But everyone who came after him was worse than him. He had reasons to be optimistic in 1990 and many were too. We don’t live in the world he created, we live in the one he didn’t. He died old, in his bed, a privilege few of us will have.
We do blame Gorby too much (though he has much of the blame).
Lenin and later Stalin, smart men trying to do things properly, over-bureaucratised the party (one of the few times Trotsky had a point) and Khruschev ossified that strata in place. The refusal to do an NEP or a Cybernetisation as Capitalist pressure on the economy increased was also damning.
Even then, even after Gorby’s catastrophic reforms, the Soviet Union could have been saved in some form even in 1990-91. So many things had to go wrong in order to put the SU into collapse. Unfortunately the Capitalist nations were weighting the dice the whole way.
Yeah, Yeltsin really doesn’t get enough credit for the damage. Gorby was a dumbass not a demon.
