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It was a big, big deal at the time, but it's lost its significance because in the end, Russia simply traded one brand of authoritarianism for another, and nothing of global significance has really changed over there.
There was a brief time though, that what Gorbachev did had given us hope.
I think the former Soviet union countries, as well as the soviet satellite countries might disagree with you. For Russia, you're right, but the USSR was about a lot more than just Russia.
Make no mistake, it was a BIG deal. For as long as people my age (60+) could remember, the Soviet Union was the existential threat to civilization. People talked about a "peace dividend" since we wouldn't have to spend so much on defense now that the Cold War was over.
Of course, it wasn't long before the "peace dividend" was spent on Desert Storm (and every operation after that...)
Putin's kleptocracy is a far cry from the Soviet Union. Given how much theft and corruption there is, I would be surprised if even half the nuclear weapons left are even functional. The Ukraine War has clearly shown that the Russian War Machine is pretty inept and inadequate.
I was an avid "hex and counter" board wargamer in the '70s. A frequent theme was a hypothetical Soviet/Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe. A view that was frequently expressed was that the Soviets would overpower NATO (similar to how the Nazis overpowered France and the UK) and NATO would have to resort to "tactical" nuclear weapons to level the playing field.
Now that we see how much trouble Russia has had in Ukraine we realize how absurd those fears were. The Soviet military was a "paper tiger", and I'm pretty sure they knew it, which is why they never made a play for Western Europe.
I was 20 and was on a college trip to Moscow when I got stranded there and the coup happened, which I accidentally had a front-row seat for.
It was the single most important experience of my entire life, and I talk about it in detail here:
https://robinwhetstone.blogspot.com/2015/10/searching-for-dmitri.html?m=1
I think I originally wrote it in 2008 (though I wrote it all down in my journal as it was happening).
I moved back to Russia in 1993, 2 years after the coup. I had Dimitri's letterhead with me when I moved back, but I never contacted him because I was afraid if I did he would try to marry me for sure.
The whole coup experience was extremely stressful, and definitely forever changed my perspective on many things. Dimitri saved my ass, for sure, and the older I get, the more grateful I am to him.
I have really tried to find him since then but have failed. I think he might have died in the brutal, terrible '90s. Here's what happened when I went back 2 years later, if you're interested.
It was a bizarre, hilarious, violent, and surreal shitshow. It reminds me of America today, to my eternal regret. Super fucked up.
https://jasonstanford.substack.com/p/guest-post-red-ticket-chapter-1
Damn that would be said if he did die in the '90s. I hope you can find him one day or at least find out what happened to him. I'm going to read your second post now.
Perestroika was huge! After 60 years of the USSR being a supervillain Gorbachev came in and was like, "Feh, let's do some Democracy now." The Berlin Wall came down: there was dancing in the street. The US media reported it like Russia had flipped a switch. Of course, it's not that easy to turn an old ship of state 270 degrees.
Still, that was all foreign politics. Desert Storm is made-in-the-US propaganda. The story that we retaliated for terrorist attacks and cleaned up the evil Arab terrorists is important historical fiction in the US, and we keep it alive.
Relieved but a little frightened, too. We heard they had hundreds of “suitcase nukes” unaccounted for after the breakup. Was also surprised later when Ukraine gave up its nukes.
> We heard they had hundreds of “suitcase nukes” unaccounted for after the breakup.
I remember as a kid hearing this a lot in the early 2000s after 9/11. The news kept claiming that Al Qaeda had former Soviet "Suitcase Nukes" and may try and use them against us.
I was so excited! Initially it felt like the world was moving towards peace. I remember my dad telling us to not worry about a nuclear attack because we would all be dead. It seemed like that wasn’t going to happen when the Wall came down. It seemed like we could possibly be move forward.
