Uploaded March 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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This video is an explanation of the consequences of the fall of the USSR. I explain the histories of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine between 1991 and 2000 and end with a brief summary of what happened since.

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Timestamps
0:00 Intro
1:33 How the Ussr worked and failed
5:02 Russia
9:26 Ukraine
14:12 Belarus
16:18 Outro

Transcript:
Hello everybody. In my last video I gave some examples of the hardship Ukraine had and has to endure because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, so I figured I will make a special standalone video just about this topic.
We will have a look at the first decade after the collapse of the soviet union and examine how the member states were doing. I will limit myself to Russia, Ukraine and Belarus both because it keeps the video easier to make and because I have a hard time believing that the average westerner would truly watch a video that spends large times on Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and so on.
Of course once I discussed the short term consequences of the fall of the USSR we will also have a look at the long term changes, that meaning how the countries are doing right now because a lot changed between 2000 and today.
If this sounds interesting or you are interested in history or politics with a focus on leftism you should probably subscribe because I upload every week unless mental health incidents occur, with a new fresh topic that usually hasn’t been done before. In addition there will be a creator commentary livestream on my second channel linked in the description one day after this upload.
Of course you can donate money and join the discord server, or you scroll to the description and click the free 5 person invite that comes with every video. Yes you can join for free you just need to be fast. All that being said, it’s time we talk about the video topic!
To understand the consequences of the collapse of the USSR we must first understand the ussr and why it fell. I have two videos which explain that, but collectively they are over an hour long so I will give you a short 5-minute summary in this video. Feel free to skip to the next chapter.
The USSR was an attempt at state socialism between 1917 and 1991. It had a federal government system so every ethnicity would get their own state, and all these states were subservient to one big central government in Moscow. The idea is that Ukranians should deal with issues in Ukraine like schools, and the central government would deal with issues that affected the whole union, like defence.
This sort of federal system is pretty common in the world, the US, UK and germany all have the same government structure. The parliarments of the member states and the central parliament were elected by the people, on paper. There was only ever one party on the ballots and all who stood for election had to be communist party members but technically there was a vote.
The soviet economy was centrally planned. This means that all factories were owned by the state itself and not by capitalists, sometimes businesses were owned by their workers but that was very rare. The government would set production goals for these factories using gosplan who planned the entire industry of this huge country and they would financially support less profitable businesses for the sake of providing jobs.
The state would also decide how much these factories can sell their products for and who they can sell it to. The entire idea was that the state represents the workers therefore when the state controls everything, the workers control everything, and that is socialism.
Naturally the control of the state extended to things like press freedoms and the secret police. The central government was always very keen to make sure that there would be no movements starting that would endanger the security of the soviet state. For example, Brezhnev sent tanks to violently crush the, mostly peaceful, Prague spring uprising.