One day that shook the world
March 11th, 2010 by Paul Norton | Published in Europe, History, International, Politics | 57 Comments
Twenty-five years ago today, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union by a unanimous vote of the CPSU Politburo. Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive chronicle and analysis of Gorbachev’s time as leader, reformer and unintentional dissolver of the Soviet Union, I’d like to take this occasion to offer some reflections on the remarkable period in history which began on 11 March 1985.
One of the things which made this period so remarkable is that when Gorbachev was appointed General Secretary, nobody could have foreseen the sequence of events over the subsequent six and a half years which ended the Cold War and saw the Soviet Union reformed out of existence. Of course, the question of how a totalitarian Stalinist regime such as that of the USSR might be transformed, and what it might be transformed into, had occupied many of the best minds across the political spectrum for decades. Some, such as the East German dissident and subsequent Green Party activist Rudolph Bahro, anticipated the possibility of the Soviet Union experiencing a process of reform similar to the Prague Spring of 1968, with the difference that such a Soviet Spring would not be cut short by the tanks and guns of a much bigger neighbour before it could usher in a democratic socialist “third way” between capitalism and communism. The Trotskyist Left put their hopes in some kind of “workers political revolution aganst the bureaucracy” to bring about socialist democracy. Communist regimes in different countries experimented with limited political and intellectual liberalisation, economic reforms including limited restoration of market elements and enterprise autonomy, workers’ participation in enterprise decision-making, campaigns against corrupt and incompetent officialdom and poor work discipline, and other minor reforms.
The fact remained, however, that in the Soviet Union and all countries where what historian Robert Service calls the “Soviet compound” had been established, neither agitation from below nor reform from above had fundamentally challenged its basic ingredients – in Service’s words, “a one-party state, dictatorship, administrative hyper-centralism, a state-dominated economy, restricted national self-expression, legal nihilism and a monopolistic ideology.” The Prague Spring, for all its undoubted promise, was not allowed to transcend the limits of the compound before the Warsaw Pact tanks arrived. Poland’s Solidarnosc movement had been repressed by the regime in December 1981 and, when Gorbachev took office, survived as an underground movement. In the Soviet Union itself, the complete crushing of civil society by Stalin and the grip retained on political life by his successors meant that nothing resembling Solidarnosc could have existed in 1985.
Furthermore, whilst Gorbachev and his supporters in the CPSU leadership recognised that the country was stagnating and was sorely in need of reform, they did not intend, in March 1985, to set in motion and persist with the momentous changes which were to eventuate. Gorbachev himself, in March 1985, considered himself a staunch Marxist-Leninist, revered the legacy of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and conceived of the reforms he believed were necessary as constituting a renewal and revival of the model bequeathed by Lenin. In 1985 Gorbachev would have been aghast at the prospect of Soviet politics and society changing to the extent they did even by 1988, let alone 1991.
In other words, given the history of limited and abortive reform from above and resistance from below in the Stalinist countries, and given what anyone knew of what Gorbachev himself and his allies intended in 1985, it was not surprising that many people (including many on the Left such as myself) were sceptical about what would come of the promising words about reform early in Gorbachev’s tenure, and, in the light of events such as Nikita Khrushchev’s ousting by Brezhnev’s neo-Stalinists, doubtful about how far Gorbachev would be allowed to go no matter what he intended. It is now history that Gorbachev surprised the world, and even himself, by continuously responding to the failure of modest reforms to achieve their desired goals by attempting increasingly less modest reforms and eventually presiding over the introduction of reforms which fundamentally destabilised the “Soviet compound” and allowed the emergence of radical democratic reform/opposition movements within the USSR and vigorous nationalist movements in its constituent republics.
