The collapse of the USSR was not a tragedy. On the contrary, the collapse of the USSR was the end of a man-made tragedy, or the tragedy finally disintegrated.
Evaluating the Soviet Union, Putin's words should be the most accurate: "Those who do not miss the USSR have no conscience, and those who want to return to the USSR have no brains." ”
The following is an excerpt from the preface to Maxim Leibsky's The Working Class in the Soviet Union: Life under Industrial Patriarchy (excerpt).
Since the 1930s, the working class in the USSR existed economically, but not politically. The class self-identity of the working people was greatly weakened and did not play an important role during the reform of the new thinking. Therefore, it cannot be said that the Soviet workers made any choice as a single class subject. Instead, they became passive observers of the political storm that swept through the USSR at the end of the 1980s.
The absence of oppressive classes in the USSR completely changed the configuration of social forces. The worker may not like his leadership, but he can no longer see his enemies through the prism of the worker's class struggle against the bourgeoisie. He began to see his struggle in terms of the general confrontation of citizens against the state, which blurred the unity within the class and formed a social consensus:"All of us, regardless of social relations, oppose the power of the Scheduled Elite. "The bureaucratization of Soviet society naturally led to the fact that in the minds of the majority of Soviet workers, class identities gradually faded from their field of vision and gave way to other identities: regional, religious, ethnic, political, etc. ”
Socialism in the USSR looked very well at the beginning. At first, almost no one questioned this assumption, saying that the achievements of the USSR were not obvious?
How do you know that the Soviet model has inherent flaws, it is effective in the short term but unsustainable in the long term, and in the end it is not as good as capitalism. In this case, we should take the initiative to reflect on the original strategy, make adjustments, or even deny it.
Note that this change in strategy is not due to any difficulties.
The Soviet model proved to be ineffective at the time, because it was found that the basic assumption of the original "Soviet blowing" was wrong.
Gilder gave an example, under the Soviet system, ** saw that the developed countries were engaged in urbanization and industrialization, and decided to do the same in their own country. This is the right direction, but the knowledge is imperfect: you only see urbanization and industrialization, but you don't know how to do it – especially in the particular environment of your own country.
So the first under the Soviet system used the simplest method: the difference between urban and rural scissors. Forcibly expropriated peasants' grain and transported it to the cities to the workers, forcibly industrialized with a visible hand – the result was a great disaster for the peasants and agricultural production.
In hindsight, those who were extravagant were fearless in pure ignorance.
Since the October Revolution of 1918, under the rule of Lenin and Stalin, forced labor camps "gulags" have spread throughout the Soviet Union. An official Russian report noted that between 1934 and 1953, more than 15 million people were sent to the Soviet Union for hard labor and more than 1.5 million died in the camp. Studies show that from 1929 to 1953, another 6,007,000,000 people were exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union, and another four to five million were sent to re-education through labor camps for less than three years.
At the beginning of the thirties of the last century, the population of the USSR was about 15.8 billion people, Stalin's "Great Purge": the murder of Kirov began in 1934 and ended in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II; Yakovlev, who presided over the rehabilitation of the Soviet Union and Yeltsin, came up with the figures, saying in an interview with reporters in 2000 that the victims of Stalin's repression involved 20 million people, perhaps more, and that "there is absolutely no exaggeration."
That is, less than 1In the Soviet Union of 600 million people, in a "great purge", Stalin dared to kill more than 20 million people without scruples.
The Great Purge was entirely a political purge aimed at purging Stalin's political enemies. Stalin thus consolidated his supremacy, while the Soviet Union lost a large number of elites.
On June 22, 1941, Stalin was shocked by the news that the German army had invaded the Soviet Union on a large scale, and in a short period of time a large number of troops on the front line were annihilated in formation.
His first reaction turned out to be: the Germans could not do this!
But the fact had already happened, and he had to accept it, and then urgently convened a military meeting to arrange the relevant matters.
After the meeting, he sat on a stool tired and lonely, somewhat helpless and decadent.
This scene was filmed by reporters. This ** was kept in the possession for more than 10 years, and it was not made public until after Stalin's death.
