The Fall of the USSR, Pt I

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Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and we're just a few cold war kids working out our ongoing fascination with the Soviet Union. That's right, this has been a long time since we've done it too part, I was trying to remember the last time we did this. Probably ADHD.

Yeah, maybe. I'm weirdly excited by a two part or for some reason. Yeah, it is a little weird. It feels like less work, even though it's not. It's fun also to tackle something and really understand it even further, you know?

No, I totally agree. Like smashing this into a single 45 minute episode would have short-tricted it. I think. You know, we did, we scored it with a sickle and then smashed it down the middle with the hammer.

Wow. Look at you. Yeah.

“So we are talking about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

The USSR for some reason the CCP in Russia, Soviet Russia, I mean, how many times are we going to do Yaka of Smurnoff in this episode? I'm going to try not to do it once. Yeah, well, you do a better Yaka of Smurnoff than me, so I hope you will.

Although brands in the very nicest time of year, they, so yeah, and basically 1990 to the very

beginning of 1992, this superpower, one of two superpowers in the world, the way that the world was aligned was based on these two superpowers. One of them just fell over and it was gone in the blink of an eye and really quickly. Yeah. I mean, like just breathtakingly fast, it went away and not just the country, this super

power, but also the Soviet communism itself, it was just gone, just gone, gone, and the end of an ideal, the end of a Cold War, like it was, you know, I can't think of anything that was bigger since the end of World War II geopolitically, like this had to be the biggest thing. I think absolutely for sure.

The best part about it, though, at least as far as the world was concerned, it didn't take a nuclear World War III to bring the Cold War and the bipolar, I guess, orientation of the world to an end. Yeah, and it was a top-down thing, like it wasn't an uprising, although as we'll see, like on the Eastern Black, there were definitely some uprisings and things that happened as a result.

The whole thing started as a top-down thing because of one guy, because of Michele Gorbachev, it's a Gorbachev. Oh, he's a Gorbachev.

I always heard both throughout our youth.

All right. Great. So I'll just say both. I mean, it was Gorby. Yeah, that's right.

Because of a series of decisions that he made to not fully westernize the Soviet Union, but to loosen the rain some, to get a little capitalism in there, to get a little more transparency,

have a newer sort of softer Soviet Union moving forward. And boy, he, I don't know if he didn't fully think it through, or if it was just the domino effect was so fast, I'm sure he was probably like, wow, like, I didn't think this was going to happen. Yeah.

He's just standing there, like, looking guilty while the whole room is just falling down around him, because he touched something he wasn't supposed to, kind of. Yeah, for sure. But it all sort of started with these two major reforms that he set out to establish, which was in Russian, it would be Perestroika and Glaznod, but to us, that would be restructuring

and transparency.

And I guess we should talk about the restructuring first.

Yeah. Perestroika. One more thing I do want to say about Gorby, though, before we move on, is I didn't see anything anywhere that suggested that he, this was secretly purposeful. I think you're absolutely right.

“I think he was completely taken off guard by the consequences of these pretty legitimate”

and good ideas at the time, because Gorby Trough inherited a USSR that was in deep stagnation by the mid 1980s, right? Yeah. It was a planned economy, and it had been moving along in that direction for decades. But by this time, by the '80s, it was just, it was not in good shape.

And so, like you said, to kind of like jumpstart the socialist economy, not replace it, but jumpstart it, he was willing to implement some Western style, free market ideas. Yeah. I mean, he was a very progressive guy for Soviet Russia.

So it was the late '80s where he launched this, like we mentioned the first thing, the restructuring

or the Perestroika. And that was sort of the economical political side of things to kind of loosen the grips a little bit, because he was like the reality of what our ideals are and what's really going on. Like there's a big gap there, so he thought maybe if we have this program of political renewal

and maybe some ethics and morals being introduced, like systematically, then maybe we can improve what's going on here, and that was what Perestroika was supposed to be about. Yeah, and Gloss now, both of them together, but that so that planned economy chuck, here's what Gorby inherited. So you have the rubble, which was the official currency of the USSR.

It was not accepted or recognized outside of the USSR or outside of the Eastern block. I should say, outside the Iron Curtain, big problem. It is a big problem. Number two, the Soviet government was responsible for deciding how much of what any given thing was made in any given year, right?