It should go without saying that a period of history so unexpected and remarkable was also not inevitable. The reason why it can’t go without saying is that a myth has grown up on the political Right, especially in the English-speaking countries, that the process of reform commenced by Gorbachev and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union was the intended and inevitable consequence of the aggressive foreign policy and arms build-up initiated by the Reagan administration in the US. It is ironic that this myth was, is, most actively propounded by the same sort of people who, as late as 1989, were warning “once a communist always a communist” and fretting that Reagan had allowed himself to be seduced by the devilishly cunning Gorbachev. The fact is that in the first half of the 1980s very few people anywhere on the political spectrum, and even fewer on the Right, were prepared to entertain the possibility that a CPSU General Secretary, being inevitably a product of the Stalinist system, would be likely to want to reform, or be capable of conceiving of reforming, such a system out of existence, or that the system itself and its beneficiaries would allow such an outcome. Further, if the initiation of liberalising and democratising reforms from above to the extent of wholesale system transformation is the inevitable response by Stalinist regimes to the kinds of political, economic and military pressure applied to the USSR by Reagan in the 1980s, why have we not seen any such developments in much smaller and weaker Stalinist states who have been likewise pressured and which have far slimmer resources with which to resist such presure.
Of course, the momentous events of the Gorbachev era had their effect on the Australian Left. It must be difficult for younger leftists to imagine how large a shadow the Soviet Union cast over several generations of Australian leftists, even those of us who had the fewest illusions about “actually existing socialism”. Whist, by 1985, the number of Australian leftists who thought the USSR represented the “glorious socialist future of humanity” was small indeed, a much larger number clung to hopes similar in emotional and intellectual content to those expressed by Manning Clark in Meeting Soviet Man. Despite the crimes of Stalin and the horrible and tawdry realities which could not be denied, many on the Australian Left clung to the hope that the Bolshevik Revolution had planted the seed of something which might eventually flower into something beautiful and admirable, or consoled themselves with thoughts that at least the Soviet Union was good at sport, and set some sort of example in education and healthcare. It was therefore not surprising that Gorbachev’s reform initiatives, even at their earliest and least radical, raised hopes that at last “actually existing socialism” was coming good, and that the socialist cause in capitalist countries such as Australia would shine in the reflected glow of socialist renewal in the USSR. Somef of us tried to provide a reality check. As a young CPA functionary I disrespected my elders more than once by pointing out, in the period 1985-1987, that Gorbachev’s reforms had yet to break the boundaries of the “Soviet compound” (although I didn’t use that phrase at the time). The late Denis Freney devoted a lot of his prodigious energies to locating and publishing articles from the more radical reforming and dissident tendencies which glasnost and perestroika had unleashed, and I arranged for some similar material to be published in the CPA’s internal journal Praxis. Denis pointed out, presciently, that the Australian left would need to be prepared to deal with glasnost’s revelations that Soviet reality was even tawdrier and its history even more horrible than any of us had imagined, and its redeeming features largely non-existent, and with what such disclosures would mean for the attractiveness of any socialist project to ordinary Australians.
What, however, people such as Denis Freney and myself clung to was the hope that out of all the tumult in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, some kind of democratic socialist alternative would emerge. For us, the blow fell when the first free elections in Eastern Europe were won by parties of some mix of the neo-liberal, nationalist and religious Right, and when the dissolution of the Soviet Union was followed by Boris Yeltsin’s embrace of neo-liberal shock therapy – with the backing of many of the radical democrats in whom we had placed such hopes in the late 1980s.
Robert Service sums up the denouement of the Gorbachev era thus:
Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader to face up to the interconnected difficulties of political intimidation, economic inhibition, militarist organization and environmental pollution – and he failed to resove the difficulties before he was overwhelmed. The fundamental problem for any gradualist reformer in politics and the economy was that the Soviet compound had eradicated most of the social groups and associations whose co-operation might have facilitated success. By the 1980s, reform had to come from above in the first instance and could be implemented only by a small circle of reformers. A further problem was that radical reform dissolved the linkages of the Soviet compound. Decomposition was inherent in the entire project of change. Those organizations based on politics, religion or nationality which had previously been cowed had no objective interest in conserving the status quo. Gorbachev’s eventual decision to eliminate the one-party state, ideological autocracy, arbitrary rule, ultra-centralist administration and a predominantly state-owned economy was bound to release such organizations into conflict with his government. The only wonder is that he did not see this from the beginning.
