Reply to post: Re: Is this Cambirdge Analyitca a Russian Company?

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Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Is this Cambirdge Analyitca a Russian Company?

Properly speaking, the cold war was won by Reagan starting so many absurdly expensive weapons programmes(*)

You are mistaking the DEFEAT of the Soviet Union with the WIN when it fell. These two events while coinciding in time were not exactly the same.

When the USSR fell over, its economic state was on par with Germany post-WW1. As a result we could have seen an unbridled dictatorship emerge there and then and it came very very close twice:

Once in 1991 and 1993. If you think Putin is bad you really need to read up on Yanaev, Rutskoi and Lebedev.

However, on the overall the LIBERAL values won. Today's Russia after all of our work to push it as far to the right as possible as a blowback is a result of that. It is significantly more liberal than a Yanayev USSR v2.0 or Rutskoi or Lebedev Russian empire v2 would have been.

(*)You are describing the symptom, not the root cause. The root cause was Suslov or someone at his level in Politburo (if memory serves me right) noticing circa 1975 that the central banks around the Warsaw pact are borrowing based on actual economical metrics and ignoring the sanctity of the 5 year economic plans. From there on the banks were mandated to borrow based on the planned economic metrics in the plans (mostly sucked out of a finger). The results of this could be seen across the Warsaw pact. Russian 20% GDP weapon spend, Bulgaria paving the pedestrianized areas of all regional centers with marble and building a "culture palace" monstrousity in each, etc. The symptoms differed, but the root cause was the same - borrowing based on predicted (aka planned) economic metrics not actual. I am not going to make any comparisons between that and certain western countries today by the way

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