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At the end of the Soviet Union, all the secrets came out. The gulag was real, and the cancelled Solzhenitsyn was vindicated. The USSR really had murdered Poles at Katyn, while blaming it on the Nazis. Millions of innocents truly had been liquidated by Lenin and Stalin. And Chernobyl was indeed a coverup. Everything everyone had darkly suspected to be true was confirmed, and then some. The consequence was the meltdown of a nuclear-armed superpower. It lost its European satellites, and its overseas military bases, and its global influence. The Soviet Union collapsed economically and imploded geographically, shattering into more than a dozen new countries. That outcome wasn’t peace and prosperity for all. It was for some, to be clear — the Eastern Europeans and Baltics are inarguably better off today as independent states. But the fall of the Soviet Union also stoked the kindling for many bloody conflicts, ranging from wars you haven’t heard about (like the Tajikistani civil war) to wars you probably have (like Serbia and Yugoslavia) to wars everyone has heard about (like the invasion of Ukraine.) Today, 30+ years later, countless Russians and Ukrainians are fighting over a border that was within living memory just an internal boundary of the Soviet Empire. The equivalent would be Blue and Red Americans blowing each other up over the California/Nevada border, or something like that. Yet at the same time, does anyone really want the Soviet Union to still be around, gulags and all? Anyway. Not making a point either way. Just saying that total societal destabilization through long repressed revelation has happened before, and recently. The consequences were profound. At the same time, the end of the Soviet Union also saw the wildest conspiracy theories uncritically adopted by the population. That’s what a breakdown of trust in the state looks like. People believe nothing, and then they’ll also believe anything. https://t.co/3num0vr5n8 https://t.co/ppUOlK2G3q