Mikhail Gorbachev has died

[littlebabyjesus]

Supposedly the view in China having watched perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (freedom) play out so tragically was one of we'll just do the perestroika bit and hold back on the glasnost (was told that by someone who lived in china at the time)

I'm not sure the timings work for that. The Tiananmen Square massacre happened on 4 June 1989. The breakup of the Soviet Union had already started by then, but it still wasn't clear how it would end. Strikes me that China stepped in to halt any thought of glasnost pretty sharpish and for its own reasons.

 

[Combustible]

This "NATO promised not to expand eastwards" really really needs evidencing though. Because as I said, as I understand it no such promise was ever made. If it was, that ought to be well documented, maybe even reported on at the time? (Sounds like a big promise tbh)

Someone here should be able to find those sources.

It was James Baker but to Yeltsin not Gorbachev. It seems very likely he made verbal assurances (as did John Major and Helmut Kohl), which were then rolled back on by Bush who limited the no eastward expansion to Germany.

 

[JimW]

I'm not sure the timings work for that. The Tiananmen Square massacre happened on 4 June 1989. The breakup of the Soviet Union had already started by then, but it still wasn't clear how it would end. Strikes me that China stepped in to halt any thought of glasnost pretty sharpish and for its own reasons.

He'd visited just prior and was supposed to have got hopes up by the standard account iirc.

 

[ska invita]

I'm not sure the timings work for that. The Tiananmen Square massacre happened on 4 June 1989. The breakup of the Soviet Union had already started by then, but it still wasn't clear how it would end. Strikes me that China stepped in to halt any thought of glasnost pretty sharpish and for its own reasons.

if post-Soviet Russia hadnt collapsed so spectacularly though it might've played out differently in China over time

 

[Combustible]

Supposedly the view in China having watched perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (freedom) play out so tragically was one of we'll just do the perestroika bit and hold back on the glasnost (was told that by someone who lived in china at the time)

Economic reforms in China predate perestroika, if anything the Soviet reformers in the leadership even pre Gorbachev were trying to follow China's example.

 

[Jeff Robinson]

By all accounts Gorby wanted to reform the USSR to be more like a Scandinavian-style social democracy not the gangster-nationalist-oligarch shithole Russia is today. To what degree can he blamed for the Russian basket case verses the Yeltsin pissed up barbarian clique?

 

[ska invita]

It was James Baker but to Yeltsin not Gorbachev. It seems very likely he made verbal assurances (as did John Major and Helmut Kohl), which were then rolled back on by Bush who limited the no eastward expansion to Germany.

Gorbachev has his own list of things he was promised by the US in his book(s) - centrally bilateral disarmament

 

[ska invita]

Economic reforms in China predate perestroika, if anything the Soviet reformers in the leadership even pre Gorbachev were trying to follow China's example.

but these are processes that play out over years
anyway a chinese man told me it and im going with it

 

[littlebabyjesus]

if post-Soviet Russia hadnt collapsed so spectacularly though it might've played out differently in China over time

Yeah maybe. The clampdown post-Tiananmen was so complete, though, and the flat denial of certain points in history seems a very Chinese reaction, no? They even made a term for historians who don't follow this denial: 'historical nihilism'. They've certainly disproved the idea that was popular among some at the time that economic development somehow naturally leads to increased freedom.

 

[ska invita]

They've certainly disproved the idea that was popular among some at the time that economic development somehow naturally leads to increased freedom.

Truly...and teaching it back to the west

 

[The39thStep]

It was James Baker but to Yeltsin not Gorbachev. It seems very likely he made verbal assurances (as did John Major and Helmut Kohl), which were then rolled back on by Bush who limited the no eastward expansion to Germany.

An interesting read that especially the link to The National Security Archive. (For the benefit of the more pro-Nato left/anarchists on here, I don't think NATO expansion justifies the Russian invasion )

 

[mojo pixy]

It was James Baker but to Yeltsin not Gorbachev. It seems very likely he made verbal assurances (as did John Major and Helmut Kohl), which were then rolled back on by Bush who limited the no eastward expansion to Germany.

