As for the soviet breakup, it happened because of internal issues more than anything else. Economy was total shit, failures were obvious to everyone, and things were reaching the point where the Soviet Union was going to start facing large internal armed rebellions all over, several of which actually happened. In a very real way they were facing the choice of being in a more-or-less permanent internal war with all their enemies holding their own large armed forces, many of which were the same sort of firepower they were using, or to conduct sufficient reforms to reduce the pressures to something that could be controlled with the usual plan of stamping out one rebellion with tanks at a time.
Trying to do any of that would have produced one of three results. First, the leadership of the Soviet Union might have decided to roll the dice on actual war instead of breaking up - because that would be the only possible chance of any kind of survival. The second possibility would be one that nearly happened anyway - a full-blown civil war in a country with thousands of nuclear warheads. The third would be them trying to double down on the fortress mentality, keeping everything -including Ukraine and the Baltics- until everybody starved. All of which would be horrible, horrible options for everybody and resulted in a death toll that would dwarf both World Wars combined. Aiding the breakup and trying to transistion the post-Soviet states to healthy democracies was quite literally the only option that wasn't utterly insane.The plan didn't fail because it was a bad idea, it failed because the institutional rot was far worse than Western observers realized, and more importantly because the American in charge of distributing the aid monies conspired with oligarchs to steal said aid monies.
I more or less agree with this assessment, although I would like to point out something at the end. Almost nobody in the Soviet Union knew how money worked. The sheer breadth of fraud and scams can hardly be underestimated, largely because basically nobody knew thing one about money.
There were also real success stories. Czechia, the Baltic States..
There were absolutely failures post 1991, though. Trials and arrests of ex secret policemen and state security officers might have saved a free Russia, but hindsight is, alas, 20/20.
As for Unthinkable and WW2.5, well.. I don't rightly know. I have little opinion on how that would have went. There wasn't much support for attacking the current ally, on either side, and it would have been extremely messy. The soviets were in a bad manpower crunch, but they still had very powerful forces in the field. And everyone in the Western Allies knew then how difficult an invasion of Russia can be. Personally, I'd be reluctant to write an AH featuring Unthinkable, it'd take a lot of changes and assumptions.
Seeing how RD consistently gets the names of places and historical facts wrong while authoritatively lecturing us on how things are, I've decided to read his posts in Mr. Plinkett's voice. It all makes sense now.
I would agree that RD seems likely to have someone tied up in his basement, yes. But Mr. Plinkett has both the ability to think critically and produce material of value.
"From their POV, they ain't doing anything wrong because those children aren't Ukrainian anymore." - Which means they were Ukrainian. More nice phrasing.
The phrasing also implies RD knows this is wrong, too.
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Topic: Emotional Responses to War in Ukraine - Personal Diary & Mutual Support (Read 119141 times)