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Comment by hakka-nyu-su | Hacker News Reader

"Collapse" is a bit too passive to describe what happened to the USSR. Gorbachev was a pro-American advocate of Social Democracy (aka the Denmark-style state that Bernie likes).

He thought that Russia would become prosperous by adopting capitalism. Instead, GDP shrank by 50% and Russia went from a global superpower to being encircled in its own backyard.

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Sure, but the fruit was pretty rotten at that point after 18 years of Brezhnev. Maybe if Gorbachev had followed Kruschev, it could've been done without a chaotic mass selloff to gangsters.

The fruit was rotten under Kruschev too, the difference between him and Brezhnwv is that his administration picked a lot of low-hanging fruit that the public approved of (Apartments, and a relaxation of absolutely insane Stalinist repression.)

The economy didn't work well under either of them, but Kruschev is credited for leaving things much better than he found them.

China did manage such a turnaround, though. Of course, they had the contemporaneous USSR collapse to point to as well as maoism in living memory, so that probably made it more politically possible.

GDP dropped 50% when honestly reporting facts stopped becoming a criminal offense.

Gorbachev liked social democracy, but the Communist Party warlords like Putin didn't disappear in the revolution, they hung back and then took over again.

Which resulted in the wholesale appropriation of state assets by the oligarchs.

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