Aquilla

I'm curious. What are these 'better ways' you are talking about?

It strikes me the idea that the Russians would have been devastated by the loss of Moscow is extremely naive in light of how the Russians once defeated Napoleon. Especially if the strike at Moscow was in retaliation for a Soviet first strike because then, like Napoleon you'd be attacking an empty city.

It sounds to be like your relating the same sort of arm chair theory thats led the US into the quagmire of Iraq.

Ah, c'mon Moif, you know better than that. You know if I told you the specifics I'd have to kill you. Moscow was just an example, but the idea was that if the Soviets invaded western Europe, they'd pay a very heavy price for it without the need for the US invoking the use of nuclear weapons. It was all a part of the deterence game that marked the Cold War.

Aquilla.

Yes. I understood what you wrote. What I don't understand is how America proposed to hit Russia so heavily without nuclear weapons.

There is a limit to how many B1's the US had in the 1980's

Moif, the idea wasn't to completely destroy the Soviet Union or Russia, but rather just to have the capability to hit them hard enough to make them consider whether an invasion of Western Europe was worth the price they'd have to pay for it. And believe me, we had that capability and I think they knew that, but I don't know for sure - that was pretty much out of my pay grade. Much of the Reagan military buildup was dedicated to improved and increased conventional capability, not just more nukes. My area was in tactical air warfare and while most of our tactical aircraft had a nuclear capability of some sort, the majority of the analysis and research that I did had nothing to do with nukes at all. I'm sure there were others who were looking at various nuclear scenarios, but I wasn't and I was being pushed pretty hard at times for specific answers and I was being pushed by some people who were pretty well up on the food chain. Someone way up there was keenly interested in making sure we had sufficient conventional capability to deter the Soviets in Europe.

Bottom line - we did, thanks in a very large part to Ronald Reagan's defense policies.

http://www.untimely-thoughts.com/index.html?art=130

Here is my (now working) link about the Soviet/Russian Oligarchy. Gives some background to the power structure.

Over and over again we hear about military build ups and how it affected the former Soviet Union- but Aquilla and others- why didn't Soviet expand to meet us if this was the case- as Vermillion provided, the Soviet military only increased it's blue water navy, and otherwise the spending was flat- so, logically, how does your argument work that increased spending in the US somehow affected the USSR?

Another link:

http://www.untimely-thoughts.com/index.htm...&type=3&art=606


When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, so did the last remnants of the Cold War. Many Americans claim that Reagan's policies forced the Soviet Union into submission. A more sober analysis is to understand the Soviet demise as the result of a failed political and economic system. The Soviet Union simply collapsed under its own weight.

Most of Russia's political elite today understands the flaws of the Soviet system. Contrary to what can be found in Western media, Vladimir Putin is not returning Russia to the Soviet past. Returning to the past would be to revisit failure.

Unfortunately, many in the West do not understand the Soviet failure. Those who claim the United States defeated the Soviet Union and communism only through the threat of military confrontation and defense spending undermine the values the West defended during the Cold War. Liberal values such freedom of expression and open markets sustained the West during the 45-year conflict. The Cold War was just as much about conflicting values systems as it was about defending the Iron Curtin.


Other dangerous misperceptions of crediting Reagan as the inspiration that destroyed communism is the perpetuation of the belief that military spending and the use of the military can solve the world's problems. The current Bush administration's use (and abuse) of Reagan's legacy to justify America's current foreign policy of unilateralism is fraught with danger -- as the war in Iraq clearly demonstrates..

Ronald Reagan did not win the Cold War for the West. The Soviet Union failed in that conflict due to its own internal contradictions. Even suggesting there was a winner in the Cold War is questionable. Where did Islamist extremism come from?

Gee...that sounds an awful lot like what Aquilla has been saying in his posts. No one is claiming that military might alone led to the Soviet defeat. (This is also a complete opinion piece, CR.)

I see so little in common with Reagan and Bush I don't know where to begin on this one. Reagan was extremely skilled as a diplomat. During his terms in office, military deployments were almost nonexistant compared to the last 12 years. There were no nationbuilding endeavors. The only military intervention that Reagan engaged in that could be considered close to Bush's policy was Lebanon...a bad decision. Fortunately, Reagan understood that it was a bad decision and LEFT, rather than increasing our forces in the area and allowing it to turn into a quagmire. Care to offer a direct example of Reagan/Bush similarity as it relates to foreign policy decisions...or is it just "military spending=bad"?

