#collapse of the soviet union

[deadpresidents]

can you recommend any bios on putin?

Sure. I haven't read a ton of books about Putin/Russia, but there are four books in particular that I have and felt were really good.

•Putin by Philip Short (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) This 2022 title is the most recent book I can personally recommend and the only one published since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. Short also wrote two other great books on autocrats that I'd suggest checking out -- Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, and Mao: The Man Who Made China.

•The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin by Steven Lee Myers (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) Myers, who has been reporting from around the world for decades for the New York Times, published this book in 2015 and it reveals a closer and more-detailed look at Putin the person than outsiders have ever had before.

•The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) Born in Russia and now an American citizen, Gessen, who is now known as M. Gessen is a prominent critic of Putin's rule. They examine how a relatively low-level, seemingly unimpressive KGB operative somehow rose to become Boris Yeltsin's hand-picked successor and one of the most powerful people of the 21st century.

•Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser (BOOK | KINDLE) I make a point of getting every book written by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, whether it's something the married couple has written together or the many books they've written on their own. Published in 2007, after Baker and Glasser finished serving as chiefs of the Washington Post's Moscow bureau in the early years of Putin's first stretch in the Russian Presidency, this book focuses on how Putin impacted a Russia that was rapidly undergoing drastic changes in the 15 years since the Soviet Union collapsed and the backsliding from the delicate form of democracy that Boris Yeltsin had attempted to implement after the end of the Cold War.

[thewinecoloredsea]

This line is hitting harder than ever

From Games by persephoneselene aka annamariavolkova

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

The real socialism, created not by theoreticians and stupid populists, but by communists, looked like this - empty shops and poor residents, while "leaders" enjoyed the benefits created by "capitalists" in special stores: The uniqueness of this photo is that it shows not only a "happy" Russian past, but also their "bright" future towards empty shops and mass poverty... Soviet Union, after WWII (sometime after WWII, a Russian store could look so empty both in the 1950s and just as well in the 1980s)

P.S. No matter how ridiculous it is, there have always been quite a lot of political idiots useful to the Kremlin in the West, who believe that they should befriend with Moscow...In the modern West, the role of this useful idiots has been taken on by various not only left-wing socialists and communists, but also by right-wing and ultra-right-wing foolish populists...

[oneofthosecrazycatladies]

Reminder that the President of the United States has complete, unilateral control over America’s nuclear weapons.

Back in 1945, Harry Truman had a bunch of trigger-happy generals who weee overexcited about the new technology that was the nuclear bomb and they basically wanted to bomb everyone so Truman decided that the President, alone, should have the power to decide when to use nuclear weapons and on whom. And that hasn’t changed to this day.

Just something to keep in mind when you’re deciding who to vote for.

[tatarstani]

“Demonstration of city residents protesting against attempts to dismantle the monument to V.I. Lenin, Donetsk, 1990”

[haventacluewhatimdoing]

God the Brigadier saying 'back in the Cold War days' in 1975 is SUCH interesting social commentary now we're 50 years hence

[ultraviolentamp3]

Playing suzerain like 🤔 hmm should i as the progressive leader of a struggling 3rd world country align myself with the ronald reagan expy or with the character that's like if lenin lived long enough to lead the soviet union and was actually for real achieving global communism

[alteredsilicone]

The Hex, but I assign them different flavors of Kārums (Latvian curd snack).

Arthur - Classic Vanilla Aoi - Caramel Amir - Lemon Lettie - Candied Fruit Eleanor - Chocolate Quincy - Hazelnut

[that-starlight-prince]

So I'm at my family's house this weekend and I'm going through boxes full of books in the basement to see if there's anything I want to take. Some of it is my stuff from when I was a kid, some of it is my parents', and some of it is idk what, grandparents (e.g. Canadian citizenship guide from 1949) and stuff that was absorbed from other family over the years probably?

Anyway there is some cool stuff here, but also like. A book of the prophecies of Nostradamus??

[cafeleningrad]

Within the general weird US-centric compulsion to set every modern!AU, it's a bit bewildering to me how the fandom still HCs Jayce and Viktor both consistently as non-US-American. Viktor is at vaguest Slavic, at most Specific Czech, Jayce any variation of Latino. By all means, I don't know if many fanfic writers think that people from different nations can only meet in the US due to migration as if LatAm doesn't have an equally vivid history of various colonial projects, and migratory waves. Or the history socialist brother states and worker migration between them? Or well, as if migration itself doesn't exist. Any out world AU could be set in... uh Liechtenstein, and there would be a satisfying reason why people from two different ethnic backgrounds meet in another nation. (Fun fact: Did you know the fanfare of Mariachi music was influenced by Bohemian immigrants bringing their musical influence with them?)

I don't know, I'm simply wondering why many our world AUs are so averse to a variety of settings that aren't the US. At this point them meeting even in Canada would be a refreshing change.

