Are you sure you’re talking about South Korea?
From time-to-time you have these moments on the internet where someone points out what is an obvious error and you’re faced with a choice: Do you double down and possibly attack the person who pointed out the error or admit you were wrong and move on? I’m going to tell a silly story about myself instead.
I worked at a musuem and right next door we had a Korean War Monument which attracted a good number of Korean visitors. I had a group come in and a man in his 60s told me they were from Korea. I swear I looked that man right in the eyes and asked, “North or South Korea?” He stared at me. I stared back. Obviously embarrassed, I shook my head and said, “I don’t know why I asked that.”
Yes. I meant North Korea.
Nowadays conservatives want to somehow give Reagan all the credit (with maybe a touch for Bush 1) for being brilliant leaders who won the Cold War. The re-written version of history is that Reagan saw how weak the Soviet regime was and pushed it over by forcing it to engage in a military spending competition.
But that’s not what happened. Reagan and Bush never said they were spending billions on the military in order to push the weak Soviet Union past the point of collapse. They always said that we needed to spend those billions on the military because the Soviet Union was very strong and was a threat to the United States. Their military policy was based on a premise we now know was the exact opposite of the reality they were living in.
I can’t claim I was any smarter (although I wasn’t running the country). If you had asked me back around 1986, I would have told you the Soviet Union was a stable country and a significant military threat. I certainly didn’t see the signs of its imminent collapse.
To successfully extracate themselves out of the economic malaise whilst keeping a grip on political power, I don’t see why China and Vietnam could get away with it but not the Soviet Union
Thank you for the clarification. I’ll suggest that this excellent post
pretty well covers my take on the situation.
IMO the SU was starting from a well-developed failed model while China and Viet Nam were starting from a relatively undeveloped model. Greenfield progress that doesn’t have to overcome entrenched interests is always easier than reform. The SU was also really, really stuck with a huge military industrial complex that would not go away quietly. That amounted to a very large anvil in their backpack as they were trying to tread water or swim to better conditions.
That “military industrial complex” of the USSR should have been a boon, and in fact for a long time the post-Soviet Russia essentially subsisted on military sales of cheap surplus equipment as their oil and gas extraction and distribution infrastructure was unsustainable and uncompetitive. If Russia had kept building weapons it would at least have some industry, but it pretty much let that fall in ruins as the oligarchs focused on extracting and selling natural resources at pennies on the dollar, enriching themselves while impoverishing the nation, just like the gentry of old.
The Peoples Republic of China was for a long time stuck in Maoist ideology, and both the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution presented profound, nearly existential challenges to the the viability of the PRC. China didn’t start to recover its footing until they essentially abandoned agrarian Maoist dogma and started building an industry geared toward export-focused market socialism (with repressive autocratic governance, of course). Mainland China’s success was hardly foretold, but they had the fortune to limit their involvement in unsuccessful wars and didn’t have the same face-to-face conflict with the West over European territory, so they were able to use market forces to co-opt the United States (and eventually Western Europe) economically.
In other words, they didn’t face the same pitfalls and conflicts, and they actually developed a strategy from the early ‘Eighties onward to engage in the global economy rather than just becoming the increasingly isolated petrostate of ‘Seventies era Soviet Union which was dependent upon its Warsaw Pact ‘client states’ for the bulk of manufactured goods and even basic staples like grain. Of course, both nations are now facing demographic collapse, but in the case of Russia it was never in a growth state post-WWII (no ‘baby boom’ or massive economic development), while China went through a massive boom and now bust cycle, complete with the same ills of Western investment and real estate speculation writ large, and is now hugely overleveraged while its Belt & Road initiative has not really given it the same influence that was expected.
Stranger
Well, China and Vietnam also had the example of how not to do it, looking at the USSR, among other factors mentioned above. Add to that, they didn’t have people like Yeltsin and Putin who saw the collapse of the USSR as a chance to aggrandize themselves, rather than actually try to make their country better. I don’t know if China or Vietnam had anyone like that, but if they did, it’s clear they never ended up in charge of enough to screw things up.
In 1980 many Americans, including me, thought the Soviet Union was winning the Cold War. We had lost the War in Vietnam. We were being humiliated in Iran. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan. Few Americans thought the Afghans could defeat them. There was talk about Mexico becoming “the last domino.” People were afraid that Soviet tanks might be facing us on the other side of the Rio Grande.
These fears contributed to the election of Ronald Reagan.
In retrospect we can see that the Soviet Union was imploding from within.
I am biased toward Jimmy Carter. I still love the guy. I also like Gorbachev. Consider those biases in what I am about to say. I am not pretending to be all knowing.
Nevertheless, I think that if Carter had been reelected in 1980, he would not have provoked the Soviet Union with an arms race. Gorbachev would have had an easier time reforming the Soviet Union.
The Soviet government had the institutions of a representative democracy. All it needed was to allow a loyal opposition and an adversary press.
And have a populace that wanted that stuff. What they wanted was economic reform. That’s harder, much harder, than just allowing real voting within a real multi-party political system.
That’s not really true. The Soviet Union had a Council of Ministers and the Presidium appointed by the Supreme Soviet, which was selected by direct election but all candidates—even ‘opposition’ candidates—were appointed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The criminal courts, such as they were, were run by the Ministry of Justice and decisions were often rendered without the defense being allowed to testify. Civil and administrative decisions were often rendered even without hearing with the judgement pre-determined by whatever official had the most standing in the CPSU. In reality, the Communist Party was the real government and the official organs of governance existed to give the government some patina of respectability. A “loyal opposition and an adversary press” was the antithesis of the Soviet system, and there were of course absolutely no protections for freedom of expression, religion, right of movement, protection from government excesses, or even the petty thievery and corruption that the “security services” engaged in as a routine matter. Nor are Russians particularly impressed with the benefits of democratic governance, which they tasted in the early ‘Nineties and found not to their liking, because Russians prefer a strong leader over a fair or just one.
