik socialists over moderate liberals to ultra-nationalists who [[ThoseWackyNazis wanted to kill lots of Jews]]).\\\

to:

This also led to a Civil War, in which the Allied powers, including the Americans joined in. It was mainly "Red" versus "White" and very nasty, with massacres everywhere; the one that shows up most often in fiction is the murder of the entire Romanov royal family, although that was an event of minor importance at the time.time (and wasn't confirmed till years afterward). The civil war was hardly two-sided, as the nation was filled with dozens of small nationalist factions fighting for independence and a confusing rainbow of smaller armies such as the Blacks (anarchists), Blues (peasants rebelling against the Reds), and Greens (desperate peasants fighting everybody just for survival). If you want a glimpse of what happened at the time, ''Literature/DoctorZhivago'' is best at describing the whole situation. Western powers like the US, Britain and France sent some troops to help the Whites (because they were fighting against communism, and [[EnemyMine the enemy of my enemy is my friend]]). This mostly served to make the Whites look like puppets of foreign capitalists and imperialists, which didn't help with their street cred. Thanks to Trotsky and the state seizing control of the entire Soviet economy to feed the Red Army (which became highly organised and disciplined -- the commissars shooting people certainly helped), the Bolsheviks ended up the ultimate victors. The Whites were [[WeAREStrugglingTogether disunited]], rather disorganised, and had difficulty mobilizing people to fight for their unclear vision, being forced to rely on Cossacks as soldiers who themselves wanted independence from Russia, Red or White -- not to mention that they had no idea what to do with Russia if they won, since they were a wide alliance of anti-communist forces (ranging from non-Bolshevik socialists over moderate liberals to ultra-nationalists who [[ThoseWackyNazis wanted to kill lots of Jews]]).\\\



Before Lenin had become incapacitated, he dictated a Testament. While critical of the other senior Commies, its message to the party was very clear: get Stalin out, now. Some say Lenin thought he'd get better and criticized everyone to keep his leading role. Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev buried the Testament. Stalin pretended to be on the right and kicked out those who could stop him on the left (Kamenev and Zinoviev), then switched sides and did the same with those on the right (Bukarin and Rykov). Trotsky, who may well have been tricked by Stalin into missing Lenin's funeral, was eventually kicked out of the USSR in 1929. He eventually headed to Mexico, where The Stranglers now tell of how [[Quotes/AntiHero "he got an ice pick, that made his ears burn"]]. Though it was actually an ice ''axe'', he ended up just as dead on account of it being embedded into his brain.\\\

to:

Before Lenin had become incapacitated, he dictated a Testament. While critical of the other senior Commies, its message to the party was very clear: get Stalin out, now. Some say Lenin thought he'd get better and criticized everyone to keep his leading role. Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev buried the Testament.Testament (though that didn't stop word of it from spreading amongst the Party). Stalin pretended to be on the right and kicked out those who could stop him on the left (Kamenev and Zinoviev), then switched sides and did the same with those on the right (Bukarin and Rykov). Trotsky, who may well have been tricked by Stalin into missing Lenin's funeral, was eventually kicked out of the USSR in 1929. He After wandering Europe in exile for years, he eventually headed to Mexico, where The Stranglers now tell of how [[Quotes/AntiHero "he got an ice pick, that made his ears burn"]]. Though it was actually an ice ''axe'', he ended up just as dead on account of it being embedded into his brain.\\\



Nevertheless, industrialization was generally successful. Though few production targets were ever truly reached, productivity was much improved and the state of the economy was certainly better than it had been for years. The First Plan was declared finished early, though the Third would be terminated early by the start of the Great Patriotic War.

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Nevertheless, industrialization was generally successful. Though few production targets were ever truly reached, productivity was much improved and the state of the economy was certainly better than it had been for years. The First Five-Year Plan was declared finished early, though the Third would be terminated early by the start of the Great Patriotic War.



The other part of the Five-Year Plans was collectivisation. All that building of factories and machines that went along with industrialisation had to be financed somehow. Most of the USSR's population consisted of peasants, so perhaps they could be persuaded to join large collective farms, work more efficiently and give up their surpluses (instead of selling them for something in return) -- all for the rapid development of the motherland, of course. However, it turned out this wasn't the most popular of ideas. So Stalin decided to be a little more persuasive, and take land from the peasants by force. Lots of force.\\\

to:

The other part of the Five-Year Plans was collectivisation. All that building of factories and machines that went along with industrialisation had to be financed somehow.somehow (and no one would loan the Soviet Union money then, party because they refused to pay back the Tsar's debts). Most of the USSR's population consisted of peasants, so perhaps they could be persuaded to join large collective farms, work more efficiently and give up their surpluses (instead of selling them for something in return) -- all for the rapid development of the motherland, of course. However, it turned out this wasn't the most popular of ideas. So Stalin decided to be a little more persuasive, and take land from the peasants by force. Lots of force.\\\



It was decided that only the first and the fourth were true allies of the proletariat. The second were unreliable. The third were considered "class enemies", which was a very bad designation to have in the USSR. Kulak became a term that was applied to a whole lot of people, often for purposes of revenge -- naturally, some local peasants didn't hesitate before declaring their neighbours kulaks, no matter how rich they were. When the Soviets tried to take their land, many of the "kulaks" proceeded to destroy their tools, kill their livestock and consume their produce. That caused a massive famine and the Soviet livestock population would not recover until after UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo.\\\

to:

It was decided that only the first and the fourth were true allies of the proletariat. The second were unreliable. The third were considered "class enemies", which was a very bad designation to have in the USSR. Kulak became a term that was applied to a whole lot of people, people (partly because there was no exact definition for how much one had to own to be a Kulak), often for purposes of revenge -- naturally, some local peasants didn't hesitate before declaring their neighbours kulaks, no matter how rich they were. When the Soviets tried to take their land, many of the "kulaks" proceeded to destroy their tools, kill their livestock and consume their produce. That caused a massive famine and the Soviet livestock population would not recover until after UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo.\\\



To say Stalin was a bit paranoid is a bit like saying Mount Everest is a bit tall or that [[Franchise/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy space is really big]]. He became rather concerned about a man named Sergey Kirov, who was actually becoming more popular than him. On 1 December 1934, Kirov was heading to his office in Leningrad when he was shot in the back of the neck and killed. Whether Stalin was involved was never proven. Kirov was publicly mourned by Stalin and got a lot of things named after him, both factual (the city formerly known as Vyatka, both "Kirov" classes of cruisers) and fictional (a space station in [[Film/TwoThousandTenTheYearWeMakeContact 2010]] and a type of [[VideoGame/CommandAndConquerRedAlertSeries heavily armored zeppelin bomber]]).\\\

to:

To say Stalin was a bit paranoid is a bit like saying Mount Everest is a bit tall or that [[Franchise/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy space is really big]]. He became rather concerned about a man named Sergey Kirov, who was actually becoming more popular than him. On 1 December 1934, Kirov was heading to his office in Leningrad when he was shot in the back of the neck and killed. Whether Stalin was involved was never proven.proven (Khrushchev thought so, but there's genuine debate). Kirov was publicly mourned by Stalin and got a lot of things named after him, both factual (the city formerly known as Vyatka, both "Kirov" classes of cruisers) and fictional (a space station in [[Film/TwoThousandTenTheYearWeMakeContact 2010]] and a type of [[VideoGame/CommandAndConquerRedAlertSeries heavily armored zeppelin bomber]]).\\\
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The Brezhnev Era is mostly known for the stagnation of the USSR politically, economically, and technologically, but it didn't start out that way. The Soviet space program continued to make incredible strides under Brezhnev's leadership, including launching the first space station, and the Soviet economy did surprisingly well in the 1960s and early 70s. In fact, at the height of OPEC's oil embargo against the US in 1973, it wasn't uncommon to hear political talking heads already proclaiming that the Soviet Union would "win" the Cold War because of its economic prosperity relative to the US at the time, at least outside of the USA. [[note]]The Soviets also looked considerably more stable in the wake of Watergate, which was a huge blow to domestic and global trust in the US government that it has never recovered from.[[/note]] However, this would not last, as Brezhnev failed to address the mounting problems in the Soviet economy, mainly the fact that ''nobody'' in the USSR had any idea what their actual GDP was or how much was being produced. Oh sure, the Central Committee thought it knew said numbers, but the books they got were most certainly cooked. The centrally planned economy placed production quotas on industries, and failure to meet said quotas could result in being reassigned to a much shittier job in a much shittier town, so when inevitable production shortfalls occurred from one of the innumerable and incalculable variables that go into a national economy, it caused a cascading effect as plant managers lied about their production numbers to avoid a sacking, causing managers further up the industry chain to also experience shortfalls, which they then lied about. This meant the Central Committee was making economic plans using numbers that could be off by incredible margins. The longer this problem remained unaddressed, the worse it became, and it was arguably one of the biggest contributing factors to the Soviet Union's decline and fall. Even with the fall of the Soviet Union this Domino effective of lying still plagues former USSR republics, particularly UsefulNotes/Russia, even today.\\\

to:

The Brezhnev Era is mostly known for the stagnation of the USSR politically, economically, and technologically, but it didn't start out that way. The Soviet space program continued to make incredible strides under Brezhnev's leadership, including launching the first space station, and the Soviet economy did surprisingly well in the 1960s and early 70s. In fact, at the height of OPEC's oil embargo against the US in 1973, it wasn't uncommon to hear political talking heads already proclaiming that the Soviet Union would "win" the Cold War because of its economic prosperity relative to the US at the time, at least outside of the USA. [[note]]The Soviets also looked considerably more stable in the wake of Watergate, which was a huge blow to domestic and global trust in the US government that it has never recovered from.[[/note]] However, this would not last, as Brezhnev failed to address the mounting problems in the Soviet economy, mainly the fact that ''nobody'' in the USSR had any idea what their actual GDP was or how much was being produced. Oh sure, the Central Committee thought it knew said numbers, but the books they got were most certainly cooked. The centrally planned economy placed production quotas on industries, and failure to meet said quotas could result in being reassigned to a much shittier job in a much shittier town, so when inevitable production shortfalls occurred from one of the innumerable and incalculable variables that go into a national economy, it caused a cascading effect as plant managers lied about their production numbers to avoid a sacking, causing managers further up the industry chain to also experience shortfalls, which they then lied about. This meant the Central Committee was making economic plans using numbers that could be off by incredible margins. The longer this problem remained unaddressed, the worse it became, and it was arguably one of the biggest contributing factors to the Soviet Union's decline and fall. Even with the fall of the Soviet Union this Domino effective of lying still plagues former USSR republics, particularly UsefulNotes/Russia, Russia, even today.\\\
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
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The Brezhnev Era is mostly known for the stagnation of the USSR politically, economically, and technologically, but it didn't start out that way. The Soviet space program continued to make incredible strides under Brezhnev's leadership, including launching the first space station, and the Soviet economy did surprisingly well in the 1960s and early 70s. In fact, at the height of OPEC's oil embargo against the US in 1973, it wasn't uncommon to hear political talking heads already proclaiming that the Soviet Union would "win" the Cold War because of its economic prosperity relative to the US at the time, at least outside of the USA. [[note]]The Soviets also looked considerably more stable in the wake of Watergate, which was a huge blow to domestic and global trust in the US government that it has never recovered from.[[/note]] However, this would not last, as Brezhnev failed to address the mounting problems in the Soviet economy, mainly the fact that ''nobody'' in the USSR had any idea what their actual GDP was or how much was being produced. Oh sure, the Central Committee thought it knew said numbers, but the books they got were most certainly cooked. The centrally planned economy placed production quotas on industries, and failure to meet said quotas could result in being reassigned to a much shittier job in a much shittier town, so when inevitable production shortfalls occurred from one of the innumerable and incalculable variables that go into a national economy, it caused a cascading effect as plant managers lied about their production numbers to avoid a sacking, causing managers further up the industry chain to also experience shortfalls, which they then lied about. This meant the Central Committee was making economic plans using numbers that could be off by incredible margins. The longer this problem remained unaddressed, the worse it became, and it was arguably one of the biggest contributing factors to the Soviet Union's decline and fall.\\\

to:

The Brezhnev Era is mostly known for the stagnation of the USSR politically, economically, and technologically, but it didn't start out that way. The Soviet space program continued to make incredible strides under Brezhnev's leadership, including launching the first space station, and the Soviet economy did surprisingly well in the 1960s and early 70s. In fact, at the height of OPEC's oil embargo against the US in 1973, it wasn't uncommon to hear political talking heads already proclaiming that the Soviet Union would "win" the Cold War because of its economic prosperity relative to the US at the time, at least outside of the USA. [[note]]The Soviets also looked considerably more stable in the wake of Watergate, which was a huge blow to domestic and global trust in the US government that it has never recovered from.[[/note]] However, this would not last, as Brezhnev failed to address the mounting problems in the Soviet economy, mainly the fact that ''nobody'' in the USSR had any idea what their actual GDP was or how much was being produced. Oh sure, the Central Committee thought it knew said numbers, but the books they got were most certainly cooked. The centrally planned economy placed production quotas on industries, and failure to meet said quotas could result in being reassigned to a much shittier job in a much shittier town, so when inevitable production shortfalls occurred from one of the innumerable and incalculable variables that go into a national economy, it caused a cascading effect as plant managers lied about their production numbers to avoid a sacking, causing managers further up the industry chain to also experience shortfalls, which they then lied about. This meant the Central Committee was making economic plans using numbers that could be off by incredible margins. The longer this problem remained unaddressed, the worse it became, and it was arguably one of the biggest contributing factors to the Soviet Union's decline and fall. Even with the fall of the Soviet Union this Domino effective of lying still plagues former USSR republics, particularly UsefulNotes/Russia, even today.\\\
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Added DiffLines:

[[/folder]]

[[folder:The More Things Change... -- The Legacy of the USSR and Putin's New Russia]]
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Formatting fixes, one or two spelling fixes, and grammar fixes (incorrect usages of "it's").


After the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of its archives, Social-Psychological Historians of the 1990s became baffled at just how contented-- if not outright ''happy''-- most people seemed to have been living under UsefulNotes/JosefStalin despite how incredibly difficult life was for them. By the late 2000s they recognised that they had made the mistake of assuming that the Soviet "man in the street" had always possessed the cynicism and disillusionment which he had demonstrated during the USSR's twilight years and ultimate suicide. Today it is accepted that in fact, the early years of the Soviet Experiment were marked by strong popular belief that they could create a man-made heaven on earth-- and that they were willing to endure incredible hardships to bequeath it to their children.

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After the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of its archives, Social-Psychological Historians of the 1990s became baffled at just how contented-- contented -- if not outright ''happy''-- ''happy'' -- most people seemed to have been living under UsefulNotes/JosefStalin despite how incredibly difficult life was for them. By the late 2000s they recognised that they had made the mistake of assuming that the Soviet "man in the street" had always possessed the cynicism and disillusionment which he had demonstrated during the USSR's twilight years and ultimate suicide. Today it is accepted that in fact, the early years of the Soviet Experiment were marked by strong popular belief that they could create a man-made heaven on earth-- earth -- and that they were willing to endure incredible hardships to bequeath it to their children.
children.



[[folder:Colour Clashes - Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Civil War]]

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[[folder:Colour Clashes - -- Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Civil War]]



This also led to a Civil War, in which the Allied powers, including the Americans joined in. It was mainly "Red" versus "White" and very nasty, with massacres everywhere; the one that shows up most often in fiction is the murder of the entire Romanov royal family, although that was an event of minor importance at the time. The civil war was hardly two-sided, as the nation was filled with dozens of small nationalist factions fighting for independence and a confusing rainbow of smaller armies such as the Blacks (anarchists), Blues (peasants rebelling against the Reds), and Greens (desperate peasants fighting everybody just for survival). If you want a glimpse of what happened at the time, ''Literature/DoctorZhivago'' is best at describing the whole situation. Western powers like the US, Britain and France sent some troops to help the Whites (because they were fighting against communism, and [[EnemyMine the enemy of my enemy is my friend]]). This mostly served to make the Whites look like puppets of foreign capitalists and imperialists, which didn't help with their street cred. Thanks to Trotsky and the state seizing control of the entire Soviet economy to feed the Red Army (which became highly organised and disciplined --the commissars shooting people certainly helped), the Bolsheviks ended up the ultimate victors. The Whites were [[WeAREStrugglingTogether disunited]], rather disorganised, and had difficulty mobilizing people to fight for their unclear vision, being forced to rely on Cossacks as soldiers who themselves wanted independence from Russia, Red or White - not to mention that they had no idea what to do with Russia if they won, since they were a wide alliance of anti-communist forces (ranging from non-Bolshevik socialists over moderate liberals to ultra-nationalists who [[ThoseWackyNazis wanted to kill lots of Jews]]).\\\

to:

This also led to a Civil War, in which the Allied powers, including the Americans joined in. It was mainly "Red" versus "White" and very nasty, with massacres everywhere; the one that shows up most often in fiction is the murder of the entire Romanov royal family, although that was an event of minor importance at the time. The civil war was hardly two-sided, as the nation was filled with dozens of small nationalist factions fighting for independence and a confusing rainbow of smaller armies such as the Blacks (anarchists), Blues (peasants rebelling against the Reds), and Greens (desperate peasants fighting everybody just for survival). If you want a glimpse of what happened at the time, ''Literature/DoctorZhivago'' is best at describing the whole situation. Western powers like the US, Britain and France sent some troops to help the Whites (because they were fighting against communism, and [[EnemyMine the enemy of my enemy is my friend]]). This mostly served to make the Whites look like puppets of foreign capitalists and imperialists, which didn't help with their street cred. Thanks to Trotsky and the state seizing control of the entire Soviet economy to feed the Red Army (which became highly organised and disciplined --the -- the commissars shooting people certainly helped), the Bolsheviks ended up the ultimate victors. The Whites were [[WeAREStrugglingTogether disunited]], rather disorganised, and had difficulty mobilizing people to fight for their unclear vision, being forced to rely on Cossacks as soldiers who themselves wanted independence from Russia, Red or White - -- not to mention that they had no idea what to do with Russia if they won, since they were a wide alliance of anti-communist forces (ranging from non-Bolshevik socialists over moderate liberals to ultra-nationalists who [[ThoseWackyNazis wanted to kill lots of Jews]]).\\\



[[folder:The Paranoid Priest Candidate - Josef Stalin]]

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[[folder:The Paranoid Priest Candidate - -- Josef Stalin]]



[[folder:Fifty Years In Ten - Industrialisation]]

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[[folder:Fifty Years In Ten - -- Industrialisation]]



[[folder:Smert Kulakam! - Collectivisation]]
The other part of the Five-Year Plans was collectivisation. All that building of factories and machines that went along with industrialisation had to be financed somehow. Most of the USSR's population consisted of peasants, so perhaps they could be persuaded to join large collective farms, work more efficiently and give up their surpluses (instead of selling them for something in return) - all for the rapid development of the motherland, of course. However, it turned out this wasn't the most popular of ideas. So Stalin decided to be a little more persuasive, and take land from the peasants by force. Lots of force.\\\

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[[folder:Smert Kulakam! - -- Collectivisation]]
The other part of the Five-Year Plans was collectivisation. All that building of factories and machines that went along with industrialisation had to be financed somehow. Most of the USSR's population consisted of peasants, so perhaps they could be persuaded to join large collective farms, work more efficiently and give up their surpluses (instead of selling them for something in return) - -- all for the rapid development of the motherland, of course. However, it turned out this wasn't the most popular of ideas. So Stalin decided to be a little more persuasive, and take land from the peasants by force. Lots of force.\\\



* kulaks, rich land-owning peasants. The term was in use pre-Red October for independent farmers who hired labour and had large farms. It quickly become derogatory --the term literally means "tight-fisted".