Aquilla



Well, I hate to be a bore (but some one has to do it) but I still don't see just how you think America was going to be able to badly hurt Russia without using nuclear weapons. The only weapons systems that America had that had the range and fire power to do as you describe were B1 bombers, and during the 80's these were still in their infancy, and few and far between or B52's which would have been blown out of the sky by the numerically superior Soviet air and SAM force's.

The reason I'm raising this point is because during my time in the military, I was made to understand, in no uncertain terms, that if the Warsaw pact attacked western Europe then the battle would be fought and won in Germany. NATO doctrine at the time was based on fighting one all important battle and the entire Danish army, was to immediately drive south, (even if it meant abandoning Denmark to the Poles) to join forces with the West Germans, and the BAOR forces.

It was also made clear that we could not rely on any assistance from France or America arriving in time but for those forces already based in Germany.

Given the size of territory at the disposal of the Soviet Union, then there is no way on this Earth that any American non nuclear counter strike could have made any serious impact on a Soviet strike into Western Europe.

I don't however, disbelieve what you are saying. I'm sure that the people in the USA did indeed work towards being able to launch a credible non nuclear counter strike, but in all honesty, I have to say that the likelihood of the Soviet leadership reconsidering the decision to annex Western Europe because it feared a non nuclear counter strike is a fantasy.

The only thing that the Soviets truly respected was strength. (Its much the same with the Russians today) and the only real military strength against the USSR that America had came from its nuclear arsenal.


Mrs Pigpen



I disagree. Aquilla is saying that Reagan was responsible for the downfall of the Soviet Union and thus the end of the cold war.

Cruising Ram on the other hand is saying that the internal contradictions of Soviet communism were exasperated by western values. At no point is CR saying that Reagan was responsible.




This is a minor point, but didn't some one mention Grenada earlier on?

No, I should clarify- GW IS different in the way Mrs P pointed out- Reagan and Goerge the first were still not total unilateralists- in this respect I agree with Mrs P- it was not my point to say thier foriegn policy was the same, only that the myth that somehow Reagan used some kind of force of personality, for lack of any other thing to call it, since there is no demonstratable political, military or cultural changes due to Reagan during that time in the Soviet Union, to embolden GW in his path he is on today.

I was not, however, indicating that Reagan's and GWs policies were the same, nor did the article IMO- just that one is the outgrowth of the other.

I do believe he (Reagan) was a horrible diplomat, however- what kind of idiot gets on the air and jokes about nuking another soveriegn country in the middle of a tense period like Reagan did (anyone else remember this one? I sure do!)

"The best example of Reagan's recklessness is his famous radio joke about bombing the Soviet Union in August 1984:

"My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."

Upon hearing this Reagan joke, the Soviets put their nuclear forces on alert and tried to determine if the United States was really launching a sneak attack. "


This was a watershed moment for me in my life, as I had never been political in nature prior to this moment. I remember hearing it (not live, it was replayed) and saying, out loud, for the first time in my life about a news subject "Oh my God, what a freaking Moron"- I always teased my Dad about yelling at the TV about news items prior to this- thought he took it way to personal.

Up until this point, I was a Reagan supporter, and a conservative, and at this point, is when I started to really research the poeple and movement I grew up in.

For that, and only that, I can thank Reagan.

I guess I'm that kind of idiot, because, not only do I remember it, I found it hilarious. And if you remember it, as it happened, you'll remember that he didn't know the mike feed was hot.

I don't care if he knew the mike was hot or not- he was president of the United states, keep that crap to himself where there are no mikes at all. He is joking about murdering hundreds of millions of poeple. And he has no real problem with that concept. To me, that was the turning point, when I realized, not only is he stupid, but evil as well.

I would never joke about killing millions of anybody, especially in the position he holds. Nothing funny about it, just scary.

Most of the Reagan military buildup went into repairing and revitalizing existing military assets, not new shiny ones. He did restart the B-1 program that had been canceled by Carter and he made sure that existing programs that were in various stages were funded, but the development cycle of weapons systems is a long one and most new programs started under Reagan would not be operational by the time he left office. So, he concentrated on making sure that existing systems worked and would be ready in an operational sense should we need them. Spare parts, upgrades, increased maintence and the like. The infrastructure of our military had been allowed to decay in the 1970's out of neglect and Reagan turned that around. This alone probably didn't bother the Soviets a whole lot, I don't know if they even knew how sad the state of our readiness was, but it was this type of thing that accounted for a large chunk of the Reagan increases in military spending. However, the SDI proposal did worry them on some level, I'm convinced about that. How could it not worry them, even if they were convinced it wouldn't work? It represented a dramatic change in the philosophy of east-west relations away from the MAD doctrine towards a more aggressive US stance. It was a political signal that Reagan was not going to maintain the status quo with them and I think that concerned them quite a lot.