Thus, from 19898 to 1991, the state of Soviet politics was best summed up in the famous words of W. B. Yeats:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Gorbachev himself, throughout this period, was trying to hold together the centre in his position as General Secretary and Soviet President, and not surprisingly defends this course of action in some detail in his memoirs, giving vent to his frustration both with the Stalinist conservatives and what he regarded as the irresponsibility of radical reformers such as Yeltsin, Yuri Afanasyev, Gavril Popov and others. Robert Service, however, is of the view that by this time Gorbachev would have done better to have broken with the communist party and allied himself and his supporters with the radical democrats in a social democratic party. This is not a difficult conclusion to come to in hindsight. The failed conservative coup of August 1991, instigated in part by several of Gorbachev’s appointees, suggests that the centre was ultimately never going to be allowed to hold together. The resultant gazumping of the cause of radical reform by the erratic and impulsive Yeltsin, the “shock therapy” economic debacle of Yeltsin’s early years as Russian President, Yeltsin’s subsequent relapse into authoritarian behaviour and the accession of the thoroughly authoritarian Putin, might also have been averted had the democratic forces regrouped around a social democratic formation including Gorbachev. However, in my mind the jury is still out on whether Gorbachev could or should have known that this was the best option at the time, given the very complex and difficult situation he faced.
When all is taken into account, however, it is impossible not to conclude that the world is a better place because Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union on this day 25 years ago – and it is sobering to reflect that the world may not have remained a livable place had someone else got the job. Gorbachev was the single most important individual in ensuring that the song 99 Red Balloons by Nena remained a piece of whimsy rather than prophecy, and the apocalyptic scenario depicted in The Road a work of fiction.
That is a sound summary Paul. Gorbachev turned out to be a more radical humanist than his predecessors and created the moment in which the USSR collapsed under the weight of it’s own terrible history. Thanks for the reminder. My own view is that socialism is a dead letter thanks to the USSR and that any genuine left project is now engaged with radical democracy and located within within the dialogue between communitarian and non-communitarian liberals. Any other form of left project is discredited by the history of actually existing socialism.
Don’t forget Sting and I hope the Russians love their children too.
Great post, Paul.
“might also have been averted had the democratic forces regrouped around a social democratic formation including Gorbachev.”
Was never going to happen. Gorbachev ran for President of Russia in 1996 and got about 1% of the vote. He then tried to form a social democratic party which went nowhere.
The impossibility of the Gorby project, to reform the Soviet Union, was crystallised a Soviet Communist Party grand conference early in 1988. Gorby made a big speech on the need to fix the inefficiencies of the grain transport and storage system, which saw two thirds of the annual grain production rot in silos and in rail carriages sitting in the middle of nowhere.
No, no, no said Gorby’s nemesis, the arch-Stalinist Agriculture Secretary,Igor Ligachev. We must not make the grain transport and storage system more efficient.
Why not? “Because we are the party of social justice.”
True story.
Very good post,Paul. But … Robert Service? If you wonder why I query his objectivity on Soviet history – http://socialistworld.net/eng/2009/10/1401.html
‘Robert Service, however, is of the view that by this time Gorbachev would have done better to have broken with the communist party and allied himself and his supporters with the radical democrats in a social democratic party. This is not a difficult conclusion to come to in hindsight.’
I dunno.
By the late 80s it was clear that sections of the Union would hive off unless stopped by force. Because it is a short step from hiving off to disintegration of the Union, I can’t see the point in Gorbachev joining with radical democrats who had virtually no support outside St Petersburg and Moscow. This at the same as there were radical nationalists arguing that the USSR had exploited Russians for its own benefit, and now Russians needed to stand up for themselves. A manifestation of this tension can be seen in the establishement of the RSFSR in 1990, finally giving the Russians their own federated socialist republic.