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* kulaks, rich land-owning peasants. The term was in use pre-Red October for independent farmers who hired labour and had large farms. It quickly become derogatory --the -- the term literally means "tight-fisted".



It was decided that only the first and the fourth were true allies of the proletariat. The second were unreliable. The third were considered "class enemies", which was a very bad designation to have in the USSR. Kulak became a term that was applied to a whole lot of people, often for purposes of revenge - naturally, some local peasants didn't hesitate before declaring their neighbours kulaks, no matter how rich they were. When the Soviets tried to take their land, many of the "kulaks" proceeded to destroy their tools, kill their livestock and consume their produce. That caused a massive famine and the Soviet livestock population would not recover until after UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo.\\\

Many people were either shot, sent to TheGulag or deported internally. Precisely how many people died as a result of "dekulakisation" and the resulting famine is subject to [[http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm#Stalin historical debate]] --the number could be as low as 3.5 or as high as 6 million. The problem is that it's not as if anyone signed death warrants or shot every single person that died; the majority of deaths were caused by the conditions that resulted from the famine. Nutrition disorders were not as well understood as they are now, and anyone who died of such illnesses or starvation would be put down as having died of natural causes. So estimating the number of victims requires estimating how many deaths by natural causes can be blamed on the policies of Stalin's government. Good luck with that...

to:

It was decided that only the first and the fourth were true allies of the proletariat. The second were unreliable. The third were considered "class enemies", which was a very bad designation to have in the USSR. Kulak became a term that was applied to a whole lot of people, often for purposes of revenge - -- naturally, some local peasants didn't hesitate before declaring their neighbours kulaks, no matter how rich they were. When the Soviets tried to take their land, many of the "kulaks" proceeded to destroy their tools, kill their livestock and consume their produce. That caused a massive famine and the Soviet livestock population would not recover until after UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo.\\\

Many people were either shot, sent to TheGulag or deported internally. Precisely how many people died as a result of "dekulakisation" and the resulting famine is subject to [[http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm#Stalin historical debate]] --the -- the number could be as low as 3.5 or as high as 6 million. The problem is that it's not as if anyone signed death warrants or shot every single person that died; the majority of deaths were caused by the conditions that resulted from the famine. Nutrition disorders were not as well understood as they are now, and anyone who died of such illnesses or starvation would be put down as having died of natural causes. So estimating the number of victims requires estimating how many deaths by natural causes can be blamed on the policies of Stalin's government. Good luck with that...



[[folder:The Midnight Knock - The Purges]]

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[[folder:The Midnight Knock - -- The Purges]]



[[folder:Rewriting History - The Cult of Personality and The Magic of Photoshop]]

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[[folder:Rewriting History - -- The Cult of Personality and The Magic of Photoshop]]



So the "facts" were altered. Other Bolshevik leaders were "erased" from history and removed, rather expertly, from photos. New textbooks were issued to schoolchildren. As his former cronies were still being purged as quickly as they fell out of favour, new pages were given for pupils to paste over. Conversely, he also had photos altered so that any particularly notable instance (such as a meeting with Lenin) would show him as being there when he really wasn't. Other photos that actually showed his face were sometimes retouched to show him in a more favourable light --for an example of what this entails, compare the famous image of UsefulNotes/CheGuevara on a shirt to the original photograph. Most photographs of him actually edited out the blemishes and pockmarks on his face.

to:

So the "facts" were altered. Other Bolshevik leaders were "erased" from history and removed, rather expertly, from photos. New textbooks were issued to schoolchildren. As his former cronies were still being purged as quickly as they fell out of favour, new pages were given for pupils to paste over. Conversely, he also had photos altered so that any particularly notable instance (such as a meeting with Lenin) would show him as being there when he really wasn't. Other photos that actually showed his face were sometimes retouched to show him in a more favourable light --for -- for an example of what this entails, compare the famous image of UsefulNotes/CheGuevara on a shirt to the original photograph. Most photographs of him actually edited out the blemishes and pockmarks on his face.



[[folder:Backroom Deals - Inter-war Germany and the Soviet Union]]

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[[folder:Backroom Deals - -- Inter-war Germany and the Soviet Union]]



The Soviet leadership wasn't all too thrilled at this turn of events, as the Nazis' rhetoric made it clear that the two wouldn't be bosom buddies - Nazis hated Communism and Slavs, so [[NinjaPirateZombieRobot Communist Slavs]] were an obvious enemy. However, the USSR didn't get involved as they were a bit preoccupied by border clashes with Imperial Japan near the Mongolian border. It was probably around this time that Stalin probably began to realize that his purges might have removed too many competent military officers from their posts, and that there were a lot more wolves outside than there were in his house. Much like every other country at the time, the USSR wasn't really all that ready for war.\\\

to:

The Soviet leadership wasn't all too thrilled at this turn of events, as the Nazis' rhetoric made it clear that the two wouldn't be bosom buddies - -- Nazis hated Communism and Slavs, so [[NinjaPirateZombieRobot Communist Slavs]] were an obvious enemy. However, the USSR didn't get involved as they were a bit preoccupied by border clashes with Imperial Japan near the Mongolian border. It was probably around this time that Stalin probably began to realize that his purges might have removed too many competent military officers from their posts, and that there were a lot more wolves outside than there were in his house. Much like every other country at the time, the USSR wasn't really all that ready for war.\\\



[[folder:A Cold Shock - The Winter War]]

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[[folder:A Cold Shock - -- The Winter War]]



The Winter War worked out badly in that was a costly failure which diplomatically isolated the Soviet Union and put the faults of the post-purge Red Army on display for all the world to see. This forced Stalin to recognize that the Red Army had to be reformed. Perhaps more importantly, it affected assessments of the Red Army's capabilities by the Fremde Heeres Ost (Foreign Armies East), a military intelligence office tasked with gathering information on Germany's eastern opponents. To their detriment, the German Army would assume that the entire Red Army would be just as incompetent in mid-1941 as it was in the winter of 1939-40 - so incompetent, in short, that it would be totally incapable of defending the USSR from a German invasion.

to:

The Winter War worked out badly in that was a costly failure which diplomatically isolated the Soviet Union and put the faults of the post-purge Red Army on display for all the world to see. This forced Stalin to recognize that the Red Army had to be reformed. Perhaps more importantly, it affected assessments of the Red Army's capabilities by the Fremde Heeres Ost (Foreign Armies East), a military intelligence office tasked with gathering information on Germany's eastern opponents. To their detriment, the German Army would assume that the entire Red Army would be just as incompetent in mid-1941 as it was in the winter of 1939-40 - -- so incompetent, in short, that it would be totally incapable of defending the USSR from a German invasion.



[[folder:For the Rodina! - The Great Patriotic War, Part One]]

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[[folder:For the Rodina! - -- The Great Patriotic War, Part One]]



To German nationalist intellectuals like Alfred Rosenberg, eastern Europe was fated to be the birthplace of Greater Germany, just as the western parts of North America had been fated to be annexed by the USA. The ultimate destiny of the Slavic-Mongoloid-Caucasian people who lived in Germany's new territories was to become as the First Nations of Canada, the Iroquois of the USA's Midwest, or the Eora of Sydney: they were to be evicted to make room for a "real" civilisation. To Rosenberg and his fellows, the only difference between Anglo and Germanic ethnic cleansing and settlement was the time factor: if Germany was to catch up with the English-speaking peoples then she would have to accomplish a similar amount of killing and colonization in a much shorter timespan. Germany under the Kaiser had been wrong to attempt to colonize overseas, they had argued - Germany's colonies had only ever been mere scraps, economically dubious and geographically disparate and militarily vulnerable to Anglo-American seapower. Germany was a land power, they argued, and her destiny lay to the east.\\\

to:

To German nationalist intellectuals like Alfred Rosenberg, eastern Europe was fated to be the birthplace of Greater Germany, just as the western parts of North America had been fated to be annexed by the USA. The ultimate destiny of the Slavic-Mongoloid-Caucasian people who lived in Germany's new territories was to become as the First Nations of Canada, the Iroquois of the USA's Midwest, or the Eora of Sydney: they were to be evicted to make room for a "real" civilisation. To Rosenberg and his fellows, the only difference between Anglo and Germanic ethnic cleansing and settlement was the time factor: if Germany was to catch up with the English-speaking peoples then she would have to accomplish a similar amount of killing and colonization in a much shorter timespan. Germany under the Kaiser had been wrong to attempt to colonize overseas, they had argued - -- Germany's colonies had only ever been mere scraps, economically dubious and geographically disparate and militarily vulnerable to Anglo-American seapower. Germany was a land power, they argued, and her destiny lay to the east.\\\



Stalin's assumption that the Nazis knew the breaks, or at least wouldn't want to gamble on their chances, underpinned the USSR's rearmament and military reforms following the Winter War. These expanded the army and were designed to make its units capable of fighting a shooting war after 1942. Until then, it was embroiled in an extensive and highly disruptive reorganisation and retraining process and its units were incapable of effective combat. Thus despite extensive manpower mobilization in the western military districts, Soviet forces were ill-prepared for war in June 1941. Many tanks and planes lacked fuel and were still in storage, or required extensive maintenance and unavailable spare parts. Most mobile units (armour, mechanised and motorised infantry) lacked tank-recovery vehicles and repair units and had only part of their truck transport and supply pools. Most frontier raions were awaiting adequate numbers of machine guns and artillery (to be delivered in 1942). And finally, most frontier commanders at all levels - bar those of the Southern/Bessarabian Military District - believed that even attempting basic tactical or operational defensive planning or preparations would show a lack of faith in their forces' ability to launch the planned counter-offensive into Poland.\\\

to:

Stalin's assumption that the Nazis knew the breaks, or at least wouldn't want to gamble on their chances, underpinned the USSR's rearmament and military reforms following the Winter War. These expanded the army and were designed to make its units capable of fighting a shooting war after 1942. Until then, it was embroiled in an extensive and highly disruptive reorganisation and retraining process and its units were incapable of effective combat. Thus despite extensive manpower mobilization in the western military districts, Soviet forces were ill-prepared for war in June 1941. Many tanks and planes lacked fuel and were still in storage, or required extensive maintenance and unavailable spare parts. Most mobile units (armour, mechanised and motorised infantry) lacked tank-recovery vehicles and repair units and had only part of their truck transport and supply pools. Most frontier raions were awaiting adequate numbers of machine guns and artillery (to be delivered in 1942). And finally, most frontier commanders at all levels - -- bar those of the Southern/Bessarabian Military District - -- believed that even attempting basic tactical or operational defensive planning or preparations would show a lack of faith in their forces' ability to launch the planned counter-offensive into Poland.\\\



* Signals and human intelligence (i.e. defectors and leaks in German-allied countries) indicated that German forces were massing on the Soviet-German border and conducting reconnaissance overflights of Soviet territory, but the head of military intelligence (Ivan Golikov) opined that these were for a defensive counter-offensive if the Soviets attacked first-- or perhaps to attack first if it appeared that the Soviets were about to attack.

to:

* Signals and human intelligence (i.e. defectors and leaks in German-allied countries) indicated that German forces were massing on the Soviet-German border and conducting reconnaissance overflights of Soviet territory, but the head of military intelligence (Ivan Golikov) opined that these were for a defensive counter-offensive if the Soviets attacked first-- first -- or perhaps to attack first if it appeared that the Soviets were about to attack. attack.



AsYouKnow, the Army had told Hitler that the Soviet-German War would be over so quickly and easily that none of the 'Against' evidence available to Stalin actually meant anything. Insufficient Army production, ''Luftwaffe'' and industrial dependency upon Soviet imports, Ivan Golikov's opinion, the postponing of the ''Barbarossa'' start-date, Churchill's hatred of Nazism and Communism-- none of it mattered.\\\

On 22 June 1941, the Axis threat was proven in dramatic style when three and a half million soldiers went into action in "Operation Barbarossa". Within weeks the frontier military districts were overwhelmed and millions of Soviet soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured. As they entered the western USSR, the locals, sick of Soviet oppression, welcomed them with open arms. [[VillainBall The Nazis responded by taking their food and shelter, or with bullets, or enslaved them to work in mines or factories.]] By July 9th Riga, Pskov, and Minsk had all been captured. But Soviet resistance was already stiffening. In the south a series of failed and uncoordinated counterattacks still managed to stall the Germans. In the center, despite losing millions more to encirclement, the Soviets succesfully pinned German forces down in a months worth of brutal fighting around Smolensk. Hitler decided that Moscow could not be taken immediately; instead, the grain and oil of the Ukraine would be seized first, and the bulging Soviet salient around Kiev eliminated. The resulting campaign led to millions more killed or captured on the Soviet side, but bought some time for the Red Army to reorganize.\\\

to:

AsYouKnow, the Army had told Hitler that the Soviet-German War would be over so quickly and easily that none of the 'Against' evidence available to Stalin actually meant anything. Insufficient Army production, ''Luftwaffe'' and industrial dependency upon Soviet imports, Ivan Golikov's opinion, the postponing of the ''Barbarossa'' start-date, Churchill's hatred of Nazism and Communism-- Communism -- none of it mattered.\\\

On 22 June 1941, the Axis threat was proven in dramatic style when three and a half million soldiers went into action in "Operation Barbarossa". Within weeks the frontier military districts were overwhelmed and millions of Soviet soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured. As they entered the western USSR, the locals, sick of Soviet oppression, welcomed them with open arms. [[VillainBall The Nazis responded by taking their food and shelter, or with bullets, or enslaved them to work in mines or factories.]] By July 9th Riga, Pskov, and Minsk had all been captured. But Soviet resistance was already stiffening. In the south a series of failed and uncoordinated counterattacks still managed to stall the Germans. In the center, despite losing millions more to encirclement, the Soviets succesfully successfully pinned German forces down in a months worth of brutal fighting around Smolensk. Hitler decided that Moscow could not be taken immediately; instead, the grain and oil of the Ukraine would be seized first, and the bulging Soviet salient around Kiev eliminated. The resulting campaign led to millions more killed or captured on the Soviet side, but bought some time for the Red Army to reorganize.\\\



[[folder:Drive Them Out! - The Great Patriotic War, Part Two]]
The initial German advance was swift, reaching Voronezh and Rostov within a few weeks. Contrary to official Russian accounts the southern armies were annihilated in the fighting and failed to make an organized retreat. With these initial victories Army Group South divided itself into two forces; one would swing south of the Don to seize the oil fields, while the other would advance into the bend of the Don, to Stalingrad. In the end the Wehrmacht never had the strength or supplies to take either objective. Trying to take both only compounded the problem. The advance into the Don resulted in a massive meeting engagement as the Red Army's 5th, 4th, and 1st tank armies counterattacked. The ensuing battle damaged the 6th Army and left in understrength even before it's final push. By the time 6th and 4th Panzer Armies reached Stalingrad they were already exhausted and unprepared for the brutal urban war that followed. Leaving most of it's strength in the north to fend off Soviet counterattacks, 6th Army pushed into the city in a series of short leaps and bounds, with 4th Panzer Army assisting in the southern districts of the city. The Soviet high command fed Chuikov, the commander of the city's defense, just enough men, food, and ammunition to allow them to continue fighting. At the same time it launched diversionary attacks north of the city in order to test and weaken 6th Army. By mid November, despite seizing much of the city, the Germans were exhausted and unprepared for a massive Soviet counteroffensive.\\\

to:

[[folder:Drive Them Out! - -- The Great Patriotic War, Part Two]]
The initial German advance was swift, reaching Voronezh and Rostov within a few weeks. Contrary to official Russian accounts the southern armies were annihilated in the fighting and failed to make an organized retreat. With these initial victories Army Group South divided itself into two forces; one would swing south of the Don to seize the oil fields, while the other would advance into the bend of the Don, to Stalingrad. In the end the Wehrmacht never had the strength or supplies to take either objective. Trying to take both only compounded the problem. The advance into the Don resulted in a massive meeting engagement as the Red Army's 5th, 4th, and 1st tank armies counterattacked. The ensuing battle damaged the 6th Army and left in understrength even before it's its final push. By the time 6th and 4th Panzer Armies reached Stalingrad they were already exhausted and unprepared for the brutal urban war that followed. Leaving most of it's its strength in the north to fend off Soviet counterattacks, 6th Army pushed into the city in a series of short leaps and bounds, with 4th Panzer Army assisting in the southern districts of the city. The Soviet high command fed Chuikov, the commander of the city's defense, just enough men, food, and ammunition to allow them to continue fighting. At the same time it launched diversionary attacks north of the city in order to test and weaken 6th Army. By mid November, despite seizing much of the city, the Germans were exhausted and unprepared for a massive Soviet counteroffensive.\\\