Very much appreciated but I don't use twitter, and I think maybe this is a question that may need a bit more than a twitter thread. If there are links please dig them out and paste them, ta!

I think the point is, it was never anyone's official policy especially not NATOs. It was never announced publicly that I recall (not that my memory is any guide, especially of the 1990s). What I do recall is it being the stuff of Newsnight talking heads around 1989/90, "So does this mean the end of NATO?", whose outcome it turns out Russian nationalists recall their own version of. Nationalists and their wishful narratives eh, who could imagine such a thing?

Anyway less twitter if possible. I know that's a lot to ask but there's a war on etc

 

[marty21]

This is a drastically over-simplified narrative, pushed to fuel western objectives in Ukraine. Putin does not want to 'reverse' anything. He doesn't want the Soviet poitical and economic system back, and has spoken against it on many occasions. What he does seem to want is a Greater Russia, which might involve re-establishing Russian domination of parts of the ex-USSR. He almost certainly knows that he couldn't have the whole of it even if he wanted it (which is doubtful). Least of all is he stupid enough to believe that the return of the Warsaw Pact is possible.

Note , I said, basically wants to reverse it , then you go on to say , re-establishing Russian domination of parts of ex-USSR , which is....basically reversing it.

 

[Combustible]

Very much appreciated but I don't use twitter, and I think maybe this is a question that may need a bit more than a twitter thread. If there are links please dig them out and paste them, ta!

I think the point is, it was never anyone's official policy especially not NATOs. It was never announced publicly that I recall (not that my memory is any guide, especially of the 1990s). What I do recall is it being the stuff of Newsnight talking heads around 1989/90, "So does this mean the end of NATO?", whose outcome it turns out Russian nationalists recall their own version of. Nationalists and their wishful narratives eh, who could imagine such a thing?

Anyway less twitter if possible. I know that's a lot to ask but there's a war on etc

The twitter thread is mainly a series of links, e.g.

NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard | National Security Archive

Western leaders gave multiple assurances against NATO expansion to Gorbachev in 1990-1991 according to declassified American, Russian, British, Germans documents

nsarchive.gwu.edu

NATO Expansion: What Yeltsin Heard | National Security Archive

Washington, D.C., March 16, 2018 – Declassified documents from U.S. and Russian archives show that U.S. officials led Russian President Boris Yeltsin to believe in 1993 that the Partnership for Peace was the alternative to NATO expansion, rather than a precursor to it, while simultaneously...

nsarchive.gwu.edu

I misremembered, Baker was actually talking to Gorbachev not Yeltsin.

 

[ska invita]

pretty conclusive
as topcat says, an idiot to believe a stinking word of his new best friends

 

[seventh bullet]

I can believe that. But they wouldn't all have thought that, and the national minorities, in the main, would many of them have thought very differently. As would the millions who were shot, starved, worked to death, imprisoned, exiled and the like. So some of the ones who survived were grateful. Stockholm syndrome?

I think this is part of the problem with western views of Russia, that the people themselves are too dumb and unenlightened enough that they deserve no less than condescension dressed up as concern. Popular support for the USSR was at its highest during the Stalin era, when a Soviet society in flux was also at its most repressive.

The social upheaval of that time and the dynamism of the industrial transformation saw enthusiastic participation alongside constant propaganda about those working to undermine it, constant threats to their own personal stakes in the promise and opportunity Stalinism offered. You can have the above as a genuine part of Soviet experience and also the reality of state repression and terror simultaneously occurring.

 

[mojo pixy]

The twitter thread is mainly a series of links, e.g.

NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard | National Security Archive

Western leaders gave multiple assurances against NATO expansion to Gorbachev in 1990-1991 according to declassified American, Russian, British, Germans documents

nsarchive.gwu.edu

NATO Expansion: What Yeltsin Heard | National Security Archive

Washington, D.C., March 16, 2018 – Declassified documents from U.S. and Russian archives show that U.S. officials led Russian President Boris Yeltsin to believe in 1993 that the Partnership for Peace was the alternative to NATO expansion, rather than a precursor to it, while simultaneously...

nsarchive.gwu.edu

I misremembered, Baker was actually talking to Gorbachev not Yeltsin.