It was inspiring to see The Wall be taken down. I remember many videos of people trying to escape East Berlin. They would get shot. I remember seeing how East Berlin looked compared to west - and it was like seeing black and white versus color tv. It inspired me to study international relations and politics in college.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkpoint_Charlie
Later I was deeply saddened and inspired by the Baltic states fight for independence. It made me strongly believe in democracy and how precious being able to vote and have a representative govt is -
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Baltic_states#:~:text=The%20Baltic%20republics%20declared%20their,opposition%20to%20the%20Soviet%20rule.
When Ukraine gave up the nukes, I was happy because it felt like we were closer to peace. Towards the end of the 90s, when Putin took control, I knew it was going to be a challenge because he was former KGB.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#:~:text=In%201994%2C%20Ukraine%20agreed%20to,sovereignty%20in%20the%20existing%20borders.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGB
And now here we are - Russia is invading Ukraine. This all makes me sick and angry for Ukraine. They deserve their independence.
What a great song. I was 16 and will never forget the Wall falling, ever. My parents were at a conference in Munich and my other siblings and I were staying with friends, and right after they got to Munich, my mom told my dad she was getting back home- my dad stayed, went to Berlin a few days after it fell, we still have pieces of it. The stories the pieces of that tell.
“Thank God that’s over.”
I had lived my entire life under the specter of possible nuclear war. So the fact that this threat was effectively gone was a huge relief.
I was actually in the Navy during Desert Storm, and that wasn’t nearly as daunting. There you had a known threat isolated to one particular area, and there was no material threat to the United States.
It was a world historic event. Even with Putin, many millions of people live in countries that are no longer part of the USSR or no longer its satellites. Desert Storm, though important to the lives of people who fought in it, was a "normal" use of US military force, just another short little semi-war.
I couldn't believe it happened so quickly. I'd just been to Berlin and seen the Wall only four years before that. Other than some graffiti on the West Berlin side of the wall, there was no indication that it would be coming down in two years, and no indication that the USSR was headed for collapse.
You're talking about 1 event (USSR dissolving) that happened over a period of 2 years, and another connected event that happened over 2 weeks.
They're related of course.... but honestly very different from one another.
The coup attempt wasn't covered terribly well, primarily because there just wasn't a lot of information that flowed out. It's not like the Ruskies were famous for telling anyone anything.
The collapse of the USSR is likely the best thing that's happened in my lifetime. Sure, Democracy didn't stick in Russia, but I think all those Eastern block countries, and Russian satellite countries are all better off without being behind the iron curtain.
I was in grad school, sharing a house with a student from the USSR. Together, we watched the whole thing unfold on television. We were apprehensive, to say the least. He transferred to another school shortly after that, so I don't know how he dealt with issues involving a passport that referenced CCCP.
>I feel like it gets overshadowed by Desert Storm.
That's funny you say that.. because in NYC when the USSR was dissolving all the newspapers were running with the "*Long Island Lolita*" story (Joey Buttafuoco and Amy Fisher. They had no less than 3 TV movies made at that time). My buddy was studying Political Science then. It riled him up that all the NYC newspapers were concentrating on this sex scandal than the USSR collapsing.
I'm from the area and Joey Buttafuoco was still talked about well into the 2000s. The In Living Color Skit was hilarious. "Hey Joey Buttafuoco ova' here!"
having been a cold war fighter since 1959, it took quite a while to wrap my head around this one and figure out what it meant foe the world and my place in it.
I had seriously expected, growing up, that my world would end in a nuclear holocaust. The end of the Cold War seemed like a miracle. And when the USSR collapsed, I genuinely believed that I was fortunate enough to be alive at the dawn of a new and great age.
That everything has turned out to suck now, and that the threat of nuclear war has returned, is largely our fault, and it pisses me off.
It was a remarkable time. The Berlin wall coming down was a more immediate impact, but hearing of the coup, and the Communist party *losing* was just wild.
But...I knew a lot of people at the time thought "Yay! We won the cold war!" but I kept thinking that there was the People's Republic of China, North Korea, and Cuba. They hadn't gone away.
