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Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem with the Soviet Union was Brezhnev not being able to keep with his economic reforms after 1974. Seeing Russia nowadays it is sometimes hard to believe that once they were the second economy in the world, before being removed from this post by Japan. Had they enacted Chinese style reforms they could have avoided the whole disastrous 90s

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Even with market reforms, I think they would have fallen victim to the addiction to energy revenues that's poisoned so many energy exporting economies. Breeds corruption, croneyism, and discourages investment in other industries.

Maybe Norway is the only exception.

They tried. Gorbachev wanted to turn Russia into another Sweden. Bush the Elder convinced the World Bank not to loan to them unless they agreed to impose neoliberal economic policies. Which led to oligarchy. And then Putin.

What is "And then Putin" supposed to mean? Perhaps you mean that Mr. Putin is implementing Gorbachev's goal of "turning Russia into another Sweden", which was blocked by Bush the Elder and the collective west's looting of Russia in the post-Soviet period?

My dad hates Mr. Putin because the television tells him Putin is a war criminal.

Other sources say Mr. Putin is the moderate who keeps the extremists in the Kremlin under control. That Russia fought in Ukraine with 9 fingers tied behind its back until it realized that there was no way to get the West to respect Russia's red line of Ukraine not being admitted into NATO. Someone on twitter said Russia's transition from 'preserve Ukraine's Soviet-era infrastructure' to 'destroy NATO's proxy army' was in September [0]. Russia didn't gave Ukraine's power grid the "shock and awe" treatment until November.

[0] https://imetatronink.substack.com/p/turning-point & various tweets - https://twitter.com/imetatronink

"[Putin] was a Lt. Col doing a mundane job in Dresden, Germany when the wall came down. He came back to St. Petersburg, Unemployed. He drove a taxi for a while. Got a job with Mayor Sochek's office, and anybody who dealt with him... said he was the most honest man he ever dealt with. ... He inherited a nation that had just undergone a decade of devastation, brought on by the west. But did he hate the west? No. He actually started his first years in office, trying to court the west, trying to come up with normalcy in economic relations. ... 2007 speech to the Munich security conference... The reality that the west is anti-Russia." Scott Riter, https://twitter.com/thatdayin1992/status/1583749384486891520 (emphasis added)

"Vladimir Putin is a Russian patriot, a moderate European-leaning leader who rescued Russia from the abyss. in Russia, he is not considered charismatic. He is supported because of Russia's economic and spiritual recovery. The Neocons hate Putin because they hate Russia." - https://twitter.com/DietHeartNews/status/1605275170138214425

Thought this video on Putin was interesting: https://rumble.com/vxm7sv-president-2015-documentary.html

Just curious what you meant.

It's a shame he blew all that up, then. Whatever he might have been before, it doesn't really matter now.

Your "source" is calling Zelensky "the Imperial Puppet" and "comedian"[0], which makes me think it's probably even more biased towards Russia than western media are towards Ukraine.

[0] https://twitter.com/imetatronink/status/1605389284369784832

My understanding is Ukraine was ready to negotiate with Russia by April 2022. Boris Johnson, the former UK prime minister, went to visit [0] around April 9 2022. Thenceforth Zelensky seems to have understood that Ukraine was to fight to the last Ukrainian.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/09/boris-johns...

What actually happened is Ukraine retook Bucha and then when Ukraine saw what Russians did k Bucha they decided negotiations were over.

I don’t blame them either why would you negotiate with the army that’s raping and torturing your civilians?.

There’s no point to negotiation with Russia anyway they don’t abide by international agreements unless it benefits them and even they may break them later.

Any peace outside of an absolute Russian defeat would be temporary and just allow Russia to invade again later.

Zelensky after Bucha ("No Other Choice Than To Talk"): https://www.rferl.org/a/un-zelenskiy-war-crimes-bucha/317863...

> Thenceforth Zelensky seems to have understood that Ukraine was to fight

You've given no evidence or argument to back up this implied conspiratorial causality. The simplest explanation is that Johnson told Zelensky that if Ukraine wanted to fight, they would have the support of the UK and the greater West.

Also, how hard is it to imagine that a country that had been subjugated by Russia up until a single generation ago, knows the horrors of such and will do everything possible to avoid ending up there again? The further east you go into previously Soviet countries, the more support there is for Ukraine. If this really were a "both sides" issue, you'd expect the exact opposite.

People who believe Putin is a radical should pray every night he doesn't die and is replaced by Medvedev.

The hallmark of central planning is that the more technology advances, the more your economy falls apart due to the impossibility of calculating every detail centrally. Good read on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/155597...

Also known as "Socialist calculation debate"[1].

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_calculation_debate

The whole point of Brezhnev reforms was decentralizing and using market signals instead of pure central planning.

I have always wondered about why the Yugoslav system of market socialism didn't succeed. It sounds like Brezhnev was trying to move toward that model.

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