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First of all, did McDonald’s really have a major hand in the fall of communism? Or was it simply just another sign of the times? Even though it opened after the Berlin wall was opened, the deal to set up shop was made in 1988, which was before the country was actually collapsing. And it wasn’t the first Western shop or even restaurant to set up shop in the Soviet Union (Pepsi was even selling their soda in Russia by the 70s), however it was by far and away the most successful venture up to that point and was located right in Red Square.
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When the Communists announced giving up their monopoly on power in 1990, were they more or less bluffing? From my understanding they were only intent on giving an inch, but the constituent republics wanted to take their mile. Considering they attacked Lithuania it doesn’t seem like the Party had as humble intentions of surrendering their hegemony as they claimed.
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Had the Coup been successful, would there still be a Soviet Union today? Is there any possible way it could have succeeded, or was it more or less doomed from the start? If the hardliners successfully took over, would they have launched a nuclear war?
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No. I’m not sure who actually made that claim. If it was said att all, it may have been meant metaphorically, which makes more sense.
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No. Things were plummeting out of their control and Gorbachev wanted to get ahead of it.
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No way to tell. There would have had to be a crackdown, and I don’t think the communists really had the stomach for it.
McDonald’s specifically? No. Consumer choices in general? Yes.
Shopping in the Soviet Empire was a mixture of farce and tragedy. My East German relatives would go to the supermarket and the great majority of shelves were empty. Their choices would be canned pinto beans, canned green beans, or bagged rice. The cashier typically wasn’t very helpful either, since he got paid whether or not you bought anything. Sometimes people would just walk right out of the store without paying.
Clothing stores were similar. Like thick wool socks and grey flannel shirts? Well you’d better, cause that’s all we have. Consumer electronics basically didn’t exist. The only available car was the Trabi. When the wall came down in 1989, many areas in East Germany still didn’t have phone service, or running water, or paved roads.
Fundamentally this made people unhappy, particularly as interaction with West Germany picked up and the East Germans got to see more and more of what was available in capitalist countries. That unhappiness lead to the end of Soviet Domination. Or as P. J. O’Rourke put it, “In the end we beat them with Levi 501 jeans. Seventy-two years of Communist indoctrination and propaganda was drowned out by a three-ounce Sony Walkman. A huge totalitarian system had been brought to its knees because nobody wanted to wear Bulgarian shoes.”
My guess is that Gorbachev didn’t realize how disaffected the Soviet people were with communism. Gorbachev, after all, had risen to power inside the system - he was somebody who had reaped the benefits of communism.
Gorbachev recognized that there were problems but mistakenly believed people still had a fundamental faith in communism. He figured he would open the system up and let people reform away the problems and build a stronger and better form of communism.
Instead, when given the opportunity, the people decided that communism itself was one of the problems that needed to be fixed.
I hadn’t heard anything specifically about McDonald’s.
But it seems that the fall of the Soviet Union had, among others, John Paul II’s fingerprints on it (possibly from even before his time as Pope). Time Magazine discussed it that when they named him Person of the Year, 1994.
As for the coup leaders “not having the stomach for it”: I recall, this was a prevailing opinion, at least in the Western press, at the time. When the Teeming Masses mobbed in the streets, they could have ordered a massacre. But they didn’t.
It would have been questionable whether the military on the scene would have been willing to do it. As it was, there were different units of the military on duty in Red Square, and some of them did turn their tanks around. That is always the calculation that coup leaders must take: Who’s side will the military take?
I’m sure that it would have been impossible for the coup leaders to have saved the old Soviet Union, as least in any form that the world had known it until then. The coup leaders were all old fossils who were unable to pass the torch to a younger generation, and there was no mechanism in the Soviet system for orderly transition of power to begin with. They couldn’t have lasted in power very long at all, and anybody who could have taken power and forged a newer stronger Soviet Union would certainly have had to be a younger reformer – exactly what the coup leaders were fighting against happening.
Trabant. Trabi is a diminutive. And they probably had the option of some variant of the (equally awful) Wartburg, too.
I’m thinking they probably had the then-recent Tiananmen Square killings in mind and realize how bad PR it was for China.
It was two decades of full on economic stagnation, which only had the edge taken off by the higher oil prices of the late 1970’s. McDonalds, Levi jeans, etc etc meant sweet fuck all in a maco sense.
Once oil collapsed, it was curtains for them.
One could easily say that the biggest loser of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War was the USSR.
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You hear this from American corps from time to time. In the days of the upheaval in the Soviet Union, and as always, they were lobbying for more open trade, so they claim the response to this “popular demand” was part of the fall. My take is that the issues were far more significant than a Big Mac.
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Remember that the crisis on the ground was instituted by Hungary, which opened it’s visas to the West. Gorbachev may have approved it, perhaps the Hungarians gambled. But once that door was open, so was Western Europe. So down goes the empire.
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Its very hard to say, because the outcome is still in question. Ukraine and Belarus are the linchpins. Russia will be as hard as they need to be with central Asia, and generally the world will let them. So that’s not an issue.
The “West” might. Russian adventurism in C Asia will be resisted by China, but also India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey.