~~He’s really old but I see him fairly regularly to take care of his cat but mostly just to hang out with him. He doesn’t really understand the internet and his interpretation is that there’s like 5 people on here who are all my friends. He has agreed to do an AMA but in his style where it might take a while to actually get some answers from him for each individual question.~~
~~The best way to do this is I think is to ask the questions you want him to answer the most and then I’ll probably update this post or make a new with with the first batch of answers and so on. He will give long answers because it’ll be like an interview of sorts but I can shorten them so they’re more friendly to digest.~~
~~He does know English but like teaching him to use a phone or my laptop would be difficult so I think it’s best I do it this way.~~
~~Don’t be shy to ask whatever you want. I will try my best to get him to answer them but if there’s a few hundred questions that might be too hard lol.~~
~~Anyways take care and looking forward to it~~
UPDATE
Hey gang really sorry to do this. I managed to ask him about 6 questions and he gave really detailed answers but one of the questions I gave him threw him off and kinda put him in a bad mood and he was saying “who would ask such stupidity?” So I moved onto a question I thought would take his mind off the other one but I think his bad mood persisted throughout and he got somewhat irate.
I don’t really know what he was expecting but he seems to think the questions weren’t good enough. I showed him the site and he got kinda upset once he realized that it wasn’t just some random chat board but rather a website with hundreds of concurrent users. He literally said “stop using that moronic website” lol. I’ll see if he comes around but he’s pretty pissed. He did give detailed answers to about 5/6 questions so I can transcribe these but sorry that we couldn’t finish this.
He is old and this is kinda how he gets sometimes but this is the first time he’s gotten this way in a while. He’ll be okay though I’ll just buy him ice cream or some shit lol.
In that period from 1987-1991, events at the top of Soviet leadership (Gorbachev, Yakovlev, Ligachev, et al) seemed to be happening rapid-fire. Was he and the people he knew informed of all the changes the Soviet leadership were implementing as it was happening. Or did he feel sort of in the dark regarding the changes that were happening.
For example, practically overnight Gorbachev instructed the industrial central planning firms to switch to more of a market-driven model, which threw these industries into absolute chaos (even by capitalist thinking, this is a bad idea unless you subscribe to Musk’s inane ideas about “breaking stuff”). Was this something people knew about before and after it happened? Or were these changes largely kept out of view from Soviet citizens?
I guess the broader question is, the late 80s (specifically that 1987-91 period) saw HUGE changes in how Soviet governance, economy, and society were organized. These decisions were made almost entirely at the top. I am curious to know how much your typical Soviet worker was informed on these changes, and how overall how they thought about them.
I doubt he’s ever read Socialism Betrayed given that it’s an obscure book that I don’t think has been translated into Russian, but if he ever reads it I would love to hear his thoughts. I think he would probably like it.
Edit: cards on the table, because reading what I wrote it feels a bit like a leading question… I have the impression that the changes made happened so quick on purpose, and that the public was kept in the dark to some extent; mainly because if the public was fully aware of how Gorbachev was changing things the people wouldn’t have gone along with it. But I would love to know if this is correct or not (or somewhere in between).