First, Stalin, by his own judgment, believed that Hitler was not yet ready to attack the Soviet Union.
Secondly, he believed that Hitler would not repeat the mistakes of the First World War, and that the German army would not be stupid enough to fight on two fronts and disperse its forces.
Thirdly, and most importantly, the close Soviet-German relations allowed Stalin to ignore Hitler's aggressive ambitions.
Before World War II, the Soviet Union and Germany had very close relations, and the two countries were simply hardcore allies.
Due to the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany secretly moved many of its factories and military scientific research institutions to the territory of the Soviet Union before the war, and a large number of German troops came to the Soviet Union to participate in training, and the relationship was as good as iron buddies.
So, Stalin absolutely did not expect that Hitler would launch the so-called Barbarossa plan for a blatant invasion of the Soviet Union.
At the time when Stalin's life was dying, people were not in a hurry to seek medical treatment, but to think about the distribution of power. By the time the top leader kicked his feet, the all-out power struggle began, and the Soviet Union was in chaos. Beria, the head of the secret police, pushed Malenkov to the forefront, and even bought people's hearts and tried to become the emperor, but unfortunately the organs were exhausted, and the self-defeating was completely eliminated by the Khrushchev joint military.
After Stalin's death, the supreme leader of the USSR was held by Khrushchev.
Khrushchev's liquidation of Stalin in the Soviet Union refers to the fact that at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, Khrushchev published a report "On *** and its consequences", exposing and criticizing the political **, the Great Purge, collectivization and other issues during the Stalin period. This report caused a great sensation and shock and marked an important turning point in the political life of the Soviet Union.
Khrushchev behaved unusually deferentially during Stalin's rule, but after Stalin's death, he gave the order to remove Stalin's body and cremate it. History has recorded that Khrushchev once begged Stalin for his son's sake, but in the end he still did not save his son's life, which may be one of the sources of conflict between the two. In addition, during Stalin's rule, he launched a purge campaign that caused thousands of people and led to popular anger. After Stalin's death, the people needed to find a suitable way to vent this emotion, so Khrushchev, after weighing the pros and cons, consulted with the ruling committee, and made the decision to whip Stalin's body, one to vent the anger of the people and make his power more stable, and the other to vent his personal grievances.
In the memoirs of the famous World War II general Zhukov, there is a note from the manuscript compiler, which tells us that Zhukov's book has long been cleared and sent to the CPSU ** for review (Mikoyan's memoirs were cut off with a head and were not allowed to be renewed). The last censor was none other than Suslov, the Prosecutor General of Ideology and the second in power in the CPSU. Zhukov's manuscript was gone, and his memoirs could not be published. After a long, long time, it was finally hinted that the book lacked the praise of Brezhnev and would have to be updated before it could be published. This made it difficult for Zhukov and the editors, because during the war Zhukov really did not know Bo and his person, how to write about his great contribution to the war? But if you can't do that, the book will never be published. Later, the publisher came up with a clever idea: Zhukov made a false shot. The method was: Zhu said that Zhu went to the front line to inspect and met a certain commander at a certain place, so Zhu asked Bo and said that he wanted to meet him (Bo had served as a military commissar during the war, and the official worshiped a major general), and the answer was that Brezhnev went to the front line, but he could not see him. It's too late, it's too fast, as soon as this "false shot" is reported, on the same day or the next day, the Kremlin's ** will come, saying that it can be printed according to the revised draft.
In Brezhnev's later years, the state was basically a conservative gerontocracy, where the corruption of privilege went hand in hand with egalitarianism, tinkering for stability, and the institutions were corrupt. At this time, the state governance system of the Soviet Union showed the phenomenon of exchanging welfare for freedom and compressing social functions, so that each independent individual left the unit and had nowhere to live like the "untouchables" in India, and the unit was not only a workplace, but also a kind of dependence and sustenance, coupled with the spread of consumption culture, cynical thinking became the mainstream, and social corruption and cynicism were rampant. The Soviets, who did not see any hope of an increase in living standards, anesthetized themselves with alcohol, and the number of alcoholics at the end of the 70s increased by 1 times compared to the 60s.
