Enough about the bad, what was GOOD abot the Soviet Union?

[LooseWilly]

145. Cronyism (and nepotism) run deep in every country around the world, including the US.

If that's the whole of our argument about the "evils" of the USSR... then maybe Halliburton execs should be prosecuted as war criminals for having crony ties to the GWB white house which led to billions in contracts... and charter school admins should be indicted for their "crony" ties to Arne Duncan... and Egypt should be invaded and "liberated" because the government there consists of "cronies" of the generals who decided to back the protestors against Mubarak.

Hells, maybe your local DMV clerks should all be arrested on charges of "cronyism", as half of them probably got the job by knowing someone else in the office.

Are you next going to assert that the DMV is Stalinist?...

The piecemeal sale of the Russian economy to mafiosi was an illegal act which was simply unenforceable because it was being acted out by the enforcers of the law - the Gorbachev government which had decided to dismantle the communist state as it had existed for 70+ years. The argument that the mechanisms by which the government was dismantled should somehow be reflective of the flaws of the government... rather than representative of the corrupt leanings of those who were dismantling the government and economy in the first fucking place... is a reflection of the urge to spin in order to push an ideological agenda (in your case a neo-anarchist, libertarian agenda)... into the brains of anyone as a knee-jerk conclusion regarding the decline and fall of the Soviet Union.

The fact that there was cronyism displayed in the dismantling of the Soviet Union could be evidence of cronyism as a inherent & characteristic problem in their system... but the cronyism could just as easily be evidence of a new, and imported Western/Capitalist, problem which had come to "infect" the Communist system of the USSR.... You have yet to provide any evidence that there is anything but a coincidental co-incidence of these two phenomena.

While we all wait for you to publish some peer reviewed papers on the subject... I will continue to judge that it was just a matter of some corrupt assholes who decided to pull a sell-out to the West in so dramatically prompt a manner as to completely catch the non-surrenderers of the party completely by surprise.

What Gorbachev did would've been like Reagan deciding to convert to Islam and start regularly attending the teachings of Khomeini.

Sure, Iranian fundamentalists would've greeted Bizarro-Reagan as a hero (like Americans currently regard de-facto-Bizarro-Gorbachev as a hero)... but what Gorbachev did... like what Bizarro-Reagan didn't do... was essentially commit an act of treason against his own people (as expressed by a government which they had fought to put into place).

Coups happen.

Spinning them as "Democratic" is often bullshit intended to sell newspapers".