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?
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.