Against this were barely concealed threats of military coup should Gorbachev begin to move any direction other than keeping the Union together.
It was a tough gig for Gorbachev. I don’t see how aligning himself with radical democrats would have made it any less tough.
Thanks Paul for this snippet.
I’ve always felt that what Gorbachev managed to do was one of the great and largely hidden stories of the later half of the 20th C – and about which we know very little.
I did comment on LP, on the 20th anniversary of the downing of the Berlin Wall, how much BS it was to claim that Reagan had anything to do with this.
Some of it I suppose is the inherent lie underlying both the Soviet and capitalist systems: that we can destroy everything around us and expect it not to come unstuck. Maybe old man Marx might have had a u-beaut phrase for this!
Amongst Gorbachev’s most significant foreign policy initiatives, did he not offer to completely de-commission all of the USSR’s nuclear arms? And in fact began this?
This makes him immediately person non-grata to the Soviet communist party / military establishment – and just as unpalatable to the war-mongers in the west.
Does this account for how and why a drunken fool like Yeltsin could be so promoted by the west, as Russia’s saviour throughout the 1990′s?
I never understood why men like his foreign minister – Georgian or Ukranian?, whatever his name was – appeared to take such a vitriolic stance against him pretty soon after the drowning of the USSR.
Any tips on further on-line reading?
Cutting through Robert Service’s thicket of abstractions, the interesting question is why the Politburo gave Gorbachev and his fellow reformists room to manoeuvre during the early days of reform in the mid 1980s.
One can only assume that the conservatives had lost self confidence and/or they believed they could step in at any time to pull the plug before the changes went too far.
I guess the state of decrepitude of the Soviet political economy impressed itself on the minds of even the Brezhnevite neo-Stalinists. And how wrong they were on the second count.
Unlike China, no one in the Soviet Union was able to marry economic dynamism to political authoritarianism. Yet the Chinese have made that trick seem simple.
By August 1991 the CPSU had died from the base up and even the elite KGB troops refused to follow orders from the conservatives.
Hi Mervyn,
It was Shevardnadze, he was Georgian, and he and Gorbachev split before the USSR went down, over matters of how best to handle the military and its increasing sabre-rattling.
Sam #4 and Katz #8, it’s interesting to reflect on the figure of Yegor Ligachev, who was initially s supporter of reform and of Gorbachev at the time of his appointment, but who had become the mainstay of the conservatives in the Central Committee by 1987 or 1988. It’s also worth recalling that Yuri Andropov had tried to initiative reforms, albeit within a limited ambit, during his short stay as General Secretary in 1982-84.
“his foreign minister – Georgian or Ukranian?, whatever his name was – appeared to take such a vitriolic stance against him pretty soon after the drowning of the USSR.”
Eduard Shevardnadze
Actually, they fell out in 1990, before the end of the USSR.
Merv #7, three years ago we stoushed on the occasion of Yeltsin’s passing. The link to Jonathan Steele still works.
Reading Moshe Lewin’s The Soviet Century, although some of his judgments on other writersare rather testy he does argue that at the elite level there was a substantial awareness that the USSR was falling further and further behind the West. Unlike the Stalin period Soviet social science was well developed and critical. However Gorbachev’s economic policy was totally incoherent and contributed to the economic collapse.
Eduard Shevardnadze – yes of course! How to handle the military? – and the future of the nuclear stockpile maybe?
But I’d love to know: Is there any validity to my comment that the whole unravelling of the USSR is greatly under-documented?
If Gorbarchev and his mates dismantled a massive and dedicated military-industrial complex — and survived a couple of counter coups – it’d be delish to know something of it. One day we’re going to have to do the same.
Paul – ? Mate, I’m confused about the “stoush”! I can’t even see that I put a post on that thread.
Maybe my computer has lost some of its’ memory too. But I’ll try the other link, thanks.
