Far from ending it, in increased tensions on both sides (on the US/NATO side by further confirmation of the perfidy of the Soviet Union, on the Soviet side by fears that this would be additional provocation to start a preventative war by NATO against the East Bloc which formed the buffer that gave the Russian-led Soviets confidence against their justified paranoia about being invaded by pretty much every military power in Europe and Asia from the Mongols to the Swedes.
Four things unambiguously contributed to the eventual failure of the Soviet Union and the resulting relaxation of tensions that signaled the end of the Cold War: [ol]
[li]the Solidarity movement in Poland which hampered Soviet control over needed goods and resources of one of its most important ‘client states’,[/li][li]the costly and embarrassing meltdown of the Chernobyl #4 reactor, which broke the already faltering Soviet economy,[/li][li]the failure of the invasion of Afghanistan (“the graveyard of empires”) which demonstrated the weaknesses of the Soviet military, and[/li][li]Gorbechev’s attempt at social and economic reforms which included normalizing relations with Western Europe and allowing significant autonomy to Warsaw Pact ‘client states’ and even within republics of the Soviet Union.[/ol][/li]
Other possible contributors, such as the competition in spending on strategic defense systems (especially ICBMs and submarine systems), greater influence of Western music and culture on the youth of the Soviet Union, publication of The Gulag Archipelago and the experience of the ‘Prague Spring’ uprising and suppression in Czechoslovakia which alienated much of the pro-Soviet support in the West, the vast amount of money spent on the Soviet ‘Buran’ system intended to replicate the functionality of the US Space transportation System (‘Shuttle’), et cetera, are worth consideration but the listed four are those which directly led to the disestablishment of the Soviet Union as a world power and its ultimate demise as a nation.
Suicide: What is it, exactly, that you’re trying to do? Look, it’s fairly obvious that you’re not looking for a real answer. What’s the purpose of this thread?
His last question above (‘did the shoot-down hasten the end of the Cold War’) is an interesting one which I, too, wanted to ask albeit for what I suspect was a different motivation.
I wondered whether the incident, enraging as it did so many in ‘the West’, acted to embolden Reagan in taking some of his more provocative stances. After all, he knew that he would have considerable public and political support in that regard. I am alluding, for example, to things like his future public pronouncements (e.g. ‘Tear down this wall’) and his political/military initiatives (e.g. continuing to promote SDI despite some high-powered domestic opposition). Each contributed in its way to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Some events are like fuses, that set of chains of events, usually requiring a lot of pre-exisiting issues ready to go (assassinating Ferdinand a classic example). Some events just get dampened out, and the ripples don’t travel far enough to matter before they are below the noise.
The critical events in the timing of the end of the Cold War are really Andropov’s and Chernenko’s death, and Gorbachev’s ascension. Andropov was already sick and probably clinically dying when KAL 007 occurred. It is doubtful these events made any difference to his demise. Gorbachev was always a likely successor, and it is doubtful KAL 007 made any difference in choosing him (after Chernenko’s brief reign.) . I doubt that the timing of his introduction of perestroika and glasnost had much to do with anything but his own timetable - which would be controlled by the time it took to take real control, settle in, and make plans. Just maybe KAL 007 could have had a very indirect influence, making it easier for Regan to apply pressure, and perhaps thus making life that little bit more miserable in the USSR, and thus that tiny bit more easy for Gorbachev’s reforms to be accepted, but it a long bow to draw. In the end I don’t think there was any real influence. It seems reasonably clear that the time had come, and it was Gorbachev that pulled the pin.
This does seem to be the classical end to totalitarian regimes. They don’t die slowly, they seem to unravel in a very short time when the time is ripe. And it is always a something of a surprise. Not that Gorbachev intended that the union break up - but once he started the reforms the inertia took hold.
There was a very good point made at the time - that Gorbachev was the first leader who did not go through the great war. He and much of the up and coming management generation did not have to fight, did not have the paranoia that everyone around them was out to attack without warning. They also did not see ideological purity and repression to support it as necessary to keep the state working. Instead, they grew up seeing unnecessary (to them) harshness, repression, and spending scarce resources on military that never really used or needed those resources better spent developing consumer goods. They also saw a west, and saw it more often, that was pulling away from the USSR in economic development. (There’s the comment that Grapes of Wrath was shown in Soviet cinemas for a while, to show the evils of the capitalist system - until the authorities realized the message their citizens were getting from it was that even a dirt-poor American could afford a car.)
So it was not these sort of incidents. If anything, it was the Reagan threat - the development of more and more sophisticated weapons - cruise missiles, advanced fighters, Star Wars - and the bankrupting cost of trying to counter them, that pushed the Soviets over the edge; just in time for a changing of the guard that said “we don’t need to worry about that”.
(If I had to point to one thing that might have tipped the balance, it might be Jimmy Carter refusing to be drawn into another Vietnam situation in Ethiopia, Mozambique and Angola to fight Soviet or Cuban troops in the late 1970’s. )
#82
Today, 03:40 AM
Monty
Straight Dope Science Advisory Board
Join Date: Feb 1999
Location: Beijing, China
Posts: 17,624
Suicide: What is it, exactly, that you’re trying to do? Look, it’s fairly obvious that you’re not looking for a real answer. What’s the purpose of this thread?
Suicide, your “darn commies” attitude isn’t particularly well-informed or helpful. You ask some good questions, but also pepper them with unnecessary comments that make you look like someone uninterested in hearing about real facts that don’t confirm your pre-existing views.
Also, if you want to quote someone, you can use the “Quote” button on the bottom right of their post. Or if you press the button to the right of it, you can add multiple quotations to your reply, which you can write by clicking the normal “Post Reply” button.
