I suggest we get them to face the wall and troll them with fake execution, Soviet-style. They need not worry, we'll use blank rounds. Pinky promise.

This has already been mentioned before, still... Fair warning: the author is very reactionary, and even though the overall analysis is okay they still sprinkle it with stuff like "though I realize only the numbers autists will truly appreciate it"

I honestly thought this could not get more embarrassing. Holy shit... Like, do you not know history at all? I can't... I just... There's a million things to say about this, I don't even know where to start.

Death to Banderite Nazis. Death to Ze. Death to America.

This does not belong here

Any scenario of an Ukraine that will be aligned with the west is long gone now.

Good.

You know, it's funny... "Russian territory is under occupation for the first time since WWII".

It sounds like a jab... But then, how about we open a history book or ask the Germans how it went after that, hmm?

Nice. More Western capitalist propaganda obviously trying to frame Ukrainian cope offensives into a success

Have you read Khruschev or are you just quoting Mao here?

Stop deflecting. And stop blindly downvoting everything. It's not about reading Khrushchev, on its own it would not do you any good. It's about looking at history and seeing which decisions and which policies lead to which consequences.

From the look of it, you're either emotionally invested in defending Khrushchev, or slandering Mao, or just being petty. Mao said certain things, history has shown us those things were correct regardless of who said them. It's not only my viewpoint, or Mao's, or anyone specific, really. No amount of reading Khrushchev would change that, it has nothing to do with it.

The Sino-Soviet split was caused by both sides.

Yeah, that doesn't mean both sides were equally responsible, though. You could say the Chinese could have tried doing some rapprochement (and evidently they did in the late 70s), and, you know, NOT helping the imperialists in Afghanistan, but at least when it came to Khrushchev they had a point.

the groundwork for the economic mistakes and the degeneration of the CPSU had been laid decades prior

To all of this I'll add that many of the reforms implemented under Khrushchev (or at least the general idea behind them) weren't necessarily out of place - things like some amount of social liberalization or increasing availability of consumption goods (the light industry), given what the USSR and its people have been through. As is always the case, the appeal for these things didn't appear out of nowhere - there were material reasons. And, of course, if implemented prudently, they could have produced positive results for the USSR. It's just that the way they were conducted was overall a failure. Khrushchev's shallow understanding of Marxist theory, his tendency of favoring short-term easy solutions aimed at quick returns (opportunism, essentially), as well as monumental loss of experienced ML cadres certainly played a part too.

"Socialism Betrayed - Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union" by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny. An absolutely indispensable book to give you a starting point and moderately deep insights.

There are more books, like "The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System - An Insider's History" by Vladimir Kontorovich, I suggest you put those off for later, as they are more detailed but dry, filled with technical language.

But what exactly caused the split?

You sort of answered this one yourself. Among numerous factors it is precisely the things you mentioned - the de-Stalinisation nonsense, the purge against pro-Stalin elements (if you can even call them that - they were just anti-revisionist Marxists-Leninists), blatant revisionism of Marxism-Leninism and its core principles (continuous class struggle, dictatorship of the proletariat, the party of the proletariat), blind optimism when it comes to the national question

What policies did he push that were reformist or capitalist in nature ? How exactly did he fuck up?

They weren't all strictly capitalist in nature, to be honest. It would be more accurate to say that his blunderous policies created conditions for capitalist restoration inside Soviet Socialism.

The policies typically referred are such: he dismantled the state-owned MTSs (machine and tractor stations), putting the responsibility of maintaining and repairing the machinery on collective farms. He dismantled central planning, replacing existing institutions with decentralized regional planning committees, which greatly exacerbated the existing difficulties with planning. He encouraged the peasantry to keep more privately-owned produce and livestock, essentially strengthening NEP-style measures without second thought. He adopted wage-leveling - a mistake of monstrous proportions, which decimated incentive for production growth (more of a left-deviation, honestly - the USSR was not ready for such a thing), and also created severe discontent among the intellectuals, prompting them to look for other means of enrichment, siphoning this strata of society into the "second" economy who would then constitute would-be capitalists in its embryonic form.

He also started the Virgin Lands cultivation bullshit, instead of trying to make a qualitative shift in agriculture. The idea was also to emulate US agricultural practice with heavy use of mineral fertilizer. The results were disastrous, partly due to the fact that initial yield seemed to have increased (but that was only true for land already cultivated), which gave overall sense of false promise, and also due to the abandonment of Stalin's afforestation program, which worsened issues with droughts.

There were also big mistakes of political nature on top of those related to the economy, including the damage done to CPSU - recruiting too many people of questionable ideological strength, massively increasing the % of intelligentsia compared to industrial proletariat, needless bureaucratization, etc. He also drove a split into industrial and agricultural factions inside the CPSU.

Simply said, his overall strategy represented a Bukharinist right-deviation within the political spectrum of the CPSU. Something Stalin warned might happen in a peasant-dominated country.

The list is hella incomplete, please feel free to add more stuff.