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0 pointspotato37328421y ago0 comments

The fall of the Soviet Union was arguably more graceful than the two world wars and myriad of colonial worlds it took Europe butt out. Even if you exclude the world wars it probably holds.

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s_dev1y ago

The fall of the Soviet Union was anything but graceful. Within months of the dissolution of the USSR Russia had children becoming prostitutes in order to get money for food.

selimthegrim1y ago

In 1986/87 top USSR newspapers were covering high class prostitution for foreign businessmen in Moscow hotels. A few years later, foreign currency prostitute was ranked among most desirable occupations for women in an anonymous poll.

ViktorRay1y ago

The Fall of the Soviet Union may not have been graceful to the Russians but it was certainly graceful to the people the Soviet Empire was exploiting in Eastern Europe.

People in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and so on probably would use the word graceful to describe the USSR's end.

(And yes I know Poland wasn't part of the USSR but it was a satelite state).

dh20221y ago

I think the current Russia-Ukraine war is the delayed end of Soviet Union collapse.

Boris Yeltsin in Aug 1991 called for "Russian Federation to reserve the right to review its borders with any adjacent republic" [0]. Yeltsin did that for a couple of weeks - until Leonid Kravchuk (Ukraine's last Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR and Republic of Ukraine's first president) said he will not support Yeltsin in dissolving USSR. By then the Baltics were already independent countries, but Yeltsin still needed Ukraine's Belarus' and Kazakhstan's support to get rid of Gorbachev.

So Yeltsin acquiesced the borders at that time, four months followed up with the Belovezha Accords and USSR dissolved without a fight a couple of weeks later.

I think what we see today is are some repressed conflicts being fought out in the open.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/27/world/soviet-turmoil-yelt... - free to read with NYT registration

wiseowise1y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_territory...

Very graceful.

potato3732842OP1y ago

The sum total of the fatalities column on that page is joke compared to even the most optimistic assessment of how the British middle east or French Indochina went, and that's before you add in all the crap in Africa.

Edit: You could probably even include the current Ukraine shindig and my statement would still hold.

Danmctree1y ago

The toll was far greater than just that of conflicts. If you look at increased mortality during the period you'll see excess death in the millions. Wiki says 3.4 million: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Un...

In absolute terms it's one of the harshest death tolls in the last decades. It's far from a joke. Though for completeness, AIDS was also going on there and it's hard to tell from the stats the proportion of impact

Herring1y ago

Yeah in retrospect I could probably have phrased that a little better!

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