So what was the real reason the Soviet Union collapsed?
>>883350
massive prevalence of FAS.
Everyone was drunk and didn't realize what they were doing. Woke up with a hangover and eltsin and bush in bed and it was too late.
>and then, things got worse
The seeds of the Soviet collapse were sown not long after its birth with the multiple betrayals of the revolution.
First you had the dissolution of the soviets as worker councils and turning them instead into federal administrative units, essentially destroying the grassroots character of the communism they sought to create. There was also the fact that the Bolsheviks, by their own admission, established a state capitalist system in an effort to modernize/industrialize Russia, but let it slip out of their hands to the point where Lenin probably couldn't have reversed course if he wanted to.
Speaking of Lenin: he died too early. We can't say for certain how he would have handled administrating the new Soviet state, but we can guess what it might have been like based on the two successors that claimed to carry the torch for his dream and theory: Stalin and Trotsky. Both of these parties had very different ideas on what the Soviet Union should become both internally and as a part of the larger worldwide worker's struggle. Stalin saw no issue with maintaining the state capitalist apparatus as operated through a extensive bureaucracy, and believed that the internal affairs of Russia was a higher priority than any larger revolutionary goals (Socialism in One Country). Trotsky was anti-bureaucratic, but similarly authoritarian in his attitudes towards party leadership of the worker's state. He, in contrast to Stalin, wanted the success of the Russian Revolution to only act as the springboard for further revolution abroad (Permanent Revolution).
Regardless of intent, Stalin's internally-focused, ruso-centric, bureaucratic state capitalist policies set a tone for the USSR that would ultimately result in reforms to the state not in the direction of turning power over to the workers as was initially intended, but to growing private interests within and orbiting the state.
>>883350
Those two articles in the center and the far bottom match up prophetically
the people wanted memes
>>883748
Found the trot.
>>883748
*sniff* pure ideology
the soviet union was destined to become a totalitarian dictatorship even if it had Reinhard von Lohengramm at the helm
literally this >>883852
In every country there is an elite well under 1% of the population yet numbering in the 1000s. This community forms a hivemind which cannot be directly controlled by whatever few members of the elite form the clique at the very top of the hierarchy.
Someone like Stalin or Mao had a lot of control over the few top rungs of the ladder, but not every single person. Some local administrator had a little leg room to bend the rules without anyone ever finding out, how they used this leg room depended on state memes.
The CIA recognized its importance funding things like modern art and spreading our free market memes while remaining deadly silent about the true power of meme magic, the Soviet Union would have to employ North Korea level censorship to prevent this from happening, they tried, but the elite would never truly comply, they weren't convinced memes were that big of a deal. They just wanted some burgers, coca cola and jeans etcetera... People openly broke the rules and the state knew it was futile to prevent it. Since the elite were doing it the middle classes joined in and it snowballed from there.
>>883350
Yeltsin was a greedy piece of shit, that's what it comes down to. He wanted Russia to be independent so he could loot it more effectively.
He made up bullshit stories about being impressed by puddin pops for western cameras, but he is just a typical sovok piggy fattening himself on the misery of the people. Gorbachev wanted smart, slow reforms. Yeltsin gave us 'shock therapy'. Worst part is people blame Gorbachev for fucking us over when he was trying to ease USSR into making reasonable reforms. If Yeltsin and his faggot friends didn't pull the rug out from under the USSR, it would still exist. Baltic states and maybe Caucasus would have left, and good fucking riddance, all are shitholes. But it is a historical crime to have separated the Slavic republics and to give independence to horribly unprepared central asian shitholes.
Keep in mind, that the referendum to end the USSR succeeded everywhere it was held by large margins, and not because vote was manipulated. Ukrainians, other than weirdo nazis who belonged in jail (under 1% of the population) and some Poles in West Ukraine, did not resent Russians. Unfortunately after independence these idiots snuck into education and supported Bandera and those like him as heroes and forced all kinds of lies down the throats of a generation. Putin's reaction in Ukraine (granted it was necessary to retake crimea, but this donbass insurgency is wasteful) just furthers this idiotic separation. It's like USA and Canada fighting, it's stupid.
Yeltsin killed an entire nation with his greed and there are some fucking idiot children who think he was superior to Putin in some way.
>>883350
I don't think it actually collapsed until 2014 per se. Originally the most supported idea was reforming Soviet Union to a "Union of Sovereign States", and most people were more or less fine with it. Aside from Baltic states, there were no talks of actual independence at all among the Soviet republics.
Then August Coup happened, and even local commie elites understood that nothing good was going to come out of it. It was a typical mistake of any hardliner faction, really: extreme actions force people to pull away even if they were just fine with status quo. Then again, the coup leaders themselves were pathetic: Yanayev's shaking hands were the laughing stock back in the day.
However, Russia had still held considerable influence over most ex-USSR republics. Different states had different degrees of it, from Tajikistan which had a civil war and Russian army was the one actually keeping the country together, various frozen conflicts started by Russia itself in order to exert influence over countries that had them (Transnistria, Abkhazia etc) to Belarus that is still a Soviet republic in all ways that count. Ukraine was an oddball here but due to metal being its main export income provider, Russia managed to keep it in its sphere to a degree. West was just fine with it too, considering Russia to be a guarantor of security and stability in the region nobody really cared about. Countries had independence de jure but de facto it was far from it.
In other words, I think that "Union of Sovereign States" model was the one that actually came into reality after 1991, even though it had a different name like CIS, though one can argue it had no name at all. I think we're witnessing the collapse of Soviet Union only now.
>>884442
Autism is truly the 21st century plague.