Operation Uranus encircled the 6th Army inside the Stalingrad region, tearing apart the German southern front. Counterattacks were easily halted, and Stavka began to expand it's objectives to not only include the reduction of the 6th Army, but the utter annihilation of all German forces in southern Russia. But, as in the First Winter Counteroffensive, it overestimated the strength and relative skill of Soviet forces. Despite mauling several more German armies, they failed to achieve encirclements on the same scale as the Stalingrad Offensive, and by March were rapidly losing momentum. Capitalizing on overextended Soviet forces, the Germans launched a massive counteroffensive which thwarted Soviet plans to collapse the entire front line, and earned them a short respite.\\\

Emphasis on 'short'; it wouldn't be long before the two sides fought one last massive engagement in the salient created by the ebb and flow of war- the 'Belorussian Balcony'. Determined to close it, the Germans gathered their strength in preparation for what they called Operation Citadel. Thus, the Battle of Kursk -- the largest battle ever in numbers of armoured vehicles employed -- was fought. A far cry from the brilliant strategic manoeuvres of the past, it was hugely wasteful: the Germans failed to achieve surprise and ended up smashing their forces against the heavily-layered Soviet defences, consisting of minefields and fortifications up to 300 km in depth, supported by artillery, anti-tank guns, and considerable reserve forces. Although the Germans inflicted far greater losses on Soviet forces, the already-depleted Wehrmacht had sustained irreplaceable casualties and lost too much of its best equipment in the offensive.\\\

to:

Operation Uranus encircled the 6th Army inside the Stalingrad region, tearing apart the German southern front. Counterattacks were easily halted, and Stavka began to expand it's its objectives to not only include the reduction of the 6th Army, but the utter annihilation of all German forces in southern Russia. But, as in the First Winter Counteroffensive, it overestimated the strength and relative skill of Soviet forces. Despite mauling several more German armies, they failed to achieve encirclements on the same scale as the Stalingrad Offensive, and by March were rapidly losing momentum. Capitalizing on overextended Soviet forces, the Germans launched a massive counteroffensive which thwarted Soviet plans to collapse the entire front line, and earned them a short respite.\\\

Emphasis on 'short'; it wouldn't be long before the two sides fought one last massive engagement in the salient created by the ebb and flow of war- war -- the 'Belorussian Balcony'. Determined to close it, the Germans gathered their strength in preparation for what they called Operation Citadel. Thus, the Battle of Kursk -- the largest battle ever in numbers of armoured vehicles employed -- was fought. A far cry from the brilliant strategic manoeuvres of the past, it was hugely wasteful: the Germans failed to achieve surprise and ended up smashing their forces against the heavily-layered Soviet defences, consisting of minefields and fortifications up to 300 km in depth, supported by artillery, anti-tank guns, and considerable reserve forces. Although the Germans inflicted far greater losses on Soviet forces, the already-depleted Wehrmacht had sustained irreplaceable casualties and lost too much of its best equipment in the offensive.\\\



[[folder:More Paranoia - Josef Stalin [=1945-53=]]]

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[[folder:More Paranoia - -- Josef Stalin [=1945-53=]]]



The Soviets facilitated their economic recovery and general repair by looting the territories they had occupied; in many cases, much of the industrial stuff that had come into their possession, a real windfall, were put on railroad cars and shipped east. They justified this policy with the argument that they were taking stuff from countries which had supported the Nazis - technically true, but then again the Nazis hadn't exactly given those countries much choice. Anyway, the Soviet policy worked, to some extent. They also got a lot of reparations; some were a little on the strange side. For example, they received some elevators from the Germans, which were used in some Stalinist apartment complexes in Moscow.\\\

to:

The Soviets facilitated their economic recovery and general repair by looting the territories they had occupied; in many cases, much of the industrial stuff that had come into their possession, a real windfall, were put on railroad cars and shipped east. They justified this policy with the argument that they were taking stuff from countries which had supported the Nazis - -- technically true, but then again the Nazis hadn't exactly given those countries much choice. Anyway, the Soviet policy worked, to some extent. They also got a lot of reparations; some were a little on the strange side. For example, they received some elevators from the Germans, which were used in some Stalinist apartment complexes in Moscow.\\\



A lot of other people were both kicked out of the new borders of Central and Eastern Europe, or were forcibly brought back. This particularly applied to the Soviet [=POWs=] and civilians forced to work for the Nazis. During the war, the Nazis put them in the death camps, where they weren't shot on the spot. 57% of Soviet [=POWs=] - that's 3.3 ''million'' - ended up being killed by the Nazis. Auschwitz II (the one with the infamous railway arch) was first built to exterminate 100,000 Soviet prisoners. You'd have thought that after they'd been through the hell on earth that was UsefulNotes/TheHolocaust, the USSR would have at least treated them decently. Instead, the Soviets accused most of them of collaboration and sent about 42% (c.2 million) to TheGulag. The German [=POWs=] ended up in forced labour camps, where many of them died. The last prisoners were not released until 1955.\\\

to:

A lot of other people were both kicked out of the new borders of Central and Eastern Europe, or were forcibly brought back. This particularly applied to the Soviet [=POWs=] and civilians forced to work for the Nazis. During the war, the Nazis put them in the death camps, where they weren't shot on the spot. 57% of Soviet [=POWs=] - -- that's 3.3 ''million'' - -- ended up being killed by the Nazis. Auschwitz II (the one with the infamous railway arch) was first built to exterminate 100,000 Soviet prisoners. You'd have thought that after they'd been through the hell on earth that was UsefulNotes/TheHolocaust, the USSR would have at least treated them decently. Instead, the Soviets accused most of them of collaboration and sent about 42% (c.2 million) to TheGulag. The German [=POWs=] ended up in forced labour camps, where many of them died. The last prisoners were not released until 1955.\\\



[[folder:Getting Shoe Slapped - Nikita Khrushchev]]

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[[folder:Getting Shoe Slapped - -- Nikita Khrushchev]]



''Shoe slap 1 - The Anti-Party Group''\\\

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''Shoe slap 1 - -- The Anti-Party Group''\\\



''Shoe slap 2 - The UN General Assembly''\\\

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''Shoe slap 2 - -- The UN General Assembly''\\\



''Shoe slap 3 - Not A Way To Woo Virgin Lands''\\\

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''Shoe slap 3 - -- Not A Way To Woo Virgin Lands''\\\



Other agricultural and administrative reforms did very little. On the bright side, Khruschev started a Union-wide housing project, with the aim of providing ''every'' family in USSR with an apartment free of charge. He more or less did (to the extent that all the old, shaggy 5-stories apartment buildings are unanimously called "khruschoba", a portmanteau of "Khrushchev" and ''trushchoba'' - "Khrushchev's slum"). The administrative reforms in the industrial and agricultural field were full of holes and excess bravado that led to numerous catastrophes, but the industry itself grew enormously.\\\

to:

Other agricultural and administrative reforms did very little. On the bright side, Khruschev started a Union-wide housing project, with the aim of providing ''every'' family in USSR with an apartment free of charge. He more or less did (to the extent that all the old, shaggy 5-stories apartment buildings are unanimously called "khruschoba", a portmanteau of "Khrushchev" and ''trushchoba'' - -- "Khrushchev's slum"). The administrative reforms in the industrial and agricultural field were full of holes and excess bravado that led to numerous catastrophes, but the industry itself grew enormously.\\\



''Shoe slap 4 - Berlin''\\\

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''Shoe slap 4 - -- Berlin''\\\



''Shoe slap 5 - Cuba''\\\

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''Shoe slap 5 - -- Cuba''\\\



''Shoe slap 6 - The Hungarian Revolution''\\\

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''Shoe slap 6 - -- The Hungarian Revolution''\\\



[[folder:More Medals Than Results - Leonid Brezhnev]]
In 1964, UsefulNotes/LeonidBrezhnev took over Khrushchev's position as General Secretary, and he would hold the office for 18 years -the longest of any other leader besides Stalin. Brezhnev was a considerable reversal of course, undoing many of Khrushchev's reforms and refusing to denounce Stalin and acknowledge his crimes. Brezhnev in some ways even attempted to revive the Stalin cult of personality, decorating himself highly with medals (that he awarded himself) and having his portrait hung around the USSR. Although this styling is reminiscent of a tinpot dictator, Brezhnev actually worked hard to rule by consensus, avoiding Khrushchev's impulsive decision making and "rule by decree" in favor of working closely with the central committee to establish a unified platform. Brezhnev had almost certainly realized that sidelining the central committee is what primarily cost Khrushchev his job, and the same would happen to him if he continued to rule in the same vein as his predecessor.\\\

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[[folder:More Medals Than Results - -- Leonid Brezhnev]]
In 1964, UsefulNotes/LeonidBrezhnev took over Khrushchev's position as General Secretary, and he would hold the office for 18 years -the -- the longest of any other leader besides Stalin. Brezhnev was a considerable reversal of course, undoing many of Khrushchev's reforms and refusing to denounce Stalin and acknowledge his crimes. Brezhnev in some ways even attempted to revive the Stalin cult of personality, decorating himself highly with medals (that he awarded himself) and having his portrait hung around the USSR. Although this styling is reminiscent of a tinpot dictator, Brezhnev actually worked hard to rule by consensus, avoiding Khrushchev's impulsive decision making and "rule by decree" in favor of working closely with the central committee to establish a unified platform. Brezhnev had almost certainly realized that sidelining the central committee is what primarily cost Khrushchev his job, and the same would happen to him if he continued to rule in the same vein as his predecessor.\\\



The USSR also began to fall behind technologically when compared to the capitalist West. While the average Soviet citizen in the 60s had electronics and consumer goods that were, for the most part, on par with those manufactured in the West (not counting deluxe models/luxury goods), the 1970s saw sharp declines in quality as the aforementioned production shortfalls caused them to scrape by with whatever they had. The end result is that every Lada ends up a lemon before it's even leaves the factory floor, and the waiting list for these sub-par cars could be 3 years or even longer. The same went for most consumer goods in the USSR, which were made to be manufactured cheaply and efficiently, with sacrifices made to quality and uniqueness. This is reflected in nearly every aspect of Soviet public life, especially the samey "Commie Block" apartment complexes that fill the former Soviet Union. This was partly justified, at least ideologically, by pointing out that places like America had a "head start" on industrialization, while the USSR had to transform Russia from draconian medieval kingdom into a modern nation state, so the importance was on quantity rather than quality I.E. "make sure every Soviet citizen has a roof over their heads first before we can start talking about luxury apartments." Of course, the reality is that the Central Committee simply cared less about providing consumer goods than they did about national prestige, the military, and the heavy industries that supplied said military. The Soviet "siege mentality" incurred by 3 successive and brutal invasions in the span of just a couple of decades made Soviet leadership dedicated to the idea of a massive standing army, so the Soviet Army [[note]]the Red Army was renamed into the Soviet Armed Forces in 1946[[/note]] ended up being unsustainably huge. This problem continues to Russia today, with it attempting to support the world's 2nd largest military on a GDP comparable to ''Australia''. Supporting this vast military-industrial complex meant diverting resources away from civilian purposes. On top of all of this, technological development in the Soviet Union was, like all other things, managed by the state, with official design bureaus, universities, and technical schools being given orders to design things, as opposed to the innovation happening organically in order to sell more shit, as it does under capitalism. While this is workable if the state has its priorities straight, it failed in the USSR, again because of the over-emphasis on military tech over civilian developments. The Soviet economy actually went so wrong that the quite agricultural country of the USSR was forced to import grain. ''From America''.\\\

to:

The USSR also began to fall behind technologically when compared to the capitalist West. While the average Soviet citizen in the 60s had electronics and consumer goods that were, for the most part, on par with those manufactured in the West (not counting deluxe models/luxury goods), the 1970s saw sharp declines in quality as the aforementioned production shortfalls caused them to scrape by with whatever they had. The end result is that every Lada ends up a lemon before it's it even leaves the factory floor, and the waiting list for these sub-par cars could be 3 years or even longer. The same went for most consumer goods in the USSR, which were made to be manufactured cheaply and efficiently, with sacrifices made to quality and uniqueness. This is reflected in nearly every aspect of Soviet public life, especially the samey "Commie Block" apartment complexes that fill the former Soviet Union. This was partly justified, at least ideologically, by pointing out that places like America had a "head start" on industrialization, while the USSR had to transform Russia from draconian medieval kingdom into a modern nation state, so the importance was on quantity rather than quality I.E. "make sure every Soviet citizen has a roof over their heads first before we can start talking about luxury apartments." Of course, the reality is that the Central Committee simply cared less about providing consumer goods than they did about national prestige, the military, and the heavy industries that supplied said military. The Soviet "siege mentality" incurred by 3 successive and brutal invasions in the span of just a couple of decades made Soviet leadership dedicated to the idea of a massive standing army, so the Soviet Army [[note]]the Red Army was renamed into the Soviet Armed Forces in 1946[[/note]] ended up being unsustainably huge. This problem continues to Russia today, with it attempting to support the world's 2nd largest military on a GDP comparable to ''Australia''. Supporting this vast military-industrial complex meant diverting resources away from civilian purposes. On top of all of this, technological development in the Soviet Union was, like all other things, managed by the state, with official design bureaus, universities, and technical schools being given orders to design things, as opposed to the innovation happening organically in order to sell more shit, as it does under capitalism. While this is workable if the state has its priorities straight, it failed in the USSR, again because of the over-emphasis on military tech over civilian developments. The Soviet economy actually went so wrong that the quite agricultural country of the USSR was forced to import grain. ''From America''.\\\



Brezhnev had also overseen some of the most brutal and repressive measures by the Soviet state yet. Domestically, the culturally liberal reforms of Khrushchev were rolled back as media became tightly controlled once more, and a light revival of Stalin-era repression policies was rolled out. If you protested the government, rather than sending you to a Siberian Gulag with only a vague pretext of some criminal act or a KangarooCourt, the Brezhnev regime would simply prefer to declare you "mentally unfit" and put you in a [[BedlamHouse Psikhushka]] instead. Their justification was that only an insane person would be opposed to socialism. However, the worst treatment was reserved for Eastern Europe, where rather infamously the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia, ''it's ally'', because it sought to democratize. It wasn't even that they were declaring themselves bourgeois traitors either, as they were still socialist, just less authoritarian. In 1968, a the reformist Alexander DubÄŤek was elected First Secretary. He laid out a program for reform called, well, ''the Programme'', that would see Czechia and Slovakia be separated into two autonomous states united by a federation, open up freedom of the press, freedom of travel, and even establish multiparty democracy. It was beyond ambitious. DubÄŤek had stated that he wanted to create "socialism with a human face," to essentially dismantle the Marxist-Leninist State and rebuild it into a Democratic Socialist one, to make a state that was more fair and equitable to citizens. Not only did it have to be better than Marxism-Leninism was, it specifically had to be better than ''capitalism'', to prove that the socialist experiment could work. After all, that ''was'' the point of all this, right? To create a truly egalitarian, classless utopia?\\\

Brezhnev and Soviet leadership largely agreed on military action. They made a half-assed show of diplomatic gestures, trying to get Dubček to rein in the reforms, but the Soviet Union was never going to react any other way. The brutish mentality of Soviet foreign policy had seemingly solved ''all'' it's problems with violence, after all: defeating the bourgeois and monarchist reactionaries in the Civil War, bludgeoning Nazi Germany to death, "compelling" the workers in East Germany in 1953 and the revolutionaries in Hungary in 1956 to stand down. When all you have is a hammer, you treat everything like a nail, so when all you have is a giant ass military, everything looks like a battlefield. This would be one of the rare occasions that a protest occurred in the Soviet Union before ''glasnost'', as 7 demonstrators unfurled pro-Czechoslovak banners in Red Square and were immediately and brutally beaten by state security forces, given KangarooCourt trials, and the whole thing was quietly dismissed as a freak incident of "anti-socialist dissent." Dubček was arrested and flown to Moscow, but Brezhnev decided to negotiate instead, making the big show of force ultimately just that: the invasion at the end of the "Prague Spring" was simply a reminder to the Czech and Slovak peoples of the might of the military titan next door. Dubček was put back in power, but was forced to limit his reforms. The whole invasion had brought serious shocks through the Comintern, effectively causing its final disintegration. It was the final nail in the coffin for Soviet-Chinese relations, as Mao reacted harshly to the invasion because he viewed the "Brezhnev Doctrine" as the Soviets essentially deciding who is communist and who is not, and to give the man some credit, that is exactly what the intent of the Brezhnev Doctrine was. Gone are the days of proletarian internationalism: now communism was defined by its use to the Soviet state. If they didn't like ''your'' communism, you weren't getting any aid. To say it was a destructive, belligerent decision that forever buried what little ties the socialist world were still bound together by... would sum it up quite nice actually. The Soviets held onto Eastern Europe under the threat of employing this "doctrine" for quite a long time, but their influence abroad had already began to fade. Any Western communist parties that were still keeping ties with the Soviets pretty much abandoned them completely, seeing the crushing of the Prague Spring as a betrayal of socialism, and of just general human decency. Other nations in the Warsaw Pact were quick to criticize the Soviets, especially [[UsefulNotes/{{Romania}} Nicolae Ceaușescu]].\\\

to:

Brezhnev had also overseen some of the most brutal and repressive measures by the Soviet state yet. Domestically, the culturally liberal reforms of Khrushchev were rolled back as media became tightly controlled once more, and a light revival of Stalin-era repression policies was rolled out. If you protested the government, rather than sending you to a Siberian Gulag with only a vague pretext of some criminal act or a KangarooCourt, the Brezhnev regime would simply prefer to declare you "mentally unfit" and put you in a [[BedlamHouse Psikhushka]] instead. Their justification was that only an insane person would be opposed to socialism. However, the worst treatment was reserved for Eastern Europe, where rather infamously the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia, ''it's ''its ally'', because it sought to democratize. It wasn't even that they were declaring themselves bourgeois traitors either, as they were still socialist, just less authoritarian. In 1968, a the reformist Alexander DubÄŤek was elected First Secretary. He laid out a program for reform called, well, ''the Programme'', that would see Czechia and Slovakia be separated into two autonomous states united by a federation, open up freedom of the press, freedom of travel, and even establish multiparty democracy. It was beyond ambitious. DubÄŤek had stated that he wanted to create "socialism with a human face," to essentially dismantle the Marxist-Leninist State and rebuild it into a Democratic Socialist one, to make a state that was more fair and equitable to citizens. Not only did it have to be better than Marxism-Leninism was, it specifically had to be better than ''capitalism'', to prove that the socialist experiment could work. After all, that ''was'' the point of all this, right? To create a truly egalitarian, classless utopia?\\\