[gregor-samsung]

" It’s important to understand that the Soviet Union achieved collapse-preparedness inadvertently, and not because of the success of some crash program. Economic collapse has a way of turning economic negatives into positives. The last thing we want is a perfectly functioning, growing, prosperous economy that suddenly collapses one day, and leaves everybody in the lurch. It is not necessary for us to embrace the tenets of command economy and central planning to match the Soviet lackluster performance in this area. We have our own methods, that are working almost as well. I call them “boondoggles.” They are solutions to problems that cause more problems than they solve.

Just look around you, and you will see boondoggles sprouting up everywhere, in every field of endeavor: we have military boondoggles like Iraq, financial boondoggles like the doomed retirement system, medical boondoggles like private health insurance, legal boondoggles like the intellectual property system. The combined weight of all these boondoggles is slowly but surely pushing us all down. If it pushes us down far enough, then economic collapse, when it arrives, will be like falling out of a ground floor window. We just have to help this process along, or at least not interfere with it. So if somebody comes to you and says “I want to make a boondoggle that runs on hydrogen” – by all means encourage him! It’s not as good as a boondoggle that burns money directly, but it’s a step in the right direction. "

Dmitry Orlov - Closing the Collapse Gap (2006)

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

Source: Comrade Kroupsky | Channel TRAILER

P.S. The best quote in 2025...It seems that the author of the excellent Paper Skies channel dedicated to the history of aviation has been thoroughly irritated by the useful idiots and simply corrupt fools in the West and East who live in pathetic illusions about Russia and the Kremlin's regime...! The beginning looks promising! We are waiting for new videos...

[kind-of-a-shitty-wizard]

just got told it was “me core” to live in a place with nice architecture and plants…… i thought that living in a place that is nice to look at and has nature was a . like a normal every day person want. like a human core thing

[spockvarietyhour]

Mikhail Gorbachev Pizza Hut Commercial

[sicheslavchyk]

Btw, I really don't understand where western communists got the idea of equal rights for women and LGBTQ+ folks in soviet union... Like damn, post-soviet countries have a great misogyny, homophobia and transphobia problem, AND THIS IS COMING FROM AN AFAB QUEER FROM A POST-SOVIET COUNTRY

I'm sorry, I'm tired of hearing "oh, your country is so bad, you haven't legalized gay marriage, you are so homophobic and misogynistic, why should we help you protect yourself!!1!1!", and then those same people praising soviet union as a paradise. Where tf do you think all of those problems, that are, mind you, especially common in post-soviet/socialist countries, came from? Don't you see a pattern here? Why the western, so-bad-capitalist part of Europe legalized gay marriage, has low levels of misogyny and has laws that protect minorities, and post-soviet countries are struggling with that? Maybe because homophobic laws of soviet union that literally jailed or put openly non-cishet people in mental institutions? Maybe because of misogynistic mindset that was extremely common in soviet union? No, women were not treated as equal, they were treated as cheap workers who you can pay less and not give a good education because they will become mothers and wives nonetheless :) No, queer folks were not treated as equal, they were treated as mentally ill sub-humans.

Bonus point: people from soviet countries struggled just to preserve their national identity. There can't be any mass riots for gay rights, if you are jailed and/or killed for creating art in your native language, researching the history of your land, that soviets tried to hide, and speaking about their crimes. And I'm not talking about only about 20s or 30s here. This thing was relevant in the 60s, 70s, 80s and all the way till the collapse of soviet union. Post-soviet countries are independent for a bit more that 30 years, and we are fucking trying, okay? I will be speaking about Ukraine right now, but the situation with misogyny and homophobia here is already better than it was in 2014, for example. There are new laws that defend women (Istanbul Convention), and activists are currently trying to push government to accept civil partnerships, so gay couples could have at least part of the rights that married hetero couples have (we can't legalize gay marriage right now because for that you need to change the constitution, and it is prohibited during the war).

by the way please share this post because i’d really like some people to reconsider using communist symbols and labels, especially the hammer and sickle / soviet flag, because i have seen lots of things like this:

and there’s several posts here about not using imperial japan flag or nazi imagery because of the mass crimes these symbols are associated with, but none about the flag under which my country and my family, and many others, have suffered.

i know tumblr is very american-centered, and not many people here care about the history of countries that are not the united states or white western europe, but seeing the above imagery can really hurt some people.

if you are a young person who just decided that communism was synonymous with “perfect justice utopia”, please reconsider because it wasn’t exactly like that for people whose lives were actually directly/undirectly altered for the worse because of your “harmless intellectual ideology”. please ask yourself why you use symbols and flags under which literal ethnic cleansings and discriminatory crimes were commited, under which disabled people (or “invalids”, how we were called in my country) have suffered. the working class was outwardly praised but secretly starved to death. women were used behind false statements of equality.

you’re a little bitch if you think pretending to be one of the people that fucked up my country and family is “badass” or “edgy”, and if you hope “communism will win”.

[glavilio]

the damage done to the burgeoning furry community by the collapse of the soviet union may not be yet understood in our lifetime