Ahhhh... errr.... Maybe, maybe not.



What you describe was indeed pretty much the doctrine and scenario imagined in Europe, at least in the beginnings of a conflict and the President did have the option available to him of using tactical battlefield nukes if that became required. With those the west had a good chance of stopping a Soviet advance long enough for heads to cool. But, it was a terrible option and ran the risk of escalating a war in Europe into a full-out global nuclear exchange. Reagan wanted to have other options at his disposal and we spent a whole lot of time and taxpayer money exploring and developing other options using the existing systems we had or were about to have. In a sense if I can coin a phrase, "We looked outside the box" and in some cases, WAY outside the box. We looked at old systems in a new way and came up with ways we could use them to exploit Soviet military flaws that we knew about. In a very real sense, this process was the first of what has become Rumsfeld's concept of "transformation" in our military that the US is on working today.




To quote "the Gipper".... "Well, there you go again....." We will simply have to agree to disagree on this one my friend. You know I'm not going to get into details on this, as much fun as that may be before they come to lock me up. All I can say is we thought we had some viable options to deter the Soviets from invading western Europe that didn't involve the use of nuclear weapons. I was and am personally convinced they would have worked, and trust me, I had a whole lot of 'splaining to do to people to convince them as well.

Like Moif Aquilla- I hate to be a bore about this- but the entire argument pro-Reagan seems to be on some fleeting military fantasy that Reagan somehow created. But you do not address some of the basic components of thier society, the most basic parts that allows some sort of change that we are talking about. It is like talking about the US elections and not talking about the economy or taking into consideration the special interests here. The former USSR is no more single faceted than the US- it certainly has an equal number of competing groups struggling for power.

So respectfully Aquilla- how do you reconcile the military angle of your argument with the realities of Russian Culture, Economy and power structure?

If any of the Reagan arguments addressed any of this, there would be a much more realistic debate- but not one post I have seen really addresses these issues.

Prior to my traveles to Russia, and my attempt and current attempts at doing business there, and my neccesary study into the way things work over there to be succesful (we are trying to start a tourist business there) I would have at least voted "some influence"- but once faced with the realities of Russian culture and economy and corruption- that far predated the Communist revolution I realized that the US, outside of pop-culture, has no influence whatsoever in moving Russia in one direction or another.

I certainly don't consider your arguments, "a bore", CruisingRam, they just come from a different perspective than mine. Your arguments come from a long term historical cultural perspective of the Russian people and mine stem from a mindset/political perspective of the Soviet political leadership during the Reagan years. There is most certainly an overlap between the two, but I think the emphasis is different because the goals in the analysis are different. In your case, you seek to understand the underlying culture for the purposes of your own domestic tranquility and for building a successful business within that culture. To you, the underlying culture is the primary thing and the politcal doctrine derived from it, secondary. In my case, it was the exact opposite. I was primarly interersted in the political doctrine and the understanding of the culture which drove that doctrine was secondary. In other words, I was less interested in the whys and more interested in the results. You seek to do business with them, I sought to find ways to attack them and to hurt them as badly as possible. That was my job, that's what I did and I'm not ashamed of it. Thanks in part to the political skills of Ronald Reagan, I and countless others who also worked on various aspects of the same problem never would find out if we were right or not. For that, I am eternally thankful.

Still though we do have the cultural issues you raise and I have a few questions about those. I hope I'm not de-railing this thread because I think it is important....

1. How do you explain the Berlin Wall? Why was it built? Why did the Soviets seek to deny people in the east from leaving and joining the west?

2. How do you explain "the list" I linked to earlier of people who lost their lives attempting to escape from East Germany to West Germany? What drove them to risk, and lose their lives doing that?

3. Why did the people tear down the wall and celebrate as they were doing it? What was that celebration all about if not the joy of freeing themselves from tyranny?

Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and he believed that in the hearts and souls of people everywhere there burned a desire do enjoy freedom and liberty. English Horn has done so in this very forum. He has stated that he would never have enjoyed the priviledge of posting here had the Soviet Union remained. He doesn't thank Reagan for that, but it seems to me implicit in his statements that Reagan was right. People do strive for freedom and then thrive in liberty. Why else would English Horn be here? I'm sure he's not thrilled with being cited as supporting Reagan, but actions do speak louder than words.

