The only mistake made by the Generals was waiting too long. Gorbachev’s so called reforms, ‘Glasnost’ and ‘Peristroika’ were nothing but the destruction of party authority and discipline – they destroyed the Soviet Union.
So the economy was going through a rough patch, that’s no reason to destroy the hard work of sixty years of Socialism; the Capitalists economies were struggling at the same time and they didn’t throw their hands up and surrender did they? Instead the likes of Thatcher smashed the trouble makers, just as the party would have if they hadn’t been betrayed by the Neo-Trotskyite Gorbachev. If the generals had removed Gorbachev when he first showed his Trotsky-fascist ways, before the collapse of party discipline, the Soviet Union would have been saved and now, with the Capitalist economies suffering the inevitable collapse that Marxism always predicted they would, the Soviet Union would the Beacon on the Hill, showing the way to Socialist Prosperity to the wage slaves of Europe and America.
This thread, with its mourning of the Trotsky-fascist Gorbachev, and his drunken toady Yeltsin, reeks of the same petty bourgeoisies sentimentality that undermined the Worker’s Paradise in the first place.
You all disgust me and I shall not contribute further!
The USSR was reeling from its own incompetence by this point. The economy was stagnant and the SSRs were already considering revolt. Glasnost and Perestroika was the only thing that could have held the USSR together.
Thats why when the coup succeeded and the Generals killed Yeltsin and removed Gorbachev from power, the SSRs seceded and now we have 18 years of civil war and seperatism while the Russian ultranationalists desperately try to keep Ukraine, the one SSR that didn't immediately secede in the union.
I hardly doubt that the Generals stepping in in '83 would have helped the Union.
I wonder if the whole Warsaw Pact fiasco still happens though. I mean Germany got off lucky, but the others... well I think everyone knows what happened to them.
Germany only got off without the Red Repressions because they had the West Germans about to move in and reunify. Thinking about it, if the coup fails and Gorbachev retains power (or gives it up to Yeltsin or another reformer), perhaps the other Warsaw Pact governments would realise that its a lost cause and be peacefully move away from Communism.
After all, the Croats, Slovenes and Bosnians managed to separate from Yugoslavia without bloodshed after the USSR collapsed, perhaps the Slovaks could leave Czechoslovakia without the Czechs trying to pacify the country by force.
What happened in Russia with the Russian Ultranationalists and the subsequent civil wars and the Ukrainian Liberation Front could definitely be avoided however if the Ultras don't' take power, but perhaps the Czechoslovak wars were inevitable. Thoughts?