this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
848 points (98.7% liked)

World News

47321 readers
2673 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 32 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeltsin brought a lot of democractic traits into Russia

No. The democratic mechanisms started working a bit earlier than the USSR stopped existing.

People like Sakharov, Galina Starovoitova, have your heard of such names?

The democratic reforms happened before USSR's collapse.

Yeltsin used that to come to power in 1991, and then kicked the ladder in 1993, and in 1999 named Putin as the next president on television. Oh, of course Putin "won" an election after that.

And that process was actively supported by western governments, especially in 1996, with the justification that an honest democracy in Russia will lead to scary-scary communists coming back to power.

Should they kept going on that direction they’d be a global superpower on pretty much all fronts by now, surpassing US and even China.

Yeltsin was a dying alcoholic living uncritically and without shame by the motto "to my friends everything, to everyone else the law". They have kept going on that exact direction. That's the bloody point.

Yeltsin usurped power in 1993. If that didn't happen and the conflict between Yeltsin and the parliament was resolved peacefully and legally (by having snap parliament and presidential elections simultaneously, so - replacing both sides of the conflict, in other words, Yeltsin would have to back the democratic claims with the democratic action of leaving the post ; that was the constitutional court's decision), then maybe. But instead Yeltsin used tanks to resolve the dispute.

Anyway, no, even if 1993 conflict would end differently, I think surpassing Germany is possible.

Soviet Union was an interesting part of the planet, the older generation from there can "know" and teach you all the right things, but not live by them. Talk about bravery and honor, and very correctly, but act dishonorably and be completely blind to that, talk about science and logic and critical mind and very correctly, but go to fortunetellers and believe in energies. Talk about principle, but not follow it. Never use the "thought experiment" tool freely. And so on.

They needed lots of time to fix that - through pain. It's not been 40 years yet, if we take biblical timespans. Maybe in year 2031 Russia will finally be ready.

But they had also pretty big internal problems and a ton of people who desired old soviet times and whatever, so we ended up with what we have today. Wikipedia has way more info and links to study it further.

In 1991 nobody desired "old times" back. People saw how it all was degrading until falling apart. Don't you give me Wikipedia links, lol. Something should have happened for a lot of people to wish a "restoration", don't you think so? Like what I've described. And that "restoration" was provided by the same people, Yeltsin's people, with the figure of Putin and his image of a "former Soviet intelligence operative".

[–] QueenFern@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago

I appreciate this response. It's informative, and I learned a lot. Thank you for taking the time to post.