I think Reagan's policies did have a influence on the Soviet collapse, but only after Gorbachev took office. Unlike his predecessors, Gorbachev was not confident in his position or his government, and Reagan's policies all affected him, at least psychologically. Gorbachev then tried to slowly change the USSR, but it collapsed due to his comparatively weak leadership.

Of course, a stronger USSR leader (i.e. Stalin) could've cared less about what Reagan was doing or had to say and the Soviets might still be around today.

I believe Reagan's policies played a role, but weren't the key factor in the demise of the Soviet Union. While it is true that Gorbachev fretted about the Star Wars program, the Soviets had other problems as well. Everything came together into a perfect political storm that ended the USSR.

-Ethnic unrest in the various Asian republics, some of which required manpower and resources to put down.

-Chinese troop movement along the Soviet border; this action forced the soviets to move countless troops and equipment from one end of Russia to another, draining resources in a financially strapped system.

-Eastern European "freedom" movements like Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement, Vaclev Havel's groups, all served to undermine Eastern European puppet-staets.

-Financing forign conquests and regimes. Trying to single-handedly support Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan, and various other nations led to a "Napoleon/Hitler effect" in which too much success leads to defeat when a power over-extends itself. Just as Hitler and Napoleon were drawn deep into Russia, the Russians were victims of their own success. So the argument could be made, Jimmy Carter won the cold war!

And of course, President Ronny's military spending. Take a look at this graph and take a look at how from '85-'90, our spending just went into overdrive. Wow!

Weak leadership- the one thing that is the Achilles heel of the Russian society. Russia does not tolerate weak leadership- any Russian will tell you this. It goes clear back to Ivan the Terrible- he actually abdicated at one point- but they begged him to come back and assert his terrible strength.

Weak leadership will affect more change from within in Russian society than any outside influence.

Gorbachev is almost universally despised in his own country, and doesn't even live there anymore!

He can barely even travell back for special occasions- he really needs special permission from Putin.

Ask about Reagan though- and they will say "Oh, wasn't he an American president?"- and that is about the extent of the impact Reagan had on the Soviet/Russian society.

Quite frankly, had Gorbachev NOT came to power, and the KGB/Military faction STAYED in power- Vaclev Havel and Lech Walensa would have been just a couple more guys in Siberia that died a horrible, slow death. And no one in Russia would have really cared, outside of thier own circle of influence. This would have not changed one wit had Reagan been in power.

Now, it's "weak leadership" that caused the end of the Cold War. "Strong leaders" would have continued the oppression of millions of people. Nevermind the clams of some that the Soviet Union collapsed under it's own weight, bankrupted by a bankrupt system. Now we hear it was a "wimp" at the helm that by granting people a little liberty led to the collapse. Interesting "analysis"......

From a recent article in The Washington Post we get the following.....



Apparently President Reagan knew something many others didn't. From Lady Thatcher's euology....



He knew, and he understood. Reagan knew there had to be a better way than the path that had been followed since in the end of World War II. He actively sought on a variety of fronts to find that way. In light of what I was doing in those days which I have described here previously, I return to the Washingon Post article linked above which adds some context to the situation at the time.....



Yep. That fits the time-frame of when the hammer came down on us to find a better way on the military front. If it came down on us, you can bet it came down on a whole lot of others working in different areas as well. Reagan was a sea-change in US-Soviet relations. We knew it and so did the Soviets. From the last paragraph from the Washington Post.....

Aquilla- you mistake my comments about "strong" leadership with "moral" or "rightoues" leadership- I am in no way implying that Stalin was good- but also, as in the "misconceptions about the soviet union" - you think they were all oppressed as well- in fact, that was not nearly as oppresive, if oppresive at all in some cases, that you and Reagan make it out to be. In some ways, our own culture is far more oppressive today than the USSR was under Breshnev.

If you ask a Russian if Stalin was a good guy, he would say no- but if you asked if he was a strong leader, he would say yes. I think this difference is very important in the context of soviet culture and the mechanism for change in the soviet union.

As far as "oppressive" goes I will simply point out to you that the United States has never built a wall to keep people from leaving.

Are you still arguing this?

Weeks ago this argument petered out because it was clear no actual causal links could be dran between Reagan's policies and the fall of the USSR. His policies did not cause an increase in Soviet defence spending, his asking for the wall to come down did not suddenly make the Kremlin realise the error of its ways and bring down the wall. I understand you keep posting statements of Reagan's regarding the USSR, but as has been pointed out in great detail:
-Reagan said a lot of things, many of them did not come true.
-You never even tried to establish any causal link between the two events
-For all his presence and charisma, he could not bring down the wall with the sound of his voice.