It wasn't based on supply and demand. It was based on a planned economy. They also set prices for those things. So if you put all those things together, the Soviet economy had no way of signaling who needed what, where, when, and so there were shortages everywhere.

There was lots of waste, and there were very few businesses, all the businesses in this plan economy were owned by the state. There were very few of those businesses that didn't need to also be propped up artificially because they were just losing money left and right. Yeah, so I mean, like you said, what he inherited was in bad shape already.

“One of the reasons, and I remember this is something we had heard a lot, like growing up”

as GeneXers, was that the Soviets are trying to keep pace in the Cold War, in the space race, and everything else, and they can't keep up that spending, like, we could there in the west, and that's true. All that government spending put a real dent in their financial outlook. The war and invasion of Afghanistan over a 10-year period from 79 to 89 was very costly.

And then Chernobyl. I mean, we'll talk a little bit about just the cost of, like the, I guess, ethical cost of the cover up on what that did to dent their image, like within Russia and the Soviet Union,

but it literally cost a lot of money, like at least $18 billion, like $1986 to clean it up

to contain it. And that was on top of everything else, like the straw that broke the camel's back. Yeah, that was a big deal for them, for sure. Did you ever see that Chernobyl many series with Jared, I can't remember his last. Jared Harris.

“Yeah, one of the finest actors of all time, I think.”

Yeah. You bet your butt I did. Outstanding. Outstanding.

Yeah. It was one of the best ones I'd seen. Yeah. Great. So, again, Perestroika is, is Gorby coming along and being, like, okay, we're in big trouble.

We need some money fast, and we need to just make some adjustments.

So, some of those adjustments were basically, this was huge, like, these were incredibly

“radical with the backdrop of the Soviet economy, right?”

One was allowing companies from outside the USSR to start up businesses in the USSR, and they would be joint ventures co-owned by the company and by the Soviet Union, right? So now, of a sudden, you have new expertise, new ideas, new innovation, new high-quality products coming in, and a bunch of money outside an investment coming into the US. This is a pretty good idea, right?

Yeah. That was a good idea. As part of that, he said, there maybe we should also get, like, the locals involved. So, hand over some of the ownership of some of these state-run enterprises that we've had, which is basically all business, right?

From the government, only owned by the government to a locally elected workers' collective or a series of them. Right.

And so, that meant that you could have private business in the Soviet Union for the first

time. And then the other ones, you mentioned that they had, like, quotas for companies, they didn't look at market corrections, like, supply and demand to indicate how they should run stuff. They said, all right, maybe we should allow businesses to, like, instead of having short balls of stuff that we really need, maybe they should fulfill beyond the quotas for a change.

And, you know, you got to make the amount set by the quota, but beyond that, you could continue making that stuff if there's demand for it.

“For sure, okay, so these are very radical ideas, but had he just gone with Paris Troika?”

My money is on Paris Troika alone would not have torn down the USSR. I think it was a combination, and probably more than anything, it was really glass-nost that did it. The problems with Paris Troika were immediately apparent.

There were by investing more power into the republics that all made up the Soviet Union.

Yeah. They started with whole tax payments that were supposed to go to the central government, right? They were kind of a little bit emboldened, I guess, by that little extra power they were given. Yeah, for sure.

Some of the ministers who had run these places for the government were now running some kind of, as private citizens, and they started looting industry, however they could, it just immediately started. And then the old quota system was what they had in place of supplying demand, but no one under the Soviet regime had any idea what other stuff you could use for supplying demand,

plus the rubble was still artificially controlled, so they didn't have any market signals. Nobody knew what the heck was going on at this point. Yeah. I mean, it was all brand new, and we'll talk about this later, but you can't just flick a switch overnight and say, all of a sudden, we're a more free market economy, and let's

just see how that works, because it had been so long. And so, you know, entwined in the government's iron fist, it was just a mess. And so, the economy started just going bananas and all sorts of weird ways, and the government tried to rain that in by spending a lot to try and like outmaneuver all the weird things that were happening, and it was just a big mess, kind of right off the bat.