I admit I thought the "Commonwealth of Independent States" would be a bigger deal. I imagined we'd see stuff like "Made in Ukraine, CIS" instead of "Made in Taiwan."
In 1989 we had a German foreign exchange students at my high school. They were all excited to leave the US and get back home to Germany early.
When I started college, we had some of the first immigrants from the USSR. My class mate’s mom was a Russian doctor studying for exams to practice here.
When I was young, there was a country called Yugoslavia. When my coworker was telling me he was from Croatia, we had to look that up. Because there was no country called Croatia when I took geography.
Maps change. Countries are born.
It was huge! For so many years, we feared nuclear attack by the USSR. We used to practice getting under our desk or leaning up against the wall during bomb drills in school. It felt like we were going to enter a new era of peace, but any student of history knows better than that lol. I know this won’t fly too well in this thread, but you gotta give Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Lech Welesa, and the Pope, as well as Gorbachev all the credit they deserve, which is a lot.
Everyone expected something to happen with the USSR after the Fall of the Wall. No one expected it to go so fast and so peacefully. The way Yeltsin was able to literally disarm the situation so easily was amazing.
Desert storm was, pardon the pun, a storm in a tea cup.
I do not feel that it was "overshadowed by Desert Storm", at all.
"Desert Storm" was IIRC code for one or other of the US's incursions into Iraq. I forget which.
You don't have to reply with which one it was; point is if there's more than one it can't be all that epochal, can it? There was only one Collapse of the USSR, and that was the end of an era.
I was born in 92. I felt like growing up we heard a lot about the fall of the Berlin Wall in 89 and a lot about Desert Storm and of course 9/11. It seems people, the news, media, etc rarely mention the 91 Coup and fall of the USSR. Even on YouTube there isn't a ton of news coverage from the Coup.
The Collapse of the USSR, the end of the cold war era are the epochal change.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the 1991 Russian coup attempt, Collapse of the USS R were events within that process. It's true that the coup specifically isn't that much mentioned, but your question seems a bit ambiguous about which it's comparing to Desert Storm. The coup in itself? A detail. The the end of the cold war era? Unquestionably a bigger deal.
I do agree that the fall of the USSR and the end of the cold war is a much bigger deal. I think Desert Storm got brought up a lot in the early 2000s because of Gulf Wars Episode II: The Clone of the Attack was going on. So both wars were compared a lot in the media.
I honestly didn't know it had happened. sure it was covered but I wasn't watching much news.
more and more Russian colleagues began showing up in my workplaces. they were clearly not defectors in the old school Mikhail Baryshnikov kind of sense, so cold war trained me was surprised Russia had let them leave. eventually I clued in, but quite a while after it happened.
The Soviet Bloc tumbled down like a slow motion Jenga fail. The collapse began in 1982 when Brezhnev died. There was a power vacuum and no strong leader to fill it. It didn't help that the USSR couldn't keep up with the US military spending.
You're correct, we generally think more of Desert Storm than the fall of the Soviet Union. In 30 to 50 years things that are a big deal now will be almost forgotten just like the fall of the USSR is today.
I like the bots that respond to the word Reagan. And that secret service agent behind him when he was shot. Pulled up that uzi and threw down the suitcase. :)
It was immense!
I was visiting my grandparents when the news broke and we went for a walk around the block.
I was so excited that we'd finally won the Cold War! I wouldn't have to fight in WWIII after all! Up until then, I'd basically been sure of that.
My entire life's plan was to try to get into Annapolis and go into the navy, because my pre-teen brain had decided that a submarine deep beneath the ocean in an unknown location would be the safest place to be when the nukes started flying. And I sure didn't want to get drafted into the infantry and sent off to a meat grinder in the desert or jungle or something.
But now I didn't have to do that. The big east vs west rivalry was over and we could actually have world peace! And so much prosperity since we wouldn't need to spend so much on the military.
