/lit/ - Literature

Was reading this recently, written a little more than 20 years ago, which was one of the first serious books to grapple with the causes of the Soviet collapse from the communist point of view and informed later books on the subject. One thing Azad said that rang true is that it became a taboo among communists to criticize the USSR for any reason, but that created a sense of paralysis when Gorby showed up and started to fuck everything up because it wasn't acceptable to criticize him either because he was the president of the USSR, even though many did at the time.

Even within the USSR, Gorby opened the political system up in such a way that you could criticize anything except Gorby's own policies, and if you supported Gorby's policies you were rewarded. So that basically allowed a bunch of liberal nutcases and counter-revolutionaries to get appointed as editors of major newspapers, which would be like the equivalent of me and my commie friends getting jobs running the BBC and calling for the dissolution of the United Kingdom.