Timothy Snyder on How the Collapse of the Soviet Union Took America by Surprise
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Part 1 of 4. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ke600MgW1F0&t=3s&pp=2AEDkAIB
Many people in the west nowadays believe that they are living in end times because they are overwhelmed by the many things changing around them. That documentary shows the opposite. The silence that arrives when the music stops. You are hungry, stores are empty, no one knows when and if ever they'll be restocked. Society just grinds to a halt and stops functioning. Completely unimaginable situation for modern people who are used to abundance.
"How the Neocons Chose Hegemony Over Peace Beginning in the Early 1990s"
https://www.jeffsachs.org/newspaper-articles/bfsmbpe4plx7cc6...
Instead, the country went straight to shit, Make Russia Great Again reactionaries won the vote, and have spent the next two decades carrying out their agenda (Which has managed to pull the country out of the hole it's been in, but as with any fascist movement, require an external enemy).
From the perspective of any sane Russian who lived through the cold war, and then the 90s, entering the 00s and expecting the West to act as a partner, as opposed to an adversary would be absolute lunacy. Fool me once, shame on me, and so forth... So the reformists got all the blame, and the hardliners took over.
The seeds of war get sown in peacetime. But hey, every one of those seeds had some pretext or other for it...
With aid come strings, those strings could have been used to softly steer the internal political clusterfuck in a better direction.
But yes, alt history is bullshit, and nobody knows what would have if-only, if-only, if-only, but we can observe and shoot the shit about what did happen. And what did happen did not win many friends in it.
There's no shortage of blame to go around within Russia. Yeltsin was a walking autocratic disaster, and handed the country right over to Putin.
I'm sure if you dig just a bit further you might find some other agreements that have been made, and then broken (by NATO nations), prior to the start of the war in Lugansk/Donetsk/Ukraine as a whole.
Gorbachev - one of Russia's few non-shitty statesmen, after his resignation, took a lot of issue with those violations of them, and you're going to have a hard time describing him as either an expansionist warhawk, or an enemy of the West. (The guy spent spent the last three decades of his life trying to patch up east-west relations, and was appalled and devastated by the war in Ukraine. If he thinks that there's something rotten about how NATO behaved in the late-90s and 00s, listen to him.)
Combined with large parts of NATO starting (for the first time in it's history) a string of offensive operations (some on good pretenses, and some on absolutely terrible, illegal ones), and even a dove will start getting security anxieties.
Except you can't, because no (legal) "agreements" as such were ever made.
Meanwhile the Budapest Memorandum is an agreement with treaty status, and it was unequivocally violated by Russia starting with the 2014 invasion.
Nobody's ever considered those promises to be legal. They were just that - promises.
The thing about promises is that when you break them, you shouldn't be surprised that your counterparty stops trusting anything else you do. You no longer have a co-operative or neutral relationship, you've turned it adversarial.
The transition from NATO being a defensive alliance (Against Warsaw pact aggression) to an offensive alliance (Second part of Yugoslavia, Iraq[1], Libya, Syria[1])[2] was a huge shift that took place in the 90s-00s.
This was the root of Gorbachev's anxieties, and it is nothing but fuel for Putin's 'they are all conspiring against us' rhetoric. Which didn't begin in 2000, by the way, but closer to 2008, with the Ruso-Georgian war being fought over an Ossetian pretext, but really about NATO expansion.
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[1] Not per-se NATO operations, but both with an incredible overlap with its membership.
[2] Afghanistan omitted because it was both defensive (an Article 5 invocation), and internationally sanctioned.
And unless we're going to talk about legal agreements -- none of this dissecting of what was said verbally or how it was understood at the time has any bearing on how the West should respond to the current situation. Now that Russia has made unilateral decision to move the relationship beyond merely "adversarial", and into the realm of outright aggression.
You ask about olive branches, I give you examples, you say that those examples were legally allowed. Okay, sure, they were, but that's got nothing to do with the price of butter. Just because you can do something from a position of strength doesn't mean doing it was a good idea, or served your long-term aims in a relationship.
But it doesn't rise to level of casus belli or even a rational reason for Russia to feel directly (tangibly) threatened. And it's definitely not the "reason" Putin started the war.