Brezhnev and Soviet leadership largely agreed on military action. They made a half-assed show of diplomatic gestures, trying to get Dubček to rein in the reforms, but the Soviet Union was never going to react any other way. The brutish mentality of Soviet foreign policy had seemingly solved ''all'' it's its problems with violence, after all: defeating the bourgeois and monarchist reactionaries in the Civil War, bludgeoning Nazi Germany to death, "compelling" the workers in East Germany in 1953 and the revolutionaries in Hungary in 1956 to stand down. When all you have is a hammer, you treat everything like a nail, so when all you have is a giant ass military, everything looks like a battlefield. This would be one of the rare occasions that a protest occurred in the Soviet Union before ''glasnost'', as 7 demonstrators unfurled pro-Czechoslovak banners in Red Square and were immediately and brutally beaten by state security forces, given KangarooCourt trials, and the whole thing was quietly dismissed as a freak incident of "anti-socialist dissent." Dubček was arrested and flown to Moscow, but Brezhnev decided to negotiate instead, making the big show of force ultimately just that: the invasion at the end of the "Prague Spring" was simply a reminder to the Czech and Slovak peoples of the might of the military titan next door. Dubček was put back in power, but was forced to limit his reforms. The whole invasion had brought serious shocks through the Comintern, effectively causing its final disintegration. It was the final nail in the coffin for Soviet-Chinese relations, as Mao reacted harshly to the invasion because he viewed the "Brezhnev Doctrine" as the Soviets essentially deciding who is communist and who is not, and to give the man some credit, that is exactly what the intent of the Brezhnev Doctrine was. Gone are the days of proletarian internationalism: now communism was defined by its use to the Soviet state. If they didn't like ''your'' communism, you weren't getting any aid. To say it was a destructive, belligerent decision that forever buried what little ties the socialist world were still bound together by... would sum it up quite nice actually. The Soviets held onto Eastern Europe under the threat of employing this "doctrine" for quite a long time, but their influence abroad had already began to fade. Any Western communist parties that were still keeping ties with the Soviets pretty much abandoned them completely, seeing the crushing of the Prague Spring as a betrayal of socialism, and of just general human decency. Other nations in the Warsaw Pact were quick to criticize the Soviets, especially [[UsefulNotes/{{Romania}} Nicolae Ceaușescu]].\\\



[[folder:Welcome to Our New... He's Dead - Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko]]

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[[folder:Welcome to Our New... He's Dead - -- Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko]]



Andropov failed to address the USSR's mounting economic malaise, having no real skills or knowledge relating to economics. By this point, the supply chain issues had grown to be nigh-insurmountable anyways, as they had snowballed into a veritable avalanche of economic decline. The 80s would see the Soviet economy tumble and fall, and it's decline was already evident by the time Andropov took up the office of General Secretary. Andropov's solution, rather than addressing the issue caused by the Soviet state's unreasonable production quotas and misplaced attention on a vast standing army, instead opted for the childlike mentality of "make them work harder." The already impossible-to-meet quotas became even more impossible and punishments for failing to meet them became harsher, only perpetuating the problem of factory managers inflating their production numbers to avoid punishment. The aforementioned sobriety campaign was done partly because Andropov believed that drunkenness was making Soviet workers slothful. While these policies ''did'' result in some economic growth, said growth was hiding an economic bubble that was going to pop, and soon.\\\

to:

Andropov failed to address the USSR's mounting economic malaise, having no real skills or knowledge relating to economics. By this point, the supply chain issues had grown to be nigh-insurmountable anyways, as they had snowballed into a veritable avalanche of economic decline. The 80s would see the Soviet economy tumble and fall, and it's its decline was already evident by the time Andropov took up the office of General Secretary. Andropov's solution, rather than addressing the issue caused by the Soviet state's unreasonable production quotas and misplaced attention on a vast standing army, instead opted for the childlike mentality of "make them work harder." The already impossible-to-meet quotas became even more impossible and punishments for failing to meet them became harsher, only perpetuating the problem of factory managers inflating their production numbers to avoid punishment. The aforementioned sobriety campaign was done partly because Andropov believed that drunkenness was making Soviet workers slothful. While these policies ''did'' result in some economic growth, said growth was hiding an economic bubble that was going to pop, and soon.\\\



Chernenko, despite his illness and obvious shoe-in as a "transitional" leader --only chosen so the Old Heads had time to plan out their retirements as the next generation of Soviets began to take office-- actually had a number of effective policies. His domestic reforms tackled corruption, lack of education, and a lack of rights for organized labor, something that was particularly egregious for a ''socialist'' country. He fired his Chief of Staff, appointing a new one to finally solve the USSR's bloated military-industrial issue by redirecting production towards consumer goods. Internationally, he promoted a stance of detente, but it was rendered ineffectual as he maintained the Brezhnev Doctrine of holding Eastern Europe under a Soviet boot, even denying Erich Honecker's attempt to normalize relations between the two Germanies.\\\

to:

Chernenko, despite his illness and obvious shoe-in as a "transitional" leader --only chosen so the Old Heads had time to plan out their retirements as the next generation of Soviets began to take office-- office -- actually had a number of effective policies. His domestic reforms tackled corruption, lack of education, and a lack of rights for organized labor, something that was particularly egregious for a ''socialist'' country. He fired his Chief of Staff, appointing a new one to finally solve the USSR's bloated military-industrial issue by redirecting production towards consumer goods. Internationally, he promoted a stance of detente, but it was rendered ineffectual as he maintained the Brezhnev Doctrine of holding Eastern Europe under a Soviet boot, even denying Erich Honecker's attempt to normalize relations between the two Germanies.\\\



[[folder:Killing the Patient By Trying to Save It, Or Was He? - Mikhail Gorbachev]]
->''"Many of you see the solution to your problems in resorting to market mechanisms in place of direct planning. Some of you look at the market as a lifesaver for your economies. But, comrades, you should not think about lifesavers but about the ship, and the ship is socialism."''

to:

[[folder:Killing the Patient By Trying to Save It, Or Was He? - -- Mikhail Gorbachev]]
->''"Many of you see the solution to your problems in resorting to market mechanisms in place of direct planning. Some of you look at the market as a lifesaver for your economies. But, comrades, you should not think about lifesavers but about the ship, and the ship is socialism."'' "''



Gorbechav's approach to leadership was a radical departure from past Soviet leaders. He was highly casual when interacting with other politicians and Soviet citizens, giving him a genial and down-to-earth character that only Khrushchev had come close to emulating. He forbade a cult of personality and encouraged those around him to speak freely, without fear of reprisal. He also forced many Soviet officials to resign, filling the ranks with some badly needed new blood while ridding him of the most stifling conservative ministers. With this, his power was secure, and he began to roll out a three-pronged reform program. The three keys to this program were ''uskoreniye'' (Acceleration), ''perestroika'' (Restructering), and ''glasnost'' (Openness).\\\

to:

Gorbechav's approach to leadership was a radical departure from past Soviet leaders. He was highly casual when interacting with other politicians and Soviet citizens, giving him a genial and down-to-earth character that only Khrushchev had come close to emulating. He forbade a cult of personality and encouraged those around him to speak freely, without fear of reprisal. He also forced many Soviet officials to resign, filling the ranks with some badly needed new blood while ridding him of the most stifling conservative ministers. With this, his power was secure, and he began to roll out a three-pronged reform program. The three keys to this program were ''uskoreniye'' (Acceleration), ''perestroika'' (Restructering), (Restructuring), and ''glasnost'' (Openness).\\\



The first major test of this policy was UsefulNotes/{{Chernobyl}}. A reactor meltdown caused by an experiment that ignored dozens of safety rules, the initial response was the usual Soviet one-- cover it up. Radioactive sheep in Wales meant that policy could not really work, and Gorbachev himself had been a victim of the cover-up, being fed misinformation by his underlings that downplayed its seriousness. When he discovered this, he went on national television to give a speech acknowledging the disaster, using it to demonstrate the corruption and inefficiency in the Soviet system, and thus a need for reform.\\\

to:

The first major test of this policy was UsefulNotes/{{Chernobyl}}. A reactor meltdown caused by an experiment that ignored dozens of safety rules, the initial response was the usual Soviet one-- one -- cover it up. Radioactive sheep in Wales meant that policy could not really work, and Gorbachev himself had been a victim of the cover-up, being fed misinformation by his underlings that downplayed its seriousness. When he discovered this, he went on national television to give a speech acknowledging the disaster, using it to demonstrate the corruption and inefficiency in the Soviet system, and thus a need for reform.\\\



Abroad, Gorbachev essentially ended the Cold War. He withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan (although the process took 4 years) concluded two arms treaties and then announced the [[Music/FrankSinatra "Sinatra Doctrine"]] [[Music/MyWay ("I did it my way")]], allowing the Warsaw Pact countries to determine their own internal polices. The 1989 Revolutions duly followed, with the beleaguered peoples of Eastern Europe finally seeing a way out from under the Bolshevik Boot. In Poland, the Catholic trade union ''Solidarity'', which was founded in 1980 and made its first bid to free Poland the following year, has repeatedly paralyzed the communist regime with mass, direct action, causing them to be utterly dysfunctional throughout the 1980s. In 1989, with it clear that they'd get no support from Moscow this time, the communist regime agreed to ''Soldarity's'' demands for free elections, which the trade union handedly won the following year. In Romania, the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown after an ill-fated attempt to crush nationwide protests resulted in his own military turning on him. Hungary had a largely peaceful transition where the communist regime met with the opposition and gradually rolled out democratization and freedom of travel, resulting in citizens from other Bloc states (particularly East Germany) to use it as a transit hub to escape to the West. This resulted in mounting pressure on Erich Honecker, leader of East Germany, to implement similar liberal reforms. Gorbachev himself urged this course of action, but Honecker refused, instead ordering the military to massacre pro-democracy demonstrators in Leipzig. When the military refused, Honecker knew he had lost control, and in his haphazard attempt to regain it, he accidentally gave orders to open travel with West Germany. He intended it to be tightly controlled by the state, but when Germans heard the news, they flocked to both sides of the Berlin Wall, and Honecker was too slow to act -- not that the military had any intention of enforcing his decision. On the night of November 9th, 1989, thousands of Germans gathered in Berlin, taking hammers and chisels to the Berlin Wall: a symbolic end to the Eastern Bloc, if not it's complete demise. Czechslovakia followed a similar path as Poland, while in Bulgaria the regime instituted top-down reforms themselves that democratized the country (coincidentally, their communist party is the only one in the Eastern Bloc that survives in some form today while still enjoying high popularity, or high "popularity" depending on who you ask)\\\

to:

Abroad, Gorbachev essentially ended the Cold War. He withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan (although the process took 4 years) concluded two arms treaties and then announced the [[Music/FrankSinatra "Sinatra Doctrine"]] [[Music/MyWay ("I did it my way")]], allowing the Warsaw Pact countries to determine their own internal polices. The 1989 Revolutions duly followed, with the beleaguered peoples of Eastern Europe finally seeing a way out from under the Bolshevik Boot. In Poland, the Catholic trade union ''Solidarity'', which was founded in 1980 and made its first bid to free Poland the following year, has repeatedly paralyzed the communist regime with mass, direct action, causing them to be utterly dysfunctional throughout the 1980s. In 1989, with it clear that they'd get no support from Moscow this time, the communist regime agreed to ''Soldarity's'' demands for free elections, which the trade union handedly won the following year. In Romania, the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown after an ill-fated attempt to crush nationwide protests resulted in his own military turning on him. Hungary had a largely peaceful transition where the communist regime met with the opposition and gradually rolled out democratization and freedom of travel, resulting in citizens from other Bloc states (particularly East Germany) to use it as a transit hub to escape to the West. This resulted in mounting pressure on Erich Honecker, leader of East Germany, to implement similar liberal reforms. Gorbachev himself urged this course of action, but Honecker refused, instead ordering the military to massacre pro-democracy demonstrators in Leipzig. When the military refused, Honecker knew he had lost control, and in his haphazard attempt to regain it, he accidentally gave orders to open travel with West Germany. He intended it to be tightly controlled by the state, but when Germans heard the news, they flocked to both sides of the Berlin Wall, and Honecker was too slow to act -- not that the military had any intention of enforcing his decision. On the night of November 9th, 1989, thousands of Germans gathered in Berlin, taking hammers and chisels to the Berlin Wall: a symbolic end to the Eastern Bloc, if not it's its complete demise. Czechslovakia followed a similar path as Poland, while in Bulgaria the regime instituted top-down reforms themselves that democratized the country (coincidentally, their communist party is the only one in the Eastern Bloc that survives in some form today while still enjoying high popularity, or high "popularity" depending on who you ask)\\\



Gorbachev had an incredibly high level of domestic support (initially), as you'd imagine, but he had two sources of consternation: communist hardliners and liberal radicals. The former were politically sidelined by Gorbachev but gradually gained political clout, as the "My Way" policy had resulted in the Warsaw Pact's disintegration. This was viewed by hardliners as a national security threat, as the Pact had been established with the intent of keeping the West away from Soviet borders. The hardliners viewed WorldWarIII as inevitable, as the capitalists would not tolerate the existence of a socialist state, so they wanted to ensure that the fighting would happen anywhere ''but'' Russia this time. Fears of NATO encroachment drove a resurgence in support for the hardliners at the end of the 1980s, but ironically it'd be the hardliners themselves who'd finally bring down the Soviet system. The liberals were broadly aligned with Boris Yeltsin, former Gorbachev protege-turned-enemy and future president of the Russian Federation. Yeltsin viewed Gorbechav's reforms as not being ambitious enough, and his supporters believed -sometimes accurately and sometimes inaccurately- that the reforms weren't really being carried out and were simply for PR.\\\

to:

Gorbachev had an incredibly high level of domestic support (initially), as you'd imagine, but he had two sources of consternation: communist hardliners and liberal radicals. The former were politically sidelined by Gorbachev but gradually gained political clout, as the "My Way" policy had resulted in the Warsaw Pact's disintegration. This was viewed by hardliners as a national security threat, as the Pact had been established with the intent of keeping the West away from Soviet borders. The hardliners viewed WorldWarIII as inevitable, as the capitalists would not tolerate the existence of a socialist state, so they wanted to ensure that the fighting would happen anywhere ''but'' Russia this time. Fears of NATO encroachment drove a resurgence in support for the hardliners at the end of the 1980s, but ironically it'd be the hardliners themselves who'd finally bring down the Soviet system. The liberals were broadly aligned with Boris Yeltsin, former Gorbachev protege-turned-enemy and future president of the Russian Federation. Yeltsin viewed Gorbechav's reforms as not being ambitious enough, and his supporters believed -sometimes -- sometimes accurately and sometimes inaccurately- inaccurately -- that the reforms weren't really being carried out and were simply for PR.\\\



[[folder:So Long, and Tanks for the Communism - The August 1991 coup attempt and the end of the USSR]]
->''"Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain."''

to:

[[folder:So Long, and Tanks for the Communism - -- The August 1991 coup attempt and the end of the USSR]]
->''"Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain."'' "''



It's an interesting question as to whether Gorbachev wanted to save communism - he would later declare he would have preferred it if Red October had not happened. In the end, his attempts to save it brought the system crashing down.\\\

As for the USSR, it's legacy is still visible throughout Eastern Europe. UsefulNotes/TheNewRussia is essentially living in the shadow of the Union, with Soviet art, architecture, and infrastructure still dominating the country, as it does in the rest of the former USSR. Communism remains popular in the former USSR, with the majority of Russians agreeing that the collapse of the Union was "a bad thing," at least in hindsight. After all, modern Russia is more or less run the same way, with all the corruption, totalitarianism, and Byzantine backstabbing of the USSR with none of its social services nor notions of proletarian equality. The only "gain" Russia derived from the fall of the USSR was economic liberalization, which inarguably only hurt Russia. Yeltsin's market liberalization "shock therapy" did not mesh well with the centrally planned economy, as many Soviet industries proved unviable in a market system. The result was a horrific economic crash that left millions jobless and the Russian economy in the gutter. Most of the industries would be bought up by the few people who actually had foreign capital[[note]]foreign currencies were restricted in the USSR, and it was difficult for anyone who worked outside of the foreign ministries to even get it. It could only be spent at special Western import shops, which were built because the USSR badly needed cash on hand for dealing with other nations. The Soviet ruble was useless and had no value on the world market, as the Soviet "second world" economically isolated itself from the "first world" and their economy simply didn't rely on exchanges of capital.[[/note]], almost all of whom were high-ranking ex-Soviet officials. These people became the modern Russian oligarchs. The USSR's collapse also left millions of ex-Soviet employees without pay and social services, resulting in even more corruption as Soviet officials sold anything that wasn't nailed down to try and make ends meet, often for absurdly low prices. Furniture, books, machining equipment, natural resources, electronics, guns, tanks, helicopters, state secrets, and ''entire ships'' would be sold, and it still wasn't enough. It'd be two decades before the Russian economy stabilized near pre-dissolution levels.\\\

to:

It's an interesting question as to whether Gorbachev wanted to save communism - -- he would later declare he would have preferred it if Red October had not happened. In the end, his attempts to save it brought the system crashing down.\\\

As for the USSR, it's its legacy is still visible throughout Eastern Europe. UsefulNotes/TheNewRussia is essentially living in the shadow of the Union, with Soviet art, architecture, and infrastructure still dominating the country, as it does in the rest of the former USSR. Communism remains popular in the former USSR, with the majority of Russians agreeing that the collapse of the Union was "a bad thing," at least in hindsight. After all, modern Russia is more or less run the same way, with all the corruption, totalitarianism, and Byzantine backstabbing of the USSR with none of its social services nor notions of proletarian equality. The only "gain" Russia derived from the fall of the USSR was economic liberalization, which inarguably only hurt Russia. Yeltsin's market liberalization "shock therapy" did not mesh well with the centrally planned economy, as many Soviet industries proved unviable in a market system. The result was a horrific economic crash that left millions jobless and the Russian economy in the gutter. Most of the industries would be bought up by the few people who actually had foreign capital[[note]]foreign currencies were restricted in the USSR, and it was difficult for anyone who worked outside of the foreign ministries to even get it. It could only be spent at special Western import shops, which were built because the USSR badly needed cash on hand for dealing with other nations. The Soviet ruble was useless and had no value on the world market, as the Soviet "second world" economically isolated itself from the "first world" and their economy simply didn't rely on exchanges of capital.[[/note]], almost all of whom were high-ranking ex-Soviet officials. These people became the modern Russian oligarchs. The USSR's collapse also left millions of ex-Soviet employees without pay and social services, resulting in even more corruption as Soviet officials sold anything that wasn't nailed down to try and make ends meet, often for absurdly low prices. Furniture, books, machining equipment, natural resources, electronics, guns, tanks, helicopters, state secrets, and ''entire ships'' would be sold, and it still wasn't enough. It'd be two decades before the Russian economy stabilized near pre-dissolution levels.\\\



