And it only last 69 years. You never heard much about this date, they more often celebrated the revolution that went down in October/November 1917 as the foundation of their state, a predominantly Russian-dominated one.
Even with my Left-leaning politics, I’ve never been a fan of this regime because everything Soviet was really just a new label slapped over the crumbling, corrupt and inept Czarist kingdom mismanaged by the Romanov family. They just replaced one set of murderous thugs for another to run the place. Just like the Who sang, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
Let’s be fair though, there were a few positive things the USSR did. They successfully launched the first satellite Sputnik, they put the first person into space (Yuri Gagarin), created the game Tetris, allegedly developed the handwriting software recognition for the Newton, brought innovation to hockey and kept the Bolshoi a premiere ballet troupe. These contributions will never outweigh all the horrors they committed. I just will never subscribe to St. Reagan’s rhetoric of them being the evil empire given the US’s atrocities via the CIA and the old fart’s history of raping women on the casting couch.
It is pretty hard to believe the Soviets are gone. Growing up in the Seventies and Eighties, they always seemed to be an enemy who’d be around to menace the West for decades to come. Now it’s mostly Russia being a pain in the ass with the cyberattacks and invasion of Ukraine under its blatant dictator while other former republics have devolved into isolated little kleptocracies with little interest in world domination. A few have moved closer to the West and wanted to embrace liberal democratic systems in the EU mold: the three Baltic nations and Ukraine.
Just goes to show you how the future is unpredictable and filled with surprises. Maybe in a few years I’ll be writing about the four or five individual states the US breaks up into as I’m forced to emigrate to California or Oregon.