The careerists joined the "democrats" who were free-market capitalists intent on capturing power and stealing everything with no thought for the morrow. The leadership of the reorganized Russian Communist party initially did fight the "democrats" tooth and nail as their tens of millions of supporters wanted, but they were literally killed with tanks in 1993 for using the legal powers of the parliament. The remaining leaders became controlled opposition - putting up a show of fighting, and thus winning elections, but caving behind the scenes over and over until their support dwindled into nothing. In exchange, the leaders are all comfortable members of the oligarchic capitalist ruling elite.
In the other republics - it depends. Eastern European states had stronger influence of foreign diasporas (especially the Baltics+Ukraine) so capitalists using Western-sponsored nationalist propaganda campaigns took power leaving communists a minority - or banned outright. (In Belarus there was later a pro-communist reaction that put Lukashenko in power who was the best at preserving the Soviet system intact. In Moldova there was a anti-nationalist regional reaction by the most ethnically diverse part of the country leading to war and a frozen conflict.) In the Caucasus and Central Asia the party elites had no opposition, so they consolidated an authoritarian central rule under whatever guise fit the local situation: reformed socialism, democracy, or this-guy-is-the-father-of-the-people-with-the-biggest-dick-everyone-follow-him-forever.
Except in Tajikistan, where there was a brutal civil war between the government and Islamists influenced from Afghanistan (since there're more Tajiks in Afghanistan than in Tajikistan). And in Georgia, where there was a political civil war within Georgia proper and a series of ethnic wars with its own minority republics of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Ajaria.
Everywhere, nationalism pitting ethnicities against each other was the biggest ideological alternative to communism and whoever happened to take control of state power (which also meant all military and economic assets) was pretty much able to defeat the opposition, whether it was committed communists or anyone else.
theres no greater example of this than armenia and azerbeijan the last 30 years. the aliyev family patriarch was a member of the KGB.
Why you making me sad? Like, this is "Le Wrong Generation", but for leftists.
maybe if we stand outside her window playing the internationale on a boombox?
Pretty wild to think if Kruschev hadn't given a speech, then a massive multinational economic and political structure would never have collapsed. Really neat how it's revisionism that is the cause and that history is driven by the action of conscious historical actors and not larger forces connected to the underlying conditions of production.
As Karl Marx famously said: "All history is the history of party intrigues."
Without the post Stalin revisions and reforms commodity production without official market competition and other contradictions would have likely led to a similar outcome, but the course could have still been variant with differences.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, etc.
and then the Central Committee & KGB launched an air invasion of the russian parliament & kidnapped the general secretary to stop the vote to preserve the union from going into affect because it would have reduced the CC & KGB's power & in the process dealt the killing blow to the union lol
were they against that coup? I've never heard anything about the US's involvement in the august coup
According to the english wiki article Bush made a big frown about it and send a letter with big red bold letters against the coup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat_attempt#United_States
BUT
According to the spanish wiki article, citing the book "For The President's Eyes Only" by Christopher Andrew, Bush sent intel info the NSA had caught between the coup plotters to Boris Yeltsin in order to stop the coup.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intento_de_golpe_de_Estado_en_la_Uni%C3%B3n_Sovi%C3%A9tica#Papel_de_EE._UU.
They knew Gorby and Yeltsin were fucking things up, so a coup against them is not good news
were they fucking things up? They were attempting to enact reform in accordance with the popular support for keeping the soviet union together but in a different form, and from the breakaway of the Baltic states which kicked off that drive for reform there weren't any other declarations of independence until immediately after the coup attempt, except for Lithuania which held a referendum right before the august coup with a 90+% support for independence as a direct result of soviet forces attacking them the day after Yeltsin's election who were headed by a general who later perpetrated the august coup. Seems to me it was Kryuchkov & Yanayev who fucked things up, convinced the republics that any reform that would quell their separatist movements would trigger a civil war and the only way their leaders could stave off the possibility of getting whacked either way was to just break away entirely.
You are fooling yourself if you think I knew anything you just mentioned. Idk, being supported by The Big Satan is a kiss of death to me.
tldr; the people who did the coup against gorbachev & yeltsin were also the people who were driving the union into collapse. The month before they attacked parliament to stop the vote to keep the union together from being enacted (& succeeding) they were in lithuania shooting nearly a thousand civilians and causing lithuania to break away.
& I dont like any theory that prescribes the power to predict the future to Bush. I think he supported both sides so he could claim to have opposed whichever side won. If he supports one side publicly then provides their enemies material support in secret, if they lose he can reveal his material support and claim the support was just posturing, if they win he can sweep the material support under the rug and claim the denouncement was the real deal. Or some order of those words, I'm too tired to check that I phrased that correctly
also I just wanted to say, I think this is the first time I've talked to anyone about the Soviet Union & mentioned an event they werent studied up on and they just admitted that they didn't know about instead of committing whatever cognitive dissonance they need to fold that event into whatever narrative they're trying to propagate at the moment without actually looking it up. It's... it's almost like... I'm free of reddit? Oh my god is this what it feels like to be free of reddit???
