How did this man become leader of the Soviet Union? He basically single-handedly destroyed it intentionally

Maybe, maybe not. I think that maybe it could because Soviet military was huge and ever expanding but it had no where to go because USA could cuck them on any front which could have contributed to internal dissent

The USSR was falling apart far before the coup attempt

yes, that is why new federal project I mentioned was necessity. the USSR was going to fall apart regardless, but communists are directly responsible for the collapse of the common state, be it Union Sovereign States or Union Soviet Socialist Republics.

without coup attempt, there would be no new independent republics, but one singular state with new government, which would have been far better than mess we have now.

Because the USSR was run totally by stiff engineers that had no idea how politics actually worked since once they got to that level they were only accountable to people exactly like them.

It was inevitable that eventually they would select an idealistic retard who would JUST the entire USSR.

But even when they saw him fucking shit up, why wasn't he blackbagged away? It's not like the USSR wasn't known for brutality by that point.

>why wouldn't Soviets be afraid of country with far greater military
tbqh the USSR and their allies could have defended themselves from a NATO invasion.

Militarily it wasn't a problem, the problem was that Reagan's foreign policy was so aggressive it posed the question of whether defending the Eastern bloc was worth global nuclear holocaust.

Brezhnev made the Soviet government very lazy by letting them spend a decade doing basically nothing.

He tried to introduce freedom of speech and personal freedoms at a time where the economy was in a free fall both due to systemic problems with communist economy and the oil prices. His naive view was that free flow of ideas will contribute to finding the best way to reform the system while keeping true to socialist values. In reality it denied the government the repressive mechanisms it needed to preserve itself during an economic crisis and supress the nationalistic forces in the ethnic republics. He was a well meaning guy that didn't understand how complicated and unethical this shit really is.
The Chinese went on a different path, throwing away communism economically and keeping the repressive mechanisms intact.

Didn't Brezhnev basically keep building weapons despite Nixon's efforts for détente to work?

communist BTFO by the gipper himself

It did. It pushed them to spend more for defence which hurt the economy.

my favorite soviet joke

A man dies and goes to hell and he sees Stalin waist deep in shit and Hitler neck deep in shit. So the guy ask the devil why Stalin is only waist deep, and the devil says "Hes standing on Lenins shoulders"

FUCK

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