Reagan administration brought down the Berlin Wall....

the widespreadedness of political jokes was one of the best side-products of communism. that's how communication was done. that part i miss. it just ain't the same anymore.

the widespreadedness of political jokes was one of the best side-products of communism. that's how communication was done. that part i miss. it just ain't the same anymore.

Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Janos Kadar (the leader of Hungary) all appear simultaneously at the pearly gates. Saint Peter tells them that they each will be granted one last wish before entering heaven.

Ronald Reagan says without hesitation, "I would like the Soviet Union to disappear from the face of the earth." They look down, and sure enough, the USSR vanishes.

Gorbachev said, "Well, then, I would like the same to happen to the USA." The United States disappears instantly.

Kadar looks down with a blissful smile. "Now that's done, I guess all I need is one last cup of coffee!"

So, in the first one, the Hungarian couldn't decide which he wanted to ask for God to erase, but since they erased each other, he went for his second choice - a cuppa?

Dmitrivich answered: "I had to! I have a wife--and a family!"

Now I was there. The Cold War was the first 13 years of my life. I lived it. My father was in prison intermittently, being a part of the human rights movement. I know that the dissidents looked up to the USA...but..."brought down the Berlin Wall"?! How? I find that statement frankly somewhat insulting.

I am absolutely uninterested in vitriolic conservative vs. liberal namecalling and insults and would greatly appreciate a merit based discussion. Thanks.

I do have this deeply seated prejudice, that always makes me vaguely suspect that, when it comes to news from abroad, (American) conservatives somehow seem more eager to find what they can fear, hate or fight - or at best, what they can rescue & liberate - than what they can respect, admire, support and trust in. Those would be the conservatives who, when they think of Eastern Europe, cannot remember the name Vaclav Havel but will contentedly recall that those were 'the countries that Ronald Reagan liberated', say.

I was very deliberately making a generalisation, of course - hence the "deap-seated prejudice" quip with which I introduced it - [but] there is also an actual point in the generalisation, too [..]

georgeob1 wrote:

It is neither fair nor accurate of Nimh to suggest that supporters of Ronald Reagan's vigorous confrontation with the Soviet Empire were either unaware or unappreciative of the crucial contributions of Vaclav Havel (and other Eastern European leaders) to the downfall of that unlamented Empire.

It would be unfair to say "all supporters" were so - thats why I didnt - but some American conservatives, oy - I've been amazed, really, at meeting people who truly thought "Reagan had liberated E-Europe". Not to belittle the role that the arms race played in straining the Soviet plan-economy to the point that it started falling apart, necessating some Soviet leader or other to change things drastically - but, a), Gorbachev could have tried taking Li Peng's road instead of yielding E-Europe to democracy, and then a lot more blood would have flown, and b) these people really seemed clueless about the Leipzig demonstrations, the Prague and Budapest dissidents, even the Polish trade unionists - they truly saw Eastern Europe as a Communist monolith, that Reagan pushed over - end of story. That I think is - apart from mere ignorance, and sad, really, also indicative of a certain populist American-conservative mindset.

It comes up again in the debate on Iran, where, away from our nuanced posts, you have the populist-conservative impression of Iran as an ultra-fundamentalist, evil monolith - an impression that would logically lead to the idea of an Iraq-style military approach by ways of solution.
Whereas in reality, you've got your evil people in the regime there, you've also got your Gorbachev-style reformists, voted into office in actual, free elections - but, though of good will, perhaps, impotent and mired in compromise [the post is from back in Khatami's times - nimh]; you've got your radical rebel students and your principled dissidents, rightly criticising the government from without - and you've got your armed guerrilla's, partly rooted in dubious exile groups.

[One] thing I'll agree on - I don't have very many nice things to say about Reagan, but his "Mr. Gorbachev - tear down this wall!", for example, was [..] widely considered a cheap rhetorical trick here [in Western Europe], meant merely to embarass the Soviet leader by demanding the impossible, in order to discredit - or avoid accepting - his invitations to end the Cold War. Yet the point is, Ronald Reagan was also simply talking common sense.