Suicide, political jabs are not permitted in General Questions. While I would ordinarily make this a note for a first offense, I think many of your responses both in this thread and others border on trolling. I’m putting you on notice that this behavior will not be tolerated. This is an official warning.
Actually, I think the generational effect worked in the opposite direction. Early Soviet leaders like Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev understood that communism was artificially maintained - they were the people who had set up that system. Gorbachev came from a later generation - he grew up inside of the artificial system those previous leaders had created. So he was a True Believer in a way they weren’t. Gorbachev believed that communism worked and was therefore willing to take chances with it that early Soviet leaders wouldn’t. The earlier leaders knew communism needed to be protected in order to survive. Gorbachev thought communism was the strongest possible system so he believed he could expose it to things like glasnost and perestroika and communism would just absorb these things and emerge even stronger from it.
Reagan was already emboldened (and in faceted campaigned into the presidency in part on a campaign of standing up to real and imagined Soviet expansionism), and had already made is monumental/absurd SDI speech (and assembled support for the Strategic Defense Initiative) six months prior to the shootdown of KAL 007. From his writing and both public and private discussions it was clear that Reagan sincerely believed that SDI could provide an invulnerable shield against strategic nuclear attack despite the very pointed and unaddressed technical challenges posed by critics. (Despite the popular notion of Reagan as a war-happy hawk, he had a great personal fear of nuclear war and genuinely sought disarmament when the opportunity presented itself. For Reagan, who was not technically astute, SDI was a second-best alternative to eliminating nuclear weapons.)
Reagan’s “Tear Down This Wall” speech occurred in June of 1987, well after Gorbechev began his demokratizatsiya and perestroika reforms, and long after the Polish “Solidarity” trade union stuck it to the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet-controlled Polish government. Reagan’s speech was bombast, combine as it did at a time when the Warsaw Pact and indeed the Soviet Empire was already coming apart at the seams. The post hoc veneration of Reagan as the bear-killing machine is a fiction of publicists and political spin doctors who would credit Reagan (and Thatcher) with the harvest of people within the East Bloc who stood up and risks their own lives to “tear down this wall”.
SDI did not have to provide an invulnerable shield. If it basically negated, say, half the Soviet arsenal, then it presented a serious threat to MAD. If it could prevent a decent amount of the American response force and industrial infrastructure from being destroyed, and leave the missile power to thoroughly destroy the Soviets - then the Soviets were royally screwed. Similarly, if the cruise missile technology could deliver a coup de grace to any surviving Soviet infrastructure even after the destruction of the USA, then too the Soviets were screwed.
Yes, perhaps Gorbachev thought that the Soviet system could survive humanizing. I think he was aiming for a system not unlike the more socialist European powers, and they worked well without repression. The “training” of the Lenin and Stalin eras that produced the state was before his time, so he did not see what was required to make the system conform to its principles. It’s interesting to speculate what this attempt and its aftermath did for the Chinese system…
But regardless, I don’t think KAL 007 did anything other than reinforce western perceptions that the Soviets were incredibly paranoid. At the time, even the most basic information was considered classified and free travel was not permitted, especially to foreigners. I suspect even the higher-ups who might begin to think it was an honest mistake were still harbouring deep questions about whether it was a setup and done on purpose by the CIA. It’s hard to imagine the level of paranoia today. I remember a fellow from our local media who was incredulous, during the Romanian revolution “we’re getting most of our information from Tass, and we actually believe them!”
Deng was older than Gorbachev and the Chinese Revolution had occurred later than Russia’s. So Deng had no illusions about communism beating rival systems in a fair competition. His reforms were strictly practical - he reformed the economy and improved standards of living while not offering any political reform. Deng offered increased prosperity but not increased freedom. Gorbachev offered increased freedom because he mistakenly believed people would choose communism even if they had a free choice.
When Andropov died, Gorbachev was a contender for the top position. It’s plausible that American policy could have made a move towards reform more or less likely when the top people made what they considered a close call. As it happens, the Politburo opted for a placeholder like Chernenko rather than a reformer like Gorbachev. Reagan’s rhetoric may have delayed reform - or it may have not made a difference.
Four things unambiguously contributed to the eventual failure of the Soviet Union and the resulting relaxation of tensions that signaled the end of the Cold War: [ol]
[li]the Solidarity movement in Poland which hampered Soviet control over needed goods and resources of one of its most important ‘client states’,[/li][li]the costly and embarrassing meltdown of the Chernobyl #4 reactor, which broke the already faltering Soviet economy,[/li][li]the failure of the invasion of Afghanistan (“the graveyard of empires”) which demonstrated the weaknesses of the Soviet military, and[/li][li]Gorbechev’s attempt at social and economic reforms which included normalizing relations with Western Europe and allowing significant autonomy to Warsaw Pact ‘client states’ and even within republics of the Soviet Union.[/ol] [/li][/QUOTE]
Among proximate causes, Chernobyl might be paired with the inept handling of the Armenian earthquake. Together, they persuaded decision makers that the Soviet system wasn’t really reformable. Historically, an elite which has lost its self-confidence becomes vulnerable to revolution.
I find it hard to believe that anyone thinks SDI mattered at all. It was more than slightly obvious that the dubious “technology” was at best decades off, not even the Soviets would have considered it a credible concern. A fair number of Americans perceived it as the hand-out to a bunch of defense contractors that it was. Not to mention it would have run afoul of a number of previous US/SU treaties designed to fend off nuclear war. In terms of the effect it has on the stability of the SU, the optimistic estimate would be none.
