Gorbachev, when young, prospered in a political world where Stalin and lesser villains like Kruschyov and Brezhnev were widely admired. He was not a good man.

The Russians showed good sense in showing no respect for the little man.

His big mistake was NOT GETTING IT IN WRITING that there would be no eastward expansion of NATO.

Who allowed this guy to speak to the enemy in the first place? The Politburo – a cabal mafia burning red hot with the desire to get their hands on every “spoil and luxury” and dollars of the West, a fruit forbidden in the then Soviet Russia. Keep that in mind. Gorbachev was “made” by them for a witless front-man – a move well proven before on Abe Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson.

When fools are counted then remember also Yeltsin. He was an even a bigger fool, because he allowed the cabal what Gorbachev would not – complete disembowelment of the “people’s collective property”, impoverishment of its once collective owners, destruction of law and order, and the borders of the once CommonWealth, all euphemistically called the”privatization”. When he realized his error he succumbed to serious depression, but eventually made good on it by anointing Putin to be the Jesus of the modern times – a non-idealist, non-dreamer, coldly calculating avenger for the Greatest Rape of the XX century.

Another viewpoint:
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Wonking Out: The Nightmare After Gorbachev
Sept. 2, 2022
Paul Krugman

Most articles on the death of Mikhail Gorbachev dwell on the political failure of his reform project. The Russian Federation, the main successor state to the Soviet Union, has not, to say the least, become a democratic, open society. Ukraine may finally have gotten there, but that very success is probably one major reason the country is now fighting for its life against Russian invasion.

What I’ve been reading has placed less emphasis on the economic failures of post-Gorbachev Russia. Yet those failures were spectacular and surely helped pave the way for Putinism. So let’s talk about how badly things went wrong in the 1990s.

First, some background: Nowadays everyone views the old Soviet Union, with its centrally planned economy, as an abject failure. But it didn’t always look that way. Indeed, in the 1950s, and even into the 1960s, many people around the world saw Soviet economic development as a success story; a backward nation had transformed itself into a major world power. (Killing millions in the process, but who’s counting?) As late as 1970, the Soviet Union’s success in converging toward Western levels of wealth seemed second only to Japan’s.

Nor was this a statistical mirage. If nothing else, Soviet performance during World War II demonstrated that its industrial growth under Joseph Stalin had been very real.

After 1970, however, the Soviet growth story fell apart, and by some measures technological progress came to a standstill.

Economic stagnation may not fully explain the rise of Gorbachev. But the increasingly obvious failure of centrally planned economics surely helped set the stage for reform. The Soviet Union crumbled; Russia turned away from socialism and toward a market economy.
….
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/opinion/russia-economy-mikhail-gorbachev.html

Rule of thumb when playing poker: Look around the table for the mark. If you don’t see him, you are him.

The USSR was unable to feed itself.

TheUSA sold 25 million metric tons of wheat and corn during 1980 to the Reds, 10% of the USA production.

The second larges such purchase was needed in 1972, an amount of 18 million tons.

Now, after communism, a war torn Ukraine’s grain is badly needed to feed the world.

Read this from someone who was in Reagan’s cabinet at the time.

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2022/08/30/mikhail-gorbachev-r-i-p/

“Russia, a superpower that defeated Nazi Germany and terrified the United States with nightmare scenarios of communist dominoes falling all around the world, was looted, impoverished and humiliated.”

And it is still being looted today. Except by its own people! When are you moving Rall?
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KICK IN THE RUBLES Inside Putin’s hopelessly CORRUPT army as generals ‘steal billions’ & soldiers ‘flog gear on Russian EBAY’
Sep 3 2022

VLADIMIR Putin’s hopelessly corrupt generals are siphoning off “billions” from the army while soldiers flog stolen gear and vehicles on Russia’s version of eBay, an investigation by The Sun Online has revealed.

Online marketplace Avito is awash with state-of-the-art Russian military kit at a time when Putin’s soldiers are being sent to the frontline in Ukraine poorly armed and poorly supplied.
….
https://www.the-sun.com/news/6140011/inside-putin-corrupt-russian-army/

Under the deft & dexterous leadership of President Vladimir Putin, Russia has become the Light of the World.

All other things being equal, it has been convincingly demonstrated that a moderately regulated capitalist system is much more efficient and productive than an orthodox communist/Stalinist system.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, however, demonstrates that the worst possible system is completely unregulated capitalism. And Milton Friedman is one of the most evil people to have ever lived, far worse than Karl Marx.