What leftists tend to forget sometimes is that, just cause an argument is not sophisticated, its not necessarily not right. Living so close to where the Cold War split the world apart, many of us were so relieved at Gorbachev's willingness to start radical, bilateral disarmament, that we were willing, for the moment, to 'forget' about the Berlin Wall and the inhumanity it represented. Demanding, basically, a complete capitulation from Gorbachev might not have been the best way to bring forward the negotiations on bilateral disarmament we were so desperately yearning for - but Reagan was right - it would ultimately have been wrong to compromise on this. I don't know about "evil empire", but Soviet communism did have to be brought to complete capitulation, as soon as global security allowed it. So he was right to press on.

timberlandko wrote:

The Soviet Union, IMO, was well into inevitable decline by the late Nineteen Fifties. They simply lost the economic race, and the final collapse and dissolution in '89 was the plain result of their mismanagement of their resources and the squanderinhg of their treasure in a futile attempt to match The US militarily. The entire Soviet Bloc was a consruct held together by a myth, a myth challenged in Hungary in the 'Fifties, in Czekoslovakia in The Sixties, a myth which evaporated in The Eighties. Had Reagan NOT been as forceful and adamant as he was, the Soviet Union likely would have plodded on for a few decades, possibly even devolving into something rather like contemporary North Korea.

Actually, North Korea, for all its disastrous poverty economics, is a very strong state in one single respect: in the stranglehold the regime seems to hold over the population. This would be a serious difference with the Soviet Union. As you already pointed out, in the various Soviet Bloc countries "the myth was challenged" time after time: '53, '56, '68, '80 ... Considering the way the SU was disintegrating from within by stagnation and mismanagement, one could think that it would have been increasingly less able to restore its stranglehold on the Eastern European countries even if Reagan hadnt also pushed onto it from the outside. And whenever it would have failed, the dissident movement within Russia, that seems to have no parallel in the DPRK either, would have been boosted too. All in all I agree the S-U itself would still perhaps have plodded on for a decade more even if the Warsaw Pact wouldnt have, but hardly with anything like the absolutist repressive grip of a North-Korea. The communists would have been very lucky to get something like current-day's China.

There's another way, also, to nuance the DPRK parallel, as well as the importance of Reagan's foreign policy. Gorbachev started reforming almost from the very start, at least partially also from a personal conviction that the system needed to be reinvigorated. It was never his intention to end communism, let alone the S-U, of course, but he did seem intent enough on reforming the system, and would have tried, more carefully perhaps, without Reagan too. And the fact that Gorbachev could emerge on top, in itself, indicates a difference between the CPSU of the 80s and the DPRK regime now (which seems more like a family clan version of Stalinism), and suggests that someone else might have emerged in time to do so if he hadn't.

Now it is my belief that the system was so ridden by contradictions, it would have gradually imploded upon any serious attempt at such reform in any case. The only way the centrifugal forces any moderate reform would have set free could still be stopped with would have been a military clampdown - and the half-hearted attempts in Vilnius, Riga and Moscow in 1990-1991 suggest the regime wasn't fully capable (or willing) to enforce one anymore either.

Thing is, weighing to which extent this or that element played a part (in the collapse of the S-U) in relationship to each other immediately necessitates a "what would have happened if" question - if not Reagan but Carter had been US president, if the S-U would have been 'free' to spend more of its resources on non-military budgets (would it have?), if Gorbachev hadnt become the new secretary-general, et cetera. That is all speculation, and in terms of speculating there's an awful lot of variables there. All one can comfortably say is which elements did play a significant role - obviously, both reformism within the CPSU, civic dissent in the Eastern Bloc and Reagan's adamant foreign policy; while the place I tried to be going - which was the determining one - is in the end too unlit a one.

It all depends on where you start, for one. Much of what I wrote about how, once Gorbachev started perestrojka, the process more or less inevitably would have led to an implosion in any case [..], goes for starting point 1985. Easy counterargument would be that, if the spending race hadnt gotten the S-U into such trouble by 1985 already, Gorbachev would never have had his 1985 chance in the first place. Counterargument to that, again, would include a reference to the cul-de-sac where the CPSU bureaucrats ended up in after Brezhnev's death, voting in one 'safe' old apparatchik after another (Andropov, Chernenko) only to see him die on them within the year or so - suggesting Gorbachev would have gotten his chance, in any case, as a consequence of the internal rot of the party rather than the outside pressure.

