I was always under the impression that Gorbachev was a naïve optimist who tried to reform the USSR too rapidly, but failed. So how exactly did he screw up and how could the USSR have been saved?
I was always under the impression that Gorbachev was a naïve optimist who tried to reform the USSR too rapidly, but failed. So how exactly did he screw up and how could the USSR have been saved?
He got western brain and believed in efficiency of the markets, which allowed people to extract money from insane disbalances between prices in the factories and black market. So factories balance sheets got completely fucked, but they couldn’t raise prices, because they have government mandates, and have to sell stuff.
He should have done either: central planning (now with computers), internet (now with ogas) and cybersyn, switch to labor accounting and do market, return factory control to unions and decentralize, don’t do afghanistan outside of sending weapons, send out dissidents, allow second party on slightly different platform, return power to local ssr (stop russian chauvinism shenanigans)
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Considering popularity of ussr on the eve of dissolution, they would have shed maybe eastern europe (but they weren’t in ussr in any case) with two parties, but second party could have easily be constructed to be trotskyite or anarchist (I.e. something that’s not very attached to the west).
They were brainwormed at the top and middle, but not at the bottom. Local ssr is hard to navigate, considering absolute rot they were in, but it would have been better if they have done it via local sortition among workers of the ssr