If we accept that, and I invite you to challenge these facts, then rather then continuing to quote single line 20 year old Reagan quotes, perhaps you could demonstrate how those single phrases led to the collapse of the Soviet Union?

Until that happens, one cannot take them as evidence of anything.

I agree with Vermillion on this one, though I think the "sound of Reagan's voice" did bring down the wall because Gorbachev wasn't willing to keep it in place.

Yes, because Gorbachev tried to give his people a little liberty, the Soviet Union collapsed because liberty is against the fundamental principle the nation was built on. Communism worked for everybody before Gorbachev... his giving away liberty shows that he knows the USSR is lagging. And when people saw this, they knew it too.

Granted, communism doesn't work and it can't sustain a country for very long. But the difference between strong and weak leadership is this:

Strong leader would go to every last measure to preserve his country. Including war and revolution. But he would not give up the basic principles of his government, at least not publically.

Weak leader would resort to unpopular methods. Whether they work or not, they are a sign of current weakness, which can lead to collapse.

Demanding some sort of concrete causal links in the arena of international politics is in my opinion, disingenuous. As a historian you surely know that seldom are such things so directly evidenced and almost never admitted. If you look back at the poll that was created to start this thread, you will notice that nobody has voted much less posted here that Reagan was the sole reason for the fall of the Soviet Union. Nobody has made that claim.

I have pointed out that Reagan was the first American President to stand at the Berlin Wall and directly challenge the Soviets to tear it down, and that did happen. Yet I haven't drawn an analogy to Reagan and Joshua at the walls of Jericho and have stated such several times here. Did Reagan's words directly cause that Wall to fall 9 months after he left office? Of course not, but they were representative of the change in the political landscape with respect to the Cold War that Reagan caused as President. This has been the crux of my argument here, this was how Reagan facilitated and contributed to ending the Cold War.

Reagan made a radical, some might call it bold, change in a policy that had been slowly evolving for 30 years. He called the Soviet Union the "evil empire", referred to them as "barbarians" and stood at the wall and demanded it be torn down. He increased US military spending dramatically and let the Soviets know he would not back down. He was firm in his rejection of a spectacular political offer for arms reduction in Iceland and held his course on SDI. None of these things in unto themselves ended the Cold War, but taken together, they most certainly influenced Soviet policies and perceptions. Sure, there were other pressures on the Soviet Union, falling oil prices, a failing economy and the like, but there is no question that one of the big pressures on the Soviets was Ronald Reagan. He was to them to put it bluntly, a real pain in the rear end. He kept up the pressure, relentlessly. Each and every day the US military grew stronger and each and every day Reagan let it be known that he would no longer continue the course of the Cold War by following the status quo. It was all very clear.

Now, is there a direct nexus between Reagan's actions and what happened to the Soviet Union? No, there are no specific causal links there but I would submit that there seldom are such direct links in the mosaic of international politics. There is however an abundance of circumstantial evidence that Reagan's policy changes had a significant impact on the eventual fall of the Soviet Union. When he entered office in 1981, the Soviet Union was still attempting to expand it's empire. When he left office in 1989, the Soviets were hanging on by a thread and 9 months later, the Berlin Wall fell. Something happened in those 8 years, actually a lot of somethings happened in those 8 years and I don't think it was just falling oil prices.

That is, of course, not true in the slightest.

The stidy of history is made of checking facts and figures, dates and times, it is a study of causality, action and reaction. History is ALL about finding the links that tie events together, current, past and future. A true historian never takes the 'great man of History' at face value, because every leader in the history of mankind makes great proclamations about his goals and the future. If some of these events happen to come true, do we automatically assume him to be the cause of it? No, we study the causality, and try and determine what happened and why. At the undergrad level Historians study what happened. Past that, it is assumed we know generally what happened, and we now study why it happened. discovering and determining causal links is the foundation of the discipline.

Hitler invaded Poland, declaring publicly that he was doing so because Poland invaded Germany, and it was an act of self-defence. A historian takes none of this at face value (I know, inflammatory example, but trying to make a general point) but studies the actual events underneath the proclamation. Turns out the Polish soldiers who were caught invading Germany were all German concentration camp prisoners dressed in Polish uniforms.

Clearly the specifics of the example have no bearing on Reagan, but I am trying to demonstrate that causality is probably the most basic root of history, not as you try and dismiss it, a kind of luxury which is rare on the international scene.



