Quote (Malopox @ 8 Feb 2024 18:08)
Don’t forget that Russia decided to inherit all foreign debt of USSR so new republics that emerged from this collapse got all their infrastructure for free. Steel smelters, nuclear and hydro plants, roads, airports, refineries, ports, pipelines. All of that - for free.
A lot of the soviet-era infrastructure they inherited was decades-old and dilapidated. Not all of it, but a lot. Also keep in mind that the USSR had exploited its periphery for decades in favor of its Russian heartland. And that the decades of forced communism hampered their economic development.
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Remember when GDR got united with FRG? Pension and savings of the little peoples were converted so they could eat and retire with dignity. Pensions and savings of all Russians got zeroed in one fell swoop of “Shock Therapy” of the 1990s. Imagine losing everything you owned for no fault of your own, while ThyssenKrupp - where you worked your whole life - gets sold to a 20 year old american hotshot for three colas and two packs of bubblegum.
This is absolutely what happened to a lot of East Germans. The run-down economy of the former GDR was shut down, the few competitive factories and companies were taken over by West Germans or sold to foreign investors (e.g. Japanese businessmen) for cheap. Many of the workers of now-defunct factories saw their qualifications devalued overnight and never found their footing again, job-wise. Property prices also cratered, so even those who had been privileged in the GDR society now found themselves on the lower rungs of the unified German hierarchy. These post-unification woes created an entire generation of bitter, resentful people. The only saving grace for many affected East Germans was the much better social safety net of Germany compared with Russia's.
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This is what Putin meant when he said that “collapse of the USSR was a tragedy”. He doesn’t want to restore the empire, he acknowledges the injustice that was perpetrated as a part of history of Russia that is behind them now.
It's still tone-deaf to call the collapse of the USSR the "greatest tragedy of the 20th century" while 23 million of their citizens died during ww2 and the country was devastated even worse than during the 90s.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Feb 8 2024 11:45am