Some have accused Vladimir Putin of wishing to reform the USSR, but this is not likely to happen. Russia has gradually lost its influence over much of the former Soviet Union: The Baltic States already heavily disliked them for innumerable past crimes the Russians wrought on them, and 2 decades of misrule by a Kremlin coolie burned through whatever goodwill Ukraine had left for them, and that was ''before'' Russia invaded them. Turkmenistan has pursued a policy of "neutrality," which is not hard to enforce given not even Russia is interested in them. Belarus and Kazakhstan are facing near annual protests, mostly in favor of joining "the West" and establishing liberal democracy, and Azerbaijan has drifted more and more towards Turkey. Armenia has also drifted away, as they felt the Russians had abandoned them during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2021[[note]]Soviet policy usually favored Azerbaijan on this matter, while Imperial Russia favored the Armenians[[/note]]. Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have made overtures towards the US, and the latter recently did away with the Cyrillic alphabet in favor of a Latin one.[[note]]This change is not necessarily meant to be a middle finger to Russia, but is instead meant to foster global trade by making Kazakh words and names easier for foreigners to read, as Kazakhstan has seen greater investment from sources besides Russia in recent years. The Cyrillic alphabet also lacks characters to represent the sounds of Turkic languages. This problem also faced Turkey, which changed its alphabet from Arabic to Latin in 1928 for much the same reasons.[[/note]] Furthermore, there are fewer and fewer former Soviet citizens that remember the "good times" of the late 60s/early 70s. Most younger Russians only remember the disastrous 80s, if they are old enough to remember the USSR at all, so their view towards it tends to be apathetic at best or disdainful at worst. Despite the fact that the communists are still Russia's second largest party by vote share, they are considered "cringe" by Russian youths, and they lag behind Putin's United Russia, which is so thoroughly dictatorial that the communists have no chance of winning an election.[[note]]And for all intents and purposes, the Communists are what are known as a "controlled opposition party," I.E. they are more or less stooges of United Russia made to keep up the appearance of a multi-party democracy in a country that is recognized by everyone --including its own citizens-- to be a dictatorship.[[/note]] The notion of reforming the Soviet Union grows more distant by the day, as the Union fades from memory and into history.\\\

The most visible legacy of the USSR internationally, at least today, is it's [[RedsWithRockets gobsmackingly large weapons market]], which saw Kalashnikovs, [=BMPs=], T-55s, and Hind helicopters be ubiquitous stables of every third world military. The Soviets were incredibly fond of handing out mass weapons shipments to fellow communists, something the capitalist bloc was way more hesitant to do (at least until you offered to buy them for a huge sum). As such, Soviet weaponry can be found across the globe, especially in the global south, where weapons dating back to ''World War II'' continue to play important roles in conflicts and insurgencies. The UsefulNotes/ColdWar may be over, but Soviet weaponry is still killing Americans, and many others, the world over.\\\

Russia also declassified a massive portion of the Soviet archives throughout the 90s. They've revealed a considerable amount of state secrets: the gulag system was exposed, as was the Katyn Massacre and many other Soviet crimes. They revealed the extent of their nuclear weapons program, and for the first time Americans realized just how wrong their assumptions were about Soviet nuclear capabilities (they had dramatically overestimated them). They also verified the long-standing rumor about the Soviet "Dead Hand" system: an automated system of Over-the-Horizon radar installations that can automatically transmit nuclear launch codes without human input. This system is still in use today. What, malfunction? [[SarcasmMode No, Soviet technology is the most reliable in the world!]] However, many state secrets --such as the existence of Moscow's "Metro-2" or the purpose of the ''gigantic'' military installation build under Mount Yamantau-- remain classified. Most of these documents remain untranslated.\\\

to:

Some have accused Vladimir Putin of wishing to reform the USSR, but this is not likely to happen. Russia has gradually lost its influence over much of the former Soviet Union: The Baltic States already heavily disliked them for innumerable past crimes the Russians wrought on them, and 2 decades of misrule by a Kremlin coolie burned through whatever goodwill Ukraine had left for them, and that was ''before'' Russia invaded them. Turkmenistan has pursued a policy of "neutrality," which is not hard to enforce given not even Russia is interested in them. Belarus and Kazakhstan are facing near annual protests, mostly in favor of joining "the West" and establishing liberal democracy, and Azerbaijan has drifted more and more towards Turkey. Armenia has also drifted away, as they felt the Russians had abandoned them during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2021[[note]]Soviet policy usually favored Azerbaijan on this matter, while Imperial Russia favored the Armenians[[/note]]. Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have made overtures towards the US, and the latter recently did away with the Cyrillic alphabet in favor of a Latin one.[[note]]This change is not necessarily meant to be a middle finger to Russia, but is instead meant to foster global trade by making Kazakh words and names easier for foreigners to read, as Kazakhstan has seen greater investment from sources besides Russia in recent years. The Cyrillic alphabet also lacks characters to represent the sounds of Turkic languages. This problem also faced Turkey, which changed its alphabet from Arabic to Latin in 1928 for much the same reasons.[[/note]] Furthermore, there are fewer and fewer former Soviet citizens that remember the "good times" of the late 60s/early 70s. Most younger Russians only remember the disastrous 80s, if they are old enough to remember the USSR at all, so their view towards it tends to be apathetic at best or disdainful at worst. Despite the fact that the communists are still Russia's second largest party by vote share, they are considered "cringe" by Russian youths, and they lag behind Putin's United Russia, which is so thoroughly dictatorial that the communists have no chance of winning an election.[[note]]And for all intents and purposes, the Communists are what are known as a "controlled opposition party," I.E. they are more or less stooges of United Russia made to keep up the appearance of a multi-party democracy in a country that is recognized by everyone --including -- including its own citizens-- citizens -- to be a dictatorship.[[/note]] The notion of reforming the Soviet Union grows more distant by the day, as the Union fades from memory and into history.\\\

The most visible legacy of the USSR internationally, at least today, is it's its [[RedsWithRockets gobsmackingly large weapons market]], which saw Kalashnikovs, [=BMPs=], T-55s, and Hind helicopters be ubiquitous stables of every third world military. The Soviets were incredibly fond of handing out mass weapons shipments to fellow communists, something the capitalist bloc was way more hesitant to do (at least until you offered to buy them for a huge sum). As such, Soviet weaponry can be found across the globe, especially in the global south, where weapons dating back to ''World War II'' continue to play important roles in conflicts and insurgencies. The UsefulNotes/ColdWar may be over, but Soviet weaponry is still killing Americans, and many others, the world over.\\\

Russia also declassified a massive portion of the Soviet archives throughout the 90s. They've revealed a considerable amount of state secrets: the gulag system was exposed, as was the Katyn Massacre and many other Soviet crimes. They revealed the extent of their nuclear weapons program, and for the first time Americans realized just how wrong their assumptions were about Soviet nuclear capabilities (they had dramatically overestimated them). They also verified the long-standing rumor about the Soviet "Dead Hand" system: an automated system of Over-the-Horizon radar installations that can automatically transmit nuclear launch codes without human input. This system is still in use today. What, malfunction? [[SarcasmMode No, Soviet technology is the most reliable in the world!]] However, many state secrets --such -- such as the existence of Moscow's "Metro-2" or the purpose of the ''gigantic'' military installation build under Mount Yamantau-- Yamantau -- remain classified. Most of these documents remain untranslated.\\\
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-->--'''[[RussianHumour Soviet joke]]'''

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-->--'''[[RussianHumour -->-- '''[[RussianHumour Soviet joke]]'''
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Some have accused Vladimir Putin of wishing to reform the USSR, but this is not likely to happen. Russia has gradually lost its influence over much of the former Soviet Union: The Baltic States already heavily disliked them for innumerable past crimes the Russians wrought on them, and 2 decades of misrule by a Kremlin coolie burned through whatever goodwill Ukraine had left for them, and that was ''before'' Russia invaded them. Turkmenistan has pursued a policy of "neutrality," which is not hard to enforce given not even Russia is interested in them. Belarus and Kazakhstan are facing near annual protests, mostly in favor of joining "the West" and establishing liberal democracy, and Azerbaijan has drifted more and more towards Turkey. Armenia has also drifted away, as they felt the Russians had abandoned them during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2021[[note]]Soviet policy usually favored Azerbaijan on this matter, while Imperial Russia favored the Armenians[[/note]]. Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have made overtures towards the US, and the latter recently did away with the Cyrillic alphabet in favor of a Latin one.[[note]]This change is not necessarily meant to be a middle finger to Russia, but is instead meant to foster global trade by making Kazakh words and names easier for foreigners to read, as Kazakhstan has seen greater investment from sources besides Russia in recent years. The Cyrillic alphabet also lacks characters to represent the sounds of Turkic languages. This problem also faced Turkey, which changed its alphabet from Arabic to Latin in 1923 for much the same reasons.[[/note]] Furthermore, there are fewer and fewer former Soviet citizens that remember the "good times" of the late 60s/early 70s. Most younger Russians only remember the disastrous 80s, if they are old enough to remember the USSR at all, so their view towards it tends to be apathetic at best or disdainful at worst. Despite the fact that the communists are still Russia's second largest party by vote share, they are considered "cringe" by Russian youths, and they lag behind Putin's United Russia, which is so thoroughly dictatorial that the communists have no chance of winning an election.[[note]]And for all intents and purposes, the Communists are what are known as a "controlled opposition party," I.E. they are more or less stooges of United Russia made to keep up the appearance of a multi-party democracy in a country that is recognized by everyone --including its own citizens-- to be a dictatorship.[[/note]] The notion of reforming the Soviet Union grows more distant by the day, as the Union fades from memory and into history.\\\

to:

Some have accused Vladimir Putin of wishing to reform the USSR, but this is not likely to happen. Russia has gradually lost its influence over much of the former Soviet Union: The Baltic States already heavily disliked them for innumerable past crimes the Russians wrought on them, and 2 decades of misrule by a Kremlin coolie burned through whatever goodwill Ukraine had left for them, and that was ''before'' Russia invaded them. Turkmenistan has pursued a policy of "neutrality," which is not hard to enforce given not even Russia is interested in them. Belarus and Kazakhstan are facing near annual protests, mostly in favor of joining "the West" and establishing liberal democracy, and Azerbaijan has drifted more and more towards Turkey. Armenia has also drifted away, as they felt the Russians had abandoned them during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2021[[note]]Soviet policy usually favored Azerbaijan on this matter, while Imperial Russia favored the Armenians[[/note]]. Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have made overtures towards the US, and the latter recently did away with the Cyrillic alphabet in favor of a Latin one.[[note]]This change is not necessarily meant to be a middle finger to Russia, but is instead meant to foster global trade by making Kazakh words and names easier for foreigners to read, as Kazakhstan has seen greater investment from sources besides Russia in recent years. The Cyrillic alphabet also lacks characters to represent the sounds of Turkic languages. This problem also faced Turkey, which changed its alphabet from Arabic to Latin in 1923 1928 for much the same reasons.[[/note]] Furthermore, there are fewer and fewer former Soviet citizens that remember the "good times" of the late 60s/early 70s. Most younger Russians only remember the disastrous 80s, if they are old enough to remember the USSR at all, so their view towards it tends to be apathetic at best or disdainful at worst. Despite the fact that the communists are still Russia's second largest party by vote share, they are considered "cringe" by Russian youths, and they lag behind Putin's United Russia, which is so thoroughly dictatorial that the communists have no chance of winning an election.[[note]]And for all intents and purposes, the Communists are what are known as a "controlled opposition party," I.E. they are more or less stooges of United Russia made to keep up the appearance of a multi-party democracy in a country that is recognized by everyone --including its own citizens-- to be a dictatorship.[[/note]] The notion of reforming the Soviet Union grows more distant by the day, as the Union fades from memory and into history.\\\
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Other [=SSRs=] saw protests and uprisings as well. Ukraine saw significant ones, particularly in West Ukrainian cities like Kyiv and Lviv, but the eastern portion of Ukraine largely remained loyal to the USSR. This is primarily because the east was settled by ethnic Russians under Stalin's "Russification" policy. Ukraine did not vote for independence, however.\\\

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Other [=SSRs=] saw protests and uprisings as well. Ukraine saw significant ones, particularly in West Ukrainian cities like Kyiv and Lviv, but the eastern portion of Ukraine largely remained loyal to the USSR. This is primarily because the east was settled by ethnic Russians under Stalin's "Russification" policy. Ukraine did not initially vote for independence, however.\\\

Added: 1787

Changed: 1750

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Added some more things to the post-Soviet portion


As for the USSR, it's legacy is still visible throughout Eastern Europe. UsefulNotes/TheNewRussia is essentially living in the shadow of the Union, with Soviet art, architecture, and infrastructure still dominating the country, as it does in the rest of the former USSR. Communism remains popular in the former USSR, with the majority of Russians agreeing that the collapse of the Union was "a bad thing," at least in hindsight. After all, modern Russia is more or less run the same way, with all the corruption, totalitarianism, and Byzantine backstabbing of the USSR with none of its social services nor notions of proletarian equality. The only "gain" Russia derived from the fall of the USSR was economic liberalization, which inarguably only hurt Russia. Yeltsin's market liberalization "shock therapy" did not mesh well with the centrally planned economy, as many Soviet industries proved unviable in a market system. The result was a horrific economic crash that left millions jobless and the Russian economy in the gutter. The USSR's collapse also left millions of ex-Soviet employees without pay and social services, resulting in even more corruption as Soviet officials sold anything that wasn't nailed down to try and make ends meet, often for absurdly low prices. Furniture, books, machining equipment, natural resources, electronics, guns, tanks, helicopters, and ''entire ships'' would be sold, and it still wasn't enough. It'd be two decades before the Russian economy stabilized near pre-dissolution levels.\\\

Russia and its former subjects also disintegrated into violence, with TheMafiya filling the void left by the Soviet state. Violent crime and outright banditry became common, and the illegal drug trade boomed as Russians used booze, meth, or heroin to numb the pain of having their entire world dissappear out from beneath them. Wars erupted: Moldova and Tajikistan broke out in civil war, Armenia and Azerbaijan continued to fight each other, and Chechnya seceded. The military was sent in, but the new Russian Armed Forces were in miserable shape. They were, as they had been in Soviet times, a poorly trained, poorly paid, poorly organized, poorly equipped conscript force that's main use was [[WeHaveReserves clogging up enemy tank treads with their bodies]] while the Soviet Air Force was relied on to do most of the killing. In the tight urban environment of Grozny, Russian soldiers fared badly against Chechen urban guerrilla tactics. Soldiers refused to leave their [=BMPs=] out of fear of getting shot, only to realize too late that the [=BMPs=] were too unarmoured to withstand RPG-7V grenades, causing many a Russian soldier to be cooked inside his APC like it was a giant flaming crock-pot. The war ended indecisively, with the Chechens bloody but the Russians being forced to withdraw. In 2000, newly elected ex-KGB man UsefulNotes/VladimirPutin made it his first priority to retake Chechnya, and he did so by [[MoreDakka leveling Grozny with mass artillery bombardment.]]\\\

Some have accused Vladimir Putin of wishing to reform the USSR, but this is not likely to happen. Russia has gradually lost its influence over much of the former Soviet Union: The Baltic States already heavily disliked them for innumerable past crimes the Russians wrought on them, and 2 decades of misrule by a Kremlin coolie burned through whatever goodwill Ukraine had left for them, and that was ''before'' Russia invaded them. Turkmenistan has pursued a policy of "neutrality," which is not hard to enforce given not even Russia is interested in them. Belarus and Kazakhstan are facing near annual protests, mostly in favor of joining "the West," and Azerbaijan has drifted more and more towards Turkey. Armenia has also drifted away, as they felt the Russians had abandoned them during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2021[[note]]Soviet policy usually favored Azerbaijan on this matter, while Imperial Russia favored the Armenians[[/note]]. Furthermore, there are fewer and fewer former Soviet citizens that remember the "good times" of the late 60s/early 70s. Most younger Russians only remember the disastrous 80s, if they are old enough to remember the USSR at all, so their view towards it tends to be apathetic at best or disdainful at worst. Despite the fact that the communists are still Russia's second largest party by vote share, they are considered "cringe" by Russian youths, and they lag behind Putin's United Russia, which is so thoroughly dictatorial that the communists have no chance of winning an election. The notion of reforming the Soviet Union grows more distant by the day, as the Union fades from memory and into history.

to:

As for the USSR, it's legacy is still visible throughout Eastern Europe. UsefulNotes/TheNewRussia is essentially living in the shadow of the Union, with Soviet art, architecture, and infrastructure still dominating the country, as it does in the rest of the former USSR. Communism remains popular in the former USSR, with the majority of Russians agreeing that the collapse of the Union was "a bad thing," at least in hindsight. After all, modern Russia is more or less run the same way, with all the corruption, totalitarianism, and Byzantine backstabbing of the USSR with none of its social services nor notions of proletarian equality. The only "gain" Russia derived from the fall of the USSR was economic liberalization, which inarguably only hurt Russia. Yeltsin's market liberalization "shock therapy" did not mesh well with the centrally planned economy, as many Soviet industries proved unviable in a market system. The result was a horrific economic crash that left millions jobless and the Russian economy in the gutter. Most of the industries would be bought up by the few people who actually had foreign capital[[note]]foreign currencies were restricted in the USSR, and it was difficult for anyone who worked outside of the foreign ministries to even get it. It could only be spent at special Western import shops, which were built because the USSR badly needed cash on hand for dealing with other nations. The Soviet ruble was useless and had no value on the world market, as the Soviet "second world" economically isolated itself from the "first world" and their economy simply didn't rely on exchanges of capital.[[/note]], almost all of whom were high-ranking ex-Soviet officials. These people became the modern Russian oligarchs. The USSR's collapse also left millions of ex-Soviet employees without pay and social services, resulting in even more corruption as Soviet officials sold anything that wasn't nailed down to try and make ends meet, often for absurdly low prices. Furniture, books, machining equipment, natural resources, electronics, guns, tanks, helicopters, state secrets, and ''entire ships'' would be sold, and it still wasn't enough. It'd be two decades before the Russian economy stabilized near pre-dissolution levels.\\\

