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Comment by insane_dreamer | Hacker News Reader

Yeltsin is very much to blame. Russia would have transitioned much better if Gorbachev had been the head of the post-USSR Russia instead of Yeltsin.

That said, the former Soviet Republics that transitioned well are those that were smaller, already edging their way towards a market economy before the USSR collapse, and received substantial help from (and eventually joined) the EU (Baltics, Hungary, Poland, Czech Rep., Slovenia), and in the case of E.Germany, unification.

I don't think most of the others have fared that well. GDP/Capita is not a good measure because it doesn't take inequality into account.

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> much better if Gorbachev had been the head of the post-USSR Russia

Gorbachev wanted to keep USSR intact. He didn't want a post-USSR Russia. He initiated referendums to that end. But USSR was already on the train to dissolution and nothing was going to stop it.

He wanted to keep the USSR intact but also understood that was no longer an option. I'm sure he would have accepted to be PM of Russia but he was considered part of the "communist regime" and wasn't the one standing on the tanks (lets ignore the fact that Yeltin was also part of the communist regime), so that didn't happen.

> Gorbachev wanted to keep USSR intact.

Indeed. He didn't weigh in on the current debacle but he praised Putin's seizure of Crimea.

He was a product of his upbringing and honestly he always seemed like a weak player to me -- but really I have no idea how difficult it might have been to bring off the reforms he did under Andropov, Chernenko and then his own premiership.

Correction: Poland and Czechoslovakia weren't Soviet Republics, and Slovenia (Yugoslavia) wasn't even in the USSR sphere of influence.

USSR Sphere of Influence > Yugoslavia > Slovenia < Yugoslavia < USA

(It wasn’t exclusively in the USSR sphere of influence, but it was in their sphere of influence.)

That’s how the USA imported the Yugo!

Yes, of course, I was thinking East Bloc and wrote Soviet Republics instead.

The data doesn't support your point about inequality. The other former Communist eastern European countries generally don't have particularly high Gini index values. Other countries have much more income inequality.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI

I wasn't saying that they have high inequality, just that GDP/Capita isn't necessarily a good measure of prosperity

You're aware that the "much better" transition of the GDR was still a giant disaster, yes?(https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15487733.2020.1...)

And the GDR still got the best deal of all of the ones you mentioned. But there's massive inequality, massive unemployment. (And as a result, extremism, political fatigue, corruption, etc)

pointing out problems that places have after they've experienced 45-70 years of domination by Soviet style authoritarian regimes (and before which they were neither democracies on a shining hill) is not at all making a case that the post soviet transitions were flawed, just that they were not miraculous.

to be convincing you have to point out things that the transitioners could have done that would have worked better, but even the best experts in the world did not know any better than what was tried, so that's going to be a tough case to make.

Correction: "East Bloc", not "Soviet Republics"

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