>1991 referendum
>literally ALL the republics voted to maintain the USSR
>yet they ignored the masses
>the final decision was made by the ruling elite
Sadly nothing prevents any AES from having a Gorbachev pulling the strings from within, and the people have no democratic mechanisms to stop this.
The referendum didn't mean shit. It was another retarded move by the imbecile-in-chief Gorbachev intended to save the Union he had already doomed, but in fact gave the opponents of the Union's continued existence another set of shovels to dig its grave.
The question was:
>Do you consider necessary the existence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedoms of all persons of all nationalities will be fully guaranteed?
What the fuck does this even mean? It's like they were too afraid to ask "Do you want [SR] to secede from the Soviet Union?", because it might not have gone their way. The additional questions added by the SRs make things even more questionable.
>Almost all the participating republics conducted the referendum in their own way. In Kazakhstan and Ukraine, the very question was altered and was even more ambiguous than the one proposed by Gorbachev. The majority in those two republics voted “Yes” in favor of their sovereign republics joining “a union of sovereign states.” In other words, they could proceed with full independence, but then join some kind of a commonwealth without a federal government. Ukraine’s Supreme Soviet added another question to the national question, asking the population to vote on its July 1990 declaration of sovereignty. The majority of Ukraine’s voters approved the declaration; they supported the “anti-constitutional” move that Gorbachev’s referendum was supposed to counter. And three Western regions in Ukraine held their own local referendum, in which people voted for secession from the USSR. The Ukrainian leadership, wrote the British ambassador during an official visit to Kiev on 20 March, was boosted by the referendum results; the majority in the republic had voted for the republic’s “sovereignty.” Kravchuk and others “radiate the feeling of confidence” in themselves and in their ideas of a future Ukraine.91This avalanche of referendums buried Gorbachev’s grand design almost entirely. Most crucially, Yeltsin and his supporters got what they wanted. The idea of the Russian Presidency received the support of 56,860,344 out of 79.7 million voters, three-quarters of the total. Some 21 million voted against the proposal. In Moscow and Leningrad, the support was 77.85 percent and 78.53 percent respectively—while only 50 percent of the same voters supported Gorbachev’s Union Treaty. In eighty-four autonomous regions of the Russian Federation, Yeltsin’s project won by a solid majority. This outcome affirmed his policy of preventing national separatism within the Russian Federation. Only three autonomous regions, among them the Tatar autonomous republic (renamed “Tatarstan”), held their own referendums and did not participate in the Russian one.92 For Yeltsin and Democratic Russia, as one retrospective assessment went, “the referendum campaign was a rehearsal for the presidential campaign.”93 The thrust of this campaign was against Gorbachev. Voting down “Gorbachev’s Union,” as Democratic Russia leaflets read, would mean support “for our Fatherland, the toil and blood of our ancestors, our Nation, Faith, and for our future.”
So if anything, it seemed like the masses were listened to just fine. They voted YES to "equally sovereign republics", not YES to "the existence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics".
>>2928605The referendum was a farce. Ukraine for example voted for an independent military, currency, fiscal policy, etc, but totally in the union you guys!! Other republics pulled similar stunts.
Gorbachev would be your argument against it, and his mere election is a condemnation of the entire ruling class. China got it right and the USSR blundered itself to death.
>>2928630And to answer your clearly written and unambiguous question, yes. The way the Soviet state was set up allowed for the emergence of a situation where a couple of dudes could write the Union out of existence in the woods of Belarus.
How is this a deboonk of demcent rather than an affirmation of it?
>>2928630>imbecile-in-chief GorbachevNah, he was the end-result of the bureaucratic shithole that was the USSR.
God bless you, Mr. Gorbachev. Without you, the state would have never withered away.
>>2928672Zubok makes the point that there were alternative paths and that it was really the disastrously ill informed reforms initiated by Gorbachev that overdetermined the collapse. I'm not sure if they could have managed to stabilise the situation and overcome systemic flaws with the more conservative reforms intended by Andropov or a shift to a Chinese-style state capitalism, but I do think Gorbachev being a retard played a major part whether this was the inevitable finale of Soviet socialism or not. Maybe putting this much blame on everybody's least favourite GenSec is a bit too great-man-theory-ish, but whatever.
>>2929040This makes Gorbachev look even better, omg.
THANK YOU MR. GORBACHEV FOR FINALLY WITHERING THE STATE AWAY.
>>2929042Present state of things: aufgeheben
>>2928605I think it's evidence against hyper centralization. The CPC claim's their political system is too decentralized for a Gorbachev or a Yakovlev to wreck things the way that they did.
As the wrecker Yakovlev said himself:
"The Soviet totalitarian regime can only be destroyed through glasnost and the totalitarian discipline of the party, while hiding behind the interests of improving socialism." Love how MLkiddies always focus on Gorby as the "big bad guy", while ignoring the two decades of stagnation under Brezhnev, where only the military was properly funded, and civil society was left to rot with outdated means of production, inefficient production methods, shit wages and shit commodities.
Working under the table was common place, and cynicism was the prevalent mood among proles, nobody believed in the official party ideology anymore.
The top-level of bureaucracy until Gorbachev were dying boomers like Andropov (who promoted Gorbachev in the first place) and Chernenko who barely reformed anything, while the Western bloc was undergoing deep transformations.
Add to that the rise of movements like Solidarność in Poland and then the 1986 Riga protests in Latvia, and basically everybody knew the Western bloc won the Cold War by the 1980s, and Gorbachev had no choice but to deeply reform the USSR.
He certainly could've done it better, so a clown like Yeltsin couldn't have been allowed to completely destroy and impoverish Russia by privatizing everything and offering state companies to a new class of oligarchs for peanuts, but if there is someone to blame for the collapse of the USSR, it's Brezhnev, not Gorbachev.
Let's face it, you might seethe at Khrushchev for being a "revisionist" and some Carlylist nonsense about him betraying Stalin, but he was the last leader of the USSR to actually give a shit about civil society and the production process outside of the military sector. After Brezhnev and his clique of boomers couped him, the USSR was done for.
>>2929095They don't want you to know the Dnipro mafia brought the USSR to its knees and is still working to this day as the hand behind zelensKKKy
>>2929095All Gorbachev did was hasten the inevitable. Like what was the alternative? Stagnate into irrelevancy? The USSR was rotten from the start because of the nomenklatura. This began under Lenin and was cemented by Stalin. Khrushchev tried to fragment the nomenklatura, but Brezhnev's dumbass couped him.
>>2929103I mean he could have done Glasnost but not Perestroika
>>2929141>I mean he could have done Glasnost but not Perestroika"Glasnost" was worse than Perestroika. "Glasnost" was a state driven campaign organized by Yakovlev and the liberal intelligentsia against the Soviet people.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220718180837/http://www.soviet-empire.com/ussr/viewtopic.php?f=110&t=52073Perestroika [which mean restructuring] was somewhat inevitable, but the form that would take would have been different if it was anyone else in the 85 politburo. No one in that politburo would have created a presidency, or do way with article 6 of the constitution. And I doubt anyone else other than Gorby, would have had the same delusions that he had with the west.
Gorbachev is historical evidence against Marxism-Leninism
Liberals are wrong that you can vote against elite interest. Anarchists are wrong you can have an agricultural let alone industrial society without elites. MLs are wrong that elites from the lower classes won't act like other elites eventually. Tech-optimists are wrong that AI can serve above elite interest.
So who's right?
>>2929392Maybe no one is right and no one will ever be right