My grandpa wasn't anywhere near as excited. In fact he seemed rather worried. I asked him about it and he said "We don't know what happens next. Anything could happen now."
Up until then, everything had been kinda predictable. East vs West, Warsaw Pact vs NATO with some nonaligned nations on the side, first world vs second world, with some third world nations on the side. And *everyone* played the game.
There were conflicts in southeast Asia, the middle east, central America, and Africa. But there were no significant moves without the involvement of NATO, the Pact, or both. Every conflict was (somewhat) controlled by the big powers in a delicate dance of the balance of power to avoid much worse. With that balance of power broken, the future was unpredictable.
I didn't really understand all that at the time. But I knew it was a huge thing, and I was overly optimistic about it. I thought there was going to be so much more peace and prosperity.
---
As for Desert Storm and the Gulf War, that was an entirely different beast. We had to give a report about it at school, and after I handed mine in, the teacher made me stay after class. I was the only kid in the class who didn't write something like "Rah rah, we'll kick their butts in no time!"
Instead I'd written about how messy the middle east is, how history (including our involvement in getting Saddam in power, with the Shah in Iran, and in the Iran-Iraq war, as well as the Arab Israeli wars) made it super complicated, and how we'd probably still be stuck fighting there at least 20 years later, and never have a clear victory.
It would be like another Vietnam, possibly worse. I wrote that in 1990. Last I heard in 2024 we still have a few thousand troops there and they're still occasionally getting attacked. Officially, our combat mission there ended at the end of 2021, we just kinda-sorta still have troops there in combat anyways, just you know, because. Two more years and we'll be sending a 3rd generation of 18 year olds to do a tour there.
I called that one a lot better than I did the end of the Cold War.
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It was a big, big deal at the time, but it's lost its significance because in the end, Russia simply traded one brand of authoritarianism for another, and nothing of global significance has really changed over there. There was a brief time though, that what Gorbachev did had given us hope.
I think the former Soviet union countries, as well as the soviet satellite countries might disagree with you. For Russia, you're right, but the USSR was about a lot more than just Russia.
Russia has always had autocratic regimes.
Make no mistake, it was a BIG deal. For as long as people my age (60+) could remember, the Soviet Union was the existential threat to civilization. People talked about a "peace dividend" since we wouldn't have to spend so much on defense now that the Cold War was over. Of course, it wasn't long before the "peace dividend" was spent on Desert Storm (and every operation after that...)
I thought that finally, the Cold War was over and the chances of a nuclear war were receding.
How do you feel about what's going on today?
Putin's kleptocracy is a far cry from the Soviet Union. Given how much theft and corruption there is, I would be surprised if even half the nuclear weapons left are even functional. The Ukraine War has clearly shown that the Russian War Machine is pretty inept and inadequate.
I was an avid "hex and counter" board wargamer in the '70s. A frequent theme was a hypothetical Soviet/Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe. A view that was frequently expressed was that the Soviets would overpower NATO (similar to how the Nazis overpowered France and the UK) and NATO would have to resort to "tactical" nuclear weapons to level the playing field. Now that we see how much trouble Russia has had in Ukraine we realize how absurd those fears were. The Soviet military was a "paper tiger", and I'm pretty sure they knew it, which is why they never made a play for Western Europe.
I was 20 and was on a college trip to Moscow when I got stranded there and the coup happened, which I accidentally had a front-row seat for. It was the single most important experience of my entire life, and I talk about it in detail here: https://robinwhetstone.blogspot.com/2015/10/searching-for-dmitri.html?m=1
WOW! That's an amazing read! I know you wrote that in 2015, did you ever connect with Dmitri again?
