Alright, imma need you to tap the breaks for a minute. The Soviet Union was a lot of good things, but it still had all the old hang-ups of Western White Chauvanism dragging it down, even to the bitter end.
be 25 years away from reaching parity with the Western world
I feel like this was the mentality that crippled the USSR. They were still always and forever playing catch-up to the Western World's consumerist imperial core. It was never enough to simply live well. They all had to live as well as the marginal petite bourgeois suburbanite. They bought into the lie of "Every Man A King" and traded out old petty bureaucrats for new oligarchs and despots.
original communist party becomes so popular
It did not become popular. United Russia subsumed the Communist movement and transformed it into the modern white supremacist state. The folks who were rebelling against Yeltsin hated the Shock Doctrine economics imposed by the newly integrated Russian economy. But they did not hate the Pizza Huts. They did not hate the Mercedes cars or the Kentucky Bourbon or the various treats that came with the end of the Cold War. They did not hate the system that made the treats, just the treat-eater at its head.
So when Yeltsin's government fell apart, Vladimir Putin was able to make of his nation a new Treat Machine and appease all the angry Russians who so desperately wanted to be as fat and happy as the Americans they saw on TV.
Alright, imma need you to tap the breaks for a minute. The Soviet Union was a lot of good things, but it still had all the old hang-ups of Western White Chauvanism dragging it down, even to the bitter end.
I feel like this was the mentality that crippled the USSR. They were still always and forever playing catch-up to the Western World's consumerist imperial core. It was never enough to simply live well. They all had to live as well as the marginal petite bourgeois suburbanite. They bought into the lie of "Every Man A King" and traded out old petty bureaucrats for new oligarchs and despots.
It did not become popular. United Russia subsumed the Communist movement and transformed it into the modern white supremacist state. The folks who were rebelling against Yeltsin hated the Shock Doctrine economics imposed by the newly integrated Russian economy. But they did not hate the Pizza Huts. They did not hate the Mercedes cars or the Kentucky Bourbon or the various treats that came with the end of the Cold War. They did not hate the system that made the treats, just the treat-eater at its head.
So when Yeltsin's government fell apart, Vladimir Putin was able to make of his nation a new Treat Machine and appease all the angry Russians who so desperately wanted to be as fat and happy as the Americans they saw on TV.