Sorry Merv, I dind’t mean “we” in the sense of “you and I”. I mentioned it in the sense of myself and various LP habitues at the time.
Paul – are you saying that Reagan’s policies had nothing to do with it?
I have always wondered why the security services and military no longer had the power to stop the internal revolt. Obviously a loss of will. Why? Societal fatigue? Too many spot fires at once?
“…a one-party state, dictatorship, administrative hyper-centralism, a state-dominated economy, restricted national self-expression, legal nihilism and a monopolistic ideology”. Dictatorship aside (I am being generous here), this more or less describes Russia today, 25 years on. As for Stalinism: it’s back.
A great post. I should mention that one reason Gorbachev’s standing in Russia fell as much as it did is not the direction in which he was taking the country but a perceived lack of competence insofar as implementation is concerned. If liberalisation was not inevitable, neither was economic collapse and the disorder of the early 1990′s.
I dunno, Ilya — I think the economic chaos was inevitable, though perhaps for not as long as it’s endured in say Ukraine. They weren’t just switching from League to Rugby, you know.
My memory is that the Chernobyl disaster enabled Gorbachev to bring in glasnost and perestroika so easily: crises enable change. But IANAH.
Gorbachev is reviled in his own country as a bumbling idiot. The only two leaders who are more loathed are Stalin and Yeltsin, respectively. Much of Gorby’s dismantling of the USSR was not the military-industrial end of it, but rather the education and welfare state componets of the USSR. Hence, many public servants lost jobs during glasnost and perestroika. Being bogged down in a senselss war in Afghanistan did not help. The shambolic handling of Chernobyl also caused the leadership to lose standing. Rightists tend to over-estimate the role played by Reagan (and even the Pope) in the unravelling of the USSR. Ethnic nationalisms were rising everywhere in the USSR at the time of its dissolution, from Ukraine and Estonia to Kyrgystan. The regime lost the will to crush dissent, and following the botched coup of 1991, the rest is history.
“…a myth has grown up on the political Right…”
Hee hee. Leftists talking with ostensible straight faces about “myths,” if you please. The gods of comedy are forever generous.
Look up “zugzwang” sometime, whydontcha. It’s not a term Reagan ever coined, so presumably you’ll be able to choke it down. Gorbachev’s ascension: 1985 did you say? And when was Reagan re-elected in a landslide? Funny I can’t recall the year. But you Marxists have all those infallible inevitable laws of History on your side, so I’m sure it’s in your notes someplace special.
What a guy, what effect Gorby had. The Intourist Office in downtown Warsaw immediately took down that sign in the window which said:
:-)
japerz, there’s a Nobel Prize in the offing if you can demonstrate a causal link between Reagan’s re-election and the timing of Konstantine Chernenko’s death.
Razor #16, I’m saying that: (a) there were long-run systemic crisis tendencies in the USSR which predated Reagan and would sooner or later have required a response, although it was not inevitable and arguably not probable that they would be precisely what transpired from 1985 onwards; (b) whilst Reagan’s policies obviously had to be responded to in some way by the USSR, it was likewise not inevitable that the response would be something more or less like Gorbachev’s peace and disarmament initiatives from 1985 onwards, and the internal reforms he initiated. After all, neither the leadership of Cuba nor that of North Korea nor (until 2003) that of Iraq responded, or is responding, as Gorbachev did to what were and are relatively far greater pressures which successive US administrations have placed on those regimes.
It’s also worth noting that Reagan’s Secretary of State George Schultz has expressed the view that what transpired in the USSR after 1985 was the long-run working out of the policy of containment which had been advocated by the Democrat George Kennan and adopted by Harry Truman and his successors from the late 1940s onwards.
Paul, on the other hand, if the US had been pursuing less aggressive policies then the USSR leadership, including Gorby, might have pursued more business as usual. They might have been then able to string things out another 5-10 years. Who knows? Counter factual history is very difficult.
