Does Anyone Miss The Soviet Union?

Let's have a look at why we might miss the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union stood for Communism and was thus an ideological competitor of the Capitalist west. The wealth gap in America, the difference between rich and poor, was at it's narrowest in 1973, at the height of the Cold War with Communism. The Communists, based on the theory of Karl Marx, gained a lot of support in the world by accusing Capitalists of allowing the rich to oppress the poor.

After the Soviet Union was gone as an ideological adversary it might have seemed like a victory but the wealth gap in America, and most of the west, began to widen. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer. It culminated in the economic crash of 2008, the worst crash since 1929. Developers built vast numbers of homes in the southwest and Florida, and then sold them to millions of people who couldn't afford their mortgages. Today the wealth gap in the west generally remains far wider than it was during the Cold War.

The wealth gap is moving in the direction of what it was before Communism, led by the Soviet Union, became a major world system. Modern Communism began with the theories of Karl Marx being implemented in the October Revolution of 1917. But only a few intellectuals in the west even knew what Communism was. 

The event that changed everything was the market crash of 1929. With the industrial capacity left over from the First World War factories were turning out a wide range of consumer goods, from cars to radios. This brought about that fabulous decade known as the "Roaring Twenties". But due to the wealth gap workers were unable to afford the goods that they were producing. Goods were just piling up in warehouses, leading to cutbacks in production and meaning that workers had even less money, and it spiralled into a devastating crash. This is what brought Communism to the world's attention, as an alternative to Capitalism.

The Soviet Union is gone but we still have nuclear missiles pointed at us. Cold War spying and espionage has mostly moved into the realm of cyberspace. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 it was considered as the triumph of democracy. Now we see that it was actually the peak of democracy and that global democracy has been in a gradual decline ever since.

It's like there are two stores in town. The competition between the two keeps both in check. But if one of the stores closes down then the other can raise it's prices because it has no competition.

I will leave it up to readers to decide if you miss the Soviet Union. The wealth gap was much narrower.