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Comment by avgcorrection | Hacker News Reader

The author seems to believe that Yeltsin was a moron who thought that the most advanced capitalist country in history would possibly be comparable to a country that belonged to the Tsar less than one hundred years prior.

Well, maybe he was an idiot.

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Your comment glosses over so many complex dynamics of how the USSR failed and mismanaged its way into how it was in the late 80's vs. the U.S (and many other major countries) that it's absurd. Of course Yeltsin understood that his own country had dealt with many problems that the U.S had never had to face, but this didn't blind him to the fact that they could have done much better after so many decades of propaganda, and failed to do so because of many self-created problems. The smack to the face that was the supermarket showed him just how far his huge country had fallen behind. It was not stupidity in "failing to compare plausibly" that affected him, it was seeing that even fundamental aspects of well-being were inexcusably failing in the USSR.

Your comment is very blind to this basic fact, and excuses atrocious mismanagement with platitudes about tsars.

Germany and Japan, as well as China, were absolute wastelands of ruin and destitution after the second world war, and had suffered decades of terribly backwards previous leadership, yet they made good on enormous well-being changes in much less time than the USSR had to do the same by the time of Yeltsin's supermarket visit.

> Your comment glosses over so many complex dynamics of how the USSR failed and mismanaged its way into how it was in the late 80's vs. the U.S (and many other major countries) that it's absurd.

My comment glosses over. Compared to an anecdote about how a supermarket visit “Brought Down the Soviet Union”? This is the thing that you leaped to respond to? You are dripping with hypocrisy.

That low-quality article deserves no more rebuttal than the sentences that I spared on it.

It's not just the anecdote, it's everything that it implies, based on decades of history books, literature, many other anecdotes (some excellent ones right here in this thread). A cheap comment that dismisses complex things in its criticism of a complex thing isn't any less facile for pretending to be lightly stated.

Well the UK belongs to a King to that day, how does it make it any less of a developed country?

You seem to greatly downplay the historic Russia.

The historic pre-Bolshevik Russia was nothing to boast about, either. Just look at literacy rate or percentage of rural population.

Compared to whom? France or Germany? The whole British Empire?

The Tsar was a shorthand for how undeveloped Russia was.

I'm not sure why it is a shorthand. A wide range of countries have monarchy, such as Belguim or Sweden. There are also a lot of piss-poor non-monarchies.

Overall you sound like a person of socialist education who never evaluated their upbringing critically.

I don’t care what I sound like to you.

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