The ‘arms race’ of the 1980s was largely one-sided; while the Soviets did ramp up military production and engaged in a few highly publicized programs, they already did a lot of their innovation in the late ‘Sixties through the ‘Seventies, which was the first time that the “missile gap” became a reality in terms of the United States being in shortfall, and engaged in a vigorous missile defense and space-based weapons program in the ‘Seventies which left them convinced that the advertised capabilities of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative were smoke and mirrors (which was largely true; even today the development of directed energy weapons that can zap ICBMs out of the sky are still decades of development away at best). But it was a great way to reinvigorate the American defense contractor sector and justify running the kind of reckless deficit spending that Reagan at al claimed to be totally against otherwise, what with those “welfare queens” driving around in Cadillacs and school children scamming the government out of a free lunch, the deceitful rapscallions.
Which ended up being the Achilles’ heel of nascent post-Soviet Russian democracy, which deflated like a KAMA tire faster than Muscovites could break down furniture for firewood. It didn’t help that the West held back on aid or even much overt support for Yeltsin, and the products of Soviet industry were so bad that they couldn’t sell for the price of shipping. The only thing the Russians really had to sell were state-owned natural resources which went to political favorites, forming the oligarch class which sold said resources for pennies on the dollar and earned Western favor by washing their money in British banks and London and New York high end real estate. The Russian people got козий помет and Putin, who is a lying troll, but he’s their lying troll instead of being some flunky puppet with a NATO hand up his ass making his lips flap (which is how most Russians think of any vaguely pro-Western Russian political figure today).
Stranger
Well said. Thank you.
This is the real punchline right here.
Much as in current China, the SU had two governments: the one in their constitution and titular apparent bureaucracy, and the other one consisting of the Party’s shadow quasi-government that actually ran the show. The Party was the brains; the government was the goons who took sub rosa orders from the brains.
China differs only in having a robust private sector that the SU lacked. Which private sector, at least the big parts, are being suborned and subdued by Xi’s Party and State right now.
This is beneath you
*shrug*
Russians have never experienced functional democratic governance, and their brief dabblings in it have resulted in near catastrophic consequences for Russia as a nation at both the beginning and end of the 20th Century. As a result, most Russians look at calls for “democracy” as just another form of corruption, and they’d rather have overt corruption with a strong leader than a kabuki theater of integrity covering a weak leader like Boris Yeltsin. If you study Russian culture or speak with someone form Russia or who has lived in Russia for an extended period of time you’ll find that this is a broadly accepted truism.
Stranger
Okay, you’ve convinced me: it’s not beneath you.
The assumption here is that without Reagan, Gorbachev would have been elected, would have had the need to make democratic reforms, and that there would have been enough support within the government to make those changes. Counterfactuals are hard to measure, but none of those are guaranteed.
Moderating:
Don’t insult/attack posters. This is not the Pit. The second post is far too much.
Hypothetical counterfactuals may be difficult to evaluate, but we can look at the reality that when various Communist regimes in Warsaw Pact countries opened up for free and fair elections in 1989-90, the Soviet-installed Communist regimes were trounced by other parties, as observed in Poland and Hungary. Even within the Soviet Union, where the ‘open’ elections for the Supreme Soviet limited the range of opposition candidates (Boris Nemtsov, later known as a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin assassinated in 2015, was blocked from standing even though he met the criteria), some of the CPSU candidates failed to win election despite being the only name on the ballot. The more liberalized elections in 1990 saw an even greater erosion of CPSU control, which led directly to the 1991 August Coup where Communist hardliners tried to seize control of the government by force, illegally arresting Gorbachev, and failing because of popular resistance, leading directly to the collapse of the USSR as a functioning government.
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union did not tolerate opposition and did not survive in an open democratic environment against challengers campaigning on reform. There is no reason to believe that it would have been able to do so if Gorbachev had been elected earlier in the ‘Eightes under some kind of extended détente, and even if it had made some kind of quasi-democratic transition and remained a majority political influence, the outlying Soviet republics which were cleaved onto the Soviet Union by political and sometimes military force would have fractured way anyway due to the liberalization of Gorbachev’s perestroika policies because the removal of Communist ideological dogma eliminated the the ‘official’ fraudulent reporting of crop yields and production quotas, showing because the industrial economy of the Soviet Union was already broken and beyond redemption.
Stranger
It was the other way around, at least regarding China. China began its economic reform program in 1978. So when Gorbachev became general secretary in 1985, he had the example of what was possible in front of him.
You make a good point about how the Russian people were exposed to democracy.
Like most of Europe, Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century was slowly acquiring democratic reforms. But they were slow coming, and the Communists held a revolution and took over. The stated idea was a better, more egalitarian society. But it was quickly taken over as just another means to take from the people and privilege the rulers. Another aristocracy under guise of equality. And this one came with ideology that couldn’t be questioned.
At the end of the 20th Century, communism was failing and a transformation was occurring. But the powerful wouldn’t relinquish control that easily. So they gobbled up whatever they could, and the kleptocracy took over.
That’s why Russians are skeptical of the idea of democracy - it sounds just like another utopian scheme that changes the decor but not the corruption.
So you are saying that the USSR was already falling apart with or without Reagan. Sure. That Gorbachev, or someone like him, was inevitable, that the Party relinquishing control of the Warsaw Pact countries was inevitable at this time?
Considering many think Russia under Putin is the Soviet Union except in name, Id say the answer for the OP is yes if the right guy were in the job.