Yes. So it was a mess, but the Soviet Union's economy was already a mess, and I don't think just Perestroika would have done what happened. It took glass notes, in my opinion, to bring down the Soviet Union. Should we keep going?

That's it. Are you kidding me? With a cliffhanger like that? Okay. Oh man, I was like, we're taking a message break, and you're like, hey man, you convinced

me immediately? Yeah. That's a great cliffhanger. We're going to come back and explain what glass notes to us right after this. Valdeleen.

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maintenance check. These texture trained to help spot issues early and give you a ride and easy. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months.

them.

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All right, Josh Tee's glass notes, and that was the the second part of the one-two punch

to try and introduce a new style of government in the Soviet Union, and this calls for this kind of started coming after the Chernobyl cover up in '86, and the whole idea behind

“glass notes was more transparency, like I said, that's what the word mean.”

So relax some of this very notorious state censorship of everything, and so once that was done, all these social ills that plague the Soviet Union started to be exposed a little bit in the media, so, you know, like mass famine, the ghoulogs, you know, the Soviet history basically kind of being realized for the first time, and displayed for people to make their own, like judgments on it was a good idea, but again, once those blood gates were open,

it was, like, turned out to not be a very good idea. Yes, so I believe Gorbachev was a true believer in the idea that the Soviet Union needed greater freedom of speech and greater freedom of the press. I think you truly believe that by YouTube. This was also calculated politically as well, and his position was, okay, if I can have an

open conversation with the the Soviet people about the need for reforms and all the stuff we need to implement because of these problems we have, they're going to support my policies and plans in me, and by doing that, I will be, I will pull the levers of power away from the conservatives who have managed to hang on to power and keep things as they were stagnated in trouble by that censorship, by the silence, silent thing of critics, by intimidation

and actual violence, like if I get people talking openly about the problems, then we can have real change. So it was politically calculated, even though he did almost certainly actually believe that it needed to happen to. Yeah, for sure.

But the thing is, like what you're saying was the conservatives had managed to hang on to that power by keeping things as they were, which wasn't great, but it was stable in a way. It wasn't chaos, it was highly controlled and that's the way they liked it, so to disrupt that system was pretty bold move.

He himself, he was part of the what was known as the Nomenclature, which was the sort of the upper echelon of Soviet society, like the elite bureaucrats, and they had perks that other people didn't have, obviously they had like, you know, the states and they had nicer cars and things like that, and that was not a part of the communist experiment, the communist idea or this idea of social equality, and I think he had spent so much time in his career

sort of day-to-day life of the average Soviet. Yeah, so he knew enough to know that they were suffering and weren't fully aware of why, but he had no idea of just how much they're suffering was promoting a desire for real change, not even like small incremental change, or even semi-big change, like he was proposing,

“but so weeping change essentially, and that's what he found out once he opened up class”

nost, and it wasn't immediately adopted, I think the press actually kind of hung back for a little while.

First like, is this a trap? Are you trying to, are we going to be arrested? And he was like,

yeah, I think he said at some point like, there's no subject that's off the table, everything is open for discussion, and very quickly the press started to do what they're supposed to do, they began reporting on the hills of Soviet society. Yeah, I mean, it was a crazy thing to do, looking back. Yes, they, you know, because all of a sudden the media is writing about food shortages and

writing about the rampant alcoholism and the pollution and the mortality rates will get to some stats later on, but the second tier sort of position of women in Russian and Soviet society, state crimes, a lot of that was like under Stalin's rule obviously, but you know, that stuff was still going on. And so all of these sort of, you know, true believers and as you'll see, like especially in Mother Russia, the Eastern block sort of had other ideas,

but especially in Mother Russia, like this is something they really believed in and they had

never received this information. So it was easy if you were, you know, in the United States

or in the West to be like, how they're, they have no idea what's going on in their own country. Right. Because everything is being censored, but they really didn't. And you know, it's, if you're living in a, in a smaller town or a village and you're looking around, you might see some hills, but if you're reading about how everything is great, then it's going to, you know, slant your opinion about all. Yeah, and even more than that is, as we'll talk about it in a

