Yes, after the reign of Stalin, where Khrushchev took over, the USSR deescalated the Cold War, yet it was the actions taken by Stalin’s regime that let the conflict start to begin with, with the USSR not retreating from Iran as the other Allied Forces did, the threat of force in the Turkish Straits crisis, comparing Churchill to Adolf Hitler and breaking the Yalta Agreement by meddling with the 1947 Polish elections.

Also, the article seems to be paywalled, so I have to see when I get around to reading it.

It might be that my comparison wasn’t the most accurate, since my main insight in the USSR is through the DDR, which was mainly a pawn in the face off between the superpowers at that time, and thus was a hotspot for tensions around that time. And I do believe that the wealth disparity wasn’t as extreme as in capitalist countries, yet it says little about what the actual average living conditions were compared to other countries. Also, corruption doesn’t always have a wealth disparity as a result. After all, people can also get corrupt due to self-preservation, which I think is most evident under Stalin’s later rule, after his wife committed suicide.

Yet I can’t really agree that it was “killed off” during its downfall, as I have my doubts that it would have survived much longer than it did without its subnations separating from it. The only way I could imagine it surviving would have been if they “licked their own wounds” after the war, so to speak, recuperate from their losses instead of its rapid militarisation that it gone through to keep up with the USA in order to win a dick measuring contest.

I am not so sure if the dissolution was really avoidable. I like to use the DDR as a comparison, as it does resemble the USSR post-war pretty well, due to the USSR pretty much dismantling factories in their occupation zone to compensate their own losses only to stop that as they realized the other occupation forces were strengthening their own zones and so reverting their course, leaving the then formed DDR in a similar state as the government that spawned in.

During the time of its existence, the DDR suffered from supply shortages to the point where the Trabant, the most driven car in the DDR had a chassis made out cotton-based thermoset. Yet at the same time government paranoia was at it’s peak, where the MfS (the East German equivalent of the KGB) coerced and blackmailed citizen to aid in the espionage and recruit them as informants against their neighbours, just to collect as much information on their citizen as possible in case they are suspected to be traitors as more and more people tried to flee the extreme poverty they had to live with. Yet the party was riddled with corruption, as the last generation of DDR politicians realized as the old ones resigned and allowed a new wave to take the lead, seeing the actual numbers of the debt of the government and the state of the country had to face with, even though the older generation of politicians were initially against Gorbachev’s Perestroika plan.

I think this level of hidden debt, corruption and paranoia/secrecy was the reason why Gorbachev claimed that the Chernobyl disaster caused the downfall of USSR, as it was the epitome of what plagued the whole nation ever since the war. Nobody wanted to speak out the truth for their fear of their status or even their lives, as they either get painted as a saboteur or gets silenced by those who would be targeted as well if the truth came out. Getting rid of that issue would be nothing less of a government dissolution, because no one could be really trusted.

Though this solution also seems to be very flawed, doesn’t it? You basically trust another company to manage your child’s smartphone and granting it full access to it. Furthermore, that doesn’t stop predators, as they could still arrange meetups with their unknowing victims. And even if it captures text messages, kids would be discouraged to use their phone due to their fear of their parents disproving of their friends or their communication to them. Instead, they’d more likely learn the use of “burner phones” by getting a factory-reset phone and using that one instead.

It’s the sort of ham-fisted attempt expected by parents that blame their kids for their mistakes instead of their parenting.

Could you explain how it doesn’t undermine your argument?

I think the term you are looking for is “Deep Net”, although it originally meant websites that weren’t indexed by web searches.