Sarah Paine

All right, Lukin continued, in the West, they love Gorbachev because everything took place so easily and cheaply, basically like that, but only for you.

For us, it was expensive.

But you could argue the time to reassess all the Stalinist stuff was long overdue.

All right, here's a completely different way of looking at it.

I've been giving you sins of commission, and now I'm gonna do sins of omission.

It's a good framework, it's useful for other things.

So the sins of commission are all the things Gorbachev did.

Now what I'm gonna do is what the army didn't do.

Some would argue that the Red Army should have done exactly what Deng Xiaoping ordered his army to do.

You just send tanks against civilian demonstrators and they will truly crush them.

And it'll be over.

Communist Party is still in power in China 30 years later.

So there are some people who believe that this was a terrible mistake.

So this argument would be that timely tank deployments, TTD, my contribution to military acronyms, would have changed the outcome of the Cold War.

All right.

Others, we'll be back to the great men of history and since of commission, and they wouldn't be picking on Gorbachev, but his successor, Boris Yeltsin, who, and there are two big pieces of evidence.

Look, he removed Article 6 from the Soviet Constitution, which basically guaranteed that the Communist Party would always be the, it would monopolize power.

And then in addition, the following years, so Yeltsin's the head of Russia.

He gets together with the heads of Ukraine and Belorussia, and they signed the Belovezh Accords, which then formally dissolved the Soviet Union.

So according to this way of thinking, it's his fault.