little while, a lot of Soviets, identities were rooted in the Soviet experiment that now had been exposed as being based on torture and executions and the starvation of millions and millions of peasants, you know, like, yeah, it shook them to their core. It wasn't just like a loss of faith in their government. It was a loss of faith in their own, their themselves, I guess, in some cases. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, like I mentioned, especially in Russia, because that was sort of the,

the center of the Soviet Union, but once this happened and these formerly independent satellite states, like he said earlier, I think he really underestimated how ready they all were to really break free and sort of rise up. And, you know, there were some, some deep-seated, like ancient hostilities and rivalries among some of the Soviet states that were forced to be together, because they were part of the Soviet Union. And, you know, a good example you found was the ethnic Albanians and

the Serbs. They had hated each other since the 14th century, since the battle of the field of blackbirds, but as a part of the Soviet Union, they were, you know, supposed to be fellow countrymen. So as

“soon as they got the chance to hate each other again, they did it. And that's why there was so much”

fighting in the Balkans, like, for all basically all throughout the 90s, once this happened.

Yeah, because the Soviets no longer forced them together, and they were like, okay, it's on, let's start committing atrocities, and they all did. The other thing that really kind of happened with classness was the, like, the exposure of Western media, Western pop culture, like, this was not something that people had in the USSR had, like, really been exposed to at this point. Did you ever see that documentary where somebody was smuggling like Chuck Norris movies into,

I think Bulgaria or something like that? And they credited, like, these bootleg American movies is essentially, like, creating, like, unrest among the youth in leading eventually to revolution? No, because they were like, wow, there's a guy like Chuck Norris in the world that we don't know about. Yeah, essentially, Chuck Norris Rambo, like, they went crazy for it, and they also now saw the Western view of their country and their culture. And they were like, wow, this maybe,

maybe you are pretty backwards. We don't have anybody like that. Well, I mean, you know, and I'm not saying this in just, because, you know, how much a

“liability role. But that, I think it was a couple of concerts he did in the Soviet Union.”

That was a really, really big deal. Like, no Western artists had ever performed there.

to, to Western culture. Yeah, I think Metallica did too. Oh, did they? Later, obviously.

“Yeah, a little later, but, um, you know, it might have been before the fall of the Soviet Union,”

but probably right around the time. Um, and Al, I mean, once they found out that Alff was on TV, they're like, it's, it is over for communist Russia. Well, the big thing that really, um, allowed the, uh, the satellite states outside of Russia itself to really, um, I guess, feel like they had a, um, a real chance at uprising was when Gorbachev renounced the Brezhnev doctrine, yeah, which was the doctrine that said, hey, uh, we're going to defend everybody here.

We're going to defend socialism with this massive army. We're all together. The Soviet

block is as one, and we will all defend each other, sort of like a NATO thing. And in its place, Gorbachev was like, you know, you guys pursue your own reforms and, you know, govern, govern with the support of the people, like all these satellite states. And again, just the pedal to the metal that happened after that, and once the, they knew that they didn't have Moscow's military support, like removing that show of force, that was kind of holding everything together. So once

“that went away, it just started to grumble. Yeah. Now, I think you've created a really good, um, cliffhanger.”

No. So what do you say should we take a, our second break here? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. We're

going to do that, guys. Chuck, just agree. The loyal change of goods at 18 point maintenance check, these texts are trained to help spot issues early and give you a run easy. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and health captive for nine months. I survived, and I spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the survivor files. You just remember,

this low taunting voice next to my ear saying shut up. Don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up without it doubt he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. There's stories about what it takes to make it out of

life. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a bookshelf and you're for you page or equally

“important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pro's Society, the weekly podcast that's”

part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Ely Rallow, and every week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations, everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I want to say, so it's us. From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments,

nothing is off the table. So if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, and that is of Trojan Horse, whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro's Society on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages.