After Brezhnev's death in November 1982, the Soviet giant's cancer cells grew more and more, and it collapsed in less than a decade.
The USSR ** built the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on the territory of Ukraine. At 1:23:58 a.m. on April 26, 1986, the No. 4 reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant occurred**, and the flames from the fire were overwhelming, and the fire lit up the entire night sky. At the time, people thought it was just an ordinary fire, and people living near the plant even ran to their balconies to enjoy the spectacular sight of the fire, and some children scrambled to ride their bicycles to the plant to see the excitement.
It's like a flashback before death happens. In the days that followed, residents in the vicinity of the nuclear power plant were evacuated and relocated. At first, they thought it was just three or five days away, and some even thought it was a city-wide camping, with happy smiles on their faces. Eventually, they found that their hometown had become heavily contaminated, and they had been labelled "Chernobyls" and could never go back.
After the accident, the first firefighters near the nuclear power plant to arrive at the scene were not extinguished, and the firefighters fell one after another due to deadly nuclear radiation. In order to extinguish the fire and prevent the reactor from being re-elected, 500,000 people, including officers and soldiers, pilots, miners, and medical personnel, went to the front line of the nuclear project to do the aftermath work. These people have a special designation called Radiation Cleaners.
Some of the clean-up people rushed to the nuclear battlefield with sincerity and heroism for the motherland, and many more were deceived and driven to the front line, fighting against the deadly nuclear radiation for seven months with no knowledge of nuclear radiation and under the simplest protective measures. However, what awaits them is death and disease. While some are lucky enough to survive, they live in fear and are not given the respect and security they deserve.
In the face of such a catastrophe, ** adopted a closed approach, and the official tried its best to cover up the truth. When the accident first happened, no one told people what radiation was, and people were still living in an orderly manner. It was only after May Day that the top leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, came out to speak to the public, saying that the situation was under control and nothing bad had happened. In those days, the Soviet Union ** reported heroic stories and the victory of people over nuclear reactors.
A chemical engineer who was outraged by being deceived ended up working as a cleaner in Chernobyl for six months after being told to serve a short-term 25-day service. Another clean-up angrily recalled that he suddenly received a notice to go to the nuclear ** site to clean up, and he was escorted to the car like a prisoner ......
Alekseevich, documenting the experiences of the cleanupers, recorded a joke about an American robot that stopped working after five minutes on the roof, and a Japanese robot stopped moving, while a Russian robot worked on it for two hours. At this time, an order came from the loudspeaker, Private Ivanov, you can come down and rest. This Russian robot is actually a Russian soldier.
According to the recollections of the cleanups, they swept away the radioactive dust left behind on the roof of the nuclear reactor, and the intense radiation actually came from under their feet, which were only plain and cheap leatherette boots.
There was a clean-up man who went to Chernobyl to clean up, and he became a second-class cripple, because he was always sick, and the factory wanted to fire him. He went to the director of the factory and said, I worked in Chernobyl, and I saved you, but the director of the factory replied coldly, I am not the person who sent you there. According to his recollection, after they evacuated, they signed a confidentiality agreement and could not talk about nuclear ** to outsiders. How much radiation they inhaled at the scene is also a military secret. couldn't bear the resentment, so he scolded directly, "Go to death, you all go to die." What made him say this unelegant remark actually revealed that the victims of Chernobyl were not treated with the corresponding respect and protection.
This tragedy is the result of a powerful and repressive political system. When it comes to Chernobyl anniversary, there is a phrase that is always mentioned: what is more terrifying than nuclear ** is lies and deception.
One of the transferred village teachers recalled, "Everything had happened and people were not given any information: ** remained silent and the doctors were silent. The regions wait for instructions from the state capitals, which wait for instructions from Minsk, and Minsk waits for orders from Moscow". In fact, the Soviet Union not only breathed, but also created a false sense of joy, peace and security. In order to avoid panic, although there are some protective measures, they are not actively organized. In order to protect their own interests, subordinates blindly obey the orders of their superiors, and cooperate with their superiors to conceal or even tamper with facts. So some say that this catastrophe sounded the death knell for the collapse of the USSR 5 years later. Even Gorbachev said in his memoirs that Chernobyl exposed many of the foci of the USSR: concealment of disasters and negative events, lack of responsibility, and so on. The whole system is permeated with servility, flattery, and exaggeration.
