Which leader of the USSR is most responsible for its downfall?

File: f6bb740916a491c0f51fc69c885612b3.jpg (61KB, 600x520px) Image search: [Google]

61KB, 600x520px

>>2142495
The one who actually could save it.

>>2142495
They all were pretty shitty
I'd say Brezhnev since he started the whole Afghanistan debacle and let the economy stagnate

>>2142495
All of them.

>>2142495
Pizza Hut
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgm14D1jHUw

Stalin. He should've just stayed home instead of waging a fucking world war.

No one man is responsible for its collapse and no one man could have saved it.
The USSR was a collection of malcontents who had been looking for a way out ever since Russia had started meddling. The idea of a pan Slavic union was never popular and even less so when the USSR set up puppet governments and started grabbing people in the night.
The dissatisfaction only got worse throughout the years as the West's quality of life went up and up while the USSR stayed quite stagnant and impoverished. More and more contraband was getting though and pretty much everyone in the USSR realized life was better on the other side.

You can argue that without the massive money problems the USSR wouldn't have collapsed in 91 but the biggest issue it had was nobody wanted to be a part of the USSR anymore and fixing that is a lot harder than not running your economy into the ground.
Which is still hard to not do when you never had a strong economy or well developed and high class society in any of the member countries. Especially when you're spending a fuckhueg chunk of the money you are making on more tanks and not more economy development.

The United States had become an economic powerhouse completely unmolested by 1900. By 1945 it was producing as much goods as the rest of the world combined and it had more than enough extra capital laying around to rebuild Europe and Japan. Russia was too busy trying to rebuilt itself to bother with rebuilding its satellites.

>>2142495
Well, Gorbachev fucked shit up real good but he was only a bad doctor trying to fix existant ills of an already broken system with too much medicine. Might be the politbureau's fault for being too afraid of the brain-dead potato that was Brezhnev.

>>2142546
Until the end of the 60s, the quality of life was actually higher in the USSR than in the West

>>2142565
[citation needed]

>>2142565
Krushchev please go back to Hell.

>>2142565
Bad post

>>2142565
Yeah no. The quality of life in the West was better but pretty much only because of America. Europe was completely ravaged on both sides and both places were complete hellholes where people only survived because of mass food handouts.
The West pulled far ahead in the 60s because the US had actually rebuilt Europe to a degree and countries were starting to get back on their feet, especially France as they had ended up the least devastated of any European country except maybe Britain. Much of the damage done to England was done to her cities and peoples, but the industry was far less touched than it could have been.

>>2142495
Reagan and George Bush

De facto it wasn't a collapse, but a semi-nationalist (separatist) coup within, when the leaders of RSFSR, USSR and BSSR had decided to take over the actual government.

Gorbachev was a victim of the collapse; Yeltsin and Kravchuk are the destroyers.

>>2142586
Anyone the living in the eastern side wanted to visit the West at least once. It was always a big event because they would bring back various souvenirs. Two different worlds. That's socialism for you.

>>2142546
The only democratic referendum held in the USSR's history overwhelmingly supported its continuation until the August coup happened.

File: 63996694533.jpg (39KB, 598x608px) Image search: [Google]

39KB, 598x608px

>>2143060
Just like the democratic referendum for whether Poland should be free or become a Soviet puppet state, right?

def brezhnev

>>2143070
The USSR's referendum was held under Gorbachev's glasnost, the USSR was not a dictatorship by that point, in fact, the most contradictory thing is that of the union republics, the one that wanted to get out the most (that didn't boycott the referendum) was Russia.

>>2142565
What was the policy that Stalin passed that stated any individual idling for more than 20 minutes should be shot or be in jail? Continue trying to convert us commie.

>>2143096
Would that be because of the fact that at that point Russia was propping up its satellites with funding while seriously struggling with its own economy?
I am not exactly an expert on this subject, but it seems like the Baltic countries had become quite dependent on Russian support and by then Russia had little support left to give, its economy being ravaged by the Afghanistan War and the general failure to significantly improve the economy as the West had done?

>>2143132
Its probably something like that, while Russia was the USSR's most developed republic, the communist idea of equal development often meant a lot of Russian economic production was used to develop the peripheral republics in the union. IIRC the republics that wanted out the last were the poorest ones in central asia. Keep in mind though that the Baltic states had declared unilateral independence and boycotted the referendum, as did Armenia and Georgia.

