> What would be the point of steering science and public academia in this way? To lower the level of public discourse to the advantage of the US?

One can only guess. For one thing, West (especially the US) needed USSR to be broken not to "free" from ourselves, but to create a new market for US goods. USA didn't need a global competitor - it needed a new market.

If population is educated, they tend to create industry products instead of mindlessly consuming. If you need a new market, you just need lowbrow population extracting natural resources for the western companies and buying consumer goods produced in the West.

Also, it would be harder to manipulate educated population.

Almost nobody analyzed this because even to this day our education is run by agents of the West. If you read articles and interviews of people who are in charge of education in Russia now, they're very openly and aggressively pro-West, nevermind that all their efforts only lowered the quality of education. It's obvious that western influence to destroy what remains of our education still remain.

I've lived for some time in some of South Asian countries and I believe it's same there. It's a part of neo-colonial politics. E.g. there's very little incentive to teach and learn mathematics and physics, chemistry, biology. There's a huge incentive to study humanities subjects and corresponding flood of US-printed books on marketing, management, "human rights", "lgbt rights", etc. But economy can't grow if everyone is a manager or lawyer - real education is needed for people to create industry products. But it's not in the West interest to allow growth of industry in Asia, Russia, Africa.

> Many here in the US claim that Gorbachev's policies of Glasnost and Perestroika contributed to the momentum of the collapse. I've heard it said before that while many here in the US hail Gorbachev as a kind of unwitting hero (due to this contribution and his affectations and coordination with Reagan), many who lived through his time in power view him more as the one who ruined everything his forebears had worked to build and achieve. Just for my own edification and curiosity, can you speak to how he's commonly viewed by former citizens of the Soviet Union?

I don't believe there was a momentum to collapse. It was a deliberate sabotage by Gorbachev. All the visible economical problems started on his term. USSR economy wasn't capitalist: it could survive whatever pressure. It survived WWII, it certainly could survive any sane reform or temporary crisis. It was deliberately destroyed by Gorbachev. Even some of pro-US/pro-West/pro-capitalist advocates agree that some of Gorbachev's decisions were caused economical disaster and it was very likely deliberate because any sane person could foresee that.

I don't know what everybody thinks about Gorbachev, but many people around me consider him a traitor (and they're probably right, there're some conspiracy theories that he was recruited by the West long time ago). People do not speak about him usually, but everyone understands that he destroyed huge a powerful country to pieces and every piece now lives much worse than before (at least economically). I'd say that significant part of population hates him for his crime, and even part of the population that is pro-West doesn't like to talk about him because he definitely betrayed his country and his people and there's little doubt about it.

Also, there's a constant pressure to tear remaining pieces even further (especially Russia which is still too big to be a tame colony for providing natural resources without any geopolitical ambitions). So, there're endless "revolutions" and coups in former USSR republics and attempts to stage such a coup in Russia. We're flooded with anti-Russian propaganda in our media, especially social networks. USA has created many institutions before and after USSR collapse to disseminate fake news. When Internet had become ubiquitous in Russia, it greatly helped these institutions. Every day on every social network under every post you can find comments how bad is Putin, how useless we're as human beings, that our history is full of violence and all other kinds of fake news.

It feels futile to resist this pressure - US troll factories are working full power 24 hours a day. They throw a lot of resources into that and there's little we can do. US propaganda was always the most powerful and well-funded. Hollywood itself is a powerful weapon (one obvious giveaway is that almost every villain in US movies is Russian, sometimes Arab).

It's very hard to counteract all this propaganda. It's literally under every YouTube video, for example. There're tons of comments in Russian under every video like "Putin is bad", "We should wake up and throw out Putin", "We Russian oppressed other nations and should repent now", "We're useless slaves, we should give up any resistance to the glorious West powers". What kind of power can counteract this?.. This is partially the reason why I don't want to consume social media. They're flooded with this nonsense.