Comment by Herring
12 days ago
Empires come and go, that's just a fact of life. The question was whether they'd fall back relatively gracefully like (Western) Europe, now with multiple countries ranking at the top of "World's Happiest Countries", or whether they'll become Russia 2.0 with the biggest guns, richest oligarchs, and the worst quality of life.
It's still far from played out, but right now they're solidly on the road to Russia 2.0, with decades-long trends pointing that way.
The fall of the Soviet Union was arguably more graceful than the two world wars and myriad of colonial worlds it took Europe butt out. Even if you exclude the world wars it probably holds.
The fall of the Soviet Union was anything but graceful. Within months of the dissolution of the USSR Russia had children becoming prostitutes in order to get money for food.
In 1986/87 top USSR newspapers were covering high class prostitution for foreign businessmen in Moscow hotels. A few years later, foreign currency prostitute was ranked among most desirable occupations for women in an anonymous poll.
The Fall of the Soviet Union may not have been graceful to the Russians but it was certainly graceful to the people the Soviet Empire was exploiting in Eastern Europe.
People in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and so on probably would use the word graceful to describe the USSR's end.
(And yes I know Poland wasn't part of the USSR but it was a satelite state).
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I think the current Russia-Ukraine war is the delayed end of Soviet Union collapse.
Boris Yeltsin in Aug 1991 called for "Russian Federation to reserve the right to review its borders with any adjacent republic" [0]. Yeltsin did that for a couple of weeks - until Leonid Kravchuk (Ukraine's last Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR and Republic of Ukraine's first president) said he will not support Yeltsin in dissolving USSR. By then the Baltics were already independent countries, but Yeltsin still needed Ukraine's Belarus' and Kazakhstan's support to get rid of Gorbachev.
So Yeltsin acquiesced the borders at that time, four months followed up with the Belovezha Accords and USSR dissolved without a fight a couple of weeks later.
I think what we see today is are some repressed conflicts being fought out in the open.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/27/world/soviet-turmoil-yelt... - free to read with NYT registration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_territory...
Very graceful.
The sum total of the fatalities column on that page is joke compared to even the most optimistic assessment of how the British middle east or French Indochina went, and that's before you add in all the crap in Africa.
Edit: You could probably even include the current Ukraine shindig and my statement would still hold.
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The end of the empires of Western Europe was not graceful. Not even close.
It may seem that way because the countries within Western Europe that had done the empires are now stable and prosperous but what about the countries of Africa and Asia? The ones who had been part of those same empires of Western Europe?
If you talk to people in these countries of Africa and Asia I think you would find that people there would strongly dispute the idea that the empires of Western Europe ended in any way that could be called "graceful"
Yes I meant now they have reasonably stable anti-fascist institutions, unlike Russia.