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The collapse of the Soviet Union as it was was inevitable. Gorbachev recognized it and tried to do something about it. Given the gargantuan challenge, Gorbachev's odds of success were not great to begin with. At least he was wise enough to shepherd its demise peacefully. In any case, the world without the Soviet Union is undoubtedly a better place.

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Gorbachev said that one of the things that shocked and demoralized him was when he visited Houston and took a trip to one of the typical supermarkets, a locally owned one not part of any nationwide chain or anything.

When he saw that average Americans were enjoying consumer choices well beyond anything the highest echelons in the USSR could attain, he was never quite the same after that.

Are you sure that was Gorbachev and not Yeltsin? There's even a famous photo of the latter at an American store.

I believe you are thinking about Yeltsin (unless both visited a Texas supermarket and were surprised to discover how well stocked it was).

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/trending...

> In any case, the world without the Soviet Union is undoubtedly a better place.

Is it, though? Putin's Russia is no better than the Soviet Union - in some ways worse. It's essentially a mafia state run by one thug. One could imagine a different scenario where Gorbachev would have been able to land the plane in a bit more of a controlled fashion and stayed around to transition to something that would look more like a European democracy - but of course, things got way too chaotic for him to stay on.

Imagine if the US hadn't gone in and come up with 'voucher privatization' which essentially created the oligarchs (and which in my mind seems to have been designed so that investment groups could take over but the mechanism got co-opted by the oligarchs).

That happened in all other countries too. Ukraine had oligarchs, Chezchia and Romania have them. Its just russian oligarchs got hold on infinite money glitch which is oil production and the country overcorrected by going full dictatorship

> in a bit more of a controlled fashion

The guiding intellectual principle in the US at the time w.r.t. the economy of the ex-USSR was "You can't cross a canyon in two leaps". This was what passed for intelligent thought.

For those who lived in the occupied areas like Poland, it certainly is.

It transitioned into a demicracy a-okay, the problem was -- russians never had any kind of democracy and it quickly descended into oligarchy, from which they overcorrected to dictatorship quite willingly.

Every other ussr and soviet-aligned country got it going somehow.

Nobody cares about democracy though. People want jobs, supermarkets, houses and cars.

The Americans actually understood this which is why they focused on the economy when they helped Japan and Europe to rebuild after the war.

> into a demicracy a-okay

Well considering that Yeltsin had to order the army to shell the Russian parliament less than 2 years after the USSR was dissolved that somewhat arguable.

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