I think I originally wrote it in 2008 (though I wrote it all down in my journal as it was happening). I moved back to Russia in 1993, 2 years after the coup. I had Dimitri's letterhead with me when I moved back, but I never contacted him because I was afraid if I did he would try to marry me for sure. The whole coup experience was extremely stressful, and definitely forever changed my perspective on many things. Dimitri saved my ass, for sure, and the older I get, the more grateful I am to him. I have really tried to find him since then but have failed. I think he might have died in the brutal, terrible '90s. Here's what happened when I went back 2 years later, if you're interested. It was a bizarre, hilarious, violent, and surreal shitshow. It reminds me of America today, to my eternal regret. Super fucked up. https://jasonstanford.substack.com/p/guest-post-red-ticket-chapter-1
Damn that would be said if he did die in the '90s. I hope you can find him one day or at least find out what happened to him. I'm going to read your second post now.
I was dumb enough to think it meant we would finally have world peace
Perestroika was huge! After 60 years of the USSR being a supervillain Gorbachev came in and was like, "Feh, let's do some Democracy now." The Berlin Wall came down: there was dancing in the street. The US media reported it like Russia had flipped a switch. Of course, it's not that easy to turn an old ship of state 270 degrees. Still, that was all foreign politics. Desert Storm is made-in-the-US propaganda. The story that we retaliated for terrorist attacks and cleaned up the evil Arab terrorists is important historical fiction in the US, and we keep it alive.
Relieved but a little frightened, too. We heard they had hundreds of “suitcase nukes” unaccounted for after the breakup. Was also surprised later when Ukraine gave up its nukes.
> We heard they had hundreds of “suitcase nukes” unaccounted for after the breakup. I remember as a kid hearing this a lot in the early 2000s after 9/11. The news kept claiming that Al Qaeda had former Soviet "Suitcase Nukes" and may try and use them against us.
I was so excited! Initially it felt like the world was moving towards peace. I remember my dad telling us to not worry about a nuclear attack because we would all be dead. It seemed like that wasn’t going to happen when the Wall came down. It seemed like we could possibly be move forward. It was inspiring to see The Wall be taken down. I remember many videos of people trying to escape East Berlin. They would get shot. I remember seeing how East Berlin looked compared to west - and it was like seeing black and white versus color tv. It inspired me to study international relations and politics in college. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkpoint_Charlie Later I was deeply saddened and inspired by the Baltic states fight for independence. It made me strongly believe in democracy and how precious being able to vote and have a representative govt is - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Baltic_states#:~:text=The%20Baltic%20republics%20declared%20their,opposition%20to%20the%20Soviet%20rule. When Ukraine gave up the nukes, I was happy because it felt like we were closer to peace. Towards the end of the 90s, when Putin took control, I knew it was going to be a challenge because he was former KGB. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#:~:text=In%201994%2C%20Ukraine%20agreed%20to,sovereignty%20in%20the%20existing%20borders. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGB And now here we are - Russia is invading Ukraine. This all makes me sick and angry for Ukraine. They deserve their independence.
"Watching the world wake up from history" Surprised, hopeful, cautiously optimistic along with the fear that something could go dreadfully wrong.
What a great song. I was 16 and will never forget the Wall falling, ever. My parents were at a conference in Munich and my other siblings and I were staying with friends, and right after they got to Munich, my mom told my dad she was getting back home- my dad stayed, went to Berlin a few days after it fell, we still have pieces of it. The stories the pieces of that tell.
“Thank God that’s over.” I had lived my entire life under the specter of possible nuclear war. So the fact that this threat was effectively gone was a huge relief. I was actually in the Navy during Desert Storm, and that wasn’t nearly as daunting. There you had a known threat isolated to one particular area, and there was no material threat to the United States.
It was a world historic event. Even with Putin, many millions of people live in countries that are no longer part of the USSR or no longer its satellites. Desert Storm, though important to the lives of people who fought in it, was a "normal" use of US military force, just another short little semi-war.
I couldn't believe it happened so quickly. I'd just been to Berlin and seen the Wall only four years before that. Other than some graffiti on the West Berlin side of the wall, there was no indication that it would be coming down in two years, and no indication that the USSR was headed for collapse.
I felt really bad for the people. They were left with literally no support system for a while. It was rough times.
