Did he really?
Nope.
My perceptioon is that Reagan had nothing to do with it and any indication that he did was pure Americam PR.
I attended an international conference at the beginning of October in 1989 in Alghero (Sardinia) and remember talking with many people from mainland Europe who commented how the economic realities were breaking down the barriers bettween east and west. I believe that Czechoslovakia was the first (or nearly the first) country to open their border to entry/exit of citizens and the reality became that many technical and skilled people were leaving the Iron Curtain countries for the West. The differences between wages and earning powers on either side of the Iron Curtain were huge and the reality was that the Eastern Eurpean countries knew that they couldn’t keep their people trapped forever. I talked with a Professor and his wife from Poland who freely admitted that their was no incentive to stay in Poland unless the government was willing to extend some freedom to their citizenry.
No, he did not.
Ronnie Ray-gun was quite out of the world politics. He read his answers from card-boards. He was totally lost in Reykjavik with Gorba.
Henry
Unequivocal no’s, eh? Honest to God. So Reagan had absolutely nothing to do with the fall of Soviet Communism. Nothing. Nada. His military build-up (Star Wars, in particular) did nothing to make the brittle Soviet economy even more in peril. His rhetoric inspired no one. Heck, he probably slowed it down, now that I think of it. Sometimes these threads are laughable.
It was a myth that he did. According to Gorbachev:
Indeed, Ambassador Dobrynin recalls things differently.
The Republican spin machine has for decades promoted the myth of Reagan the toppler of communism. But the facts simply do not support this claim.
Bob, while I think that Reagan worshippers overstate the certainty and magnitude of Reagan’s impact, I don’t see the sources you’ve cited as being especially credible on the issue: asking a political leader if he was intimidated into backing down is like asking a salesman if his competitor’s product is better.
I think he did, for all the usually stated reasons.
That having been said, a large percentage of the members of this message board are Reagan/Pubbie haters, and will soon be along with a myriad of thoughts/cites/statistics that support their feelings on the matter.
To me, he’s a hero. YMMV.
Which pretty much sums it up right there. I’m pretty sure when a few more years have gone by we’ll be hearing how Reagan won WWII by personally killing Hitler, was the first man on the moon, and freed the slaves.
Did he do it single handedly? No. I do think he played a role, and an important role. Certainly he deserves more credit than he gets on this message board…but thats unsurprising considering how most here feel about the man.
Anyway, there are myriad threads on this topic in GD…all the usual answers have been given on both sides. I don’t see anyone substantially changing their minds.
-XT
Of course Ronnie didn’t do those things:
Honest Abe freed the slaves
Ike whipped Hitler
Tricky Dick was prez when the first man walked on the moon…
Hey! Wait a minute… 
IANA political sciences geek. My recollection is…
I would give Reagan significant credit, but more to MIkhail Gorbachev, and more yet to the qualities of freedom itself. (Anyone who’s ever seen Miracle on 34th Street will recall the end-scene where the attorney sees the Santa Claus cane and backs down from the claims for what he personally has accomplished).
Gorbachev seemed to have become convinced that the Soviet Union had to become genuinely competitive with the US and the West in general in order to prevail in the long run, and that this required an open society where shortcomings and insufficiencies couldn’t be swept under the carpet. Reagan took the opportunity provided by the new “glasnost” policy to issue challenges, point out shortcomings of the Soviet system, offer support to dissenters, and of course make the people in the Soviet Union aware of the US doing military buildup. The resultant criticism of the system taking place internally led to a groundswell of sentiment in favor of disbanding the sprawling Soviet Union and returning to the historical component countries such as Russia and the Ukraine and so forth — many of which had only existed as conquered satellite provinces with cultures and ethnicities and etc very different from those of the core state Russia, and never had much of a sense of national identity as “part of the Soviet Union”. (Meanwhile, the Russian folks felt like it was costing them money and other resources to run those other folks’ regional affairs, etc). The war in Afghanistan had left them all with a bad taste in their mouth for doing lots of foreign intervention stuff, so the mood was very isolationist (and a bit nativist).
If Brezhnev had been in robust good health and stayed in charge of the Soviet Union through the end of the 80s, I don’t think the “fall of the iron curtain” would have occurred on Reagan’s watch. On the other hand, if Carter had won a second term and Mondale had succeeded him, I’m not sure Gorvachev’s glasnost would have led to the dismantling of the Soviet Union. It might have taken a different course, with more freedom of speech and assembly and press and whatnot but wtih a fairly firm marxist grip on economic policy, at least until internal criticism on its own forced through economic freedoms and policy reform, etc.
,
That’s like giving Hitler more credit for ending WW2, which while you might be able to justify, we normally don’t give credit to the looser for loosing.
Is the OP asking about communism in general or the Berlin wall in particular?
Communism ended mostly because Gorbachov opened a few cracks in the dam,(with glastnost and perstrioka) , starting a flood.
But the Berlin wall toppled , I think , for a different reason. Not thanks to Ronald Reagan, or to Gorbachov–but thanks to Nike, Levi’s and Coca-cola. East Germans could hear and see the good life only a few meters away on the other side of the wall. And they wanted it. So when it became possible to demand change, they did.
When the wall fell, people’s first response was not to deface the statues of Lenin, rejoicing in freedom. Their first response was to run to the malls, rejoicing in consumerism…
A note on what the public perception of this is here in Germany is:
-
the view is mostly that we have the Poles, Hungarians, East Germans, Russians etc. to thank; that they liberated themselves, with the help of a Soviet leadership that was newly enlightened enough to know when to fold. The statement “Lech Wałęsa toppled the Berlin Wall” would probably get more “agree” answers than “Ronald Reagan toppled the Berlin Wall.”. I haven’t heard the latter statement voiced in public even by mainstream conservatives. (which is not to say that it hasn’t been voiced. Every meme that the US right promotes is also tried out here, but usually they don’t get traction. For example the Nazism-is-left-wing meme was tried out in 1979 but laughed out of court.)
-
the statesman who’s remembered for his positive role in Germany is Mikhail Gorbachev, not Ronald Reagan. He still gets a hero’s welcome here. For example, just this year he picked up a honorary doctorate in Münster and a peace prize in Augsburg. Reagan, were he alive and healthy today, would hardly be feted.
-
Ronald Reagan isn’t idolized even by conservatives (as his public statements were quite a bit over the top by the standards of German conservatives). I’d say Bush I’s reputation here is definitely better than Reagan’s. A lot of people remember Reagan as the ideologue who might have got us all killed just when the Russians were beginning to mellow.
That is probably the fairest assessment of Reagan’s role in (world) history.