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It wasn’t so much freedom as a bunch of old men got really scared that they would never get to have the nice dacha that they’d been promised and totally freaked out.
The late Soviet Era was a complete shit show.
Brezhnev thought he’d win Afghanistan with one big push; exactly the same mistake LBJ made when he tried to wipe out the Viet-Cong. That led to a quagmire with Soviet soldiers dying by the truck load and their buddies coming home addicted to opium. Not a good look for the troops that were supposed to be able to march across Europe in a week.
Can you spell “Chernobyl” ? That was kind of a big deal.
Brezhnev followed the invasion with another classic blunder. He dropped dead. Iron Man Yuri Andropov, the fearsome leader of the KGB took his place and died. Three dead leaders for the USSR while Ronald Reagan is seen around the world walking away from an assassin.
Now comes Gorbachev. Suave, urbane, well read, and obviously intelligent, he was everything the hard liners ahd been trained to despise. He tells them that they are going to have to share their toys and play nice with the kids who actually know how to make the system work. They responded by staging a coup.
And American MAGoos will tell you it was all Ronald Reagan’s doing…
Fast forward 35 odd years and everyone finally realises that taking down that wall was a mistake.
what
Berlin is a, let’s say, troubled city. The infrastructure is even more rotten than in the rest of Germany, meanwhile they’re pouring endless amounts of money into vanity projects that turn out to be international embarrassments, like that airport they recently managed to finally finish building equally late and over budget. Berliners do have a reputation of arrogance and entitlement. Social problems caused by a whole bunch of rich people gentrifying the shit out of the place after the government moved there cause rampant crime, and, of course, there is the government with all its lobbyists and corruption.