Socialism didn’t kill the Soviet Union; capitalism did.

Both Communist Central Planning and unregulated Capitalism will fail in the implementation. Real economies are mixed economies. Public financing of public needs and private financing of private needs. How you do the mixing can lean left or right.

I found Gorbachev rather charming. Partly because he had a map of Albania on his forhead.

So you’re admitting Reagan was smart? You could lose your party card for that.

Hopefully, the Chinese will have learned an object lesson from the trajectory of that traitor, fool and coward, Mikhail Gorbachev, and make the crucial understanding that the USA can never but never be trusted and can only be dealt with from a position of overwhelming strength.

Another point, the simple and obvious explanation is that Gorbachev was just not very bright – and venal and corrupt to boot. Truly a terrible combination for a supreme leader.

Meanwhile in USA ===Amtrak Joe has dispatched how many billions —which is being diverted ??

gorby’s biggest mistake was buying the american corporate propaganda; life goes better with coke, levi’s blue jeans, mom’s apple pie and chevrolet. at the time the majority of russians also brought into this belief that things would be better if they were in the west, not understanding the illusory nature of the american dream. i think this is what made it so easy for banksters to walk in and financially rape, pillage, and loot the entire country, rall correctly points out the millions of early and unnecessary deaths caused by their reign of terror.

all of this makes the accomplishments of putin and the russian people even more amazing, as in a mere 20 years they were able to rid the country of the most dangerous parasites and bring the remaining oligarchs under heel. at the same time they were able to rebuild and modernize both their military and domestic economy, all the while being attacked and provoked by a nato coalition constantly pushing at their borders.

the west will never be able to fool the russian people again and the russians will never again, want to be anything other than russian.

Do you really, honestly and seriously believe that the US State Department would actually *respect* a properly signed, sealed, agreed and witnessed solemn oath any more than they would respect the ‘verbal assurances’ they gave to the dumb, gullible naive Russians.

Grain was purchased in order to feed animals and so increase the consumption of meat by Soviet citizens. There was no shortfall in Soviet grain production as it pertained to feeding the population.

http://www.soviet-empire.com/ussr/viewtopic.php?t=47201

I should note the drops in agricultural production which took place in Russia and Ukraine during 1987-2001 as given in table 2 of the appendix to Agricultural Productivity and Efficiency in Russia and Ukraine: Building on a Decade of Reform by the Economic Research Service (ESR), Department of Agriculture:

https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/41466/31384_aer813app_002.pdf?v=7581.8

I don’t have any source offhand for current agricultural figures for either Russia or Ukraine, but it’s undoubtedly buried somewhere. The total grain production for Russia/Ukraine in the years 1987-2001 comes out as:

1987_____93.26/43.98
1988_____88.73/42.07
1989_____98.93/47.73
1990_____110.57/47.26
1991_____85.58/36.28
1992_____102.45/35.15
1993_____95.17/42.16
1994_____77.54/32.43
1995_____61.10/31.93
1996_____66.80/23.11
1997_____86.02/33.90
1998_____46.24/25.32
1999_____53.19/24.22
2000_____63.01/23.25
2001_____83.60/38.35

The data reads as if some of the earliest deregulation measures may have started to have some positive effect, but then became overwhelmed with a reverse-overkill effect so that the whole economy crashed, and grain production dropped very badly. It could be interesting to know what more recent figures show.

His big mistake was NOT GETTING IT IN WRITING that there would be no eastward expansion of NATO.

They lie to American TAX CATTLE every single day. Russia could see that easily back then because it was the same. They failed to read their own critiques of American Capitalism.

Gorbachev was wrong to trust them, true. So are the rest of us.

It is a pity that grass could not have been imported to feed starving soviet animals.
“My country for a blade of grass” – yelled Comrade Andropov (or Chernenko?)

Gorby was unlucky.

Note the very extremely high price when Afghanistan was invaded, the extremely high price when Georgia was invaded, and the super high price at the Time of the Revolution Of Dignity, when Crimea was annexed and the Donbass rebellions started. Contrast with the low price during the Orange revolution, when Putin did nothing.

2022 invasion?