On the timing on Chernenko’s death, maybe the CIA bumped him off. When you consider what else they were up to at the time (Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan), you couldn’t rule it out. :)
My own view wouldn’t be a long way from that of Paul Norton. In the short to medium term it was clear even in the 1970s that the USSR was not economically sustainable. The adventure in Afghanistan almost certainly hastened the end, but it is unlikely in any event that the USSR could have survived configured substantially as it was in 1975 to the new millennium.
Its infrastructure was crumbling and many of them must surely have wondered how long the ediface could last. If autocrats could be rational, they would have worked out a way to negotiate a phased retreat from their external (to Russia) entanglements and attempted more localised control. They’d have effected an orderly retreat from state involvment in all but those parts of public goods that could not plausibly be delivered outside of the state. They would have sharply liberalised foreign trade and professionalised their bureaucracy and sperated their execituive and judical governance functions. They’d have radically cut back their bloated military apparatus.
That of course would have looked to them a lot like suicide, which is why if anyone thought of it, nobody was game to try carrying it out or persuaded that they could get enough of the others to go with them. Dismounting the tiger was going to be hard. Allowing nature to take its course while clinging on for dear life was probably, from the POV of the autocracy, safer and less costly for all the individuals even if it was worse for them in the long run as an institution. They were old, very old, and in the long run, they were dead. The idea of spending your last days being accountable for bad stuff or at the mercy of even nastier rivals surely didn’t appeal. There really are very few good ways for a brutal autocracy to step down. They almost always have to be pushed aside or overtaken by events. That’s how 1917 happened after all.
I sometimes wonder if the Afghan adventure wasn’t a perverse attempt to speed the end by crippling the military by adopting a policy the old guard would like. Too Macchiavellean? Maybe.
Another key factor was that, unlike the Chinese, the Soviet leadership actually believed their own bullshit.
This is always a great danger for any government.
Forgetfulness is no bragging matter, Japerz. The year was 1984.
Here are some other events that, on the same basis, may have caused the rise of Gorby.
Katz, two highly relevant events which are not on that list are:
* Jo Vallentine was elected to the Senate representing the Nuclear Disarmamant Party.
* The Communist Party of Australia held a Special Congress in November 1984 which resolved to commence discussions on socialist renewal and the formation of a new left party.
However, Hawkie was re-elected as PM in December, which is much closer in time to the rise of Gorby than Ronnie’s re-election.
ERGO…
The voters of Australia caused the rise of Gorby!
Additionally, Peter Garrett failed to be elected to the Senate in 1984 representing the Nuclear Disarmament Party.
My first son was born on 22/4/84, (Lenin’s birthday NS) — so I’m pitching that as the trigger …
I was in Canberra in 1984.(I think.) That has to be what did it.
Michael Holding and Malcolm Marshall kicked our arses in the Test cricket series of 1984-85. That must have been a factor.
Neither Washington nor Moscow, but International Socialism!
I particularly like the story of the KGB librarian / archivist, who – over decades – surrupticiously took mountains of documents to his dahca on weekends and typed copies of them.
To believe that someone, someday, may find them and make use of them – despite all objective facts to the contrary – is just a wonderful example of the human spirit keeping faith, when all else around seems to indicate the absurdity of resistance.
This, for me, is an example of the countless and nameless men and women who did things – anything subversive – to help bring the monster to an end.
That he lived to walk over the border with a briefcase of some of it, would surely have put a smile on his face until the day he died!
Viva!
His name was Vasili Mitrokhin.
The CIA thought he was a plant and told him to piss off.
That makes me smile.
Speaking of the CIA and plants, it would seem that the Sixties were the result of a CIA Conspiracy.
“the Test cricket series of 1984-85″
That’s it.
Kim Hughes corresponds to Alan Border as Chernenko corresponds to Gorbachev.
There was certainly a lot of perestroika in the Border regime, though not a whole lot of glasnost.
Fran, your oldest child is a couple of weeks younger than my youngest, so I claim responsibility for the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Katz @ # 35. Thanks for that name – that’s one story I really will follow up!