It really is nice to be surrounded of cool people.
Btw, when in r*ddit talking about, basically anything, you have 99% of chance of being interacting with a dipshit, so in that case I would stan the soviet union despite not knowing shit about it. Among cool people, of course shit is complicated and we can shit on everything together.
haha what if we did this but for the USA, no that's stupid, unless?? 😍
Pretty meaningless except to show that 70% of people liked the idea of a powerful union. Doesn't say anything about communism really.
Like a few months later Yeltsin won 60% of the vote in Russia - and I know there was a soft coup involved in his victory, but still, that's a terrible result for a country with such a strong communist history.
Similar thing happens with strong political leaders, like there are genuinely people who like Lenin, Stalin and then also Putin -- doesn't matter that Putin's ideology goes against everything they stood for, they just like to have a strong daddy in charge. Same with this, some people just stan the idea of the badass USSR without any care what political party is controlling it. Most regular people's ideologies are a fucking incoherent mess.
EDIT: I remember watching some video on youtube of some dude reacting to a video about "what if Yugoslavia reunited today" and when the video brought up "communism would need to be restored" the dude watching the video was confused as fuck and goes "why is communism important in this?" And he was a Yugoslavia simp for Christ's sake.
Pretty meaningless except to show that 70% of people liked the idea of a powerful union. Doesn’t say anything about communism really.
I just want to respond to this that the Russian parliament in 1992 and 1993 had a majority of members who were opposed to Yeltsin's reforms, and the conflict led to Yeltsin illegally disbanding it and sending the army to the Russian parliament and bombing it which led to 180 deads according to official sources (over 2000 according to the communist party. In the subsequent 1995 election the communist party got a plurality of the votes, but all the bourgeois parties made a coalitian against them.
I know, I acknowledged the coup in my post -- that doesn't change the fact that a couple months after this Soviet Union referendum, more than 70% of Russians came out to vote in the Presidental elections, and 60% voted for Yeltsin.
People in the former Eastern Bloc thought images of homeless people were doctored by the communist party, they didn't believe an advanced industrial society would allow something like that to exist. The same is true for statistics about homelessness, poverty and so on in the West. They believed the social system that existed in their countries would continue to exist after they "became democratic". When they actually got a taste of free market capitalism, opinions changed, like the Yeltsin coup showed.
Also, don't forget the massive amount the US governement invested in Yeltsin his reelection.
I'm not saying the vote was fair, or that the people weren't tricked or sold a bunch of lies, etc
My point is, this post makes it seem like that in 1991, 70% of people in the USSR were still communists or something like that, and I don't think that's the case. I think like 30-40% were actual communist and the rest are just like any regular voter anywhere else in the world -- if things aren't going great, they'll vote for the other most popular option no matter how insanely different it is. Voting for the Soviet Union and then for Yeltsin in a span of a few months? That's a perfect example of how idiotic and ineffective lib democracy is -- similar to stuff we see all the time in other countries today.
EDIT: lol why is this getting downvoted? Do people really think a majority of Soviet citizens loved communism or identified as communists in 1991 and then 9 years later like 70% of them were voting for Putin? Come on.
EDIT 2: Just to make it clear, I'm not in support of the Soviet Union falling apart, I'm saying liberal democracy is a sham and is used to get people to vote against their own self-interests, and that most people aren't inherently ideological. If things are going good, they'll like the current government, if things are going poorly, they'll dislike the government - doesn't matter if things going well/poorly is actually due to the actions of that government.
You're being downvoted because while the substance of what you're saying is fine, your first line (and thus ostensibly your thesis) is an emotional rejection of preserving the USSR/AES: "Pretty meaningless".
Like, yeah, this doesn't mean 80% of the Soviets were committed Marxists. But most people in most places aren't ever going to be ideologically committed to anything. They do just care about having basic stability and their needs being met.
But 80% of the Soviet people had associated a Communist government with a basically good life (DESPITE the late 1980s being an era of reaction and every scandal in the history of the USSR being aired).
When neoliberals win elections today they throw it in our faces - "We won! You lost! Nobody supports Sanders/Corbyn/Varoufakis!" And the media agrees with that - "you're a minority of radicals who'll never succeed in the real world, gtfo". But they only win because enough people associate the status quo with a basically good life.
So when we do win - it's not "meaningless". It's something to embrace, to celebrate. Don't be a defeatist.
Like kilternkafuffle basically said, you're being completely pedantic and don't understand that a majority in any country is never completely ideologically motivated. Do you think a majority of Americans are really liberals (in the proper sense) who support capitalism in any concrete way? No, and the evidence is in a number of things, including that over 100 million Americans don't (or sometimes can't) even vote in elections. Bernie Sanders got very high support even though he calls himself a Democratic socialist and they (mildly) red-baited against him. People care about their material reality, not whether some form of worker ownership is going to improve their lives. People want the end result, they don't care about the means to achieve it. The goal of socialists/communists is to associate a better life with socialism, which is exactly what the Soviet Union did for most of the people who lived in it and many people around the world, from China to Chile.