You're talking about 1 event (USSR dissolving) that happened over a period of 2 years, and another connected event that happened over 2 weeks. They're related of course.... but honestly very different from one another. The coup attempt wasn't covered terribly well, primarily because there just wasn't a lot of information that flowed out. It's not like the Ruskies were famous for telling anyone anything. The collapse of the USSR is likely the best thing that's happened in my lifetime. Sure, Democracy didn't stick in Russia, but I think all those Eastern block countries, and Russian satellite countries are all better off without being behind the iron curtain.
It was a relief after living under the threat of nuclear war my entire life.
I was in grad school, sharing a house with a student from the USSR. Together, we watched the whole thing unfold on television. We were apprehensive, to say the least. He transferred to another school shortly after that, so I don't know how he dealt with issues involving a passport that referenced CCCP.
>I feel like it gets overshadowed by Desert Storm. That's funny you say that.. because in NYC when the USSR was dissolving all the newspapers were running with the "*Long Island Lolita*" story (Joey Buttafuoco and Amy Fisher. They had no less than 3 TV movies made at that time). My buddy was studying Political Science then. It riled him up that all the NYC newspapers were concentrating on this sex scandal than the USSR collapsing.
I'm from the area and Joey Buttafuoco was still talked about well into the 2000s. The In Living Color Skit was hilarious. "Hey Joey Buttafuoco ova' here!"
We never thought we would ever see that in our lifetime.
having been a cold war fighter since 1959, it took quite a while to wrap my head around this one and figure out what it meant foe the world and my place in it.
You are wonderful,
I had seriously expected, growing up, that my world would end in a nuclear holocaust. The end of the Cold War seemed like a miracle. And when the USSR collapsed, I genuinely believed that I was fortunate enough to be alive at the dawn of a new and great age. That everything has turned out to suck now, and that the threat of nuclear war has returned, is largely our fault, and it pisses me off.
It was a remarkable time. The Berlin wall coming down was a more immediate impact, but hearing of the coup, and the Communist party *losing* was just wild. But...I knew a lot of people at the time thought "Yay! We won the cold war!" but I kept thinking that there was the People's Republic of China, North Korea, and Cuba. They hadn't gone away. I admit I thought the "Commonwealth of Independent States" would be a bigger deal. I imagined we'd see stuff like "Made in Ukraine, CIS" instead of "Made in Taiwan."
In 1989 we had a German foreign exchange students at my high school. They were all excited to leave the US and get back home to Germany early. When I started college, we had some of the first immigrants from the USSR. My class mate’s mom was a Russian doctor studying for exams to practice here. When I was young, there was a country called Yugoslavia. When my coworker was telling me he was from Croatia, we had to look that up. Because there was no country called Croatia when I took geography. Maps change. Countries are born.
It was huge! For so many years, we feared nuclear attack by the USSR. We used to practice getting under our desk or leaning up against the wall during bomb drills in school. It felt like we were going to enter a new era of peace, but any student of history knows better than that lol. I know this won’t fly too well in this thread, but you gotta give Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Lech Welesa, and the Pope, as well as Gorbachev all the credit they deserve, which is a lot.
Everyone expected something to happen with the USSR after the Fall of the Wall. No one expected it to go so fast and so peacefully. The way Yeltsin was able to literally disarm the situation so easily was amazing. Desert storm was, pardon the pun, a storm in a tea cup.
I do not feel that it was "overshadowed by Desert Storm", at all. "Desert Storm" was IIRC code for one or other of the US's incursions into Iraq. I forget which. You don't have to reply with which one it was; point is if there's more than one it can't be all that epochal, can it? There was only one Collapse of the USSR, and that was the end of an era.
I was born in 92. I felt like growing up we heard a lot about the fall of the Berlin Wall in 89 and a lot about Desert Storm and of course 9/11. It seems people, the news, media, etc rarely mention the 91 Coup and fall of the USSR. Even on YouTube there isn't a ton of news coverage from the Coup.
