[billfruit]

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.

[petre]

You're also right. One thing led to the other. Also the Russo-Afghan war.

https://unherd.com/2019/06/chernobyl-and-the-meltdown-of-the...

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.

[mopsi]

> 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.

The sentiment in Chernobyl is spot-on.