Lenin's bald patch, talk about a necro bump!
2dimes wrote:Have you seen the black square?
I'm not sure what you're referencing. So no.
Is Russia getting ready for a future war with USA?
Such a war would be an absolute disaster for all involved. The Kremlin is smart enough to know that. What the Russians are doing is rebuilding some of that old soviet muscle and pushing at the amercians in places the Americans don't really have a firm hold. Think the summer war in 2006, the Shanghai co-operative agreement, Eurasian Union.
These weren't moves leading up to direct confrontation think more of a game on conquerclub where one player has grabbed a tenuous hold of half the map and then other players slowly pick away at loosely held areas.
In recent years Russian foreign policy people have been talking about "multi polarity" on the global stage, instead of the metropole of the USA you would see a diffusion of power more similar to pre-ww1 where you had multiple actors with a similar level of power. Russian wants very badly to be one of those poles and is trying to use its oil wealth and soviet technological base to do it. A direct confrontation with the US now would be the last thing the Russians want.
Perhaps in the next 50 years this would happen, more likely though will be a gradual recognition by the Americans that they can't keep their fingers in all the pies and they will pull back.
Do you think the USSR would have crumbled without Gorbachev's help?
This just about the crux of all Soviet studies "why did the Soviet Union collapse"
I don't think Soviet collapse was inevitable. There was sufficient common cause to hold it together, even today you will find nostalgics in every single former republic.
I think Gorbachev had the right idea, he saw the writing on the wall. His problem was he tried to do to much at once too fast and things spun out of control. The Chinese started their economic reforms back in the late 70s and proceeded glacially away from their command economy, and over course of a generation have achieved the result you see today.
Gorbachev tried to start a similar process in a decade at the same time as massive political reforms. Nothing could have been more certain to stir up the hard-liners into doing something crazy.
So you see a simple yes or no is impossible. All I can say is maybe maybe not.
Conceivably the Soviets could have pulled another Stalin out of a hat and clamped down hard. Imagine a north Korea but instead of a few dubious nukes on rickety ass rockets, you have a few thousand on fully capable ICBMs. Would the west do shit to such a crackdown? not likely. Could the Soviet Union have done that at the point it was at? hard to say, I think not by that time it was tiered. There wasn't the fire in the Communists like there was under Stalin.
But properly done reforms could have seen a sort of reformed Soviet Union a la china. Maybe a few years down the line a re-branding of sorts away from communism. As with all what ifs in history it's a bit of a fantasy.
