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IMO I don’t like citing the referendum because it only shows that people wanted to maintain the USSR, not that they necessarily wanted socialism. At that point Gorbachev (and the party, tbf) had fucked things up so much, things were already in a death spiral. If you want to talk about public opinion though, you can highlight that after the Soviet Union broke up socialist and social democratic parties did so well in the Duma that Yeltsin basically had to strip them of their power and concentrate all the power in the executive.

You could point out the fact that in 1985 or so, no one in the USSR or the US thought the USSR would face an economic collapse (I think there’s some CIA document to that effect somewhere). When people reference “bread lines” or major shortages in the USSR, usually that references the period only after Gorbachev started fucking up - those shortages were precisely because Gorbachev was throwing monkey wrenches into the works. Before then yeah they didn’t have as many blue jeans or dishwashers but major shortages weren’t anywhere near as prevalent.

The Soviet economy absolutely had problems, but so does the current US economy. There’s always some problems going on in every economy. They don’t all collapse. That’s where part of the “overthrow” comes in. The problems in the US economy haven’t lead to a collapse because the US is in a hegemonic position - no one is “pushing” our economy to collapse. For the USSR, the economic pressures placed on them by the west can only be described as “total war”. Especially in regards to military spending and nukes.

If I want to be as charitable to as possible to Gorbachev, I would paint him simply as a loser and a coward. I think he saw the military and nuclear buildup of the US and figured there was no way to catch up; and that eventually, the US will start a nuclear war that could jeopardize all life on earth. However, instead of rising to the challenge, he capitulated. There’s some letter he wrote to the US State Dept I think (which they didn’t even respond to) where he basically said “ok, what kind of government do you want me to have?”. I really think all of Soviet leadership deserves blame but it’s hard not to pin so much of it on Gorbachev when he was such a pathetic little worm.

But honestly, all of this is details. I think the best response when people say that socialism in the USSR “didn’t work” is to give them the Parenti response: that socialism in the USSR did work. It took a poor, mostly pre-industrial society and transformed their economic capacity to be able to get tens of millions of people out of poverty and up to a standard of living nearly up to the west in an unprecedented time frame, all without the imperialism that the UK and US needed. For the vast majority of Soviet citizens, socialism did work. Of course, there’s a minority of people for whom they definitely would have been better off materially in the west (business owners, highly skilled professionals and managers, doctors, etc) but we only ever hear their perspective in the west, not the perspective of the overwhelming majority of workers. That is intentional.

You have to look at the overall arc of Soviet economic history. After the civil war, socialism took a completely broken, already poor country and in less than 20 years put their productive capacity on par with the fully industrialized west. So much so that the USSR was able to save the world from fascism. In the process though, they lost much of that industrial capacity and 25% of their people. No big deal, Stalin had them back on their feet and in fighting form in less than a decade. From there, despite the intense pressure and the poor economic leadership under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the Soviet economy still grew like gangbusters well into the 70s. There was a slowdown from then on but growth was still basically fine, it was just less than previous. Essentially the socialism in the USSR delivered decades of incredible growth, only to be punctuated by a few years of intentionally fucking things up. The pressure on the USSR meant unlike capitalist countries in the west, they had a lot less space to try and work out those problems.

Assume I know nothing except US propaganda.. What would you say to me to educate me on how the soviet union was overthrown, and didn't collapse.