I smile at the thought of whether I have been duped by a fictitious man, set up by the KGB to dupe the CIA.
I suppose my basic point is that the ‘big picture’ histories will have been written to dissect the demise of “communist” Russia – allocating credit to those who appear to be the movers and shakers.
Including, that never ending propaganda machine that wants to claim “victory” for that crazed outfit headed by Ronald Reagan!
But the dripping tap of resistance by people going about their ordinary lives, knowing there is a better life for themselves, family, friends and comrades – looking for chinks in the armour and committing acts of subversion when and how they could, all remorselessly set the stage for what Gorbachev may have cut the ribbon on. Fanciful? Maybe.
These nameless and countless people are my heroes.
And in another context, Mamdouh Habib did the same, through all those years he was locked away in the gulag our despicable government countenanced.
It’s what gives us half a chance to rectify any of the messes we find ourselves in – does it not?
And I look forward to chasing down more on Gorbachev as I do think it is a remarkable and largely unavailable story. Some further worthwhile links would be appreciated.
Yes the suggestion that Reagan and the CIA had anything to do with the collapse of the USSR is absurd in the light of samizdat. Ideological cold war warriors usually know little legitimate history.
I loathed Reagan and all his works, but the Soviet’s reaction to his rearmament policies did in fact add substantially to the strain on the Soviet economy and led to consequent falling living standards. It’s too much to say that US rearmament was the cause of the Soviet collapse but it was certainly one factor, and it’s pretty foolish to deny it.
As I’ve often said in other contexts spending too much on “defence” actually undermines national security – and the Soviets, in a vain attempt to be a superpower, were spending well over a quarter of national output on defence.
Mind you, Reagan’s spending spree put a strain on the US economy too – the sustained budget deficits it led to were the ultimate cause of the early 90s recession – as well as putting us all in serious danger of nuclear war. And an arms-race induced collapse of the USSR wasn’t deliberate US strategy anyway, but rather a fortuitous outcome; Reagan had the good luck of optimistic fools all his life, and it didn’t fail him here.
I don’t think so.
Indeed, after 1985, Gorbachev much reduced Soviet military expenditure. From 1985 to 1991 the Soviet economy grew rapidly.
The graph and discussion here suggests that economic failure could not have precipitated the end of the Soviet Union.
Note that the graph indicates unprecedentedly rapid growth in the Soviet economy after 1985.
However, that does not preclude the possibility that the inability of the Soviet economy to satisfy rising economic expectations may have played a hand in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Indeed, the period of economic stagnation as indicated in the above referred to graph occurred in the late 1970s.
What was happening to Soviet public expenditures around that time?
Oh yes, the Soviet Union was building a monster naval base at Cam Ranh Bay, [South] Vietnam.
That could not happen until after the US puppets were defeated in 1975.
Thereafter the Soviet Union spent itself into serious imperial overreach.
Could it not be argued, therefore, that Gerald Ford, by refusing to prop up his Saigon puppets, set the scene for the exhaustion of the Soviet economy?
Is Gerald Ford in fact the unheralded strategic genius who precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union by cutting his own puppets’ strings?
Ronald Reagan? Pffft!
Gerry is da man!
When Nixon ended the gold standard (~1971) he ushered in a period of global price instability. Price and monetary instability is toxic in a capitalist economy but lethal in a large centrally planned economy.
In history it’s easy to get lost in the difference between necessary, sufficient and contributory causes.
Also:
“Cause and effect are easily distinguished, when they occur in succession; but are often confounded, when the operation is continuous and simultaneous.” — Jean-Baptiste Say.
Tis a peculiar discussion about the collapse of the USSR that attributes the collapse to external causes (gold standards, US policy intervention etc) and neglects the agency of the citizens of that benighted regime. They’d had enough, support for a centralised economy ceased, the history was far too bloody to be minimised and the repression of freedoms we take for granted too entrenched to be tolerable. When deeply cynical and funny food queue jokes characterise a regime then it is over because the people inhabiting the structures literally could stomach it no longer. It is no surprise at all that many ranking officers in the NKVD went on to become the new entrepeneurs of the period of crude capital accumulation or the gangstas of Europe. Under the Soviet regime those security agencies always attracted the sort of sociopaths who flourish wherever the opportunities for predation are strongest.
