Was the Soviet Union still salvageable when Gorbachev took over the reins?

MY

LIFE

> Most republics in the Union did not want to dissolve it
Except, you know, Russians themselves, who got tired of subsidizing the rest. I mean, of course Cental Asia and Caucasus didn't want to dissolve the USSR, they had to start to actually do something after Russians stopped to feed them.

How could the alts consume so much?

Nope it wasn't. People meme a lot that it was Gorbachev, Reagan, socialism, capitalism etc that destroyed the USSR but the real reason is more boring and prosaic than that.

It was oil.

The same thing that is destroying Modern Russia then.

thw soviet union collapsed when it was most capitalist

Modern Russia has marked economy and inflation, it can survive cheap oil by making the people poorer without causing social unrest and bankrupting the state. In USSR, the theory was, could be no economical crisis, no inflation, no unemployment and government had to support the same quality of life regardless of international markets, despite half of it's exports being from oil. And they actually tried to do so until the very end, absolute madmen.

It didn't adopt Captialism because the System already had stagnated/was falling?
Which then either caused the whole thing to fall down, or just revealed all those errors that existed in the system anyway.

Better housing, better food, larger pensions, etc. Everything was provided by the state, so the state subsidized national republics so they wont rebel. It failed.

To bad so many of their other exports are being embargoed then.

What exports? Discounting oil and gas, even within COMECON Russia was a net importer.

At that point it was already economically done for.

No. Baltic republics and Ukraine wanted to live the Union, also there were a huge amount of problems. Being a former USSR citizen(Belarus) I'm really glad that big commie tumor had collapsed and fell apart. Fuck USSR and those imbeciles who created that big piece of red shit. Being a young man I have a car, I have my own apartments - I bought it recently to not to pay rent, I have tons of gadgets and electronics, I can afford good private healthcare, cuz I have a fucking job, I had 3 interviews before I got the job. if I were to live in USSR I would live with my parents in the middle of nowhere, without anything, having shit and working as a fucking plumber or smth, I would fucking kill myself probably. USSR was cancer.

*to leave the Union, fucking autocorrect

> Was the Soviet Union still salvageable when Gorbachev took over the reins?
Yes. Kind scruffy, but even in 1990 it had a very good chance of slogging it through and getting back on the feet with the Robotization they've planned by the 00s.

But when Gorbachev destroyed legitimacy of the government and destabilized the Party, there was no power left that could keep Union together.

> Russians
Not really. Also this subsidy stuff is deliberately misleading.

Without USSR you wouldn't be able to shitpost on Veeky Forums.

>Without USSR you wouldn't be able to shitpost on Veeky Forums.
There's always the possibility his country had developed a bit better if it hadn't been for the USSR.

> truth is deliberately misleading.
And the reality has an anti-commi bias.

It became gradually more liberal because it was failing.

> There's always the possibility his country had developed a bit better if it hadn't been for the USSR.
That's wishful thinking.

Baltics did not develop fast without USSR. They all turned into impoverished cleptocratic dictatorships within 20 years, despite being the cream of Russian Empire - they had factories and much higher literacy, not to mention access to the sea.

Unless you go all WHITE POWER you cannot realistically expect Belarus to be better than Congo or Columbia.

And then there is this who Lebensraum business. Belarus lost almost third of population during WWII, despite being on the winning side.

It was capitalist in the beginning too: New Economic Policy.

So - no. It was falling because it started getting more "liberal" (as in free market liberal). Efficiency was lost and there was no point in pretending that essentially Capitalist state is Socialist.

> whole

You aren't telling me the Baltic states were all better off during Soviet rule than before Soviet rule?

I think it is quite unambiguously stated that Baltics were not better off outside of USSR.

Well, yeah, though that do not really make it worth for me to throw a hissy fit over anything, apart from perhaps stating that pre-soviet Baltic states were far more productive when it came to producing literature as well as several thousands being deported away to Gullag which should at least prove somewhat that they indeed were better of.
My problem is he tries to state that it was the Russians who turned the Baltics away from shitholes into non-shitholes and that they would all have became poor peasants without Russian Soviet help.

This is some incoherent mess.

Are you trying to say that Baltics were successful pre-1939 ?

What I am trying to say is that they weren't better off with Soviet rule and that Soviet rule if anything added to make the Baltic states come worse off.

> What I am trying to say is that they weren't better off with Soviet rule and that Soviet rule if anything added to make the Baltic states come worse off.
I respectfully disagree.

Baltics were one fucked up puppy by the 1939. I don't really understand how can you think otherwise.

JUST

WE

BUILD

Care to explain how they were better off with Soviet rule?
Soviet rule brought mass deportations of "enemies of the people", new forms of censorship As well as Russetification. Just look at the Baltic forest brothers that continued to fight against the Soviet government long after the fall of Germany, is it wrong to assume that they show that the Baltics at least believed they had it better without Soviet rule?
If anything of that seems wrong I happily take criticism for it.

> Russetification
Good God. Learn some English, man.

Were there any other fucked up parts in my post or are you just nit-picking on one single word?

Yes, there were. It's just this specific word overloaded my brain with facepalm.

>is it wrong to assume that they show that the Baltics at least believed they had it better without Soviet rule?

Not only does this sentence not make sense given the rest of your argument, but your argument is patently false as under the Stalin regime russification policies were explicitly reversed. Literally hundreds of languages were put into writing and for the first time territories in the previous russian empire were given equal rights.

What I am trying to say is, the Soviets had a really long lasting armed independence movement against themselves. Don't that show that the Balts indeed were thought they were better off without Soviet rule, as such a movement would not have been able to survive for so long without a support form the population?

> What I am trying to say is, the Soviets had a really long lasting armed independence movement against themselves.
Nazi collaborationists and gangsters are not "independence movement".

And it does not prove anything. Popular opinion does not equal ultimate truth.

Finally, how can you even pretend that popular opinion was anti-Soviet, when there were more Balts fighting in Red Army for USSR, then there were in Wermacht fighting against Soviets?

>tfw all they had to do was annex China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, etc. and they would still be existant today

Goddamn, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan should have stood together.