this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
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Rivalry with Vietnam, desire to improve relations with the Great Satan
I think it wasn't so much rivalry as a side effect of the Sino-Soviet split, Vietnam didn't want to cut ties with the USSR so China supported Cambodia against them.
Same reason China supported jihadists in Afghanistan really. What came out of it was the fall of the USSR (Afghan war wasn't the only or even main cause but a major one for sure), and China ended up with an extremist state on their borders which exported terrorism into Xinjiang, and the rest is history.
The immense misery of both China and post Soviet peoples in the 90s could probably be avoided if Sino-Soviet split didn't happen, if they worked together against religious extremists and counter-revolutionaries.
And if the Tito-Stalin split also didn't happen...
If Tito-Stalin split didn't happen, there would be great chance that Yugoslavia would splinter even earlier. Resulting level of Serbian centrism if they leaned on Russians would certainly not be tolerated.
firstly, the ussr was a multicultural internationalist project, not just russia, as it is often mischaracterised by the west. while there was a certain amount of russian cultural domination in some respects, this was mostly due to that nationality having the largest population, as well as baggage from the russian empire, not government policy, which was, if anything, geared towards the opposite.
also, i can't quite see what "serbian centrism" you are referring to in regard to the sfrj. living standards in slovenia and croatia were generally much higher than in the more southern republics, and the central government's policy regarding kosovo and metohija was anything but pro-serbian. in fact, the serbian right wing constantly whines about how socialism allegedly "weakened their nation".
Exactly. There was no serbian centrism in SFRJ. In part because of split from USSR. Those who favored the split also favored federalism which prevailed. Constitution of 1974 which was very federalist was largelly pushed by faction that was also in favor of anti-Stalinism before. Of course serbian centrists like Milošević didn't like that constitution one bit.
didn't the federal system lead to the various republics becoming increasingly economically independent from each other, competing for resources, and thus laying the seeds for future political conflict? to me, it seems like exactly the kind of system that produced people like milošević in the first place!
also, a federal system risks exacerbating, instead of relinquishing, needless national differences, creating opportunities for people to primarily identify with their petty national groupings, rather than the internationalist project as a whole, and risking giving breathing space to reactionary movements hiding behind the shield of this or that national cultural grievance.
from the mid-'80s onward, the soviet government was granting greater and greater degrees of cultural and, more importantly, economic independence to its various republics, imitating some aspects of the yugoslav system. this policy ultimately led to nothing but further decomposition of social unity, which went on contributing to the country's collapse.
This. We should seek to learn from mistakes of the past, not praise them and ignore their disastrous consequences out of misguided idealist notions. The federalism of Yugoslavia and the national policies of the USSR both failed and led to fratricidal wars.
Are we blaming AES now for the shit that happened after they collapsed and got replaced by capitalist states?
Yugoslavia and USSR both ultimately failed and collapsed, that much is true. I believe they could've survived if they formed a strong alliance, including China.
But the federalism of Yugoslavia and the national policies of the USSR were both incredibly successful in squashing ethnic tensions. People lived peacefully and most would never think fratricidal wars are even possible anymore.
At least with the USSR, I think things would be much improved if initiatives like korenizatsiya, zhenotdel etc were not abandoned.
I don't want to get into a whole big theoretical discussion here on this topic. Maybe we can discuss this more thoroughly in a separate post.
I just think that mistakes were made in the implementation of national policies (like Korenizatsiya in the USSR, and in Yugoslavia's own approach to the national question which leaned into the national differences rather than transcending them) which allowed reactionary nationalism to fester and eventually rise up again. I think nationalism should have been much more suppressed than it was, instead at times the USSR downright encouraged it, which in hindsight appears to have been a mistake.
I also think that the federal structure of these states contributed to their catastrophic break-up, and if the national republics had not been as given as much autonomy as they were, up to and including forming their own governments and ruling cliques, those break-ups might not have been as easy as they were for the traitors and national bourgeoisie of those republics, and the foreign forces scheming to achieve those breakups.
In all of these regards i think China has taken a better approach to preserving the stability of the unified state and ethnic harmony among the people. But we have the benefit of hindsight now of seeing the tragic result of the well-meaning but ultimately misguided policies of these first socialist experiments, which is why i don't blame the communists of that time for making those mistakes. I do think we should learn from them and not repeat them.
We can't close our eyes and pretend everything was perfect when we see how things ended up in Yugoslavia and between former Soviet Republics (not just Russia and the now Nazified Ukraine and Baltics, but also Azerbaijan-Armenia, conflicts in Central Asia, etc.). The idea of creating countries-within-a-country, which is what the Soviet and Yugoslav republics were, has not been a recipe for long term stability.
And while these were far from the only factors that led to the eventual breakups and wars, i think we have to acknowledge that they played a role.