Social_Critic wrote:(I was in the business before many of you were born)
Aww spare me this crap! I was there, so despite the massive flaws in my claims, I'm right. I'm old, so I'm right. I don't actually know very much about the Soviet system in the 1980s, so I'll keep referring to Cuba in the 21st century instead. At least you haven't dropped any more meaningless names or appealled to cartoonish parables.
You know what? Since nothing I can say can convince you (since I'm not older, more there, or more knowledgeable about Cuba
) and doing so seems to only prompt another spray of rubbish on your part, I'm not responding to your rubbish further.
Beren wrote:Gorbachev was too late and he tried to save a socio-economic system and country unstoppably collapsing.
Gorbachev himself didn't actually think that he inherited a collapsing system. His actually called it a "pre-crisis situation".
Beren wrote:I don't think any of that, but Gorbachev could have become the leader of the USSR and he had to do what he did because the country and its socio-economic system were in crisis and collapsing due to inner failures and Cold War.
Gorbachev may have been required to act to improve the situation, but the specific solutions he chose were not actually the result of the economic situation. Everyone forgets that Gorbachev didn't go to Perestroika (restructuring) staight out the gate, instead he went to Uskorenie (acceleration) pretty well until 1987. Uskorenie bore a lot of similarity to Andropov-era efforts at improving economic performance, which figures since Gorbachev owed a lot to Andropov. Since Uskorenie failed to have the desired impact he sought liberal solutions, in essense his second personal preference. Glasnost wasn't really required to resolve the economic problems (see the PRC as a counter-example), but somehow he decided to include that anyway.
Beren wrote:You mentioned another time and another place. The Chinese began their reforms just in time, the USSR was 10 years late at least when Gorbachev came to power and that was the primary reason of the collapse of the USSR, not Gorbachev and his reforms. The USSR was a lost case then already.
There really isn't any feeling about the Soviet collapse however that suggested they somehow ran out of time or resources, so I don't agree that the timing of reform was the key element. Instead I think it is clear that Gorbachev's reforms got out of control, largely because of his style of non-intervention (demonstrated by the Sinatra doctrine) and the particular mechanisms he lost by chosing the style of political reforms. So Gorbachev was unable to intervene in the economy, to deal with the contradictions created by his hybrid system. Gorbachev was unable to shape the new debates that emerged. And so on.
Even Gorbachev and the Soviet Union wasn't totally stuffed by runaway reform until the August coup attempt. Given the large representation of the defence and intelligence complex in the Gang of Eight I think it might even be a bit too far a stretch to pass this off as simply the last gasp of the old nomenklatura. Espcially since Gorbachev, in another stellar act of decision making, promoted most of them to their positions of authority prior to the coup.