Same kind of questions abound if you do take 1985 as starting point. If Mondale or Dole had been president at the time or in the years previous, would Gorbachev still feel necessitated to embark on reform? I think so. Would any of the glasnost he attempted - primarily to drive the conservative communists in a corner - have automatically set the centrifugal forces free that would disintegrate ideology and central control? I think so. Would he have clamped down? There's the rub - that's the big question. He had no qualms in having Georgian insurrectionism quashed in '88. Why did he back down in the Baltic states two years later? Because he realised it was already too late? That properly quashing the independence movements there - also considering the support they enjoyed among the Moscow opposition - would really require a re-imposition of orthodox Soviet control, spelling an end to his reform project, for which by that time he'd already given up all of Eastern Europe? He didn't seem ready for that, though some say he was ready for such a draconic step by 1991, when he seemed resigned in the face of the hardliner's bumbling coup.

Would he have clamped down earlier in the Baltics, when it still could have been done, perhaps, without a drastic reimposition of orthodox communism, and a muddling Soviet Union might still have been saved, if there hadn't been such a stern onlooker at the Western front? Perhaps it was indeed his eagerness to deal with the West about disarmament that kept him from clamping down when he still could when internal dissent spiralled out of control. Alternatively, perhaps the way he seemed to be overtaken by events, driven forth on a stream of reformist demands he had unleashed but lost control over - a stream he tried to stem but without the stomach to do so with any acute force - was merely the consequence of his own personal tragedy, independent from any Western pressure. Courageous enough to see the need for change and attempt it, but too locked in his loyalties to foresee where it eventually would have to end. Who knows? [..]

In the end, we shouldn't underestimate the power of [Gorbachev]. [O]ther new leaders might have tackled reform or stabilisation in wholly different ways. [W]ho knows - the S-U might have ended up dumping its [Warsaw Pact] colonies and continuing in the current Chinese way by itself. For example.

Jim wrote:

Reagan/Thatcher freed Eastern Europe and dismantled the Soviet Union. Not a shot fired.

Was Reagan great? You bet.

What is this bull about Reagan (and Thatcher, even!) "freeing Eastern Europe and dismantling the Soviet Union"!?

It's not you, Jim, nothing personal, it's just how many times have we heard this now the past week?

What utter disrespect for the thousands of dissidents, human rights activists, underground trade unionists, who fought the Communists at home in Poland, Hungary, name it - and the tens of thousands who stood up and defied their dictators in the first 1989 demonstrations, risking their lives, at a time when those were still well able to shoot back ...

What disrespect, too, for the brave (yes, brave) reform communists who dared leave or challenge the fold at a time when it could still well have landed them in internal exile or worse - the ones who were too early, and who are now nameless victims, and the ones who dared to just in time, like Gorbachev.

Yes, the ratcheting up of NATO military expenses played an important role. It weakened the economic basis of the Soviet empire ever further, making it ever harder for the sleepyheads of stagnation to cruise on with their dictatorship as if nothing had changed. But that in itself did not "free" Eastern Europe "without a shot being fired". It merely created the conditions that would edge a reasonably level-headed communist boss on, when one finally did appear on the scene, to venture into a bold reformist adventure of his own.

Remember, it could all have ended in a Tien-a-Mien Square. The 1991 coup could have succeeded, at least for a while. If the streets hadnt filled up with Russians, back then, if Yeltsin hadnt been up there defying the tanks -- or if in the GDR two years earlier defenceless demonstrators hadnt stood there in Leipzig, chanting "Keine Gewalt!" -- if one Central-European apparatchik hadnt forced another to withdraw the tanks and not mow 'em all down -- how many deaths would there have been? How much longer might this or that Communist state, or even the Eastern Bloc as a whole, not have tottered on?

"Not a shot fired"! People did give their lives, in the anonimity of underground resistance before Gorbachev told his cronies in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the GDR to back off, henceforth - and in the open battles of Tbilisi, 1989, Timisoara and Bucharest, 1989, Vilnius and Riga, 1991 and Moscow, 1991. Don't you forget it!

