Posted 6/9/2004 7:35 PM
How Reagan made Soviet society face its failures
By Leon Aron
Where Ronald Reagan's role in the fall of the Soviet Union is concerned, most obituaries mention the re-armament of America, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and the resistance to Soviet expansion in the Third World. These policies, the story goes, had dramatically increased the cost of global military and political competition with the United States, forcing the Soviet leadership to change its policies.
True enough, as far as it goes. However, this précis leaves out the most important dimension of Reagan's contribution to the collapse of the Soviet Union: the deep impact he had on the self-perception and self-confidence of the Soviet regime.
In the end, every great revolution is about morality and legitimacy. Impoverishment, military defeat or famine alone is never enough. To take only the most recent examples, neither starvation nor food rationing nor a crushing military defeat stopped North Korea, Cuba or Saddam Hussein's Iraq from persisting in irrational and inhumane policies. The change comes only when elites begin to lose faith in the country's direction and their right to rule, and the people soon join in, first in doubt, then in anger and protest.
A singular force
Reagan did more than anyone to delegitimize and demoralize the Soviet Union. Where the arms race, in general, and SDI (a planned space-based anti-ballistic missile system), in particular, are concerned, far more important than the costs was the realization by the Soviet Union's unelected rulers that their science and industry were incapable of matching U.S. technology. Contrary to what the Soviet propaganda stridently asserted at the time, the problem had little to do with their fear of nuclear annihilation.
Instead, for the Soviet Marxists, the impact stemmed from the belief that the economy defined every other aspect of the society and served as the most important barometer of its health and progress. Having long given up on even approaching the standard of living of the U.S., Soviet leaders had considered strategic parity with the U.S. as evidence that theirs still was an economic and political system that provided an alternative and, in the long run, a winning vision of society. By exposing the inability of the Soviet economy to compete in advanced weaponry, Reagan made that evidence increasingly flimsy.
Similarly, the success Reagan fomented with anti-communist resistance in the Third World severely damaged the Soviet rulers' belief that their advances in Africa, Asia and America proved that they were riding the crest of the "wave of history."
Yet, as frequently happens, the crucial trends are intangible and invisible at the time. Enormous as the damage done by the SDI and the anti-communist resistance, Reagan's greatest contribution to the Russian revolution perhaps came from the mere fact that he inflicted his personality and beliefs on the Soviet regime when it was most vulnerable.
In the early 1980s, the Soviet Union was not just repressive and deeply corrupt, as the ruling nomenklatura had delicacies delivered to their posh apartments and dachas, while food was rationed outside Moscow and mothers stood in line for hours to buy milk for their kids. It was a deadlocked and depressed country.
Mikhail Gorbachev's future prime minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, who was by no means a radical, wrote of those years: "The stuffiness in the country has reached the limit: After that, only death...Nothing was done with any care. (We) stole from ourselves, took and gave bribes, lied in the reports, in newspapers, from high podiums, wallowed in our lies, hung medals on one another...The country was drinking itself into the ground."
Reagan's voice of hope
Suddenly, from the relentlessly jammed but occasionally audible foreign broadcasts and from the shrill propaganda, which generations of Russians learned to decipher for a few words of truth, came a voice. Into an airless, oppressive, sunless world that Russian writer and exile Vladimir Nabokov described as "so shoddy, so crabbed and gray" burst this big, charming, handsome American. Sunny, serene, self-confident.
Reagan did not seem to be the least bit impressed by the Soviet Union's 10,000 nuclear missiles, or its 5-million-strong army, or its annual production of more tanks than the rest of the world.
For Reagan, there was no "parity," nuclear or otherwise, between America and the Soviet Union. The former was vastly and permanently superior for one and only reason: Its people were free. As if that were not bad enough, he did not confine these sentiments to private musings. He told the entire world that the "evil empire" was destined for the "trash heap of history."
No one, not even the participants in these events, can be certain today of the exact impact that this unprecedented assault on the legitimacy of the Soviet system had on people's thought and actions. Yet there is little doubt that everything Reagan had said and done in the previous four years was central to the almost palpable sense of foreboding and desperate need for a change: On the evening of March 10, 1985, General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko died in the "Kremlin hospital" in the Moscow suburb of Kuntsevo. The future "godfather of glasnost," Alexander Yakovlev, remembered thinking that day: Tak dal'she zhit' nel'zya. "That's it. We cannot live like this any longer."
A day later, at a Politburo meeting in the Kremlin, without formally asking for the floor, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko got up to nominate Mikhail Gorbachev to the post of general secretary.
The rest, as they say, is history, which Reagan had so profoundly shaped.
Leon Aron, resident scholar and director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life. |
