Surely this subject has been covered before, but I think its nature is too broad to do a productive search.
Last night I was listening to NPR, and various voters were being interviewed about their views on the election standoff, etc. One older Republican voter said that Reagan was the best president we ever had, because “he broke down Russia.” Now, it had been my understanding that a lousy economy and corruption did the trick, although as I thought about it, I realized I didn’t really have a firm basis for that belief. Surely many factors came into play. Because I am currently reading “The Hunt For Red October,” (great book!) I’m curious as to why such a large, powerful government just sort of imploded.
Can any of you history/political buff Dopers sum it up for me?
Economic recession, public discontent at decades of bureaucratic mismanagement, and a desire by many upper-level politicians to push for further market cooperation with the West.
That’s what I can remember reading from several sources I’ve got back home. I’ll check back in this thread tonight and give some titles.
Of course, Bosda may have something there. It’ll take a while to research.
The conventional wisdom is that the combination of pressures from within and without caused the collapse.
The escalating arms race with the U.S. forced the Soviets to spend more on their military in an attempt to keep parity. I forget the percentages, IIRC the percentage of Soviet GNP allocated toward defense was considerably higher than in America, even though the Soviet total GNP was considerably less than America’s total GNP.
In order to spend this much on defense, the Soviets had to cut back on public works and agricultural expenditures, leaving many Soviets cold and hungry. And a unhappy populace is probably the leading cause of revolutions. The Soviet people probably recognized that they were getting shafted while the party elite lived high on hog. (Not unlike the US in a way, but that’s another debate.)
This is probably an extraordinarily simple view of such a complex subject, but like I said, it’s probably the conventional wisdom (which is sometimes quite wrong).
As for whether or not Reagan was directly responsible, that would probably be a Great Debate, if the OP isn’t.
Very interesting topic. The USSR collapsed for a variety of reasons, but the main one was this-it was never really a country-it was actually more like a 19th century colonial empire, with Russia as the colonial power.Just like the old British Empire started to break apart (in the 1930’s), the USSR could not afford to keep its subject peoples together by force. The second thing was economics-the inefficient centrally-planned economy was extremely wasteful and non-productive. One western economist estimated GNP per capita in the USSR (late 1960s) as below that for Great Britain in 1914!Because of low productivity (agriculture was a disaster after enforced collectivizationin the 1920s), the USSR was chronically broke-and after WWII, it attempted to add eastern europe to its domains-only to find that the burden of supporting Poland, Romania, etc. was too much! The huge jump in world oil prices in the mid-70s staved off banruptcy for a while, but come the 1980s, the whole thing just collapsed. Reagan had very little to do with it.
I guess Ronald Reagan must have meant the technology race in space weapons.
This might have been a contributary factor but it was one of many.
The Russian failure in Afghanistan whose rebels were backed by the US using Osama bin Laden as a conduit.
Many of the Soviet leadership who had travelled to the Western world were likely disillusioned.
The ability to recieve Western media, particularly in Eastern bloc nations must have depressed and angered those populations, just simple stuff like ads and ordinary tv programs rather than propaganda must have led them to realise that their own puppet leaders were lying to them.
When Poland got rid of its military leadership and Russia merely rattled sabres but actually did very little must have demonstrated to Soviet bloc countries that there was some chance of true self-rule.
I like to think that when the US finally pulled out of Vietnam having at one time put up to 17% of its GDP into that action, the resources freed up enabled the US economy to grow immensely dragging the rest of the world along with it except for the Soviet bloc which not only fell behind but went backwards in terms of GDP.
Reagan is directly responsible for the fall of the ‘Evil Empire’.
His tax cuts (Reaganomics) led to the economic boom in the US at the same time that the Soviet economy was stagnant. His Strategic Defense Initiative was going to make the Soviet ICBM fleet inoperative. Ted Kennedy may not believe in SDI, but Gorbachev and the rest of the Soviet bureaucracy were awake when the space shuttle started flying, and they had no doubt we could unilaterally reduce the effectiveness of their missiles by 90%, minimum, and they could neither match the technology nor spend the money to increase their fleet. Then at the Reykavik summit, where Reagan refused to give up SDI even when Gorbachev offered him everything else he thought Reagan wanted, the Soviets realized they weren’t going to be handed at the bargaining table what they couldn’t get anywhere else.