Russians had traditionally always had a low meat diet, with grain playing a disproportionate role in diets. There were no starving animals in the USSR during the period of the 1970s and 1980s. From the Medley paper:

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Soviet agricultural imports have changed significantly over the course of the past two decades. During the period 1956-1970 the USSR was a net exporter of grain, exporting (net) an average of 3.5 million tons per year (Goldich 1979:144). From 1970 onward it became a progressively heavier importer. Net grain imports rose from an average of 9.88 million tons per year over the period 1970-1974 to 20.52 million during the period 1975-1979, to 30.88 in 1980-1984 and to 32.1 million tons during the four year period 1985 1988 (USDA 1989:49). Prior to 1970 Soviet net meat imports were small but by 1990 they were approaching US levels.

These rising imports of grain and meat were not triggered, as one might be inclined to infer, from declining production. Grain production rose from an average 181.6 million tons in 1971-75 to an average 206.9 million in 1986-89. Meat production rose from 14.0 million tons in 1971-75 to 19.2 million tons in 1986-89, i.e., a 37 percent increase. The imports were triggered by the rising demand for meat which accompanied rather sharp increases in income. Per capita consumption of meat, rose from 47.5 kg per capita in 1970 to 67 in 1989 (NKhSSSR V 1980:201-202 and V 1989: 118). In a very approximate fashion, the 5.2 million extra tons of meat produced in 1986-89 over and above the 1971-75 level required approximately 50 million tons of grain for feed, 25 million of which have come from domestic production and some 25 from additional imports. Since the increase in grain output and imports has not been sufficient to cope with the increasing requirements for domestic meat production, meat imports were increased.
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— Joseph Medley, Soviet Agriculture: A critique of the myths constructed by Western critics

As I understand it, the Saudis agreed with Reagan to keep oil prices low as part of Cold War strategy. So, it wasn’t just bad luck. It was politics.

https://asiatimes.com/2022/09/the-ghosts-of-gorbachevs-energy-legacy/

According to the linked article, the Saudis were tying to drive their rivals out of business or into an agreement, nothing to do with politics, just business unrelated to what the US wanted and in fact the US was not that happy about it. I agree agriculture gave the US leverage (also kept balance of payments healthy). Gorby was hardly to blame for the ruinously expensive Chernobyl fiasco, and although the anti alcohol campaign cost $16 billion it was intensifying a policy began by Andropov.

Fascinating about the demands of Poland and Ukraine in the Gorby era for cheap energy. It is also interesting about how the German doing deals with Germany to supply energy drove the US crazy. Cutting those links has finally been achieved.

Putin had something similar to Gorby’s bad luck happen to him in 2014-15 , when the Saudis tried to bring the Frackers to heel by making much of shale oil production uneconomic. That is probably why Ukraine did not get the full on invasion nine years ago.

Rall pretends he’s a radical but in the end he’s just one of those salon types. Pseudo-intellectual, pretentious, putting up an impotent fight against ideas simply because the ideas don’t fight back.

If he hasn’t figured out by now that the real fight is not between capitalism and communism or what have you, but between the Crime Inc. in DC and the rest of the world, he never will.

I’m definitely not holding my breath, seeing that he was completely on board with the Crime Inc.’s vax program. He probably likes their massive deficit spending, too, as long as they pretend it’s for “building back better”.

I’m more or less on the “reap what you sow” wagon, on this one. Yes we suckered Gorby and the drunkard. On the other hand, Stalin suckered us in the West over the 1940s (and, by the way, suckered the Jews too).
I am willing to accept this turn of affairs as exactly that, a turn of affairs. The Soviets had racked up quite a bill against us and, in the 1980s, when we were in position to call it in, we called it in.

Every country with a central bank and fractional banking is a centrally planned economy. Instead of demagogues, banksters decide who gets their snouts into the trough first.

And so I take it that Russia is calling it in now? Stalin did not sucker the Jews, or even the West. The West suckered him into a war with Hitler, which he would have preferred on his terms, after the Germany – Britain War. He was very clear in what he wanted in a post- WW2 Europe – a wide barrier between the Western Europe and Russia proper. He could have taken at least a couple of countries in post ww2 Europe, and America could not have done much about it. Instead, he trusted America, and America paid back by creating the NATO.

Stalin was brutal, heartless, suspicious and probably crazy too – anyone who kills his own son for no reason at all is undoubtedly crazy. But he was not smart enough to see through the West.