Democracy Killed The Soviets, and Authoritarianism Is Killing America
The weird thing about Soviet collapse was how democratic it was. By 1991, Ukraine already had an elected President and Parliament. 90% of Ukrainian people voted to leave in a referendum. The other republics eventually followed them out. It was the original Brexit, only better managed.
There was a chain reaction: Ukraine did not want to be in the Union, Russia could not imagine the Union without Ukraine, and the rest of the republics could not imagine it without Russia. (The Last Empire⁴⁶⁷)
On Christmas Day, Gorbachev got on TV, the Soviet flag came down, and they handed the nuclear briefcase to the already elected President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin. It was a clean collapse, affected by the people of the republics and their leaders. In short, democracy.
George H.W. Bush quickly got on TV to take say he was Santa Claus, but it wasn’t true. America didn’t flip the communist table over. All the legs just left.
Until the last weeks of the existence of the USSR, Bush had resisted its disintegration and tried to keep Gorbachev in power at all costs. But now that Gorbachev had resigned, Bush and his team were ready to take the credit for something they had worked hard to avoid —…
