• Thomas_Dankara [any,comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Gorbachev said in an interview in Turkey in 2000 "My ambition was to liquidate Communism." and establish a "Union of Independent Sovereign Republics" and to basically help America fight China. So he wanted a return of bourgeois nationalism, and a fully capitalist mode of production, but without dissolving the USSR, and with the addition of social democracy, which would rely on imperialism. It was a very naive in my opinion.

    • Capaedia [he/him,any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      That interview is monstrous bearing in mind what happened what he did to the Soviet living standard

      • Thomas_Dankara [any,comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I think on a long enough timeline it could be said Gorbachev killed more people than WW2. Because what he really did was he dismantled the nation best equipped to handle climate change, and to help others handle climate change. :doomjak:

        • Mardoniush [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          While the Soviets had some terrible environmental policies (their role in whaling, for instance.) on the whole they were better than the USA, and they were concerned about climate change in the mid 70s, and established the first predictive models about it.

        • Capaedia [he/him,any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I was thinking about something similar this morning actually. Maybe the USA would've felt more coerced to take action on COVID with the USSR instead of China. Similar to the Smallpox situation

          If nothing else, we would've had another truly major distributor of vaccines to the third world rather than just China and to a lesser extent Russia

          • Thomas_Dankara [any,comrade/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Also being able to actually plan the economy instead of just letting the market decide everything allows you to re-prioritize away from endlessly profiting off of fossil fuels and towards alternative sources of energy at a system-wide level.

        • SaniFlush [any, any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          We live in the stupidest timeline… but we don’t get to pick what we’re born into, we only get to pick what we fight for.

      • Thomas_Dankara [any,comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        He wanted to rename it "Union of Independent Sovereign Republics". Basically he wanted to turn the USSR into "America: Eastern Edition". His naivete was in imagining that America could tolerate a rival of any variety.