11-10-2019, 06:12 PM
(11-10-2019, 08:48 AM)Isoko Wrote: Well to begin with Warren, the generation that fondly remembers the Soviet Union primarily focus on the Khruschev and Brezhnev era where there was more of a opening up of the Soviet Union and the country had essentially rebuilt itself. Apart from the lack of consumer goods like jeans etc, the vast majority had access to food, good healthcare and quality education, from what I have been told. To them, there was a real progress in their lives and they seemed content with the system.
Gorbachev on the other hand is very hated by the vast majority of Russians as they see that he essentially opened up forces that led to the destruction of the Ussr. In reality though it was the soviet elites who destroyed it as they fancied western capitalism over soviet communism where as the rank and file were happy to see it continued, albeit with improvements.
Thanks - interesting! This view seems rather divorced from reality, but I have to remember that these people were rather young at the time and it's not as if the Soviet Union had a free press.
In reality, the centrally planned Soviet economy resulted in major food shortfalls starting by 1972, a decade before Brezhnev left power. Russians would have starved if the US hadn't sold them millions of tonnes of wheat per year for the next two decades. The inflationary effects on food prices in the West were highly publicized, but the Soviet press might have kept things quiet.
This is in fact what caused the Soviet elites to consider free market capitalism: the ready availability of all sorts of food in the US, as opposed to the Soviet Union where meat was kept under lock and key. Introduction of some elements of a free market have been a great success in this respect; in place of being the dependent on massive food imports to avoid starvation, Russia is now the world's biggest exporter of wheat.
It's sad if a substantial fraction of the Russian population don't realize this. That said, if the younger people are happy with going in the direction of a liberal economy, as the rest of your posts seem to say, they should be okay as the older people die off.
Quote:The dislike of America is mainly due to politics and great power posturing. Most seem America as infringing on their sovereignty with the military bases and Nato border exercises. For others it is the traditional cold War rivalry. Some even blame America for the collapse of the Soviet Union. So its a mixed bag. They don't hate the individual American but the American government is heavily viewed with distrust.
Blaming America for the collapse of the Soviet Union is certainly legitimate; that was the primary foreign policy goal of the US for half a century. In the 1980s, we found the winning strategy of spending enough on the military that the Soviet Union had to choose between feeding its people and keeping up militarily, and it chose to feed its people and collapse. Frankly, I'm proud to have contributed to that.
What's unfortunate is that the US didn't take advantage of the opportunity to develop friendly relationships and a strong, mutually beneficial trade ties - and to a lesser extent, that we didn't take the opportunity to grossly reduce the threat of nuclear weapons. Sadly, too many American still see Russia through Cold War eyes - and it sounds like that's a mutual feeling.