Russia and its former subjects also disintegrated into violence, with TheMafiya filling the void left by the Soviet state. Violent crime and outright banditry became common, and the illegal drug trade boomed as Russians used booze, meth, or heroin to numb the pain of having their entire world dissappear out from beneath them. Wars erupted: Moldova and Tajikistan broke out in civil war, Armenia and Azerbaijan continued to fight each other, and Chechnya seceded. The military was sent in, but the new Russian Armed Forces were in miserable shape. They were, as they had been in Soviet times, a poorly trained, poorly paid, poorly organized, poorly equipped conscript force that's main use was [[WeHaveReserves clogging up enemy tank treads with their bodies]] while the Soviet Air Force was and artillery were relied on to do most of the killing. In the tight urban environment of Grozny, Russian soldiers fared badly against Chechen urban guerrilla tactics. Soldiers refused to leave their [=BMPs=] out of fear of getting shot, only to realize too late that the [=BMPs=] were too unarmoured to withstand RPG-7V grenades, causing many a Russian soldier to be cooked inside his APC like it was a giant flaming crock-pot. The war ended indecisively, with the Chechens bloody but the Russians being forced to withdraw. In 2000, newly elected ex-KGB man UsefulNotes/VladimirPutin made it his first priority to retake Chechnya, and he did so by [[MoreDakka leveling Grozny with mass artillery bombardment.]]\\\

Some have accused Vladimir Putin of wishing to reform the USSR, but this is not likely to happen. Russia has gradually lost its influence over much of the former Soviet Union: The Baltic States already heavily disliked them for innumerable past crimes the Russians wrought on them, and 2 decades of misrule by a Kremlin coolie burned through whatever goodwill Ukraine had left for them, and that was ''before'' Russia invaded them. Turkmenistan has pursued a policy of "neutrality," which is not hard to enforce given not even Russia is interested in them. Belarus and Kazakhstan are facing near annual protests, mostly in favor of joining "the West," West" and establishing liberal democracy, and Azerbaijan has drifted more and more towards Turkey. Armenia has also drifted away, as they felt the Russians had abandoned them during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2021[[note]]Soviet policy usually favored Azerbaijan on this matter, while Imperial Russia favored the Armenians[[/note]]. Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have made overtures towards the US, and the latter recently did away with the Cyrillic alphabet in favor of a Latin one.[[note]]This change is not necessarily meant to be a middle finger to Russia, but is instead meant to foster global trade by making Kazakh words and names easier for foreigners to read, as Kazakhstan has seen greater investment from sources besides Russia in recent years. The Cyrillic alphabet also lacks characters to represent the sounds of Turkic languages. This problem also faced Turkey, which changed its alphabet from Arabic to Latin in 1923 for much the same reasons.[[/note]] Furthermore, there are fewer and fewer former Soviet citizens that remember the "good times" of the late 60s/early 70s. Most younger Russians only remember the disastrous 80s, if they are old enough to remember the USSR at all, so their view towards it tends to be apathetic at best or disdainful at worst. Despite the fact that the communists are still Russia's second largest party by vote share, they are considered "cringe" by Russian youths, and they lag behind Putin's United Russia, which is so thoroughly dictatorial that the communists have no chance of winning an election. [[note]]And for all intents and purposes, the Communists are what are known as a "controlled opposition party," I.E. they are more or less stooges of United Russia made to keep up the appearance of a multi-party democracy in a country that is recognized by everyone --including its own citizens-- to be a dictatorship.[[/note]] The notion of reforming the Soviet Union grows more distant by the day, as the Union fades from memory and into history.
history.\\\

The most visible legacy of the USSR internationally, at least today, is it's [[RedsWithRockets gobsmackingly large weapons market]], which saw Kalashnikovs, [=BMPs=], T-55s, and Hind helicopters be ubiquitous stables of every third world military. The Soviets were incredibly fond of handing out mass weapons shipments to fellow communists, something the capitalist bloc was way more hesitant to do (at least until you offered to buy them for a huge sum). As such, Soviet weaponry can be found across the globe, especially in the global south, where weapons dating back to ''World War II'' continue to play important roles in conflicts and insurgencies. The UsefulNotes/ColdWar may be over, but Soviet weaponry is still killing Americans, and many others, the world over.\\\

Russia also declassified a massive portion of the Soviet archives throughout the 90s. They've revealed a considerable amount of state secrets: the gulag system was exposed, as was the Katyn Massacre and many other Soviet crimes. They revealed the extent of their nuclear weapons program, and for the first time Americans realized just how wrong their assumptions were about Soviet nuclear capabilities (they had dramatically overestimated them). They also verified the long-standing rumor about the Soviet "Dead Hand" system: an automated system of Over-the-Horizon radar installations that can automatically transmit nuclear launch codes without human input. This system is still in use today. What, malfunction? [[SarcasmMode No, Soviet technology is the most reliable in the world!]] However, many state secrets --such as the existence of Moscow's "Metro-2" or the purpose of the ''gigantic'' military installation build under Mount Yamantau-- remain classified. Most of these documents remain untranslated.\\\
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Abroad, Gorbachev essentially ended the Cold War. He withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan (although the process took 4 years) concluded two arms treaties and then announced the [[Music/FrankSinatra "Sinatra Doctrine"]] [[Music/MyWay ("I did it my way")]], allowing the Warsaw Pact countries to determine their own internal polices. The 1989 Revolutions duly followed, with the beleaguered peoples of Eastern Europe finally seeing a way out from under the Bolshevik Boot. In Poland, the Catholic trade union ''Solidarity'', which was founded in 1981 and made its first bid to free Poland the following year, repeatedly paralyzed the communist regime with mass, direct action, causing them to be utterly dysfunctional throughout the 1980s. In 1989, with it clear that they'd get no support from Moscow this time, the communist regime agreed to ''Soldarity's'' demands for free elections, which the trade union handedly won the following year. In Romania, the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown after an ill-fated attempt to crush nationwide protests resulted in his own military turning on him. Hungary had a largely peaceful transition where the communist regime met with the opposition and gradually rolled out democratization and freedom of travel, resulting in citizens from other Bloc states (particularly East Germany) to use it as a transit hub to escape to the West. This resulted in mounting pressure on Erich Honecker, leader of East Germany, to implement similar liberal reforms. Gorbachev himself urged this course of action, but Honecker refused, instead ordering the military to massacre pro-democracy demonstrators in Leipzig. When the military refused, Honecker knew he had lost control, and in his haphazard attempt to regain it, he accidentally gave orders to open travel with West Germany. He intended it to be tightly controlled by the state, but when Germans heard the news, they flocked to both sides of the Berlin Wall, and Honecker was too slow to act -- not that the military had any intention of enforcing his decision. On the night of November 9th, 1989, thousands of Germans gathered in Berlin, taking hammers and chisels to the Berlin Wall: a symbolic end to the Eastern Bloc, if not it's complete demise. Czechslovakia followed a similar path as Poland, while in Bulgaria the regime instituted top-down reforms themselves that democratized the country (coincidentally, their communist party is the only one in the Eastern Bloc that survives in some form today while still enjoying high popularity, or high "popularity" depending on who you ask)\\\

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Abroad, Gorbachev essentially ended the Cold War. He withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan (although the process took 4 years) concluded two arms treaties and then announced the [[Music/FrankSinatra "Sinatra Doctrine"]] [[Music/MyWay ("I did it my way")]], allowing the Warsaw Pact countries to determine their own internal polices. The 1989 Revolutions duly followed, with the beleaguered peoples of Eastern Europe finally seeing a way out from under the Bolshevik Boot. In Poland, the Catholic trade union ''Solidarity'', which was founded in 1981 1980 and made its first bid to free Poland the following year, has repeatedly paralyzed the communist regime with mass, direct action, causing them to be utterly dysfunctional throughout the 1980s. In 1989, with it clear that they'd get no support from Moscow this time, the communist regime agreed to ''Soldarity's'' demands for free elections, which the trade union handedly won the following year. In Romania, the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown after an ill-fated attempt to crush nationwide protests resulted in his own military turning on him. Hungary had a largely peaceful transition where the communist regime met with the opposition and gradually rolled out democratization and freedom of travel, resulting in citizens from other Bloc states (particularly East Germany) to use it as a transit hub to escape to the West. This resulted in mounting pressure on Erich Honecker, leader of East Germany, to implement similar liberal reforms. Gorbachev himself urged this course of action, but Honecker refused, instead ordering the military to massacre pro-democracy demonstrators in Leipzig. When the military refused, Honecker knew he had lost control, and in his haphazard attempt to regain it, he accidentally gave orders to open travel with West Germany. He intended it to be tightly controlled by the state, but when Germans heard the news, they flocked to both sides of the Berlin Wall, and Honecker was too slow to act -- not that the military had any intention of enforcing his decision. On the night of November 9th, 1989, thousands of Germans gathered in Berlin, taking hammers and chisels to the Berlin Wall: a symbolic end to the Eastern Bloc, if not it's complete demise. Czechslovakia followed a similar path as Poland, while in Bulgaria the regime instituted top-down reforms themselves that democratized the country (coincidentally, their communist party is the only one in the Eastern Bloc that survives in some form today while still enjoying high popularity, or high "popularity" depending on who you ask)\\\
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more fixes (I promise I edit these things before I post them)


Gorbechav's approach to leadership was a radical departure from past Soviet leaders. He was highly casual when interacting with other politicians and Soviet citizens, giving him a genial and down-to-earth character that only Khrushchev had come close to emulating. He forbade a cult of personality and encouraged those around him to speak freely, without fear of reprisal. He also forced many Soviet officials to resign, filling the ranks with some badly needed new blood while ridding him of the most stifling conservative ministers. With this, his power was secure, and he began to roll out a three-pronged reform program. The three keys to this program were ''uskoreniye'' (Acceleration), ''perestroika'' (Restructering), and ''glasnost'' (Oppenness).\\\

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Gorbechav's approach to leadership was a radical departure from past Soviet leaders. He was highly casual when interacting with other politicians and Soviet citizens, giving him a genial and down-to-earth character that only Khrushchev had come close to emulating. He forbade a cult of personality and encouraged those around him to speak freely, without fear of reprisal. He also forced many Soviet officials to resign, filling the ranks with some badly needed new blood while ridding him of the most stifling conservative ministers. With this, his power was secure, and he began to roll out a three-pronged reform program. The three keys to this program were ''uskoreniye'' (Acceleration), ''perestroika'' (Restructering), and ''glasnost'' (Oppenness).(Openness).\\\



"Openness" was a policy of earning the public's trust by making more of the government's internal affairs public, loosening restrictions on media and the press, and encouragement of more free and critical arts. Foreign radio and TV stations were no longer jammed, ending the policy of cultural isolation that had been enforced since Stalin took over. It also brought a wave of legal reform intended to turn the Soviet KangarooCourt system into something that actually tried to uphold a concept of justice. Gorbachev was openly critical of the Soviet Union in his public addresses, creating an atmosphere of freedom and critical thought that had been absent in the Soviet Union up until now. Finally, he would move to establish a limited form of democracy with the Congress of the People's Deputies, which was a freely elected body that had the authority to choose the members of the Supreme Soviet, and the Soviet legislatures were given more power, dismantling the technocratic rule of the Politburo. For the first time in nearly 60 years, Soviet citizens could now vote and have a say in their government. However, the Soviet Union remained a one-party state, with the choices being for competing CPSU candidates and independents rather than a multi-party democracy.\\\

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"Openness" was a policy of earning the public's trust by making more of the government's internal affairs public, loosening restrictions on media and the press, and encouragement of encouraging more free and critical arts. Foreign radio and TV stations were no longer jammed, ending the policy of cultural isolation that had been enforced since Stalin took over. It also brought a wave of legal reform intended to turn the Soviet KangarooCourt system into something that actually tried to uphold a concept of justice. Gorbachev was openly critical of the Soviet Union in his public addresses, creating an atmosphere of freedom and critical thought that had been absent in the Soviet Union up until now. Finally, he would move to establish a limited form of democracy with the Congress of the People's Deputies, which was a freely elected body that had the authority to choose the members of the Supreme Soviet, and the Soviet legislatures were given more power, dismantling the technocratic rule of the Politburo. For the first time in nearly 60 years, Soviet citizens could now vote and have a say in their government. However, the Soviet Union remained a one-party state, with the choices being for competing CPSU candidates and independents rather than a multi-party democracy.\\\
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some minor grammatical and stylistic fixes


The USSR also began to fall behind technologically when compared to the capitalist West. While the average Soviet citizen in the 60s had electronics and consumer goods that were, for the most part, on par with those manufactured in the West (not counting deluxe models/luxury goods), the 1970s saw sharp declines in quality as the aforementioned production shortfalls caused them to scrape by with whatever they had. The end result is that every Lada ends up a lemon before it's even leaves the factory floor, and the waiting list for these sub-par cars could be 3 years or even longer. The same went for most consumer goods in the USSR, which were made to be manufactured cheaply and efficiently, with sacrifices made to quality and uniqueness. This is reflected in nearly every aspect of Soviet public life, especially the samey "Commie Block" apartment complexes that fill the former Soviet Union. This was partly justified, at least ideologically, by pointing out that places like America had a "head start" on industrialization, while the USSR had to transform Russia from draconian medieval kingdom into a modern nation state, so the importance was on quantity rather than quality I.E. "make sure every Soviet citizen has a roof over their heads first before we can start talking about luxury apartments." Of course, the reality is that the Central Committee simply cared less about providing consumer goods than they did on national prestige, the military, and the heavy industries that supplied said military. The Soviet "siege mentality" incurred by 3 successive and brutal invasions in the span of just a couple of decades made Soviet leadership dedicated to the idea of a massive standing army, so the Soviet Army [[note]]the Red Army was renamed into the Soviet Armed Forces in 1946[[/note]] ended up being unsustainably huge. This problem continues to Russia today, with it attempting to support the world's 2nd largest military on a GDP comparable to ''Australia''. Supporting this vast military-industrial complex meant diverting resources away from civilian purposes. On top of all of this, technological development in the Soviet Union was, like all other things, managed by the state, with official design bureaus, universities, and technical schools being given orders to design things, as opposed to the innovation happening organically in order to sell more shit, as it does under capitalism. While this is workable if the state has its priorities straight, it failed in the USSR, again because of the over-emphasis on military tech over civilian developments. The Soviet economy actually went so wrong that the quite agricultural country of the USSR was forced to import grain. ''From America''.\\\

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The USSR also began to fall behind technologically when compared to the capitalist West. While the average Soviet citizen in the 60s had electronics and consumer goods that were, for the most part, on par with those manufactured in the West (not counting deluxe models/luxury goods), the 1970s saw sharp declines in quality as the aforementioned production shortfalls caused them to scrape by with whatever they had. The end result is that every Lada ends up a lemon before it's even leaves the factory floor, and the waiting list for these sub-par cars could be 3 years or even longer. The same went for most consumer goods in the USSR, which were made to be manufactured cheaply and efficiently, with sacrifices made to quality and uniqueness. This is reflected in nearly every aspect of Soviet public life, especially the samey "Commie Block" apartment complexes that fill the former Soviet Union. This was partly justified, at least ideologically, by pointing out that places like America had a "head start" on industrialization, while the USSR had to transform Russia from draconian medieval kingdom into a modern nation state, so the importance was on quantity rather than quality I.E. "make sure every Soviet citizen has a roof over their heads first before we can start talking about luxury apartments." Of course, the reality is that the Central Committee simply cared less about providing consumer goods than they did on about national prestige, the military, and the heavy industries that supplied said military. The Soviet "siege mentality" incurred by 3 successive and brutal invasions in the span of just a couple of decades made Soviet leadership dedicated to the idea of a massive standing army, so the Soviet Army [[note]]the Red Army was renamed into the Soviet Armed Forces in 1946[[/note]] ended up being unsustainably huge. This problem continues to Russia today, with it attempting to support the world's 2nd largest military on a GDP comparable to ''Australia''. Supporting this vast military-industrial complex meant diverting resources away from civilian purposes. On top of all of this, technological development in the Soviet Union was, like all other things, managed by the state, with official design bureaus, universities, and technical schools being given orders to design things, as opposed to the innovation happening organically in order to sell more shit, as it does under capitalism. While this is workable if the state has its priorities straight, it failed in the USSR, again because of the over-emphasis on military tech over civilian developments. The Soviet economy actually went so wrong that the quite agricultural country of the USSR was forced to import grain. ''From America''.\\\



Speaking of his death, Brezhnev kicked the can in 1982, but his health had been failing since 1975 and he'd become withdrawn from public and political life, leaving the Central Committee to its own devices for the most part. As with one of his contemporaries, UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan, he had shown signs of mental decline by the end of his tenure as well. This was emblematic of a major problem currently facing the USSR, and one that would come to a head after Brezhnev's death: the leadership of the USSR was increasingly ''old''. Brezhnev had been of the same generation as Khrushchev and most other Soviet political leaders, who had held on to power long past their prime as a sort of "Old Boys Club." Most of them were veterans of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, and quite a large few were veterans ''of the Russian Civil War'', as many a child soldier had fought over the course of 1917-1921. This gave them political clout that allowed them to deny any ascension to higher office by the newer generations. This became known as a "gerontocracy;" ''rule by the old.''\\\

