Midway through HBO’s Chernobyl it struck me: this was the start of the fall of the USSR. I guess that’s obvious, but the dominant narrative growing up was that the US outspent them militarily and it bankrupted them.
But it was so eloquently shown in the miniseries that it was really about the facade coming down — the illusion of the all-knowing regime crumbling into that vast, hellish pit at the center of the reactor.
To someone in the USSR at around the same time it might as well have looked that AIDS epidemic is going to put the US in serious trouble. The US authorities were not admitting it as a serious problem until many thousands had died.
I would discount much of the insinuations that the HBO series is making, it was made without any inputs from Russians/Ukrainians which should be a serious argument against its authenticity of sentiment.
A theory is that the collapse of the USSR was not any grassroots uprising or the expression of people longing for democracy, it was just mostly a few higher-ups like Yeltsin figuring out that they can hold and exercise greater power and authority by dissolving the Union than keeping it. I view the claim that Chernobyl had much to do with the end of the USSR as a naive and unrealistic analysis.
The part with "poor quailty Soviet tech" is of course bullshit. The VVER reactor fleet works fine without any major incidents. The RBMK by contrast was an irresponsible design pushed by a politically connected engineer. Otherwise most of the article also applies to China.
> A theory is that the collapse of the USSR was not any grassroots uprising or the expression of people longing for democracy, it was just mostly a few higher-ups like Yeltsin figuring out that they can hold and exercise greater power and authority by dissolving the Union than keeping it.
This theory must've been dreamt up by someone with next to no knowledge about the USSR. The Soviet Union collapsed through its republics (puppet states) declaring self-government, followed by declarations of independence later on.
Day by day, general disillusionment from Afghan war, disasters like Chernobyl and massacres like those in Tbilisi and Vilnius eroded authority of the central government until Gorbachev was commanding phantom armies like Hitler in his bunker in the final days of WWII. The conspiracy theory of KGB-led (or whoever else) coup ignores the decade of events leading up to the 1991 and Kremlin's increasingly desperate attempts to maintain control, all of which are extremely well documented, with direct participants of all levels still alive today.
I would place it on the same level as suggesting that the whole Vietnam-era peace movement and 1960s cultural revolution was a KGB plot and not a genuine grassroots movement.
You could watch Adam Curtis' HyperNormalisation documentary for further insight into this. It's about the current political elite but comoares the current situation with the one in the USSR before the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Another think the US likes to look at differently:
US: Marchal plan was self-less help.
Reality: Marchal plan was mostly self-help, preventing a economical collaps of the US and securing strong longterm influence in the EU/Germany to make sure the EU/Germany won't side with communism in the future. Also allowing them "secure/safe/accepted" military presence in the EU/Germany "just on the border to their enemy". Etc. (Don't get me wrong. It was still awesome and I'm still grateful. Just don't go around stating the EU/Germany owns the USA and should do thinks which would harm itself to support the USA, especially given that currently the US is slightly falling from grace.).
I'm not saying the CCP's days are numbered, but maybe, just maybe they will live in interesting times.