its actually amazing how internet culture went from this anarcho-utopianism where information just wants to be free, maaan to reddit style races to the normie bottom. who gives a shit about intellectual property other than bowtie spinning economist dickheads and the beltway lanyard class?
Most of the stuff pointed out (cultural conservatism, bourgeois “rights”) are liberal posthoc stories told by the west as cover. The soviet union failed plain and simple because the party itself did not believe it was legitimate. Economic dysfunction is not an automatic death sentence for a regime, otherwise the high inflation and chronic shortage nations like Argentina and Mexico would have their nation states fragmented and replaced every few years.
The USSR, starting with Khrushchev as ssjmarx puts it, was run by a vanguard party that shit all over its past leaders and embraced nothing but personal gain and bureaucratic ladder climbing. By the time you get to 1980s USSR, the CPSU was not a party of the people but a party over the people.
In fact, Gorbachev’s glastnost policies were the impetus for the west to seize upon nationalist movements in undermining the USSR. The state security apparatus that had kept the union together for decades suddenly couldn’t act on nationalist sentiment. And once people got used to complaining about the CPSU it was pretty much all over. Opportunists inside the party and all over worked overtime to heighten every crisis . Ultimately, you can trace the start of the collapse to Gorby flying to Crimea to renegotiate the Union treaty into something more like federalism, but by then Union hardliners had enough. They couped him and in the resulting chaos opportunists like Yeltsin were able to seize the initiative and dismantle the USSR republic by republic.
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