Brezhnev had also overseen some of the most brutal and repressive measures by the Soviet state yet. Domestically, the culturally liberal reforms of Khrushchev were rolled back as media became tightly controlled once-more, and light revival's of Stalin-era repression policies were rolled out. If you protested the government, rather than sending you to a Siberian Gulag with only a vague pretext of some criminal act or a KangarooCourt, the Brezhnev regime would simply prefer to declare you "mentally unfit" and put you in a [[BedlamHouse Psikhushka]] instead. Their justification was that only an insane person would be opposed to socialism. However, the worst treatment was reserved for Eastern Europe, where rather infamously the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia, ''it's ally'', because it sought to democratize. It wasn't even that they were declaring themselves bourgeois traitors either, as they were still socialist, just less authoritarian. In 1968, a the reformist Alexander DubÄŤek was elected First Secretary. He laid out a program for reform called, well, ''the Programme'', that would see Czechia and Slovakia be separated into two autonomous states, united by a federation, open up freedom of the press, freedom of travel, and even multiparty democracy. It was beyond ambitious. DubÄŤek had stated that he wanted to create "socialism with a human face," to essentially dismantle the Marxist-Leninist State and rebuild it into a Democratic Socialist one to make a state that was more fair and equitable to citizens. Not only did it have to be better, it specifically had to be better than ''capitalism'', to prove that the socialist experiment could work. After all, that ''was'' the point of all this, right? To create a truly egalitarian, classless utopia?\\\

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Speaking of his death, Brezhnev kicked the can in 1982, but his health had been failing since 1975 and he'd become withdrawn from public and political life, leaving the Central Committee to its own devices for the most part. As with one of his contemporaries, UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan, he had shown signs of mental decline by the end of his tenure as well. This was emblematic of a major problem currently facing the USSR, and one that would come to a head after Brezhnev's death: the leadership of the USSR was increasingly ''old''. Brezhnev had been of the same generation as Khrushchev and most other Soviet political leaders, who had held on to power long past their prime as a sort of "Old Boys Club." Most of them were veterans of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, and quite a large few were veterans ''of the Russian Civil War'', as many a child soldier had fought over the course of 1917-1921. This gave them political clout that allowed them to deny any ascension to higher office by the newer generations. This became known as a "gerontocracy;" ''rule by the old.''\\\

Brezhnev had also overseen some of the most brutal and repressive measures by the Soviet state yet. Domestically, the culturally liberal reforms of Khrushchev were rolled back as media became tightly controlled once-more, once more, and a light revival's revival of Stalin-era repression policies were was rolled out. If you protested the government, rather than sending you to a Siberian Gulag with only a vague pretext of some criminal act or a KangarooCourt, the Brezhnev regime would simply prefer to declare you "mentally unfit" and put you in a [[BedlamHouse Psikhushka]] instead. Their justification was that only an insane person would be opposed to socialism. However, the worst treatment was reserved for Eastern Europe, where rather infamously the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia, ''it's ally'', because it sought to democratize. It wasn't even that they were declaring themselves bourgeois traitors either, as they were still socialist, just less authoritarian. In 1968, a the reformist Alexander DubÄŤek was elected First Secretary. He laid out a program for reform called, well, ''the Programme'', that would see Czechia and Slovakia be separated into two autonomous states, states united by a federation, open up freedom of the press, freedom of travel, and even establish multiparty democracy. It was beyond ambitious. DubÄŤek had stated that he wanted to create "socialism with a human face," to essentially dismantle the Marxist-Leninist State and rebuild it into a Democratic Socialist one one, to make a state that was more fair and equitable to citizens. Not only did it have to be better, better than Marxism-Leninism was, it specifically had to be better than ''capitalism'', to prove that the socialist experiment could work. After all, that ''was'' the point of all this, right? To create a truly egalitarian, classless utopia?\\\



...From the outside. From inside, the country looked in surprise at his hardline sobriety campaign (which led to a surge in moonshining), stringent work ethics revival and other really old-school moves that could be expected from a (seriously) dedicated, order-loving ex-KGB director. Under Andropov, the oppression of the Brezhnev Era (which he had largely masterminded, as the head of the KGB) grew even harsher. It was Andropov who had urged Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 , in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Afghanistan in 1979, as well as constructing the "psychiatric healthcare" system that was used to imprison tens of thousands of dissidents. It was Andropov who proved instrumental to send the tanks into UsefulNotes/{{Poland}}, which Brezhnev had initially and uncharacteristically decided against.\\\

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...From the outside. From inside, the country looked in surprise at his hardline sobriety campaign (which led to a surge in moonshining), stringent work ethics revival and other really old-school moves that could be expected from a (seriously) dedicated, order-loving ex-KGB director. Under Andropov, the oppression of the Brezhnev Era (which he had largely masterminded, as the head of the KGB) grew even harsher. It was Andropov who had urged Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 , in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Afghanistan in 1979, as well as constructing the "psychiatric healthcare" system that was used to imprison tens of thousands of dissidents. It was Andropov who proved instrumental to send the tanks into UsefulNotes/{{Poland}}, UsefulNotes/{{Poland}} in 1981, which Brezhnev had initially and uncharacteristically (and uncharacteristically) decided against.\\\



Chernenko, despite his illness and obvious shoe-in as a "transitional" leader, only chosen so the Old Heads had time to plan out their retirements as the next generation of Soviets began to take office, actually had a number of effective policies. His domestic reforms tackled corruption, lack of education, and a lack of rights for organized labor, something that was particularly egregious for a ''socialist'' country. He fired his Chief of Staff, appointing a new one to finally solve the USSR's bloated military-industrial issue by redirecting production towards consumer goods. Internationally, he promoted a stance of detente, but it was rendered ineffectual as he maintained the Brezhnev Doctrine of holding Eastern Europe under a Soviet boot, even denying Erich Honecker's attempt to normalize relations between the two Germanies.\\\

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Chernenko, despite his illness and obvious shoe-in as a "transitional" leader, only leader --only chosen so the Old Heads had time to plan out their retirements as the next generation of Soviets began to take office, office-- actually had a number of effective policies. His domestic reforms tackled corruption, lack of education, and a lack of rights for organized labor, something that was particularly egregious for a ''socialist'' country. He fired his Chief of Staff, appointing a new one to finally solve the USSR's bloated military-industrial issue by redirecting production towards consumer goods. Internationally, he promoted a stance of detente, but it was rendered ineffectual as he maintained the Brezhnev Doctrine of holding Eastern Europe under a Soviet boot, even denying Erich Honecker's attempt to normalize relations between the two Germanies.\\\



->''""Many of you see the solution to your problems in resorting to market mechanisms in place of direct planning. Some of you look at the market as a lifesaver for your economies. But, comrades, you should not think about lifesavers but about the ship, and the ship is socialism.""''
-->-- '''Mikhail Gorbachev''' to other members of the Eastern Bloc, 1985\\\

UsefulNotes/MikhailGorbachev is the dude with the great big birthmark. He was a fairly minor Soviet administrator before moving to Moscow and seeing a meteoric rise in the CPSU due to Andropov and Chernenko's reshuffling. Although privately a reformist, he made sure to mask his true intentions to avoid drawing the ire of conversvative hardliners. He worked closely with Andropov despite him being his ideological opposite in many ways, and he towed the party line, publicly supporting the invasion of Afghanistan despite being privately against it. It was a ruse, and a successful one, as he most assuredly would not have been given power if his true intentions were known, as the CPSU was still dominated by conservative, Brezhnev Era politicians.\\\

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->''""Many ->''"Many of you see the solution to your problems in resorting to market mechanisms in place of direct planning. Some of you look at the market as a lifesaver for your economies. But, comrades, you should not think about lifesavers but about the ship, and the ship is socialism.""''
"''
-->-- '''Mikhail Gorbachev''' Gorbechav''' to other members of the Eastern Bloc, 1985\\\

UsefulNotes/MikhailGorbachev is the dude with the great big birthmark. He was a fairly minor Soviet administrator before moving to Moscow and seeing a meteoric rise in the CPSU due to Andropov and Chernenko's reshuffling. Although privately a reformist, he made sure to mask his true intentions to avoid drawing the ire of conversvative conservative hardliners. He worked closely with Andropov despite him being his ideological opposite in many ways, and he towed the party line, publicly supporting the invasion of Afghanistan despite being privately against it. It was a ruse, and a successful one, as he most assuredly would not have been given power if his true intentions were known, as the CPSU was still dominated by conservative, Brezhnev Era politicians.\\\

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Expanded the last two folders


UsefulNotes/MikhailGorbachev is the dude with the great big birthmark. He was much younger than the rest of the Politburo when he was elected and still remains alive. Realizing the USSR was in deep trouble, he instituted two major policies at home:\\\

''Perestroika''\\\

"Restructuring". The Soviet economy was liberalized, allowing private (and even foreign) investment and in 1990, you could get a Big Mac in Moscow. However, this caused prices to skyrocket and the tottering economy to deteriorate (the Russian economy still hasn't fully recovered to this day). The USSR's living standards went even lower. This made people annoyed.

''Glasnost''\\\

"Openness". Restrictions on freedom of speech were reduced, with Gorby hoping that this would lead to reform of the system. People just wanted more freedom.\\\

The first major test of this policy was UsefulNotes/{{Chernobyl}}. A reactor meltdown caused by an experiment that ignored dozens of safety rules, the initial response was the usual Soviet one-- cover it up. Radioactive sheep in Wales meant that policy could not really work.\\\

Although Chernobyl was in the Ukrainian SSR, the wind blew most of the fallout north into the Byelorussian SSR. Belarus still has a lot of problems as a result.\\\

There were other policies, as well, all with one-word Russian names, including ''uskoreniye'' ("acceleration," a sort of proto-''perestroika'') and ''gospriyomka'' ("state approval," i.e. quality control). This led to a famous joke:

to:

->''""Many of you see the solution to your problems in resorting to market mechanisms in place of direct planning. Some of you look at the market as a lifesaver for your economies. But, comrades, you should not think about lifesavers but about the ship, and the ship is socialism.""''
-->-- '''Mikhail Gorbachev''' to other members of the Eastern Bloc, 1985\\\

UsefulNotes/MikhailGorbachev is the dude with the great big birthmark. He was much younger than the rest of the Politburo when he was elected and still remains alive. Realizing the USSR was in deep trouble, he instituted two major policies at home:\\\

''Perestroika''\\\

"Restructuring". The
a fairly minor Soviet economy administrator before moving to Moscow and seeing a meteoric rise in the CPSU due to Andropov and Chernenko's reshuffling. Although privately a reformist, he made sure to mask his true intentions to avoid drawing the ire of conversvative hardliners. He worked closely with Andropov despite him being his ideological opposite in many ways, and he towed the party line, publicly supporting the invasion of Afghanistan despite being privately against it. It was liberalized, allowing private (and even foreign) investment a ruse, and in 1990, you could get a Big Mac in Moscow. However, this caused prices to skyrocket and successful one, as he most assuredly would not have been given power if his true intentions were known, as the tottering economy to deteriorate (the Russian economy CPSU was still hasn't fully recovered to this day). The USSR's living standards went even lower. This made people annoyed.

''Glasnost''\\\

"Openness". Restrictions on freedom of speech were reduced, with Gorby hoping that this would lead to reform of the system. People just wanted more freedom.
dominated by conservative, Brezhnev Era politicians.\\\

The first major test of this policy was UsefulNotes/{{Chernobyl}}. A reactor meltdown caused by an experiment that ignored dozens of safety rules, In 1980, Mikhail Gorbachev left the initial response Central Committee for the Politburo, as the latter increasingly took over the former's role in Soviet politics. He was the usual youngest member of the Politburo at 49 years old. When Chernenko passed, the Soviet one-- cover foreign minister and close Andropov ally, Andrei Gromyko, proposed Gorbechav's appointment to General Secretary. Gorbechav expected it up. Radioactive sheep in Wales meant that policy could not really work.to be ugly, as his reformist intentions were now becoming publicly known, but to his surprise the Politburo unanimously confirmed him. They did this less out of a desire for reform, and more because they didn't want another elderly dedushka to take over and die right after assuming office.\\\

Although Chernobyl Gorbechav's approach to leadership was in a radical departure from past Soviet leaders. He was highly casual when interacting with other politicians and Soviet citizens, giving him a genial and down-to-earth character that only Khrushchev had come close to emulating. He forbade a cult of personality and encouraged those around him to speak freely, without fear of reprisal. He also forced many Soviet officials to resign, filling the Ukrainian SSR, the wind blew most ranks with some badly needed new blood while ridding him of the fallout north into the Byelorussian SSR. Belarus still has most stifling conservative ministers. With this, his power was secure, and he began to roll out a lot of problems as a result.three-pronged reform program. The three keys to this program were ''uskoreniye'' (Acceleration), ''perestroika'' (Restructering), and ''glasnost'' (Oppenness).\\\

There ''Uskoreniye'' and ''Perestroika''\\\

"Restructuring" was a process of fixing the Soviet economy. The first part of the process was ''uskorenie'', and ambitious 5-year plan meant to accelerate Soviet industrial growth, hence the name. Gorbachev began borrowing element's of Lenin's New Economic Policy to stimulate the Soviet economy: workers
were other policies, as well, all with one-word Russian names, including ''uskoreniye'' ("acceleration," a sort given greater say in the management of proto-''perestroika'') their industries, farmers would be able to sell a portion of their harvest at market, wages were increased across the board, and ''gospriyomka'' ("state approval," i.e. he introduced quality control). control measures called ''gospriyomka.'' This led to a famous joke:
joke:\\\



--> '''Waiter''': ''Glasnost!''

Abroad, Gorbachev essentially ended the Cold War. He withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan, concluded two arms treaties and then announced the [[Music/FrankSinatra "Sinatra Doctrine"]] [[Music/MyWay ("I did it my way")]], allowing the Warsaw Pact countries to determine their own internal polices. The 1989 Revolutions duly followed.\\\

In the USSR itself, the republics started to break away. When Lithuania did so, rogue elements sent in the tanks.

to:

--> '''Waiter''': ''Glasnost!''

''Glasnost!''\\\

Finally, he made state quotas non-binding, meaning there was no longer a punishment for failing to meet them.\\\

Agricultural reform was his cornerstone, as the inefficiently organized agricultural sector was resulting in poor harvests and food shortages, and having to import grain from America to make up for it hurt Soviet prestige. To this end, he merged all the agricultural ministries into one, Agroprom, but the issues of collectivized agriculture were too deep for this change alone to correct, and overall his agrarian reforms underdelivered.\\\

''Glasnost''\\\

"Openness" was a policy of earning the public's trust by making more of the government's internal affairs public, loosening restrictions on media and the press, and encouragement of more free and critical arts. Foreign radio and TV stations were no longer jammed, ending the policy of cultural isolation that had been enforced since Stalin took over. It also brought a wave of legal reform intended to turn the Soviet KangarooCourt system into something that actually tried to uphold a concept of justice. Gorbachev was openly critical of the Soviet Union in his public addresses, creating an atmosphere of freedom and critical thought that had been absent in the Soviet Union up until now. Finally, he would move to establish a limited form of democracy with the Congress of the People's Deputies, which was a freely elected body that had the authority to choose the members of the Supreme Soviet, and the Soviet legislatures were given more power, dismantling the technocratic rule of the Politburo. For the first time in nearly 60 years, Soviet citizens could now vote and have a say in their government. However, the Soviet Union remained a one-party state, with the choices being for competing CPSU candidates and independents rather than a multi-party democracy.\\\

The first major test of this policy was UsefulNotes/{{Chernobyl}}. A reactor meltdown caused by an experiment that ignored dozens of safety rules, the initial response was the usual Soviet one-- cover it up. Radioactive sheep in Wales meant that policy could not really work, and Gorbachev himself had been a victim of the cover-up, being fed misinformation by his underlings that downplayed its seriousness. When he discovered this, he went on national television to give a speech acknowledging the disaster, using it to demonstrate the corruption and inefficiency in the Soviet system, and thus a need for reform.\\\

Although Chernobyl was in the Ukrainian SSR, the wind blew most of the fallout north into the Byelorussian SSR. Belarus still has a lot of problems as a result.\\\

Abroad, Gorbachev essentially ended the Cold War. He withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan, Afghanistan (although the process took 4 years) concluded two arms treaties and then announced the [[Music/FrankSinatra "Sinatra Doctrine"]] [[Music/MyWay ("I did it my way")]], allowing the Warsaw Pact countries to determine their own internal polices. The 1989 Revolutions duly followed.\\\

followed, with the beleaguered peoples of Eastern Europe finally seeing a way out from under the Bolshevik Boot. In Poland, the Catholic trade union ''Solidarity'', which was founded in 1981 and made its first bid to free Poland the following year, repeatedly paralyzed the communist regime with mass, direct action, causing them to be utterly dysfunctional throughout the 1980s. In 1989, with it clear that they'd get no support from Moscow this time, the communist regime agreed to ''Soldarity's'' demands for free elections, which the trade union handedly won the following year. In Romania, the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown after an ill-fated attempt to crush nationwide protests resulted in his own military turning on him. Hungary had a largely peaceful transition where the communist regime met with the opposition and gradually rolled out democratization and freedom of travel, resulting in citizens from other Bloc states (particularly East Germany) to use it as a transit hub to escape to the West. This resulted in mounting pressure on Erich Honecker, leader of East Germany, to implement similar liberal reforms. Gorbachev himself urged this course of action, but Honecker refused, instead ordering the military to massacre pro-democracy demonstrators in Leipzig. When the military refused, Honecker knew he had lost control, and in his haphazard attempt to regain it, he accidentally gave orders to open travel with West Germany. He intended it to be tightly controlled by the state, but when Germans heard the news, they flocked to both sides of the Berlin Wall, and Honecker was too slow to act -- not that the military had any intention of enforcing his decision. On the night of November 9th, 1989, thousands of Germans gathered in Berlin, taking hammers and chisels to the Berlin Wall: a symbolic end to the Eastern Bloc, if not it's complete demise. Czechslovakia followed a similar path as Poland, while in Bulgaria the regime instituted top-down reforms themselves that democratized the country (coincidentally, their communist party is the only one in the Eastern Bloc that survives in some form today while still enjoying high popularity, or high "popularity" depending on who you ask)\\\

In the USSR itself, the republics started to break away. When Lithuania did so, rogue elements sent While most Soviet republics had no significant nationalist dissent, the Baltic states and the Caucuses did. The former disliked the Soviet repression of their Catholic and Protestant faiths, didn't feel "in tune" with the Soviet people culturally, and had been fiercely independent before their absorption into the USSR in the tanks.1930s. The latter were torn by ethnic strife, with the USSR not helping matters by openly favoring some groups to others. While Eastern Europe were free to choose their own destiny, Moscow had no intention of giving up Soviet territory, so they cracked down harshly when these regions attempted secession.\\\

