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In Western politics, the collapse of the Soviet Union has been heralded as a triumph for Western-style capitalism and democracy, and a vindication of the policies of the Reagan and Thatcher governments in particular. This self-congratulatory analysis has little relation to the facts, circumstances, and internal political dynamics which were the real historical causes of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the loss of its satellites in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Political speeches and diplomatic posturing cannot of their own engender political transformation in totalitarian nations, as is evidenced by the continued perseverance of other, less powerful Communist regimes. The key to understanding the reasons for the demise of the Soviet Union is to be found in Soviet history, not in the speeches or deeds of Western politicians.
The Soviet Union was in a period of economic stagnation at least since the 1970s. The realistic threat of a global Communist hegemony had dissipated even earlier, with the deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations in the 1960s. The threat of nuclear conflict had been eased considerably by the anti-ballistic missile and stategic arms limitation treaties contracted with the Nixon and Carter administrations. Their anti-Communist posturing notwithstanding, Western Europeans and Americans maintained trade relations with the Soviet Union, and offered financial support in the form of massive loans. In his radio broadcasts during the 1970s, Ronald Reagan complained that the capitalist nations propped up the intrinsically flawed Soviet regime, rather than allowing it to naturally collapse. In contradistinction with his later hagiographers, Reagan did not envision defeating the Soviet Union by positive action, but instead the empire would collapse under its own failings once the West removed its financial life support system.
It was not Reagan, but Carter who re-initiated a hostile stance against the Soviet Union in 1979, boycotting the Moscow Olympics, training guerillas to resist the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and using the Soviet menace as a justification for increased military spending. Still, this was relatively mild tension compared to the earlier Cold War, as in the same year both superpowers agreed to abide by the terms of the SALT II talks.
During the early years of his presidency, Reagan employed potent rhetoric about the “evil empire”, establishing an openly adversarial stance toward the Soviet Union, abandoning the policy of détente initiated by Nixon. His confrontational tone caused many to fear he would steer the world toward a repetition of the Cuban missile crisis. These fears were not quelled by Reagan’s massive military spending, particularly in nuclear weaponry, nor by his infamous Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Although SDI was supposed to end the fear of nuclear war by creating an umbrella of reliable missile defense, many political analysts saw the “star wars” program as potentially destabilizing and destructive of arms reduction treaties. Worse, SDI could be interpreted as Reagan’s attempt to make nuclear war “winnable”. Despite Reagan’s apparent belligerence, he never directly engaged the Soviet Union in a showdown that involved heightening the nation’s nuclear alert. His Strategic Defense Initiative never materialized, though it was taken seriously in Soviet military circles.
Reagan’s exorbitant military spending might have indirectly harmed the Soviet economy, but it also strengthened the hard-line elements of the regime. During the Reagan era, Soviet military spending did not appreciably increase as a percentage of GNP. Still, the Reagan buildup made badly needed reductions in military spending politically unfeasible. The American president’s hostile position strengthened the hand of Soviet hard-liners against the reforms of Gorbachev, and led to a greater Soviet emphasis on nuclear weapons and ballistic missile development. Thus, Reagan’s strategy had mixed effects on the Soviet regime, but in no way did Reagan force the Soviets’ hand. They were free to respond to his threats in a variety of ways, and determined policy according to their own internal dynamics. It is true that the Soviet Union could not compete with the United States in an arms race, or at least in certain aspects of an arms race, but this is not enough to account for the loss of its Eastern European empire and its own dissolution.
Conservative think-tanks and advisers recommended that Reagan combat the Soviet Union by cutting its financial supply lines from foreign governments and businesses. Much of this advice has been preserved in documents that partisans use to prove that the administration had a plan to defeat the Soviet Union. This plan indeed existed, yet it was never implemented, as the administration’s economic policy was determined by political realism. The United States continued to facilitate trade relations between the Soviet Union and American businesses, and Western capital continued to finance the Soviet command economy. There were no embargos imposed on the Communist bloc, and the Soviets continued to conduct a lucrative arms trade. Like the presidents he criticized, Reagan found himself forced by circumstance to allow Western businesses to continue to support the Soviet economy.
