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?
Khrushchev had a problem to turn the USSR from the industrial economy it had under Stalin to the technological power it needed to become a lot of Stalin's policies regarding policing needed to be changed. However Stalin had been built up into such a legend that this legend would not allow changes to be made without Stalin loyalists turning on the new leader of the soviet union
When he was alive Stalin was an able economist and for all his other flaws a commited socialist but Stalin was dead and a dead man cannot be in charge anymore or the country would become a mausoleum to him.
Khrushchev was smart enough to appreciate the problem but not quite smart enough to solve it non destructively and after him the leaders of the Soviet union had less and less actual education in Marxism