Okay, Chuck, so where we last left off was when Gorbachev banned in the Brezhnev doctrine that said, we're going to show up with our military. If there's any unrest in any of the satellite states or republics, and without that show force, that was probably like you said before the break the thing that really kind of gave rise or gave support to these nationalist movements, and each time one of the satellite states were focusing now on satellite states, we should differentiate.

a bunch of others. And then there were satellite states that were ostensibly independent countries, like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Albania, a few others. Those were considered satellite states. You put all of them together. So you have the USSR, the 15 republics, and the satellite states. Now you have the eastern block, and all that's behind what they called the Iron Curtain. That whole portion of the world was turned in on itself, had turned its back on the rest of the world,

and was focused on its own socialist experiment, aside from helping out other countries that

“wanted to try their own socialist experiments, which is why there was secret fighting and like”

Knike Rockwood, and why Cuba had missiles, nuclear missiles aimed at the United States. For the most part though, the eastern block paid attention to itself, and kept the rest of the world out. That's right, and kept them in, but once there was freedom of movement and travel from behind the Iron Curtain, this was like a really key to like the weakening of the Union. And they were like, you know what's really nice is Budapest, and that's just a handful of hours

by train and Austria. So all of a sudden you had tens of thousands of East Germans defecting. Most people wanted to stay in their houses, so like people want to live where they have lived their whole life. Right. So it wasn't like everybody left. Like citizens of other Soviet republics, East Germans most of them wanted to stay in their homes, but they wanted things to be different. So as soon as

“sort of the door was open politically, and all of a sudden you could vote for different candidates,”

like those candidates completely swept every election that happened.

Yeah, Poland was the first one. It's also probably the best example of them all,

because being in the eastern block, there was one party. When you went to vote, you voted for one party, and that was the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Even if you had an independent country, the communist had your country, your government, unlocked down. Right. And at one point, as part of like the series of decisions that just took this rolling snowball and just turned it into an avalanche, was Gorbachev saying no longer are alternative parties outlawed.

We can have other parties. And that first started in Poland with the Solidarity Party, which had been a trade union for a decade or so, and had turned into a populist anti-authoritarian party. And now that it was possible for Solidarity to run against the Communists, like you said, the board was just totally swept by that. Wasn't that like Valenza? Yeah, I remember, I mean, all this stuff was on the news,

but I was in late high school, into early college, and that wasn't, you know, I wasn't

“paying attention, like I do, you know, as you get older, I think, the same as most people.”

You didn't have a Solidarity Party t-shirt in the, it looked like a smurnaff label.

But I remember, you know, all of this stuff was in the background, always on the news.

Yeah. But yeah, once the Solidarity Party had a chance to run, it was, it was a sort of partially pre-election because what they did was, they said, all right, you can have a new party, but it's not just for 100% of the available seats. The Solidarity Party can have 35, like up to 35% of the seats in their, you know, the Polish equivalent of the House of Representatives or House of Commons.

The other 65% were still reserved for the Communists party, so they would still hold on to power, and then they also had a newly created Senate, so 100 newly created Senate seats. And Solidarity won 99 out of the 100 Senate seats. The one independent that won later switched to Solidarity, and they completely obviously filled the 35% a lot meant that they were, well, a lot did. In the House, and the Communists were so impopular, they didn't even get all the votes.

They needed to fill the other 65%. Yeah. Yeah. So Solidarity showed the rest of the world, like, like we have been under the Communist thumb, the Soviet thumb. We don't want that. Not only do we want to be independent, we don't want to be communist anymore. And they weren't after that. I mean, once Solidarity came into power, Poland very quickly was like, we're not associated with them anymore, everybody. Come on over to Poland. We have amazing

soft edges, and all sorts of other good things that you'll find out when when you get here. That's right. But we're pleased, no jokes. We've heard about all that stuff, but yeah, leave those at home.

Right. Our submarines do not have screen doors on them. That's right. I've never understood that.

if you, like, once it's submerged, so the water would come through the screen door.

“Now, I remember jokes about Polish people. I never, I knew the background to that. I think they just”

got picked on. It's one of the things where it's like, so this group has all the jokes against them. So then you start to just think they're all stupid, so that just begots more jokes. Right. That's what I think. It's like Detroit. It yes, exactly. Just kidding Detroit. We love you. So the, the Berlin Wall comes down. Obviously, that was a big deal. Germany was reunified. You know, sort of been a model of the West, and that was just like, that was less than a year

after the Polish elections of, of 1989. So like, things were really happening at a fast clip. Yeah. The leader of Bulgaria retired. The Czechoslovak government was replaced. The only place kind of shockingly that you had a bloody revolution was in Romania and Chalchescu. Yeah. Took that happen in a few months in 1989. All of that. All of the satellite states, just communism fell. So, I mean, I can't, I wish I'd been a little older. I remember when the

Berlin Wall fell. And I was like, Mom, we got to go. We got to get on a brand. We have to get there.