Add to that the success of the missions in Grenada and other places such as the arming of the Afghanis with Stingers that denied the Soviets control of the air (as well as Reagan’s ability to learn from his mistakes, such as in Lebanon), and the Soviet military knew with uncomfortable clarity that they were never going to win a war with the West.
The election of a Polish pope (along with the failure of the KGB-inspired assasination attempt of J2P2) and the success of Solidarity broke the psychological back of the Warsaw pact, all of whose member countries wanted the material success and prestige of the US and had it made screamingly clear to them that they were never going to get there the Marxist way. Then Gorbachev attempted reforms at a time when the only chance to delay the crash was drastic clampdowns similar to what Lenin or Stalin would have imposed. The reforms were seen as a sign of weakness in the regime, and the bottom fell out.
It would have happened sooner or later. Reagan made it happen sooner. It is entirely possible that the USSR would be muddling along like North Korea for decades yet, but fortunately for the world and the cause of human freedom we had a real president during most of the 80s.
It collapsed because Trotsky lost to Stalin (or was muscled out, rather).
Others might say it is because of the law of nature, or human nature. That the stronger, more ruthless people and ideals must almost always defeat the more noble attempts at true democracy and world-wide peace and contentment.
I ask you only to remember that the true goal of socialism was always to give the PEOPLE a voice, not to be a platform for dictators and madmen to rise to influence. The inequality of the arrogant Soviet system of government contributed heavily to the demise of the “union”.
I wonder how much SDI had to play in the fall. Even if we could eliminate 90% of the missiles, which (inspite of the “no doubt”) was and is very doubtful, it only takes 10% or less to completely destroy us. Sure they didn’t want us to further develop the program, but were they so afraid of our present abilities? I doubt it.
I really think, altho this is a subject for GD, that it was, at least, an enlightened leadership: Gorbachev. Altho he grew up with the Soviet ambience, he was intelligent enough and humane enough to know that was not the way. Communism turned out so ugly not because the system, per se, is so flawed, but because it was led by brutal dictators, beginning with Stalin. Even Lenin was afraid of the consequences if Stalin became the leader. If the provisional leader, Kerensky, managed to retain his leadership, the entire history of the USSR and the world would have been quite different and more benign. It took a long time for Stalin’s proteges and mindset henchmen finally faded from the picture. Gorbach and Yeltsin were permeated with that propaganda, but rose above it. Russia now has a leader who was a former head of the old secret service and is showing signs of slipping back into the old style regime.
I have read a little on SDI… It was perhaps one of the most effective intelligence operations ever pulled off in public. IIRC, even Reagan himself knew SDI didn’t have a chance of succeeding in its goals, but there was just enough plausibility that we could make it work (after all we put men on the moon). The Soviets believed it could work (along with a significant portion of the American public) so we kept pumping money into the program. In effect, this opened up a new front in the military spending wars between the superpowers.
Perhaps not ‘the’ proverbial straw, but one of many.
According to this report (or at least the bits I have struggled through), the main causes of the collapse was the intoduction of perestroika and glasnost. This led to the Soviets admitting that people were starving in the streets, but nothing was fundamentally changed. The revolution occured because people suddenly realised that they were being repressed. Kinda like North Korea will be in a year or two at the present rate.
One word of warning, the atricle was co-sponsored by the CIA and the George W Bush Center for presidential studies. Guess it’s where he went to night school.
For a Marxist perspective why not try this site? I have no idea what he’s prattling on about though.
Wozniak and Jobs invented the personal computer, and the Soviets found themselves totally unable to keep up with the consequent rapid expansion of the western economies.
Actually this probably isn’t the WHOLE story here, but it’s as least as plausible as “Reagan” explanation.
I’m sitting here at the computer with my Russian buddy, an Afghanistan military vet, and I pointed out this question. His first answer was “I don’t know and I don’t give a shit either” but, when pressed, he said “because the communist party officials, who were all corrupt thieving bastards, had pretty much stolen all they could within Russia, and needed to open up to international markets to enrich themselves further.”
So Olentzero’s post may have hit the nail on the head: “a desire by many upper-level politicians to push for further market cooperation with the West.”
Rule of Debate #32: Don’t adulterate an otherwise cogent argument with utterly ridiculous statements. The invasion of Grenada got the Russkies shaking in their boots?!?! Read a non-biased history of that invasion.
Sua
