There are a lot of ways to break crowds up into 2 groups. One of them is the people who believe reality is more important vs. people who are convinced that The Narrative is more important. Really interesting debate - the narrative people are usually right and they certainly have the numbers but when the reality people have a point it is rather overwhelming. Narratives cannot overcome economics.
This article seems to be a narrative person's perspective. Once the Communists gave up control of the media, blam. Game over. The realist argument would probably be that reforming to a justice system with some integrity and adopting some policies to score consecutive years of 10% growth was all they needed to keep treading water. People do make reference to their actual real-world experiences when pushing for change in government.
> In fact, in 2006, Gorbachev pinpointed Chernobyl and the resulting media fallout as the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I just struggle to accept that Gorbachev was being intellectually honest with this one. Is that really where he assigned the blame? The USSR had real economic and legal problems. The US had spent decades showing up just how bad Soviet policies were.
The USSR had real problems but something like Chernobyl exposed the out in the open. Had it been a chemical event, the Soviets might have still gotten away with it. But a nuclear event with thousands of eye witnesses and even more people responsible for clean-up? And fallout that spread across the entirety of Europe?
We kind of saw a similar process in the beginning of COVID, when China was actively suppressing information internally. But it may not have had the same results because of deeper state centralization and information control, as well as other countries having to bother with the same issue. Yet it still sparked a number of protests across China, due to directly or indirectly being affected by COVID-19.
Narrative people vs reality people maps quite well to the left/right split.
Gorbachev probably did assign blame to Chernobyl. The USSR collapsed not due to internal revolution but because the people at the very top of the system became so demoralized they basically gave up on it. Key people just stopped fighting to defend the system, and the event that demoralized them was a bit different for each.
If you look at the career trajectory of Yeltsin, who never gets enough credit for the ending of the USSR, then it's a very clear case of someone at the top levels of the Soviet system suddenly realizing just how far ahead the US was in its provision of consumer surplus. The USSR was very effective at censoring information, including from people very high up the ladder. He visited a Randalls supermarket as part of a diplomatic mission to NASA and after realizing it wasn't staged or fake, it changed him forever. He became an outspoken critic of the system from the inside, which destabilized the regime. He was exiled from power and the pressure nearly killed him as part of this, but the other Soviets never did put a bullet in his head in the way they might have done in an earlier era.
Why not? Well, perhaps because the experience of dealing with Chernobyl had sapped their confidence so much. It's easy to overlook what an absolutely massive drain on the USSR's resources and time of senior party officials it was. And because everyone knew, and everyone knew everyone knew, it dealt a huge blow to their own ability to shape the view of the Soviet system. They suddenly had to divert vast resources and years of time to cleaning up a huge disaster of their own making. Undoubtably this demoralized Gorbachev significantly, and many others.
> The realist argument would probably be that reforming to a justice system with some integrity and adopting some policies to score consecutive years of 10% growth was all they needed to keep treading water.
"all they needed" - as if that's easy to achieve consistently for decades.
In the end what killed it was the combination of stagnation and the ability to freely talk about it.
This article seems to be a narrative person's perspective. Once the Communists gave up control of the media, blam. Game over. The realist argument would probably be that reforming to a justice system with some integrity and adopting some policies to score consecutive years of 10% growth was all they needed to keep treading water. People do make reference to their actual real-world experiences when pushing for change in government.
> In fact, in 2006, Gorbachev pinpointed Chernobyl and the resulting media fallout as the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I just struggle to accept that Gorbachev was being intellectually honest with this one. Is that really where he assigned the blame? The USSR had real economic and legal problems. The US had spent decades showing up just how bad Soviet policies were.