Quote Originally Posted by Basil77 View Post
That's funny but you've just repeated word-by-word what Alexander Prohanov said several hours ago at "Echo Moskvy" radio. And btw, I agree with most of this, although I don't like Lukashenko at all.
I could only understand bits here and there of what Prohanov was saying and he's using a lot of "difficult" words...

But as a general observation, it seems to ME that many things that happened in the early 1990s in the ex USSR was not generally in the interest of most people. Seems that Lukashenko was the only CIS leader who realised that and put the brakes on.. Whether what he did after that was right or wrong.. is the question. Perhaps he allowed the country to stagnate.

I guess guess there WAS no easy solution, but the idea of "freedom" at the price of poverty, suffering and degradation for so many in society simply can't be what the majority would really have wanted! Doing the reforms slower might have prevented a lot of that.

And look at the ex Soviet republics how things have worked out there... In Central Asia they certainly don't have any more democracy now, than under the USSR, but now they are also much poorer also have less opportunities to improve their lives.

BBC makes pretty good and transparent surveys. Here is what they found in 2009, in the survey "Twenty Years after Fall of Berlin Wall" (full survey with questions and methodology)Twenty Years after Fall of Berlin Wall

Quote Originally Posted by BBC World Services Survey
.....majorities would like their government to be more active in owning or directly controlling their country’s major industries in 15 of the 27 countries. This view is particularly widely held in countries of the former Soviet states of Russia (77%), and Ukraine (75%), but also Brazil (64%), Indonesia (65%), and France (57%).

Majorities support governments distributing wealth more evenly in 22 of the 27 countries —on average two out of three (67%) across all countries. In 17 of the 27 countries most want to see government doing more to regulate business—on average 56%.


The poll also asked about whether the breakup of the Soviet Union was a good thing or not. (.....)

Among former Warsaw Pact countries, most Russians (61%) and Ukrainians (54%) believe the breakup of the Soviet Union was a bad thing.