I ran into this image today from the online class I’m taking. I suspect Uncle Joe may have been reincarnated and his shadow darkens the Kremlin floors even today.

Question: How do you transition from a Stalinist dictatorship to something less terrible and maybe even faintly democratic? It’s still an open question.

Nikita Krushchev led de-Stalinization after Stalin died but was soon replaced by Leonid Brezhnev. It is said that not much of interest happened during the Brezhnev years other than keeping up with the cold war.

Big changes finally began with Mikhail Gorbachev and his glasnost and perestroika, but the USSR imploded before he was finished. The Kremlin couldn’t make the centralized economy work as desired, so they shut off the lights and went home. Boris Yeltsin was the first popularly elected and reelected President of Russia from 1991 to 1999 but his tenure was checkered with successes and failures. His hand picked successor was Vladimir Putin who was later elected President. The merits of that choice is apparent in the news today.

An even better question: how does a country whose skids were greased with bribery, had zero history of democratic anything or a market economy and little if any market-related institutions make the transition? Yeah, it’s a hard problem. The Soviet security apparatus didn’t fully collapse and survives to this day, frightening as ever.

There was an old joke- the KGB headquarters in Moscow went up 7 floors and down all the way to Siberia. The gulags were substantially emptied of millions of laborers after Krushchev’s elevation, but many of the camps were retained.