Belarusian female writer Sa.Alekseevich interviewed more than 100 survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear accident and asked them to tell their personal experiences. This oral history presents us with cruel facts that few people know about that catastrophe.
Alekseevich and her parents lived in the polluted area at the time, and her mother was blind as a result of the disaster. So we can say that she was also one of the witnesses of Chernobyl.
In 2015, the then 67-year-old Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The reason for the award was given to the Belarusian female writer: her multi-voice creation is a monument to the pain and courage of our time.
She wrote "The Cry of Chernobyl", and instead of writing about such important figures as "the radiation dose is equivalent to 500 times that of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki", she recorded how people were driven from their homes and watched their loved ones die.
However, this great catastrophe in human history, whether in the Soviet Union or in Belarus after the collapse, is rarely mentioned in official history books. She believes that only by letting everyone who has witnessed it speak can it be a real record and the whole history. It is with this intention that Alekseevich created her work as a monument to pain and courage.
In a civilized society, every human life is of equal value, and a country of unequal value does not deserve the respect of the people.
The Soviet Union disposed of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant with the lives of more than 500,000 people.
In 1988, the Soviet Union was mired in the war in Afghanistan and faced a dire situation. The war put enormous military, economic and political pressure on the Soviet Union. Soviet troops met with stubborn resistance in Afghanistan and were unable to achieve their goal of complete control of Afghanistan. The war caused a large number of human and material losses and put a serious burden on the domestic economic development of the Soviet Union. In addition, the Soviet Union was widely criticized and condemned internationally.
During this period, there were also some problems and turmoil within the Soviet Union. After Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, he began a series of reforms and opening-up in an attempt to change the economic and political situation in the Soviet Union. He put forward the ideas of "New Thinking" and "Gorbachevism", trying to solve various problems facing the USSR through diplomatic means.
On 14 April 1988, Pakistan, the Kabul regime in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union and the United States signed an agreement on a political settlement of the Afghan problem.3 On May 15 of the same year, the Soviet Union began to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan, and finally withdrew from Afghanistan in its entirety on February 15, 1989.
You may not think that the Cold War was not only an arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, but also a "statistical war" about national economic data. At that time, the most important task of the US intelligence bureau was not to send spies to obtain military secrets, but to collect economic intelligence of the Soviet Union and try every means to dig up evidence of the falsification of Soviet economic data, so as to destroy people's confidence in the Soviet economy. The CIA announced that the total industrial output of the USSR was only 1 5 of the official Soviet figures.
In this case, it happened within the ruling circles of the USSR **, and a part of the top leadership began to doubt the Soviet model. Gorbachev openly criticized the falsification of economic data in the Soviet Union and argued that there were serious problems with the method of accounting for gross social output.
A strong man would not break his arm until he was dying, but when he found that death was coming, it was too late to break his arm. Many people blame the collapse of the Soviet Union on Gorbachev, who announced the ruling party, in fact, Gorbachev is like the last emperor of **, he hopes to try to save the empire through reforms, but unfortunately, the window of reform quickly dispersed, so that it was difficult to return, the gas was exhausted, and finally the wall fell down and everyone pushed it.
I remember that the situation at that time was developing at a breathless pace.
On August 19, 1991, a coup d'état took place in the Soviet Union, and the vacationing Gorbachev was placed under house arrest, but the coup subsequently failed and Yeltsin rose.
On August 24, Gorbachev announced his resignation as leader of the CPSU and suggested that the CPSU dissolve itself.
The hearts of the people were in turmoil, and the Soviet Union was in turmoil. The republics have declared their independence one after another, and Tatarstan, Chechnya, Siberia, and other places in Russia have also sought independence in the same way.