I agree, despite my comments, I know you are not actually trying to say the walls were brought down by his voice, but you say the walls were brought down by his policies, and the only evidence you can offer is that he told them to come down, and eventually they did. That is referred to as non-Euclidian logic. (He called them down, they came down, so his calling them down must have caused it)

In response to that, we look at the actual figures and facts we know. We know that Reagan had a policy of vast militarisation and deficit spending. Now it is common among the right to assume he did this to bankrupt the USSR, but in reality, we know that he did this in an effort to redress what he saw as a Soviet superiority in weapon numbers and technology. He told us this plainly in his own speeches. Now this 'superiority' actually only existed in a few fields, in a direct measure across all technologies it is safe to say that while the USSR held important leads in some key military fields, the US was more technologically advanced overall, and in particular in computers.

But that is hindsight. Now we look for causality: what effect SPECIFICALLY did Reagan's policies have on the USSR? Did Soviet overall defence spending increase? No, actually it remained level. Did soviet strategic defence spending increase? No actually it decreased.

The effect we can draw, is that Reagan's policies prevented serious cutbacks in the Soviet military budget, which were more and more necessary due to OTHER financial events. Thus, Reagan may have accelerated the fall by a year or two. But the cause for the fall does not rest with Reagan.

Had the USSR had a more Stalinist leader willing to increase terror and make harder decisions, the USSR would still be there today, albeit increasingly far behind the US as a superpower.

Had the Commodity (Oil in particular) not dropped out in the Mid 1980s, the USSR would still be there and would still be competing with the US on many fields of technology.

If we remove those two events from the equation, we have a Soviet Union that does not fall. But what if everything else remains the same, except for the hardline policies of Reagan and SDI?

We have a USSR, crippled economically, and in the midst of poorly thought out political reforms at the hands of an enlightened but naive leader, which collapses due to massive deficit spending and poorly planned reforms. Without Reagan and SDI, we STILL have the collapse of the probably at the same time, though possibly a year or two later.

In the absence of causal links connecting Reagan's policies to the fall of the USSR, and considering the SUBSTANTIAL causal links we DO have between OTHER factors and the fall of the USSR, the direct agency of Reagan in this world changing event can best be described as minor. Not non-existent certainly, but minor.

Really? Wow, I've been wasting my time taking classes that deal specifically with those links. More to the point, Vermillion and I have provided the sort of links you refer to in explaining the collapse of the Soviet Union. You've just ignored them because they don't coincide with your particular version of events.

The single most important event in the U.S. "triumph" over the Soviets was George Kennan's draft memo to the State Department in 1947 which really set down the parameters of containment; and even though that policy drifted from it's real dictates, it's underlying principles persisted and had a strong impact.

Here's something from an article by Melvyn Leffler:



Then again, I suppose you can dismiss the work of the majority of International Relations scholars just as easily as you dismiss ours because according to you:

From:

The Ronald Reagan I Did Not Know

By James Pinkerton Published 06/08/2004




I think Lukhin was in a good position as anyone to know the effect Reagan's policies had on the USSR. 5 to 10 years seems like a reasonable figure. I certainly think it was Gorby's reforms that speeded the collapse of the USSR. Gorbachev's reforms snowballed on him.

The USSR was doomed the day Truman was picked to replace Wallace on the Democratic ticket in 1944. I shudder to think what would have happened if Wallace had become President. Reagan's SDI speech speeded up the end of the USSR.

Were Reagan's policies a major influence on ending the Cold War?

No. Reagan did do a good job (or so they say) in hurting the Russian economy. However, his efforts are easily eclipsed by those of Gorbachev. He took a far more prominent part in the collapse. Therefore, what Reagan did was only minor.

Reagan saw how detente was propping up the Soviet Union like a crutch, and instead sought to hold the USSR responsible for how it treated its citizens instead of relaxing US policies. Reagan used the Helsinki Accords to do this. Reagan understood that the USSR could not compete on a technological and an economic bases. Once the US told the Soviets, that in order to get what they needed in the form of technology and trade, they needed to respect the human rights of their citizens. Reagan could see how realpolitik idealogy was flawed... and in so doing, is behind G W Bush's view on spreading democracy to regimes that supported tyranny and terror. A good book to read on this matter is:

The Case For Democracy: THe Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny & Terror by Natan Sharanksy
Click Here to see the book on Amazon.com

Like it or not, this is where our country's foreign policy is today, the days after 9-11.

P.S. One can argue that Detente in itself did weaken the Soviet regime some, because it allowed more foreign influence, and the Soviet people got a taste of what they were missing. But if we stayed on a course of coexisting with the Soviets, they would eventually regain strength and get a grip back on their population.