This is amazing. She wanted to so bad, but she just, we didn't. You're like, I've always wanted

to seize Germany. Exactly. This is our only chance. Yeah. But I wish I had been a little bit older. So I could have paid attention to this because I can't imagine what it was like paying attention to this over just these few months from the time that Poland's elections were held in June to the end of 1989. Like, just country after country's communist regimes fell. And like you said, only Romania's turned bloody. And you can pretty much fully blame the Chalchescu regime

for starting it. They started it essentially. Yeah. He was the remaining dictator there. Nicolai Chalchescu and his wife Elena, who was also appointed in a high office by her husband. So they were, you know, they were a power couple, I guess. But they had mass protests breaking out and Chalchescu went to the military and he said, kill him. Fire on these unarmed civilians. And he thought that would have been like, all right, we're going to wash this really quick.

But the military was like, bro, that's, we're not into that. And so they defected just like a few days after he ordered them to fire upon them. Not only did they not do that, they defected to the protestors side. And he and Elena saw the writing on the wall and they're like, we need to get the heck out of here. But the military caught them. Technically had a military tribunal. It was pretty short form, though. And they were found guilty and executed by firing squad.

Yeah. And strong upside down by their ankles for public viewing. Yeah. Harsh stuff.

“There was a rumor, too. Do you remember hearing this that, um, Chalchescu sort of?”

The Chalchescu's were fed to dogs. Yeah. After they were dead. And um, that is a rumor from what I can tell it did not happen. But the reason that rumor came about, um, is too full. One, Chalchescu was very famous, especially in Romania, for having appointed his favorite labrador as a general. Yeah. So there's a dog theme with that. And then he was blamed, specifically, for the terrible problem with fero packs of dogs. What used to be family dogs,

roaming Romania at times like killing children and stuff, right? Like it was a bad problem. The reason why it existed was because he had ordered a bunch of villages bulldozed. So he could build these new agrotechnical centers. Then after he bulldozed them and before he could build the centers, he just kind of lost interest in it, moved on. And so a lot of people lost their homes. So did a lot of dogs. And that's where they got their ferold dog problem from. Yeah.

“And then I remember this. I will never forget it. This wasn't like a dog my memory. I think about”

this joke every, I don't know, you're in a half, I would say. Dennis Miller. Yeah. Do you remember that? I do. I was, I thought Dennis Miller was very, very funny when he was an SNL news guy.

Yeah, not bad, but he was never funnier than when he was on Monday night football.

Oh god. Yeah, what was the Chalchescu joke? So yeah, on on weekend update, on Sarah and live like a couple weeks after the Chalchescu's were executed. And the rumor was that they were fed to the dog. Dennis Miller said that Purina had released a new, a new product, puppy Chalchescu. Yeah. You remember that one? What happened next? Well, I mean, this is the end of 1989, basically. And the only communist state still left west of

non-intervention-nullist way about him. I think he knew also that like the genie was out of the

bottle and like trying to to bottle it back up as impossible and resuming the Cold War again as a bad idea. Yeah. So he stayed out of it. And, you know, it felt like he said in just a handful of months, like right before the world's eyes. Right. And so far, we're talking just satellite states. Already independent, ostensibly independent nations took their independence back in 1989. The USSR is still together. And Gorbachev is not pushing for it to break up.