Another front on which Reagan faced the Soviets was the attrition battleground of the Third World. A staunch anti-Communist, Reagan deployed military resources against Communist regimes that were at best obliquely connected to the Soviet Union, as in the cases of Grenada and Nicaragua. While these minor actions did in some small way stem the spread of Communism, they did little to damage the Soviet empire. The only significant point of military engagement with the Soviet Union was in Afghanistan. American support of Afghan and Arab guerrillas turned the conflict into a costly quagmire for the Soviets. The war ended in defeat and humiliation for the Soviets, with great loss of life. Nonetheless, these losses were easily absorbed by the Soviet military colossus, and did not necessitate significant increases in the military operating budget. The U.S.'s Afghan policy might be fairly credited for preventing Soviet expansion in the Middle East, but if we consider that in previous decades nearly all Arab nations were Soviet clients, we can see that Soviet imperialism was already in decline long before the Afghanistan debacle. Reagan’s indirect engagement of the Soviet Union did not bring about a Soviet military decline, as much as it exposed weaknesses that already existed.
Military and economic reprisals against the Soviet Union in the 1980s were far too mild to account for its demise. Much harsher embargos were imposed on the feeble regimes of North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba, yet these were all able to survive. The only stresses commensurate with the magnitude of the Soviet collapse are to be found in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
The death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982 opened the door to possible reforms of the stagnant Soviet political and economic structure. His eventual successor, Mikhail Gorbachev, initiated increasingly radical reforms of the command economy, allowing private ownership in manufacturing in certain industries in 1988. These reforms actually caused the Soviet economy to deteriorate, as unprofitable private enterprises were subsidized by the state, and the lack of state oversight of supply lines resulted in shortages of food and clothing, which were unknown even under Brezhnev. These crises seriously undermined the legitimacy of the government.
More pertinent to the eventual overthrow of the Soviet regime was Gorbachev's political reforms, or glasnost. Relaxing government censorship and political repression, and allowing open elections for congressional deputies and regional governors, Gorbachev's reforms enabled the creation of an entirely new political class in Russia and the other Soviet republics. This rising political class included the very men who were directly responsible for the dissolution of the union. Populists like Boris Yeltsin rose to prominence in this period, as did nationalists in other Soviet republics who sought greater independence from Russia.
The Soviet empire was effectively lost during the upheavals of 1989, which was expected by almost no one, least of all the government that supposedly caused the downfall of the Soviet bloc. Reports by the CIA and other security agencies in that year predicted continued growth for the Soviet Union, and gave no hint of the calamity to come. If the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe was the result of some deliberate U.S. policy, it is astonishing that no agency was able to anticipate this event. The U.S. has a long history of provoking coups and economic crises through a variety of methods, but with limited success, even in relatively small countries. Massive resources would have been needed to orchestrate a collapse in Eastern Europe. Such an operation could not remain invisible for very long, nor could agencies responsible for such a project fail to anticipate the possibility of its success. The collapse of the East must be understood by studying the East, not the speeches of Western politicians, which at best had an inspirational effect, but provided no tangible aid to independence movements.
Eastern Europeans had long been dissatisfied with Soviet rule by proxy, a yoke that was intolerable to the fervent nationalism of the region. The Baltic countries were especially problematic within the Soviet Union, as were the Balkans without. Poland proved to be the initial point of rupture, voting out the Communists in June 1989 after years of economic decline. Her successful example was soon followed by other Eastern European regimes, largely through peaceful means. These changes were made possible by increasingly open elections that eventually permitted constitutional reforms abolishing the preferential status of the Communist Party. It is not miraculous or coincidental that these changes took place all at once. Eastern Europe had already been in economic decline since 1979, so the Communist regimes had been unpopular for years. As soon as the popular will was permitted formal expression through elections, peaceful reform became possible.
A key to the success of nationalist movements was the refusal of the Soviets to exert military force to maintain control. A variety of factors went into this decision, including the relative cost and benefit of direct military occupation, the weaknesses exposed in Afghanistan, and the liberalizing tendencies of Gorbachev. It is not clear how much of the bloc the Soviets would have been able to retain by force, but they certainly made a deliberate strategic decision in relinquishing all of it. For their part, Communist governments were under popular pressure not to rely on foreign military support, so they asked for Soviet withdrawal as a last attempt to preserve the legitimacy of their rule. If the Soviets hoped the Communist regimes would survive without military intervention, this proved to be a miscalculation.
Eastern Europeans did not need Western propaganda to teach them to despise their dictatorial governements; the everyday facts of life provided ample cause. As Reagan had contended back in the 1970s, the Communist regimes could not survive because they were “inhuman”, and would not be tolerated indefinitely. Only when the proper conditions, such as the liberalization programs under Gorbachev, the faltering in Afghanistan, and the stirring example of Poland, had all come together, was liberation possible.
