Somebody on Twitter said I can’t possibly remember the USSR because I’m not old enough.
That was very sweet. Or possibly ignorant because I noticed that some people think the USSR happened way back in the past and isn’t relevant any more.
Compliment or Ignorance?
Clarissa's Blog 
Well, Stalin lived at the same time as Hitler, and how many people are old enough to remember the Nazis?
Lenin and Stalin are the Soviet leaders most likely to be studied in school, so maybe that’s the time period people associate with the USSR.
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Exactly, people associate the USSR with Stalinism, and as a result they think I’m vastly exaggerating when I say that some of the things I see here in the US remind me of the USSR. But the USSR wasn’t the gulag or the mass purges for the last 35 years of its existence. It wasn’t that terrible but it was still pretty terrible.
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but, but… I *remember* when the Berlin wall came down. That was sort of the beginning of the end for the whole Soviet bloc, right?
I’m not *that* old.
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“that was sort of the beginning of the end for the whole Soviet bloc”
There were a bunch of events and different people give different weight to them…
In 1988 Hungary recognized ethnic Hungarians fleeing repression in Romania as ‘refugees’ an unheard of breech of diplomatic protocol between two Warsaw Pact countries.
Then in June 1989 Poland had partially free elections in which the communists… did not do well….
Around the same time East Germans began leaving the country in large numbers either making their way to Hungary to cross the no longer electrified border fence to Austria or to Prague where a bunch climbed over the fence to camp out in the West German embassy. Eventually there were special trains for them to leave.
There’s more but those are some of the highlights… Also important was Gorbachev’s decision to not interfere in those countries (parts of the USSR like Lithuania were another matter….)
People remember the Wall but it was just one culminating point in a long process across several countries (some would include Romania participating in the 1984 LA Olympics as a hairline crack in the Warsaw Pact).
The USSR didn’t collapse the coup to oust Gorbachev failed in 1991.
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A lot of people seem to think the USSR got dismantled in the 1940’s.
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