P.S. One can argue that Detente in itself did weaken the Soviet regime some, because it allowed more foreign influence, and the Soviet people got a taste of what they were missing. But if we stayed on a course of coexisting with the Soviets, they would eventually regain strength and get a grip back on their population.

As I have just said, Gorbachev was the main reason for the collapse. He made freedom of speech legal (which was the beginning of the end). The Warsaw countries gradually declared independence (he let them), and the Communist Party collapsed (he had been planning for a slower transition to capitalism but the people wouldn't wait). In short he ended the cold war. If Reagan had never been born, the end result would still have been the same. Gorbachev (and no, he didn't institute policys which he knew would unsurp his own government, in order to get some US commercial technology. The Soviet Union could have merely gotten products that did the same thing, from Europe) would have still instituted the reforms that crippled the USSR.

Not one poster pro-Reagan has been able to rebut or refute or even really address what Vermillion has so eloquently posted above. This, to me, goes to the heart of the "reagan myth"- grand pronouncments about how great a man he was, with no real "thing" to back this up. Sure, he galvanized the religious right and started the path to the neo-con we have today, but he really had zip, nada, nothing to do with the "fall" of the "soviet empire"- if that was even an accurate description of what it was.

IF SDI was so devestating- where was the massive increase in spending to send the USSR over the edge? Obviously didn't happen!

I will say this again- power does not shift in Russia without bloodshed- and there was no real bloodshed over the "fall"- in fact, Russia is , in organization, a leaner version of Stalin's Russia today.

"A left Handed person" wrote:




I will open this reply in classic Reagan style... with a joke- one Reagan used to make.

General Secretary Brezhnev and Premier Kosigin were discussing whether they should allow freedom of emigration. "Look, America's really pressuring us," Brezhnev said, "maybe we should just open up the gates. The problem is we might be the only two people who wouldn't leave." To wich Kosigin replied, "Speak for yourself."

The joke points out that the Soviet Union was losing support of its own population before Gorbachev. This was because the Soviet citizens did not feel free and felt repressed.

The beginning of the end came from the Helsinki Accords in 1975. This is important because the Soviets had to uphold the basic human rights of its people in order to obtain economic cooperation. The Soviets reluctantly signed the accords because it officially recognized their "sphere of influence" and gave them the international legitimacy they had for decades desired. The Soviets figured it was a non-binding commitment that gave their borders concrete recognition.

Reagan was the first US leader to realize that the Soviet economy was falling apart and it was Detente the Soviets needed to stay alive. Reagan used the conditions of the Helsinki Accords to take Detente out of the picture because the USSR was not upholding basic human rights. This was the crucial tipping point for the downfall of the Soviet Union. But few could see it that way at the time.

Anyone who says that Reagan was lucky, and was president at the right place at the right time, is to not understand the criticism from other top officials, the experts, and the media about going against the idea of Detente. The top US economists were saying that the Soviet economy was doing well and was supported by their own strong work force, not the economic cooperation of Detente. And after all, the experts said Detente was the mechanism keeping the peace. So Reagan seemed to be flying in the face of everything logical. This made the idea of holding the Soviet's internal affairs accountable in regards to human rights seemingly baseless. Remember, this is 1982. In fact, the criticism throughout Reagan's presidency about his new policy with the USSR was so great he once read a poetry stanza during a speech:

The bull fight critics ranked in rows;
fill the enormous plaza full.
But only one is there, who really knows-
and he is the one who fights the bull.

To say that any president who may have been sitting in office during that time would go against the many critics is absolutely baseless, out of touch with how large the number of critics, and out of touch with the times. What the world outside the Soviet Union could not see, was that in fact, the Soviet Union's economy was falling apart, and that its people inside were feeling repressed. The Soviet Union would have eventually collapsed anyway because that is what happens when a government ignores freedom and rules with tyranny. It is just a question of time. Reagan was able to look past his critics, know what he was seeing, and believed his time was the time to speed up the crumble of the Soviet Union. If Reagan had not abandoned Detente, the Soviet Union's crumble would have been delayed by decades.

When Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985, he inherited a problem on two fronts, the Soviet Union was losing control of its people and had a weakening technological base to keep up its military edge with the West because indeed, the Soviet economy was weakening. With the Helsinki Accords, Reagan was able to abandon Detente to make Gorbachev pick one or the other, but he could not have both. If Gorbachev wanted Detente to keep military might he would have to respect his citizens basic human rights and risk giving dissent power to bring down the USSR. If he wanted to pursue squashing down dissent, he would have to abandon Detente, losing its military advantage with the West, and quickening the pace of Soviet economic decay.