Even after the loss of its European buffer zone, the Soviet Union remained formidable. On the basis of its strategic nuclear capability and troop strength, it could reasonably claim to be the world's greatest military power, and had reason to be optimistic about its economic outlook. Long before 1989, Soviet economic fortunes had been disentangled from the welfare of Warsaw pact satellite states. Abandoning Eastern Europe left the Soviet Union economically viable and militarily sound. The need for direct confrontation with Western Europe had evaporated long before 1989, so withdrawal from the East would relieve needless military commitments. Intelligence reports among Western governments corroborated the perception that the Soviet behemoth was still a veritable superpower, and no intelligence agency predicted a Soviet collapse before 1991. Once again, if Western governments were responsible for the demise of the Soviet Union, it is incomprehensible that none could have anticipated the realization of this end.
Western conservatives are rarely able to resist drawing a simplistic connection between Reagan’s famous speech calling for the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the events of 1989. In fact, Reagan called for Gorbachev and the East German government to tear down the wall, which is not what ultimately happened. The events of 1989 were far more radical than anything hoped for in his speech, which was mainly a call for the restoration of basic political liberties and a more open society. The top-down reform demanded by Reagan was outpaced by a nationalist uprising that took matters into its own hands and abolished the East German regime altogether, repudiating Marxism with breathtaking rapidity. Anyone who had ventured to predict the Berlin Wall would be torn down by ordinary citizens while soldiers watched would have been dismissed as naïve. Since Reagan was the most optimistic of Western statesmen regarding the fall of Communism, he now seems the most prescient. While we cannot credit his policies for directly engendering this collapse, we may acknowledge that Reagan most clearly perceived how deeply unpopular and injurious Communism was among the peoples who labored under it.
Despite his bellicose rhetoric, Reagan actually had a cooperative relationship with the Soviet Union, and a respectful understanding with Gorbachev. The Reagan era was marked with significant bilateral arms control agreements, as well as greater economic openness between the West and the Soviet bloc. This warming of relations continued under President Bush, who was even more supportive of the Soviet regime than his predecessor. As nationalist fervor aroused separatist sentiments in the Baltics and the Ukraine, Bush unswervingly asserted his commitment to a unified Soviet state. In a 1991 speech he delivered in Kiev, Bush affirmed the necessity of a united Soviet Union for continued global stability, angering his Ukrainian audience. Ukrainians had previously jeered Gorbachev for accidentally saying “Russian” when he should have said “Soviet”.
The uprisings in the Soviet republics were motivated more by nationalist sentiment and a desire for political liberty than any embrace of Western-style capitalism, though frustration with the failed command economy certainly played a role. They neither needed nor desired coaxing or agitation from the West. Bush, in any case, discouraged such aspirations, and with good reason, as he feared the security disaster that would accompany a sudden nuclear proliferation among newly liberated Soviet states, not to mention unpredictable political and economic chaos. As a firm believer in realpolitik, Bush valued regional and global stability over ideology.
Students of Soviet history know that the Soviet Union had ceased to be a truly socialist state long before 1991. The practical difficulties of Marxism were obvious even to Lenin, who abandoned early attempts at collective ownership in favor of the New Economic Program, which restored capitalist managers and technocrats. While the economy became more collectivized in the period from Stalin to Brezhnev, by the 1980s the Soviet federal budget as a percentage of GNP was similar to that of the United States, around twenty percent. Gorbachev’s policies produced political and economic liberalization that left the nation Communist only in name, much like China. Communist ideology and rhetoric was retained in order to unify political authority under a single party apparatus. Communism was also the glue that held the Soviet republics together; it was the reason for the super-state’s existence. Without the internationalist rationale of Communism, there was no way to legitimize Russian rule over other nations. As the Soviet Union abandoned her satellite states, there was less need for a transnational Communist ideology. Nonetheless, the Communist fig leaf held the Soviet Union itself together, until powerful members of the Party chose to destroy the Union in favor of narrower political interests.
As popular as Gorbachev was in the West, he was an embattled figure at home. Hard-liners resented his soft policies in Eastern Europe and his relaxing of Marxist principles. Others found that he moved too slowly, while still others found him as an obstacle to their own political aspirations. It was this last group which ultimately won the day, reflecting the dysfunctional nature of Russian politics. Before, during, and after the Soviet period, Russia has been ruled by autocrats whose fate is decided by cabalistic intrigues instead of legality. Stalin was possibly assassinated, while Khrushchev was victimized by a bloodless coup, resulting from a loss of confidence among the party bosses. Gorbachev found himself in a similar position in 1991, but the coup against him was ineptly organized, enabling him to survive politically for a few more months. The governments of the Western world unanimously opposed the short-lived coup. Gorbachev still had many political enemies, and some of these found they could topple him by pulling the state out from under him.