In relation to the West, Gorbachev attempted a policy of detente, but he found US President UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan difficult to work with. None-the-less, the two managed to hammer out arms control treaties that, when combined with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, resulted in a considerable warming of relations between the two countries. Gorbachev himself became quite popular among the US public, at least for a Soviet leader, and to this day he enjoys far more approval from the American public than the Russian one, basically for the exact same reason (he is seen as dismantling the USSR: a good thing in America but a bad thing in Russia). He re-established ties with China, then under the leadership of its own reformer UsefulNotes/DengXiaoping. This relationship continues into the present, with Russia and China being close economic and military partners. In the rest of the world, Gorbachev withdrew the USSR's commitment to establishing communism internationally, and many a Moscow-backed regime was toppled (sometimes at the behest of the CIA, and sometimes organically). Despite the hawkish Reagan administration's attempts to portray the USSR as still an "evil empire," the days of Soviet interventionism were gone.\\\

Gorbachev had an incredibly high level of domestic support (initially), as you'd imagine, but he had two sources of consternation: communist hardliners and liberal radicals. The former were politically sidelined by Gorbachev but gradually gained political clout, as the "My Way" policy had resulted in the Warsaw Pact's disintegration. This was viewed by hardliners as a national security threat, as the Pact had been established with the intent of keeping the West away from Soviet borders. The hardliners viewed WorldWarIII as inevitable, as the capitalists would not tolerate the existence of a socialist state, so they wanted to ensure that the fighting would happen anywhere ''but'' Russia this time. Fears of NATO encroachment drove a resurgence in support for the hardliners at the end of the 1980s, but ironically it'd be the hardliners themselves who'd finally bring down the Soviet system. The liberals were broadly aligned with Boris Yeltsin, former Gorbachev protege-turned-enemy and future president of the Russian Federation. Yeltsin viewed Gorbechav's reforms as not being ambitious enough, and his supporters believed -sometimes accurately and sometimes inaccurately- that the reforms weren't really being carried out and were simply for PR.\\\

Gorbachev, contrary to the beliefs of many a Russian or American, was not a secret liberal but a dedicated socialist. His reforms were not intended to dismantle the USSR, but to save it. Unfortunately, this was not to be, as regardless of how effective ''perestroika'' and ''glasnost'' were, the political machinations going on behind the scenes were about to sink Gorbechav's proverbial ship.\\\



On 18 August 1991, Gorbachev was in his dacha, when he was essentially taken prisoner by hardliners, who declared a "state of emergency" and proceeded to shut down anti-communist newspapers. The people of Moscow rose up against this coup and blockaded the White House (the location of the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic's parliament). Much of the military refused to obey orders, UsefulNotes/BorisYeltsin stood on a tank and the coup failed.\\\

With Gorbachev's reputation ruined, the CPSU had its property nationalised and was later closed down. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvoa25IiUEo On December 8th, the heads of the SSRs of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine drafted and signed a document declaring the USSR dissolved in a 24-Hour period.]] Gorbachev and UsefulNotes/GeorgeHWBush were informed over the phone simultaneously. Russia had a new flag now, and most of the republics declared independence.\\\

to:

->''"Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain."''
-->-- '''Apocryphal,''' popularity attributed to '''Vladimir Putin.''' \\\


The USSR had already started to dissolve in 1987, when mass demonstrations acknowledging Stalin's crimes in the Baltic [=SSRs=] went largely unopposed. The next 4 years would result in an unraveling of the USSR that was very gradual... right up until the day that it wasn't.

Demonstrations continued in the Baltic throughout the late 80s, with the most notable being the "Chain of Freedom," when 2 million Baltic citizens locked arms and formed a chain spanning 370 miles across all 3 of the Baltic [=SSRs=]. Some of these protests were violently suppressed by Soviet police and soldiers, but others were not, demonstrating just how uneven and indecisive the rollout of ''glasnost'' had been.\\\

Meanwhile, the Caucuses and Central Asia were being torn apart by ethnic conflicts and banditry. In the Azerbaijani [=SSR=], the Autonomous Oblast of Nagorno-Karabakh voted to join the Armenian [=SSR=], as a large chunk of the Oblast's population was Armenian. This was in defiance of Baku ''and'' Moscow, and it sparked and on-again off-again war between Armenia and Azerbaijan that continues to this day.\\\

In 1990, elections were held across the USSR. The elections, being a relatively new thing for the USSR, were disorganized and left a lot up to the [=SSRs=] themselves, resulting in many including ballot measures to decide whether they should be independent or not. Most of the [=SSRs=] voted "nyet", but the Baltic states, Georgia, Armenia, and Moldova voted "da". This proved to be a lengthy process that would play out in Soviet courts and committee chambers over the course of the next year, and in Moldova, a break-away republic called Transnistria that was still loyal to the USSR rose up. It still exists today as an unrecognized nation, mired in Soviet imagery. Azerbaijan also had a popular uprising as well. This one prompted Soviet military intervention partly because of the strategic necessity of Baku's oil fields.\\\

Other [=SSRs=] saw protests and uprisings as well. Ukraine saw significant ones, particularly in West Ukrainian cities like Kyiv and Lviv, but the eastern portion of Ukraine largely remained loyal to the USSR. This is primarily because the east was settled by ethnic Russians under Stalin's "Russification" policy. Ukraine did not vote for independence, however.\\\

Russia itself saw dramatic change. With ''glasnost'' allowing the formation of non-communist organizations, new ones appeared, such as the nationalist group ''Pamyat''. In the 1990 elections, Boris Yeltsin was elected to the Supreme Soviet. He had previously been First Secretary of the [=CPSU=] before resigning/being fired in 1987. Yeltsin gave no initial indication that he intended to liberalize Russia and thus end Soviet socialism, but his affiliation with groups like ''Pamyat'' made it clear that he was a communist in name only. He then got elected as Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR, the highest position in Russian (not Soviet!) government at the time. He rapidly began agitating for independence, and the Congress of the People's Deputies of the [=RSFSR=] declared Russia's independence in July of 1990, but as with the other [=SSRs=], this was stonewalled by the Soviet government.\\\

Gorbie decides to settle this with a nationwide vote in 1991, with the very Soviet nation on the line. The 6 that had already declared independence boycotted it, but in the remaining [=SSRs=], the majority vote in favor of keeping the Soviet Union around. Meanwhile, the Soviet Army invaded Lithuania, causing protesters to start blockading streets. The unrest continues, and Gorbachev decides on a compromise that he believes can save the USSR: the New Union Treaty. It is to give the [=SSRs=] ''de facto'' independence, with them sharing only a common military and foreign policy. Like many a compromise before it, it only succeeds in pissing off ''both'' sides of the opposition. The hardliners viewed it as the end of the Soviet Union, while nationalists and liberals viewed it as "too little, too late." The hardliners make their move.\\\

On 18 August 1991, Gorbachev was in his dacha, when he was essentially taken prisoner by hardliners, who declared a "state of emergency" and proceeded to shut down anti-communist newspapers. Military forces loyal to the plotters besieged the White House (no, not [[EagleLand that one!]]), the seat of the Soviet Legislature. The people of Moscow rose up against this coup and blockaded the White House (the location of the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic's parliament). building. Much of the military refused to obey orders, UsefulNotes/BorisYeltsin stood on a tank and the coup failed.simply fizzled out. UsefulNotes/BorisYeltsin, whom the coup plotters tried to arrest, saw the time was right and stood on a tank, making inspiring speeches to the people of Moscow.\\\

With Gorbachev's reputation ruined, Gorbachev briefly returns to power at the CPSU had its property nationalised head of a country that, in reality, has ceased to exist. He resigns from his leadership position in the communist party and was later closed down. orders it dissolved. He makes an attempt to preserve what's left, but the jig is up: the Baltic states are already internationally recognized as sovereign nations, Ukraine has just declared independence, Armenia and Azerbaijan are ''at open war with each other'', and even in Russia itself, Yeltsin has already usurped power, with the Russian [=SFSR=] taking control of Soviet assets and responsibilities.\\\

[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvoa25IiUEo On December 8th, the heads of the SSRs of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine drafted and signed a document declaring the USSR dissolved in a 24-Hour period.]] Gorbachev and UsefulNotes/GeorgeHWBush were informed over the phone simultaneously. The Belavezha Accords formally dissolve the USSR, replacing it with the Commonwealth of Independent States. It ends up being more anemic than Gorbechav's New Union proposal, being little more than an economic bloc-cum-alliance.\\\

The rest of December is spent formally transitioning to this new state of affairs. On Christmas Day, 1991, Gorbachev resigns and the Soviet flag is lowered in front of the Kremlin for ([[MakeTheBearAngryAgain probably]]) the last time. The Supreme Soviet voted itself out of existence, and the Soviet Union was officially finished. The [[UsefulNotes/TheNewRussia Russian Federation]] had begun, with Yeltsin's first act to declare
Russia had a new flag now, to be the successor state to the USSR, thus allowing it to assume the USSR's place on the UN Security Council and most of the republics declared independence.other global responsibilities.\\\



On Christmas Day, 1991, with no country left to rule, Gorbachev announced his resignation as President. The hammer and sickle was lowered from the Kremlin, the Supreme Soviet voted itself out of existence, and the Soviet Union was officially finished. The [[UsefulNotes/TheNewRussia Russian Federation]] had begun, with Yeltsin's first act to declare Russia to be the successor state to the USSR, thus allowing it to assume the USSR's place on the UN Security Council and other global responsibilities.

to:

On Christmas Day, 1991, As for the USSR, it's legacy is still visible throughout Eastern Europe. UsefulNotes/TheNewRussia is essentially living in the shadow of the Union, with no country left to rule, Gorbachev announced his resignation Soviet art, architecture, and infrastructure still dominating the country, as President. it does in the rest of the former USSR. Communism remains popular in the former USSR, with the majority of Russians agreeing that the collapse of the Union was "a bad thing," at least in hindsight. After all, modern Russia is more or less run the same way, with all the corruption, totalitarianism, and Byzantine backstabbing of the USSR with none of its social services nor notions of proletarian equality. The hammer and sickle was lowered only "gain" Russia derived from the Kremlin, fall of the Supreme USSR was economic liberalization, which inarguably only hurt Russia. Yeltsin's market liberalization "shock therapy" did not mesh well with the centrally planned economy, as many Soviet voted itself industries proved unviable in a market system. The result was a horrific economic crash that left millions jobless and the Russian economy in the gutter. The USSR's collapse also left millions of ex-Soviet employees without pay and social services, resulting in even more corruption as Soviet officials sold anything that wasn't nailed down to try and make ends meet, often for absurdly low prices. Furniture, books, machining equipment, natural resources, electronics, guns, tanks, helicopters, and ''entire ships'' would be sold, and it still wasn't enough. It'd be two decades before the Russian economy stabilized near pre-dissolution levels.\\\

Russia and its former subjects also disintegrated into violence, with TheMafiya filling the void left by the Soviet state. Violent crime and outright banditry became common, and the illegal drug trade boomed as Russians used booze, meth, or heroin to numb the pain of having their entire world dissappear out from beneath them. Wars erupted: Moldova and Tajikistan broke out in civil war, Armenia and Azerbaijan continued to fight each other, and Chechnya seceded. The military was sent in, but the new Russian Armed Forces were in miserable shape. They were, as they had been in Soviet times, a poorly trained, poorly paid, poorly organized, poorly equipped conscript force that's main use was [[WeHaveReserves clogging up enemy tank treads with their bodies]] while the Soviet Air Force was relied on to do most of the killing. In the tight urban environment of Grozny, Russian soldiers fared badly against Chechen urban guerrilla tactics. Soldiers refused to leave their [=BMPs=]
out of existence, fear of getting shot, only to realize too late that the [=BMPs=] were too unarmoured to withstand RPG-7V grenades, causing many a Russian soldier to be cooked inside his APC like it was a giant flaming crock-pot. The war ended indecisively, with the Chechens bloody but the Russians being forced to withdraw. In 2000, newly elected ex-KGB man UsefulNotes/VladimirPutin made it his first priority to retake Chechnya, and he did so by [[MoreDakka leveling Grozny with mass artillery bombardment.]]\\\

Some have accused Vladimir Putin of wishing to reform the USSR, but this is not likely to happen. Russia has gradually lost its influence over much of the former Soviet Union: The Baltic States already heavily disliked them for innumerable past crimes the Russians wrought on them, and 2 decades of misrule by a Kremlin coolie burned through whatever goodwill Ukraine had left for them, and that was ''before'' Russia invaded them. Turkmenistan has pursued a policy of "neutrality," which is not hard to enforce given not even Russia is interested in them. Belarus and Kazakhstan are facing near annual protests, mostly in favor of joining "the West," and Azerbaijan has drifted more and more towards Turkey. Armenia has also drifted away, as they felt the Russians had abandoned them during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2021[[note]]Soviet policy usually favored Azerbaijan on this matter, while Imperial Russia favored the Armenians[[/note]]. Furthermore, there are fewer and fewer former Soviet citizens that remember the "good times" of the late 60s/early 70s. Most younger Russians only remember the disastrous 80s, if they are old enough to remember the USSR at all, so their view towards it tends to be apathetic at best or disdainful at worst. Despite the fact that the communists are still Russia's second largest party by vote share, they are considered "cringe" by Russian youths, and they lag behind Putin's United Russia, which is so thoroughly dictatorial that the communists have no chance of winning an election. The notion of reforming
the Soviet Union was officially finished. The [[UsefulNotes/TheNewRussia Russian Federation]] had begun, with Yeltsin's first act to declare Russia to be grows more distant by the successor state to day, as the USSR, thus allowing it to assume the USSR's place on the UN Security Council Union fades from memory and other global responsibilities. into history.



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->''"The one who comes too late is punished by life."''
-->-- '''Mikhail Gorbachev'''

Added: 1729

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Expanded Andropov and Chernenko's section


...From the outside. From inside, the country looked in surprise at his hardline sobriety campaign (which led to a surge in moonshining), stringent work ethics revival and other really old-school moves that could be expected from a (seriously) dedicated, order-loving ex-KGB director.\\\

Then he died too.\\\

Ill at the start, Andropov's successor UsefulNotes/KonstantinChernenko lasted just 13 months and did nothing to calm down the Cold War.\\\

The streak of insta-dead senile leaders (caused by lack of rotation in Politburo) not only meant there were three transitions in less than three years, but also spawned its own set of jokes. No wonder the next Secretary was a refreshing change.

to:

...From the outside. From inside, the country looked in surprise at his hardline sobriety campaign (which led to a surge in moonshining), stringent work ethics revival and other really old-school moves that could be expected from a (seriously) dedicated, order-loving ex-KGB director. Under Andropov, the oppression of the Brezhnev Era (which he had largely masterminded, as the head of the KGB) grew even harsher. It was Andropov who had urged Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 , in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Afghanistan in 1979, as well as constructing the "psychiatric healthcare" system that was used to imprison tens of thousands of dissidents. It was Andropov who proved instrumental to send the tanks into UsefulNotes/{{Poland}}, which Brezhnev had initially and uncharacteristically decided against.\\\

Then Andropov had one of the shortest terms as General Secretary, but he died too.was incredibly influential in Soviet politics under Brezhnev, and after Brezhnev took ill in 1975, it was Andropov who ''de facto'' took up Brezhnev's leadership role. After formally succeeding to the post of General Secretary, Andropov would implement arguably his most influential policy by launching an anti-corruption campaign. He used it largely as a guise to dismantle the gerontocracy, as most of the Old Heads were indeed corrupt and could be forced to resign. This paved the way for a new generation of Soviet politicos, and enabled Gorbechav's rise to power.\\\

Ill at Andropov failed to address the start, USSR's mounting economic malaise, having no real skills or knowledge relating to economics. By this point, the supply chain issues had grown to be nigh-insurmountable anyways, as they had snowballed into a veritable avalanche of economic decline. The 80s would see the Soviet economy tumble and fall, and it's decline was already evident by the time Andropov took up the office of General Secretary. Andropov's successor UsefulNotes/KonstantinChernenko lasted just 13 months solution, rather than addressing the issue caused by the Soviet state's unreasonable production quotas and did nothing to calm down misplaced attention on a vast standing army, instead opted for the Cold War.childlike mentality of "make them work harder." The already impossible-to-meet quotas became even more impossible and punishments for failing to meet them became harsher, only perpetuating the problem of factory managers inflating their production numbers to avoid punishment. The aforementioned sobriety campaign was done partly because Andropov believed that drunkenness was making Soviet workers slothful. While these policies ''did'' result in some economic growth, said growth was hiding an economic bubble that was going to pop, and soon.\\\

Andropov didn't live to see it, as he died too, in 1984.\\\

Ill at the start, Andropov's successor UsefulNotes/KonstantinChernenko lasted just 13 months. He was more or less Andropov's designated heir, and was confirmed as General Secretary without much fuss. After all, he was Andropov's right hand man, and he had run the domestic affairs of the USSR while Andropov was in-power, effectively taking up the role of Head of Government while Andropov was head of state (before them, the line between the two positions was blurry at best, and non-existent under Khrushchev and Stalin).\\\

Chernenko, despite his illness and obvious shoe-in as a "transitional" leader, only chosen so the Old Heads had time to plan out their retirements as the next generation of Soviets began to take office, actually had a number of effective policies. His domestic reforms tackled corruption, lack of education, and a lack of rights for organized labor, something that was particularly egregious for a ''socialist'' country. He fired his Chief of Staff, appointing a new one to finally solve the USSR's bloated military-industrial issue by redirecting production towards consumer goods. Internationally, he promoted a stance of detente, but it was rendered ineffectual as he maintained the Brezhnev Doctrine of holding Eastern Europe under a Soviet boot, even denying Erich Honecker's attempt to normalize relations between the two Germanies.\\\

None of these policies really panned out, as Chernenko died early in his tenure, to the surprise of absolutely no one.
The streak of insta-dead senile leaders (caused leaders, caused by lack of rotation in Politburo) Politburo not only meant there were three transitions in less than three years, but also spawned its own set of jokes. No wonder the next Secretary was a refreshing change.

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