It seems like a slow motion inevitability.
People's opinions are just so strong.
To make matters worse, seems like the smartphone revolution has provided quick communication channels that magnify the rhetoric.
Forget more information at your finger tips, smartphones and the internet provide easier means of finding like-minded people to raise pitchforks with.
The biggest thing going on is opinion shapers and propagandists have been given powerful tools the 20th century PR men could have only dreamed about. Growth hacking, sentiment analysis, personal network analysis, and deep learning are all things that allow cunning people to do extraordinary things.
Messages can be tested and fine tuned to see which ideas resonate. Communication channels can be established directly to the recipient of your message by creating Facebook groups and the like.
People simply haven't developed this critical thinking skills to defend themselves from this new onslaught of opinion shaping tech whose efficacy is based on very timely data.
I imagine Boyd's Law of Iteration is going to be a huge factor in deciding who wins the new propaganda wars. https://blog.codinghorror.com/boyds-law-of-iteration/
Updated: Minor edits for clarity
I read a Pilger article last year that sent chills down my back:
http://johnpilger.com/articles/a-world-war-has-begun-break-t...
Very sad to see such article from one of the few still supposedly reputable publishers.
Maybe we should stop shelling the east of Ukraine and get out of its south (Crimea)?
Also, economically, I don't think the Soviet Union was in such great shape as you say. A space shuttle is not the same as having an economy that creates surplus wealth in real terms. The war in Afghanistan and having to compete with a West bouncing back from 1970s stagflation were other factors not under Gorbachev's control.
The same will at some point happen to e.g. North Korea or Cuba. It has happened to some of these Arabic regimes: when the top echelons are removed or the repressive nature is relaxed, the entire order collapses, leaving a big void and a population which has less than before. In some cases, much less... (Hopefully, North Korea and Cuba will receive lots of support from their neighbours, so it won't be too bad.)
It may also happen with our financial system, the continuation of which comes with ever escalating costs, top-down intervention, bluff, guarantees and outright financial repression. Like Gorbachev, some politician or bank would accidentally upset the balance and would get the blame. E.g. "he raised the rates too fast". Or "too slow", depending on what actually happens. But in reality you should blame the historical fragility of the system itself. (I like the term Soviet monetarism.)
> He basically ran a superpower into the ground in 6 years flat, from space shuttle to hunger and abject poverty
The Soviet Union was in free fall economically long before Gorbachev. It was a systemic failure. To pile the genocidal failings of 3 generations of communist rule onto the first leader to free his people from that oppression is a terrible perversion of history.
People were happy, had children and believed in their country and made progress in art and science. Then one person who possibly had good intentions "gave everyone freedom". You can't just do that without consequences. It should have been a very gradual transition similar to how it is in China. Instead the country got completely destroyed. Every single thriving industry collapsed and people's savings were worth nothing basically overnight. Police stopped enforcing laws, gangs appeared all over the place, everyone started doing drugs. It was a disaster.
Gorbachev was almost immediately hated throughout the country.
If USSR economy was in free fall, how come GDP per capita was about 2x smaller in Soviet Union compared to USA in 1989 while income distribution was much more even?
Edit: If you believe propaganda in US doesn't exist, look at this law https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...
Those who grew up in Russia in the 90s see this differently.
People had to turn to growing vegetables in their rural cottages (dachas) to survive. Massive unemployment, staggering inflation. Gang leaders elected as mayors and governors who murdered anyone who dared to oppose them.
Does any of this sound like you would want in your country?
Virtually nobody takes Gorbachev seriously no matter their political views.
The referendum results are interesting. Estonian independence referendum results division matches closely the ratio of natives and civilian population of that the occupying power(USSR) transferred into the occupied territory. Same with the voluntary referendums organised by pro-Soviet front-organisations. The count of voters is close to illegal occupant's population. We were lucky. After breaking free we did not suffer such harsh conditions as you have mentioned(Gang leaders elected as mayors and governors who murdered anyone who dared to oppose them.) Economy boosted and living conditions improved drastically every year.
We can safely establish that part of the soviet union wanted to stay together and part of it did not. And the results varied drastically country-by-country - nation-by-nation.
At the same time the Baltic republics always felt like an artificial part of the USSR, only a little closer than e.g. Bulgaria or DDR. The same can't be said of Belarus and Ukraine, which were culturally, ethnically, and territorially more cohesive in the greater whole, and the loss of which was tragic, and has repercussions to this day.
EDIT: Culturally we were even farther from CCCP than Bulgaria, I guess, but that is my opinion only formed from my own experience visiting all those countries You have mentioned.
The key problem with command and control economies in the 20th century was those economies were fundamentally limited by the command's ability to capture accurate market data, learn they key insights about that data and then execute smart decisions.
I'm not claiming China is capable of doing that today, but information technology has significantly improved the efficacy of the leadership's influence on economic activity. However, they were also wise enough to distribute the work of optimising markets by allowing business owners and capital investors to benefit from the efficiencies they introduce.
Simply put: The Communist Party of China has been using a very different playbook for the past 30 years and they've benefitted significantly and the effect of IT has had a profound impact on their efficacy.
Let's see how the Chinese communist party handles a situation where the low hanging fruit of pedal-to-the-metal big percentage GDP growth has been picked.
But we seem to have strayed off course somewhat.
Russians - may be, All the other oppressed and occupied nations - no. Cant vouch for other but almost every Estonian secretly hoped for freedom and despised Russians. When our chance came we acted swiftly. Soviet Union was just another form of Russian Empire and a way to try to control the world.
The Soviet Union, when Gorbachev took over, had spent itself to the brink of collapse in a decades long military spending competition with the richest nation on the planet and it's rich allies, and papered over that with propaganda, which was itself weakening after some notable and hard to cover up setbacks.
Gorbachev pulled back some of the veil of propaganda simultaneously with (and as part of) trying to engineer a soft landing. It's true he largely failed, but I doubt anyone could have done much better (an authoritarian might have managed to paper over things longer and direct blame at external actor when the bottom eventually fell out, and by doing so remained more popular at home -- at least, among Russians if not the rest of the people under Soviet rule.)
I think much of the perception that things were his fsult is a result of pre-Gorbachev propaganda (mostly Soviet, but also Western propaganda about the strength of the USSR that served to shore up support for the Western side of the spending war.)