/lit/ - Literature

>>20430182
Ironically, the Soviet Union collapsed because Gorbachev decided to force its industries to become efficient by instantly revoking the guaranteed annual quotas of what the Soviet government would purchase from them and instead advertised that they would look for the best price/quality they could find on the market. Gorbachev quite literally told the entire Soviet economy to "sink or swim" and, unsurprisingly, a Soviet economy that had grown used to planned economic stability and a single, massive, guaranteed customer couldn't quite survive Gorbachev's impatience with them.

Quite funny that he also freed the industries from central influence by allowing the workers to democratically elect their managers and, of course, the short-sighted workers voted for whichever candidate would raise their wages the most, and these bidding wars siphoned all the industries' capital and caused massive inflation of the rouble nation-wide. Anyway, not to say that the free-market destroyed the Soviet economy, just Gorbachev's socialist-lite naivete - because at least the Marxist hardliners were able to maintain a stable, if stagnant, economic climate

>>18950088
>The eyes of a man who was forced to watched the fragmentation of his country from orbit