On September 6, the State Council of the USSR adopted a resolution recognizing the independence of the three union republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
On December 8, in order to resist Gorbachev's initiative of economic complex, Yeltsin secretly met with the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine and signed the CIS agreement, and the Soviet Union existed in name only.
On December 21, 11 Soviet republics signed in Almaty and joined the CIS, and the Soviet Union was sentenced to death. In his speech, Yeltsin said: "I used to spend most of my life meditating on the future of the Soviet Union, but now I don't need to. ”
On December 23, Yeltsin came to the Kremlin and held an eight-hour meeting with Gorbachev, asking him to hand over the supreme command of the armed forces and launch 2The "nuclear button" of 70,000 nuclear warheads, the Kremlin, etc.
On December 25, Gorbachev signed his last decree: to resign from the post of Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and to transfer control of the armed forces and the "nuclear button" to Yeltsin.
At 7 o'clock in the evening of the same day, Gorbachev made a televised speech, announcing his resignation from his position, but at the same time he said: I firmly advocate the independence of the people of all nationalities and the sovereignty of the republic; At the same time, it advocates the preservation of the Union State and the preservation of the integrity of the State.
In conclusion, he added: I am confident that sooner or later our joint efforts will bear fruit and that our people will live in a prosperous and democratic society.
A few minutes later, the red flag fell to the ground and the Soviet Union collapsed.
The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the formation of 15 countries and 15 capitalist countries.
If the situation has changed, the original assumption is no longer true, you still do not allow others to question that assumption, and even everyone has found that the assumption is obviously wrong, but they dare not say it, and we have to say that what we think is right, we must persevere to the end, and this is called a road to the dark.
Being accountable to everyone often results in not being accountable to everyone. When the above talks about social responsibility in order to cater to the above, it is actually easy to fall hypocritical and say something that you don't believe. We must make decisions based on real problems, not empty words.
Postscript: After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia's **Yeltsin implemented the so-called "shock**".
In July 1997, the Independent newspaper published a report on household income and expenditure that nine out of ten Russian households lived below the poverty line, and one in four was in abject poverty. Until 2008, Russia's GDP barely exceeded 1989 levels.
This is the darkest hour for Russia.
It is no wonder that when it comes to this period of history, Putin is very angry, "What the collapse of the USSR? This is the collapse of historical Russia under the name of the USSR. ”
One of the world's most territorial countries, a superpower that once terrified even the United States, suddenly disappeared and, in Putin's words, the collapse of the Soviet Union, was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century."
Russia is also tasting the geopolitical consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Yeltsin once presented himself as a fighter for democracy, but when he gained power and shocked the reform was questioned by public opinion, he immediately took off his disguise and destroyed democracy nakedly. By 1992, less than 20 percent of people supported shock, and even some of Yeltsin's former supporters were calling for a revision of the reforms.
Because the parliament refused to obey the orders, Yeltsin bombarded the parliament in October 1993 and arrested those who opposed him, and then he dissolved the parliament, replaced all the key positions in the parliament with cronies, and then they passed a constitution that gave ** supreme power, and the parliament became an advisory body with no real power, its official name was the State Duma, exactly the same as the name of the tsarist era.
This structure was maintained until the reign of Putin, who further strengthened his power on the basis of Yeltsin, established local and official allegiance mechanisms, and established an official opposition, and the democratic process started by Gorbachev came to an end.
By the time Yeltsin left office, his approval ratings had fallen to single digits and he had become one of the most unpopular leaders, and he knew he was guilty of a crime, so he handed over power to Putin and hoped that he would promise not to liquidate his corruption and withdraw from politics until Putin gave an affirmative answer.
In the documentary "Russia, Latest History," Mr. Putin gave an interview about how he had to drive a private car to support his family after the collapse of the Soviet Union. "I mean, drive to make extra money and be a private driver," he said. Truth be told, it's not pleasant to talk about it, but unfortunately, it is. ”
A former KGB dignitary had to use the "Didi driver" method to maintain the family's expenses; One can imagine the plight of other Russians at that time.
This is a sad past that Putin and even a country cannot look back on.
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