He's kind of trying to figure out how to balance these reforms he just introduced with keeping the USSR together and it proves impossible for him. Yeah. I mean, he sees what's happening all around. And, you know, he abandoned communism, basically. He voluntarily devolved power. Yeah. Which, again, just all these years later, it looks like a crazy thing to do. But just seating all that power when all they had ever known and all the west had ever known was

just just how powerful the Soviet Union was in controlling everything. And to just loosen

the knot on all of that was just really a pretty wacky thing to do. Yeah. I mean, especially unilaterally, I don't know quite enough about modern Russian history to know who else, like who is advisors and aides were? Yeah. Yeah. So it basically just seems like this is Gorbachev doing it himself. And I'm sure he did have help. But in the end, it was Gorbachev doing this himself. Like this wasn't some coalition with other people. Like he was the head of the Soviet

the communist party of the Soviet Union, the CPSU, the ruling body of the entire eastern block

at one point up until very recently, he used his position as the head of the CPSU to dissolve

the CPSU. It was as simple as that. And what's that happened? If you don't have the party who is pushing everybody around and censoring everything, if they don't exist anymore,

“now it's a free for all. And that was what he did at the I think the end of 1990. Yeah. He created”

a what we would think of as the House of Reps in their Congress of people's deputies that was, you know, mostly kind of fairly elected, at least compared to what it had been. He ended, like we said earlier, you know, he opened it up to other political parties, which is just going to completely weaken the grip of communism by virtue of doing that. And then he created an office of president. He appointed himself president. So it's not like he was elected. But this was

in March of 1990 and it was a brand new office. And you know, that was a that was a big deal. It would have like an eventual elected president. It was. And the reason why he did that is because he dissolved the communist party. So he couldn't be the head of the USSR because he was the head of the communist party. If the communist party didn't exist anymore. So now he's like, I call president of the USSR. He also introduced elections. So each of the 15 republics

head, what's called the Supreme Soviet, which was their own parliament. And he said, hey, guys,

“why don't you start having free elections with alternative parties legalized and let's see what happens?”

I'm Gorby. I'm pretty sure that the USSR is going to want to stay together. And I hope you didn't put any money on that because he would have lost big time. Yeah. And you know, we already covered kind of what Poland kicked off. The Baltics really helped set a tone as well. Pretty much immediately, Lithuania said, all right, we're six we're succeeding. We're not a part of the USSR anymore. There's a March of 1990 very quickly after a lot via an Estonia said, yeah, we're

going to succeed too. The Georgians did, the Armenians did. And these were, you know, kind of small time as far as the the might of the Soviet Union, like they could have still had a Soviet Union after this, even with these, I guess, secessionist. But it was really Ukraine. Like Ukraine was a, was in

“is a very big and powerful country. And just second after Russia. And so that is A, that's why, you know,”

after Ukraine, I think they held a referendum in 90% of the voters voted for independence. And after Ukraine left, the writing was really on the wall. But that's also why if you just want some modern context of why Putin has, why Ukraine means so much to him personally. Right. It is because

nostalgia for the old days. And Ukraine leaving was a real big thorn in his side and just the side

of sort of their history, the Soviet history. Yeah, he said publicly that it's ridiculous. Estonia is an independent country. Like he does not see these as independent countries. He sees them as republics of the Soviet Union that should be brought back together with Russia. Right. Right. That's what happened. I mean, this is so 1989. You saw the satellite states break out of the eastern block. And then now 1990 to 1991. Now it's happening with republics. Like actual, the actual Soviet

Union is starting to break up because the republic states are now saying we're independent. We're not part of the USSR anymore. And now, now, everyone's looking to Russia, which being a Cold War

kid, I always basically used Russia and the Soviet Union is interchangeable. But Russia was a republic

of the Soviet Union. Far in the way the most powerful one. That's where the seat of Soviet government was. But it was still a republic just like Latvia and Estonia. Yeah. And so now everybody's like, okay, what are you going to do? You guys are going to try to carry on as your own kind of Soviet Union. You're going to start World War III. What's going on next? And I say check that we end this episode here. Yeah. I see into part one, everybody. And as for tradition, we don't do listener

“males at the end of a part one. I think we just say, you know, tune in on Thursday, right?”

Yeah. We go out and stun the silence. I feel like we don't do we usually say anything. It's been so long. We're not actually the one that handles this. Yeah. Yeah. I know, but it's fun watching. So thank you, everybody, and we'll be back with part two of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. That was great. But don't forget to tell them what our email addresses. Oh, do we have to do that? What usually do?

All right. What is it? I heard the stuff podcast that I hurt media.com.

I heard radio. I heard radio. I see. I never say it. This is your job. You did great.

All right. We'll see everyone Thursday.

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