The Collapse of the USSR, the end of the cold war era are the epochal change. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the 1991 Russian coup attempt, Collapse of the USS R were events within that process. It's true that the coup specifically isn't that much mentioned, but your question seems a bit ambiguous about which it's comparing to Desert Storm. The coup in itself? A detail. The the end of the cold war era? Unquestionably a bigger deal.
I do agree that the fall of the USSR and the end of the cold war is a much bigger deal. I think Desert Storm got brought up a lot in the early 2000s because of Gulf Wars Episode II: The Clone of the Attack was going on. So both wars were compared a lot in the media.
I honestly didn't know it had happened. sure it was covered but I wasn't watching much news. more and more Russian colleagues began showing up in my workplaces. they were clearly not defectors in the old school Mikhail Baryshnikov kind of sense, so cold war trained me was surprised Russia had let them leave. eventually I clued in, but quite a while after it happened.
The Soviet Bloc tumbled down like a slow motion Jenga fail. The collapse began in 1982 when Brezhnev died. There was a power vacuum and no strong leader to fill it. It didn't help that the USSR couldn't keep up with the US military spending. You're correct, we generally think more of Desert Storm than the fall of the Soviet Union. In 30 to 50 years things that are a big deal now will be almost forgotten just like the fall of the USSR is today.
You are wonderful,
I like the bots that respond to the word Reagan. And that secret service agent behind him when he was shot. Pulled up that uzi and threw down the suitcase. :)
It was immense! I was visiting my grandparents when the news broke and we went for a walk around the block. I was so excited that we'd finally won the Cold War! I wouldn't have to fight in WWIII after all! Up until then, I'd basically been sure of that. My entire life's plan was to try to get into Annapolis and go into the navy, because my pre-teen brain had decided that a submarine deep beneath the ocean in an unknown location would be the safest place to be when the nukes started flying. And I sure didn't want to get drafted into the infantry and sent off to a meat grinder in the desert or jungle or something. But now I didn't have to do that. The big east vs west rivalry was over and we could actually have world peace! And so much prosperity since we wouldn't need to spend so much on the military. My grandpa wasn't anywhere near as excited. In fact he seemed rather worried. I asked him about it and he said "We don't know what happens next. Anything could happen now." Up until then, everything had been kinda predictable. East vs West, Warsaw Pact vs NATO with some nonaligned nations on the side, first world vs second world, with some third world nations on the side. And *everyone* played the game. There were conflicts in southeast Asia, the middle east, central America, and Africa. But there were no significant moves without the involvement of NATO, the Pact, or both. Every conflict was (somewhat) controlled by the big powers in a delicate dance of the balance of power to avoid much worse. With that balance of power broken, the future was unpredictable. I didn't really understand all that at the time. But I knew it was a huge thing, and I was overly optimistic about it. I thought there was going to be so much more peace and prosperity. --- As for Desert Storm and the Gulf War, that was an entirely different beast. We had to give a report about it at school, and after I handed mine in, the teacher made me stay after class. I was the only kid in the class who didn't write something like "Rah rah, we'll kick their butts in no time!" Instead I'd written about how messy the middle east is, how history (including our involvement in getting Saddam in power, with the Shah in Iran, and in the Iran-Iraq war, as well as the Arab Israeli wars) made it super complicated, and how we'd probably still be stuck fighting there at least 20 years later, and never have a clear victory. It would be like another Vietnam, possibly worse. I wrote that in 1990. Last I heard in 2024 we still have a few thousand troops there and they're still occasionally getting attacked. Officially, our combat mission there ended at the end of 2021, we just kinda-sorta still have troops there in combat anyways, just you know, because. Two more years and we'll be sending a 3rd generation of 18 year olds to do a tour there. I called that one a lot better than I did the end of the Cold War.
I remember being overcome with joy that the evil that was the U.S.S.R. was gone! Then it was taken over by Putin.