Thanks, yes, I've read those but a while ago and I withdraw my flippant remark about kissinger and drinks

It's important to recognize that ex-soviet bloc countries applied to join NATO, they were not annexed by NATO.

 

[Raheem]

I misremembered, Baker was actually talking to Gorbachev not Yeltsin.

I think it went something like:

Baker: There will definitely not be any NATO expansion.
Gorbachev: We would like that in writing.
Baker: I've forgotten my pen.
Gorbachev: OK, fine.

 

[seventh bullet]

And just like that the Russian people were free

View attachment 340440

I remember as a kid watching that episode/s, featuring The Gremlin in the Kremlin, which was one of those Boglin puppets wearing a little ushanka hat.

 

[Idris2002]

Gorbachev pulled together a whole host of Soviet reformers, to whom Andropov had come to be sympathetic. Their ideas had been around, and at times listened to, and to some extent implemented, at the highest level for years. Never before, though, had they so directly had the ear of Soviet President, so they were able to go a lot further. The process took on its own momentum, resulting in the fracturing of the CPSU.

It really wasn't a case of one brave man standing up to the 'totalitarian' politbureau.

Wasn't it Trotsky who said that the CPSU contained, beyond the official ideology, a range of views, from far-left to far-right? The aftermath of the party's split seems to have vindicated him.

It wasn't an accident that Perestroika was called the "revolution of the 40 year-olds".

 

[Idris2002]

okay i'll rephrase.

idris, tell us how gorachev stopped reagan from killing you.

His new policies made it much harder for RR to keep up with the insane warmongering, which had already (though we didn't find this out until later) nearly produced World War 3 via the Able Archer exercises.

 

[Spandex]

The discussion of NATO expansion has been shaped recently by the invasion of Ukraine and it's use as a justification for the invasion. That's made a long, twisting, complex process, with multiple layers of reasons for happening, with views from those involved changing and evolving over time, into a cartoon version with EU-loving liberals vs Stalin-loving Putinists.

One thing that has been erased in much of this simplistic discussion, with evil imperialist Americans vs the evil all-powerful Putin, is the views and agency of those former Soviet countries that joined NATO. One of the driving forces behind NATO expansion was the desire of eastern European countries to join NATO, at times in the face of tepid enthusiasm from the US and other NATO members.

With the debate on social media often decending into two sides shouting at each other, as is often the case with social media debate, it does more to cloud than illuminate understanding of the issue. Same goes for Stalin's legacy (he was the figurehead of a movement that dragged the smoking remains of the recently feudal Russia following the revolution towards the space age as well as being a brutal tyrant who placed no value on individual lives) and Gorbachev's (he was pushed by economic and social forces beyond his control as well as bearing personally responsibility for the break up of the Soviet Union, for good and for bad).

 

[seventh bullet]

Stalin-loving Putinist just doesn't make any sense.

 

[Spandex]

Stalin-loving Putinist just doesn't make any sense.

Nor does lots of the shit that people post on social media, trying to fit complex histories into short posts as they try to win an Internet argument.

 

[Raheem]

Stalin-loving Putinist just doesn't make any sense.

Many things that don't make sense exist all the same.

 

[RD2003]

Always been the case in the CCP - everything from full on Chicago types nurtured on Ford Foundation scholarships in the 80s to full tankies.

And yet the world at large, and not a few posters on here, still believe in 'totalitarianism' and the idea that these actually are communist parties rather than parties for which the official ideology is an interpretation of Marxism suited to their local needs, containing a sizeable number who may still believe in it to one degree or another.

 

[The39thStep]

 

[Pickman's model]

Stalin-loving Putinist just doesn't make any sense.

Yes it does

 

[seventh bullet]

I told a (Former Soviet) Central Asian colleague that I'd lived in St. Petersburg. "You mean Leningrad", she snapped (yes, snapped) at me.

I recently noticed the Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa's dialogue-less docu Blockade (on the seige of Leningrad) is available on Amazon, but not included with Prime. His State Funeral is there as well.

 

[seventh bullet]

Yes it does

Not in understanding Putin's politics of national reassertion.