this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
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Curious what is says about me that my answer has always been "the Cold War."
... Other than the fact that history feels far too present these days.
I was actually born at the "end" of it. I generally am interested in US-Soviet relations and how the Cold War/Communism became a major factor in political campaigns after WWII, specifically the Dewey-Truman upset.
It's funny, all through college I had either older people looking askance at me about why I'd be interested in "ancient" history or peers teasing me about being a Russian asset just for the interest... I just never thought the Cold War actually ended, and when I was in college in the late 2000s, that was a wild take to have lmao
Idk, no matter what happens to America, it's still not Russian, and that will always be a win.
When you look at the immediate aftermath post USSR collapse, nearly every ex-soviet country got into really fucking deep economic trouble. There was also the little fact that pretty much every position of power was achieved by being friends with powerful people, so corruption and incompetence were rampant. Combine the two and it's no wonder most people would rather go back to the old system, especially in the first 10 years.
I recommend anyone interested in the topic checking out how the German reunification worked out. It was quite a mess that they plowed through.
The truth is that every soviet country was already in deep economic trouble, that's what caused the collapse. There was also a ton of corruption before the fall of the USSR. The only difference was that during the cold war, the USSR wanted to pretend that their way of life was as good or better than the capitalist west. That meant that there was a ton of propaganda making things seem better than they were, and a ton of censorship about how it was in the west. It meant that the corruption was kept relatively quiet so that it didn't embarrass the government so that it looked weak compared to the west.
As soon as the USSR collapsed, they stopped putting all the effort in to censor the west and make the USSR seem great through propaganda. That resulted in people thinking that the economy had collapsed after the USSR, when the truth is that the actual economy was simply finally revealed to them.
Well, I'm not sure if you can really say that reunification was ever properly completed.
interesting. I'm most interested in the Khruschev era, during de-Stalinization and when the USSR was at its peak, and the satellite countries (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, etc.) the collapse just makes me sad.
Cold War spy stories are the best. It was a rare period of superpower vs. superpower and with enough technology to make it interesting. (I might be wrong, but I don't think a spy story where you had to communicate using carrier pigeons and spy by simply listening over walls would be as interesting.)
For sure! I love the whole gadgetry aspect, especially how it bled into pop culture with things like Get Smart and Spy vs Spy.
And, of course, the whole Bond franchise.