I know things were really bad in 1989, but what made it so bad that people in so many socialist countries just rose up and overthrew their own governments?
I know things were really bad in 1989, but what made it so bad that people in so many socialist countries just rose up and overthrew their own governments?
people in so many socialist countries just rose up and overthrew their own governments
Where do you get the impression from that the people rose up and overthrew their governments?
Not OP, but the dissolution of the ussr was entirely undemocratic. They also violated the constitution, which did have provisions for leaving, in order to do so.
Some republics did actually leave using the correct procedure. Estonia and Armenia - definitely, Lithuania and Latvia - I think so.
This is total nonsense. The Baltic republics completely ignored the Soviet constitution, their declaration of independence was entirely unilateral and decided on not by referendum but solely by a parliament elected in farcical bourgeois manipulated elections that followed the disastrous perestroika reforms. And the text of the declaration was full of historical revisionist lies and promises they never intended to keep, like in the case of Estonia for example they said they were declaring independence so they could pursue their own path to socialism, and that they would never pass laws discriminating against other ethnic groups. Yet immediately after they went on to dismantle socialism and pass laws that took away the citizenship of ethnic Russians and excluded them from being able to buy land or hold certain jobs.
Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia were and are bastions of anti-Soviet expressly Nazi sacks of shit.
Not related to what you said, but I just want to remind people that the Holocaust on the eastern front (from the Nazi position) was perpetrated with gleeful help from collaborators in these nations. Always remember this when you hear immigrants from these nations speak poorly of the Soviet Union. It’s like listening to the grandson of some reactionary Bay of Pigs PoS who was told constant lies about the “evils of communism!” They have incentive to lie and misrepresent constantly.
speak poorly of the Soviet Union
That'd be understandable, however when such people say "Communists were even worse than Nazis" IRL you should just inform them that there are Jewish people in the room and see that mild irritation on their faces.
Look up how color revolutions work. They are very much not organic, they are engineered from the outside, and this was the case for most of the counter-revolutionary events of 1989. In Romania it was even more blatantly not a popular uprising, not only was the initial unrest that was used as a smokescreen to mask what actually happened fabricated by western-funded counter-revolutionary cells operating out of Hungary, but what ended up destroying the socialist state was a straight up military coup.
Though the official history that is taught there nowadays doesn't acknowledge it and pretends it was a "revolution", at the time even observers writing about the events from outside of Romania could see this:
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/marcy/1990/sm900104.html https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/marcy/1990/sm900111.html
Look up how color revolutions work.
So, similar to the more recent Arab Spring in the early 2010s?
Yes. The tools and methods used were different back then because things like social media weren't available and imperialist intelligence cutouts calling themselves NGOs didn't permeate socialist countries to anywhere near the degree they did and still do in the countries targeted by the Arab Spring operation or in other recent victims of (successful or attempted) color revolutions like Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, but the essential characteristics are the same.
Incidentally, the much discussed Tiananmen square incident basically followed more or less the same playbook as was pulled in Eastern Europe around the same time, and the main reason why it failed in China despite having succeeded everywhere else is because the CPC had not degenerated to the same level of demoralization, confusion and revisionism as the ruling communist parties of Eastern Europe had in the wake of Perestroika.
Ironically this may have been due to the Sino-Soviet split which led China to pursue a more independent path and as a result was able to resist following the CPSU down the fatally erroneous path it took under Gorbachev. The CPC managed to outmaneuver the imperialists and defeat their plot and that is why the West is still so butthurt about that incident to this day. It is even more of a sore spot for them because having failed in flipping China they were also unable to destroy the DPRK since they could not fully surround them.
It started with Krushchev and all went downhill from there. https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_the_Soviet_Union
By the time of Gorbachev, revisionism had taken hold and the economy was mismanaged. It was still better to live in the USSR than the nascent Russian Federation (and even today arguably), but there were lots of problem popping up.
In China you can actually get a master in the history of the dissolution of the soviet union, they've studied it extensively so the same fate doesn't happen to them.
Here are some resources on it. In most cases, it was a combination of internal revisionism and Western infiltration:
Hakim’s video on the fall of the USSR: https://youtube.com/watch?v=w72mLI_FaR0&feature=sharec
disillusionment with the government, decades of stagnation and lack of revolutionary spirit
That's a very vague way to say that a planned economy going down with USA doing actual humanitarian flights with actual food doesn't really help people to trust in any system.