And you're leaving out other stuff, such as the fact that Yeltsin greenlighted the earliest round of new admissions (PL, CZ, HU), and that Gorbachev himself downplayed the significance of the expansion issue during negotiations to which you are referring -- as he made clear in that famous RBTH interview:
"The topic of 'NATO expansion' was not discussed at all, and it wasn't brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn't bring it up either."
As far as "antagonistic" is concerned, I think there's a much stronger case to be made in regard to the intentional decision by US policy makers not to provide extensive economic aid (a "Marshall Plan") to its former adversary, its insistence on shock reforms, and so on. But this is another topic. And it's not as if Russia didn' also "behave in an antagonistic/untrustworthy/threatening manner" against its would-be benefactor during its hour of need.[0][1]
World War I & we won! But did we bother to win the peace? Make ’em suffer! Let ‘em starve! Led direct to the Nazis
After World War II, we learned Rebuilt Germany and Japan But when the Soviet Union fell Where was our Marshall Plan?
We created Putin We created Putin We created Putin, yeah!
Real James Bond villain We lost! See him prancing, half naked On his horse Side saddle, the blushing bride Clings with those little hands Stared into his eyes We saw his soul He saw how dumb our leaders are We’ll hack and ruin everything we want 'til your democracy’s a joke Like ours
We created Putin We created Putin We created Putin, yeah!
Capitalism has failed Mob corruption everywhere Not true comrade, can’t you see It’s working perfectly
https://songtextes.de/songtexte/jello-biafra-we-created-puti...
We’re more like russia every day
Oligarchs steal everything
Crime families like Kushner and Trumps
To Koch&Head, Zuckergoogle and Bezos chumps
Loot the country, loot the banks
Cook up another ’08 crash
Barrack and Biden chickened
No one went to jail
Kleptocracy’s too big to fail
We created Putin!
By the way, I read a compilation of letters, I believe the title was, "I Love You, Ronnie" and it became clear that Mrs. Nancy was the driving force in his White House. She cared for him in many ways despite his profound incapacity (perhaps like Dr. Jill Biden today) and First Ladies have been ever more emboldened to use very real influence and femininity to complement the Executive branch. Nancy's role was quite downplayed in the film, but any admirer of Jackie or Michele would need to acknowledge the First Lady's accomplishments.
This isn't because the CIA is incompetent. No politicians don't want want to hear what the CIA has to say. The US intelligence services isn't run by some tinker tailor spy spy master. It's just another Washington bureaucrat playing politics.
They train people who speak the language and absorb the culture and their reports are ignored.
Had the leaders reintroduced NEP after Stalin's death in the early 50s ,the Soviet Union would still be around with a GDP of 10 or 15 trillion dollars . China is a Soviet Union with NEP
What? The Soviet economy grew like crazy under Stalin, and he even pushed the Germans back to Berlin. Workers from depression racked Western Europe moved to Russia for work in the 1930s.
It was when Khrushchev took over that the economy began to sink.
My understanding was that the Soviet economy actually boomed from the mid 50s to the late 60s (Khruschev's tenure from 1953-1964) -- but that once Brezhnev took over, that's when it started hitting the brakes.
Over the decades, this difference in growth compounded, until you hit Brezhnev where growth in friction, inefficiency, and corruption exceeded growth in productivity.
And then you had a lot of, uh, degrowth with Yeltsin's shock therapy.
Yeah, yeah. I do not think the neocons would be happy about a democratic Russia with an economy of the size of the U.S. and oil payments settled in rubles.
What nonsense.
I grew up in late stage Communism; the only thing that the dying regimes were reliably producing were impressive, and completely fraudulent, statistics.
On paper, we were all economic tigers, but in the street, people queued in front of the shops whenever something rare, such as washing machines, was promised to be delivered.
And the Soviet Union was even less developed than Czechoslovakia. Plus, the more developed regions like the Baltics didn't want to stay subjugated to Russia.
Russia proper was underdeveloped. No surprise for a country whose access to the sea is limited and distances are absolutely vast. Such places tend to be underdeveloped everywhere - Kazakhstan, inner Congo, inner Brazil, Australian outback, even many places in the flyover US.
Those states could’ve been part of western block and now big chunk of them is slowly drifting to China.
In the immediately post-Soviet era, they were just ghastly.
It is another story in Moldova or Armenia.
"Between 2004 and 2016, one out of five Lithuanians emigrated, primarily due to insufficient income for residents." (Wikipedia)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1016444/total-population...