Best Soviet Leader...

A tie between Gorbachev and Yeltsin. They ended it!

Second Place: Kruschev. He presided over the Soviet space program and managed not to nuke everyone during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
 
Khrushchev. Because nobody can spell his name right. And because he produced some of my all-time favorite quotes. And he was actually (slightly) benevolent and competent!
 
Lenin made the USSR possible. Stalin created it. Kruschev tried and failed to make it work. Brezhnev froze it in place and milked it for what it was worth. Some guys died before they could achieve anything. Gorbachev destroyed it.

Stalin Created It.

In the end, comparing the others with Stalin misses the point. The Soviet Union, the Soviet Empire as it was was essentially Stalin's creation. Those who followed tried to make it more humane and to fix the fundamental flaws in it, but Stalin determined the basic shape of the system and planted the seeds for its eventual collapse. To fix the mess they were left with in 1953 would have required more than a little speech about Stalin's badness: it would have required saying that the Soviet Union was the twisted production of a paranoid monster, and that achieving anything like True Socialism would require essentially returning to the mid-1920s and rebuilding everything from scratch. It would have required another man with the power and will of Stalin to do so, and Stalin's massacres of the Party pretty much guaranteed no such person would emerge or be allowed to hold power.

Stalin wasn't a "Soviet Leader". He was the Soviet Union's black, diseased heart, and all future Soviet leaders were caretakers of his legacy, no matter how much they tried to move away from him.

Bruce
 
His reforms were not all of the sort one would really desire, as a citizen of the country.

Andropov's last job was managing KGB. As the usual proverb goes, to a man with just a hammer, everything will look like a nail. Andropov wanted to combat corruption, and his recipe was to subordinate police to KGB. He wanted to fight the drunkenness by pretty much introducing Prohibition coupled with an police state. The result would be (if the reforms were to go anywhere) a more complete, more effective total surveillance of the citizens than was ever attempted before in the SU.

On the other hand corruption was bendemy the 1980's and the KGB was his main base of support meaning he would lean on them to help reforms.

Andropov’s modest market-reforms and general tightening up central control, over the U.S.S.R which had in fact lapsed during the late Brezhnev era, meaning regional party bosses ran their own private fiefdoms almost. This may have done enough good to revive the economy without destabilizing the regime. In bad times you cant overhaul the economy and political system at once. So If Andropov had lived longer you’d butterfly Chernenko’s leadership at least and maybe see a surviving U.S.S.R if things go fairly well. Of course for that you’d need Andropov to be in better health. That’s not too ASB he was relatively young by Politburo standards at 67.

Gorby did very little he was led by events, he no clear and coherent policies and he lacked the backbone and toughness a political leader needs for such a vast project like reforming the U.S.S.R. The fact he didn’t kick the drunken, thieving slob Yeltsin into jail proves it.

Seriously Yeltsin was vastly corrupt even by late Soviet standards. when he ran the ‘’Sverdlovsk mafia’’ (as the local party got nicknamed under him). So Gorby could’ve got rid of him on real corruption (or worse) charges.

As for the facile ''durrr Gorby was the best coz he ended teh evil commies lulzs'' posts I’d ask you to look at the post-Stalin U.S.S.R and then look at the various SSR’s today and tell me which is better. Frankly 12 of the 15 SSR's are undoubtedly much worse off for the collapse and some like Azerbaijan are hereditary dictatorships (just like Syria wOOt:rolleyes:).

The U.S.SR for all it's faults rose to superpower status and was the 2nd largest economy in the world. Today Russia, Ukraine etc are a rotting mess don’t even get me started on ‘’democratic Georgia’' and Central Asia is well one word Turkmenbashi.
 
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