Russian tanks roll again, well almost.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/georgia/7442366/Russia-invasion-spoof-report-spreads-panic-in-Georgia.html
Word, AN.
A revolution of rising expectations swept important groups in Soviet society during the 1980s.
The young were particularly attached to the promise of these expectations. Revolutions in communication gave Soviet citizens for the first time the opportunity to perceive the freedoms of the West. Rock music was a particularly strong agent of these expectations.
The KGB was flat out during the 1980s not tracking down the influences of dissidents so much as attempting to staunch the inflow of Pink Floyd, Led Zepp, and Michael Jackson.
Soviet culture was stodgy and threadbare by comparison. And young people were angry that they could not listen to this music and to adopt openly the culture and lifestyles that went with it.
No, he didn’t, Katz. The estimates that I’ve seen suggest that Soviet military spending neither materially increased nor decreased as a share of GDP in the 1980s. No credit to Reagan or Gorbachev on that score.
As dd noted, however, Soviet military spending was at all times a severe strain on the brittle Soviet economy.
No, it didn’t.
No, they don’t.
No, it doesn’t. Check the data – they do not mean what you think they mean. Your source, a Wikipedia article, was written by an economic illiterate.
Sure, have it both ways.
No, it’s tosh. Cam Ranh Bay had a negligible impact on overall Soviet defence spending.
Really, Anthony? Which “ranking officers”? I can’t think of a single Russian entrepreneur who was a silovik.
Did you see these estimates in your dreams RRRRR? Or did the Angel Moroni bring them to you on golden tablets?
And what do these data mean?
Source?
RRRRR @45: what, haven’t you heard of Vladimir Putin?
Close, Lolkatz, close.
In fact, ’twas the Angel Baloney wot delivered unto me Easterly and Fischer’s analysis of The Soviet Economic Decline and the WMEAT report of the US State Dep’t, borne aloft on wings of carbon fibre, with a little help from a droogy drogue.
What’s your source?
Not a lot, given they track nominal GDP in USD terms, not real GDP at a real exchange rate. The person who wrote your Wikipedia article was economically illiterate, but YOU know the difference between nominal and real growth, don’t you, Lolkatz?
See above.
I have indeed, Anthony. However, I’ve been heretofore unaware of his entrepreneurial escapades. Please enlighten me.
La Ruée au Larousse du Roux Russe
Katz
Katz, since you are the one making the big claim the onus is on you, and not fyodor, to provide your sources and prove your claim.
(Hint: They weren’t building a monster base at Cam Ranh Bay. The Americans had already built it. They just moved in, in a very limited way, probably to annoy the Chinese and everyone else in East Asia, as well as getting a longed for all-weather port in the Pacific.)
In 1996 the Vietnamese offered to rent the base to the Americans- again probably to annoy the Chinese- but on that I’ll let you do your own research.
These services don’t come cheap. Nothing like putting old school skills on the market and at a good price I’d wager. Follow your own nose comrade.
That link seems to be a list of allegedly state-sponsored executions, attempted assassinations, and spurious legal proceedings leading to the seizure of private assets by the state rather than evidence of Putin’s personal entrepreneurship. The only entrepreneur mentioned,Khodorkovsky,languishes in a Siberian gulag.
Heh – Gogol gadget! But I digest…
Not seeing any entrepreneurialism there, Anthony. Would you like a third attempt at substantiating your assertion?
Nitpicking again:
As the NKVD was merged into the NKGD/MGB in 1946, and assuming that a “ranking officer” even after the Great Patriotic War would have had to have been in their thirties, this would make the cohort you’re talking about at least 75 years old. Not the most entrepreneurial of ages.