To facilitate the Soviet demise even further, Reagan challenged Gorbachev on both fronts. Reagan incited the freedom of the Soviet Union to increase dissent in a number of ways, the most prominent example is his "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech at the Berlin Wall. On the military front, Reagan started the very expensive "Star Wars" programme. This programme forced the Soviets to invent new technologies to compete with the United States military at a very high cost. The inability to compete with Star Wars was so great, that it spurred summit talks of nuclear arms reduction. At one point during the 1986 Reykjavik, Iceland summit, the Soviets offered to dismantle its whole nuclear arsenal if the United States did so also. Reagan refused nuclear peace because the "Star Wars" programme was what spawned the talks, and it was the Soviet's economic weak spot. If Reagan had accepted any proposal that took the cost out of maintaining an equal military force, it would have undermined the leverage of removing Detente from the Helsinki Accords. The Soviet economy would have stabilized itself, and the USSR could continue its human rights abuses with impunity for decades longer. The Soviet people would have not benefited from a nuclear free Soviet Empire.

After the arms talk, Gorbachev was forced to chose the path of accepting the human rights condition of the Helsinki Accord to try and regain Detente so at least it could put up the facade of keeping Soviet status abroad. Gorbachev had to make laws to convince the West it was improving its human rights behavior wich gave rise to dissent. It was the knock out blow for the Soviet Empire and it was down for the count. Reagan had set a trap before Gorbachev came into power. Gorbachev tried his best to get out of the trap by negotiating a peace that kept the Soviet Empire intact but Reagan was determined not to let Gorbachev escape.

To argue that Ronald Reagan had only a "minor" influence on the fall of the Soviet Union, and that it was Gorbachev who ran the country into the ground is not to understand the issues and the political environment of the time. The argument for a minor Reagan role in the Soviet collapse is without base and very misled.

I find this topic fascinating. I studied history at university, and studied the collapse of the Soviet Union twice on two different courses. One course was called 'The Right in US Politics since 1945,' and the other was called 'The Russian Revolution of 1991.'

It was a very research based course, so we led a lot of books on Reagan and a lot on Gorbachev, and what I found was that all the books on Reagan looked took their evidence from US sources, as you would do. All the books on Gorbachev worked from Russian sources (as would again be expected).

The books on Reagan all discussed his responsibility, to one degree or another, of the end of the Cold War. The books derived from Russian sources (though mostly not written by Russians) barely mentioned Reagan, if at all.

The first lesson that I learnt from this, if I didn't know it already, is that history is incredibly subjective, particularly if you ask leading questions, such as 'What impact did Ronald Reagan's policies have on the collapse of the Soviet Union?,' which I answered in my exam incidentally. The correct question is 'Why did the Soviet Union collapse?,' which I wrote a coursework essay on in my Russian class.

If you look for Reagan's influence then you will find it. If you look from the Soviet view, then contemporary sources do not give much consideration to Reagan. They are far more concerned with the bigger problems that were affecting the USSR, like Gorbachev's half-way reforms, which released all the harm of the free markets but produced none of its benefits. Reagan's defence spending increase did not produce a similar Russian one that might have harmed their economy. Moreover, nor did US pressure seem to have a huge impact on Gorbachev's policies - he was always a moderate, and always hoping to reform, even before he got into the Politburo in the early 1970s.



The success of American capitalism against Soviet communism was a definite cause of the Soviet collapse, because it drove the reforming instinct, which in turn generated the attempted coup by the hard-liners, which was the direct cause of Yeltsin's power grab. Specific Reagan policies were no more than a minor cause. I think that a lot of mythology is generated around Reagan, and this is the prime example.

It's sad that George Kennan, who died recently, does not get the credit he deserves for the successful strategy.

That Ronnie - still fooling people from the grave. Too bad he wasn't prez in '56. Seriously, it's been a while but I just saw this. I bolded one sentence as evidence that Ronnie least helped one anti-communist somewhere. A very small chip in his wall tearing-down project.

No cause- no effect, no proof- I see the Reagan myth/religioun still grows, but there is absolutely no way to measure any Reagan influence whatsoever- Americans like to think they are the center of the universe, the controller of all things on the globe- but, like religion, believing it to be so doesn't make it so.

Many posters have asked conservatives that worship this guy to show at least some MINIMAL cause and effect- there is nonel as has been conclusively proven.