Reagan "dismantled the Soviet Union" ... <mutters> ... I mean, sure his bold, controversial foreign policy played an important role, he was actually proven right, there, though he ratcheted up the risks way high - but he "freed Eastern Europe"? What, single-handedly? How bloody narcissistic can a nation be!?

dagmaraka wrote:

Ehm, what? Reagan the reason for Soviet Union to collapse? Really? Now that's news to me!

OCCOM BILL wrote:

Really? You must not have been paying attention.

Bill, not one of your best targeted posts. If anyone on this thread paid attention, it was Dagmaraka. She grew up in communist Slovakia, after all. Her family was personally persecuted by the Soviet-sponsored regime there. And they played as much of a role as they could in overturning it. If anyone here can be said to have an inside view on what made the Soviet system collapse, it's her. [..]

I have an opinion too (not because I'm European but because I studied Russia and Eastern Europe Studies and all). I'd say Reagan's cranking up of the arms race definitely seriously contributed to the economic crisis the Soviet Union slowly but certainly grinded towards. And that's about as far as it goes.

Other at least as important elements in the equation were the internal contradictions of the Soviet economic system in itself, the ever resurgent political opposition and civic movements in various Eastern European countries and the sincere enough desire on the part of some reform communists, Gorbachev being a brave example, to reform the system into a more tenable variety. A hopeless cause, but their work on it did lots to bring the old system down.

Without individuals like Gorbachev and Yeltsin or the political undercurrents they represented, the outcome would have been very different, just like it would have been without the dissident activists in CEE or without Reagan's pumping up of the arms race. To credit the eventual collapse of the Eastern Block to any one of them is just silly - and for an American to claim all credits for Reagan is both arrogant and silly.

There. I said my say.

I havent got a clue whether Dagmaraka would be offended, I would think not at all. She probably thinks I overreacted and spoke before my turn ;-).

Blame it on coming across the "Reagan brought the Soviet Union down" myth one time too many on this board. Of course Reagan's way of upping the ante in the arms race must have sped up the tempo in which the Soviet economy headed for its unavoidable breakdown, no contention there. But that doesn't mean that if Chernenko had not died, for example, and young Gorby had thus never had the chance to move up, the Soviet Union might not still have dragged itself on another decade, with increasingly heavy-handed clampdowns masquing its inability to reinvent itself. If instead of Gorby, Andropov had presided over an increasingly restive population, he might have opted for the Chinese route: economic reform combined with violent political repression. That, too, might have given the ossified system a new temporary lease of life.

And then there's the movements from below. Without Gorbachev's rather idealistic decision to implement glasnost' (openness, free press) first and perestrojka (economic-systemic reform) later - thus dooming his sincere attempt to save the communist system by straight away opening up a democratic "Pandora's box" of systemic dissent - they wouldn't have had a chance, perhaps. But as it is they did, and they grabbed it with both hands. If it were not for the Baltic states pressing ever more boldly for independence, for Yeltsin undermining Soviet imperialism from inside, for reform communists in Hungary and Poland taking the ball and running with it, agreeing to the truly free elections Gorbachev himself would not allow in the SU, and cutting open the Iron Curtain (thus dooming the GDR to dissolution) - if they all had not continually pushed Gorbachev on, forced him to make ever new compromises, then who knows what wishy-washy mid-way reform Russia would have stalled at - look at Vietnam. And you're right - I agree that the system was so afflicted by its internal contradictions that, lacking the will anymore to rule through terror like Stalin had, it was fated to succumb sooner or later.

Reagan sure added a vital element to this brew, upping the pressure in the pressure cooker, and perhaps without his upping of the ante the breakdown would have taken longer. On the other hand, the success of his gamble in the end depended on various other things falling into place as well - without Gorbachev or the dissident and civic movements from below, the costs of the arms race might well not have led to a breakdown yet for another decade either. Look at Cuba - the economic strongarming on the part of the US has ever further corrupted its system, but it hasn't succeeded in bringing it down (alas). [..]

OCCOM BILL wrote:

I only meant the timing of the collapse can be attributed to Reagan's perpetual upping of the Anti in the highest stakes game of poker ever. The Soviet's didn't have enough money stay in that game (no one did, that was the point). [..] Of course I recognize there were many forces at work... but certainly Reagan's policies accelerated the demise of a system that, IMHO, was doomed to failure from it's conception.

Well, it seems we are fully in agreement ;-)