>>2143314
While I have none to no knowledge(sic? sorry english is not my main language) it is common knowledge that USSR drained all the industrial input it could take from Poland, mostly from coal mines, as far as "helping" its satellite states goes.

>>2143371
>it is common knowledge
I should have stated that it is common knowledge in Poland

>>2142495
Anyone who doesn't say Gorbachev doesn't understand history.

>>2143402
>why didn't that guy just rearrange the deck chairs
>the Titanic is a big ship, it should have worked itself out

>>2143412
I'm not sure if I understand your metaphor, but Gorbachev wasn't some guy rearranging deck chairs - he was the captain who rammed right into an iceberg. The USSR was economically stagnant and was losing the cold war, but it wasn't in any danger of collapse before Perestroika and Glasnost.

>>2143566
Well, the phrase "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" is a common metaphor for making inconsequential changes in an effort to prevent an inevitable event.

Soviet Socialism became untenable long before Gorbachev came to power. It could have ended in a less destructive way, but it certainly could have been worse. Imagine if the USSR clamps down on the satellite states instead of dropping the leash, and you get former SSRs declaring independence with nuclear weapons.

>>2143371
Yeah "equal development" largely applied to the USSR itself, in many ways the Warsaw Pact members were treated like colonies. In fact, part of the reason Gorbachev let them go is that they weren't an useful economic asset to have anymore, and occupying them had become too costly. Remember that unlike, say, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Poland and East Germany and so on were nominally independent states, rather than members of the USSR.

>>2142495
>>2142511
>>2142518
Khrushchev killed Stalin
he led the coup and reforms that doomed ussr to failure

Kruschev took power with the coup and started with the revisionist reforms, Stalin would send him personaly to the gulags if he were alive at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itvdi-A-wkM&list=FLxgJ0vK112MRHzFqHgPKAhw&index=1


>>2142561

In October 1987, Gorbachev mounted an anti-corruption campain to clear-out the old Brezhnevite guard and forced Aliyev to resign from the Politburo, ostensibly for health reasons. Aliyev was forced to resign from this position in 1987 amidst allegations of corruption made against him by Mikhail Gorbachev.


Forced into early retirement by Gorbachev, Aliyev focused his resources on returning to power and avenging Gorbachev for his retirement. Aliyev plotted against Gorbachev by orchestrating the ethnic conflict that would lead to cessation of Azerbaijan from USSR and dissolution of the USSR. The first pogroms against Armenians in Azerbaijan were instigated by the local mafia, which was controlled by Aliyev, in order to create an international crisis that would be detrimental to Gorbachev regardless of the outcome.

File: Лаврентий_Берия.jpg (10KB, 220x292px) Image search: [Google]

10KB, 220x292px

IT WAS ME, BERIA!

>>2143126
>Stalin is the only Soviet leader I know so I'll talk about him even in the timeframe when he was already dead

Probably Khrushchev. Folks are less likely to revolt if they've got food, and Krushchevs agricultural reforms put food production on a decline.

Gorby schweine

>>2144586
recommend me resources

>>2144586
> Stalin would send him personaly to the gulags
Stalin had an opportunity. It isn't like there was no Khrushchev in his time, lmao.

>>2144586
Stalin would send Stalin to the gulags if somehow that was possible to do.

>>2144886

https://books.google.com/books?id=5ehhBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA69

http://mailstar.net/death-of-stalin.html

https://www.marxists.org/subject/stalinism/origins-future/ch4-2a.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZZAoSyGnRI

https://www.amazon.com/Khrushchev-Ubil-Stalina-Dvazhdy-killed/dp/5699427147

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1989/06/01/the-gorbachev-prospect/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heydar_Aliyev

>>2142588
the nationalists wouldn't rise without glasnost.

>>2143371
the USSR drained no one. on the contrary shitholes like poland were a money drain to them, and again they are a money drain to the EU (they get the most investments) and that doesn't count the fact that many polacks work and reside in western europe, and send home some good money while enjoying free healthcare.

I'd probably pick Brezhnev honestly. The Brezhnev years consisted of political and economic stagnation and were when the grand quagmire that was Afghanistan started. He left a system that Gorbachev could not save no matter what he tried. Although as said earlier in the thread I think at least part of the USSR could have remained together if not for the coup attempt by the hardliners.