The total dissolution of the Soviet Union was not demanded by external or internal necessity, but was the result of a deliberate strategy adopted by ambitious high-ranking Soviet officials. Insurrection in the Baltic States and other nationalist hotbeds such as Ukraine was scarcely avoidable, but this did not mean nations such as Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, united to Russia even under the tsars, also had to be relinquished. Indeed, disbanding the Soviet Union made little sense, except in terms of the benefits it afforded a rising political elite. Power would devolve to the republic of Russia, and the wealth of the defunct Soviet state could be plundered for private profit. The ensuing economic and political chaos was the product of this decision to dismantle the state, not the cause of the Soviet downfall. Former Politburo members such as Yeltsin cannibalized the state for their own political and economic benefit. The Soviet Union was not felled by the inefficiencies of a command economy, but by the corrupt machinations of the one-party bureaucracy. Russia’s economy entered a cataclysmic collapse as state industries were privatized and state assets mysteriously disappeared. Revenue was crippled by the loss of the Ukraine and the decline in productivity accompanying the dismantling of the state-dependent Soviet economy. This auctioning of the country’s resources benefited eager foreign investors and unscrupulous Russians who assumed positions of oligarchic authority. The main beneficiary was Russia’s newest tsar, Boris Yeltsin.
Yeltsin cleverly played along with the West’s conceit that the Soviet Union’s collapse resulted from inchoate historical forces that impelled people towards the superior systems of capitalism and liberal democracy. A cunning realist, Yeltsin spoke democratic language while acting autocratically, and lauded the free market while promoting crony monopolism. Without the other Soviet republics, there was no more need to continue insincere professions of Marxism. Besides, rejecting Communism made Yeltsin the favorite of the West, whose financial support he would need more than ever. The plundering oligarchs of Russia were rewarded with unprecedented financial aid from Western nations, so that a few became kings while the nation as a whole was humiliated and stripped of its great power status. Yeltsin established his monarchical authority by a military showdown with defiant legislators. He dissolved the parliament in 1993, sending tanks to overrun parliamentary defenders, and established a new constitution increasing the powers of the president. Since the opposition was largely of Communist leanings, Yeltsin retained the support of the West despite his flagrantly anti-democratic practices.
The Soviet Union had serious economic problems, but none were grave enough to account for the total collapse that followed its dissolution. Prior to 1991, no Western economist predicted such a debacle; some forecasts for Soviet growth were actually encouraging. Economists are well aware of the market’s sensitivity to minor government policy changes, so it should be unsurpristing that the wholesale liquidation of a state would cause cataclysmic economic upheaval. No one predicted such a sell-off because it made little political or economic sense, but the Russian oligarchs acted without regard for the welfare of the nation. There was no historical precedent for the plundering of a state the size of the Soviet Union, and uncertainty is always bad for markets. The economic disaster of privatization was worsened by the neoliberal austerity measures promoted by the IMF, the World Bank, and "free market" ideologues in Washington, who have destroyed more than a few economies through uncritical deregulation of markets and demolition of social welfare programs. The independent Russian Central Bank furthered the crisis by monetizing much of its debt and causing hyperinflation.
Russia entered a period of chaos that political realists like George Bush had sought to avoid, though fortunately the issue of nuclear weapons was soon resolved by moving Ukrainian warheads into Russia. Once the moment of nuclear peril had ended, the United States could look back upon the collapse of the Soviet Union as a definitive victory for American policy. As I have tried to show, the reality is not nearly that simple.
The United States did not seek to destabilize the Soviet Union politically or economically. This was true even of Reagan, who oversaw economic and strategic rapprochement with the Soviets despite the saber-rattling of his early presidency, so by his second term he repudiated the "evil empire" moniker as applying to the reformed Soviet Union. Bush was even more openly supportive of a unified Soviet Union, as late as 1991. Thus it is revisionism of the first order to claim that the United States caused the Soviet collapse through its deliberate policies. It is possible that the United States accelerated the Soviet downfall incidentally, through economic competition or financial penetration. This scenario is unlikely, however, since the United States has had much more lopsided economic relations with Third World countries, yet is seldom able to engender political reform this way. The breakup of the Soviet empire would not have been possible without the potent force of Eastern European nationalism and the heavy yoke Communist rule imposed on the people economically and culturally. The destruction of the Soviet Union itself was not foreordained, even after the loss of its satellites. Here it was victimized by a political structure that lacked all legal accountability, inhabited by men without scruples. Socialism did not deal the death blow, but instead a complete lack of social consciousness among Soviet bureaucrats made possible the looting of the state. The collectivist spirit of Marxism had long been dead in Moscow; the events of 1991 formalized this reality.
© 2006 Daniel J. Castellano. All rights reserved. http://www.arcaneknowledge.org
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