I know things were really bad in 1989, but what made it so bad that people in so many socialist countries just rose up and overthrew their own governments?
Not OP, but the dissolution of the ussr was entirely undemocratic. They also violated the constitution, which did have provisions for leaving, in order to do so.
Some republics did actually leave using the correct procedure. Estonia and Armenia - definitely, Lithuania and Latvia - I think so.
Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia were and are bastions of anti-Soviet expressly Nazi sacks of shit.
Not related to what you said, but I just want to remind people that the Holocaust on the eastern front (from the Nazi position) was perpetrated with gleeful help from collaborators in these nations. Always remember this when you hear immigrants from these nations speak poorly of the Soviet Union. It’s like listening to the grandson of some reactionary Bay of Pigs PoS who was told constant lies about the “evils of communism!” They have incentive to lie and misrepresent constantly.
This is total nonsense. The Baltic republics completely ignored the Soviet constitution, their declaration of independence was entirely unilateral and decided on not by referendum but solely by a parliament elected in farcical bourgeois manipulated elections that followed the disastrous perestroika reforms. And the text of the declaration was full of historical revisionist lies and promises they never intended to keep, like in the case of Estonia for example they said they were declaring independence so they could pursue their own path to socialism, and that they would never pass laws discriminating against other ethnic groups. Yet immediately after they went on to dismantle socialism and pass laws that took away the citizenship of ethnic Russians and excluded them from being able to buy land or hold certain jobs.
