You don't know how lucky you are, boys.
Well, no, in all sorts of ways, the boys were not lucky at all.
But the world ought to have insisted that the 15, largely cobbled together, republics were not under any circumstances to make the ludicrous attempt to go their separate ways.
As we now see.
Meanwhile, congratulations to Newsnight on having "discovered" the Far Right "links" of the Ukrainian coup. It'll be Tartar Islamists in Crimea next. Imagine!
Indeed. Most Soviet citizens did not want the Union to end. Over 75 percent of voters in the 1991 referendum voted to maintain the Union.
ReplyDeleteHere is a link to a nice graphic on the 1991 referendum in case anybody is interested:
http://en.ria.ru/infographics/20110313/162959645.html
Hitler was also very popular-overwhelmingly won an election and referendum.
ReplyDeleteStalin is popular even now in Russia.
What's your point?
What's yours?
ReplyDelete@Anonymous:
ReplyDeleteMy point is that most Soviet citizens were in favor of the Union and did not want to see a separation of the republics in the same way that many Southerners in the U.S. did not want to secede, knowing the problems that would cause but their desires were overridden by the Southern elite, just as the Soviet elites tore the Soviet Union apart for their own selfish reasons.
Whatever one may think of Soviet communism, the break-up of the Union caused an explosion of ethnic and religious violence from Nagorno-Karabakh to Tajikistan to Chechnya, all to the benefit of gangsters, fascists, and Islamist jihadists.
John.
ReplyDelete"Whatever one may think of Soviet Communism".
The moment someone says that, the conversation is over.
It's like those Holocaust deniers who begin a sentence with "whatever one may think of the Nazi Government".
There is only one thing that decent people think about the Soviet Union.
And it isn't that they want it back.
Who said that they did?
ReplyDeleteThe 15, largely arbitrary, republics ought never to have become independent. That has always been obvious. But never more so than now.
You are going neocon.