Here’s an interesting quote from Mikhail Gorbachev to the Soviet Politburo in 1987:
“Gentlemen, comrades, do not be concerned about all you hear about Glasnost and Perestroika and democracy in the coming years. They are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no significant internal changes in the Soviet Union, other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm the Americans and let them fall asleep. We want to accomplish three things:
One, we want the Americans to withdraw conventional forces from Europe.
Two, we want them to withdraw nuclear forces from Europe.
Three, we want the Americans to stop proceeding with Strategic Defense Initiative.”
I can’t vouch for its authenticity, but it doesn’t sound like the sentiments of a man who was so dead set on democratizing the Soviet Union that he would have done so without any encouragement from the outside. (via The Argus )
So the historical revisionism is setting in, evinced by the unified theory of Perestroika that maintains Gorby shut down the Soviet system out of the goodness of his heart and over the objections of a stubborn cold-warrior Reagan who actually wanted the MAD to continue. That’s not the way I remember it, of course. The advent of the SDI gave the US a first-strike capability, and Gorby didn’t want to go down in history as the Communist in Charge when the US attacked the Soviet Union and took it down by force.The technical lag between the US and the Soviet Bloc opened into a wide chasm in the mid-80s, which I saw up close in Singapore where I met various Eastern Bloc engineers who were running around the island trying to scoop up the technology necessary to built a credible Personal Computer and failing.
The modus was like this: each satellite country had responsibility for a part of the system, the Soviets the CPUs, the East Germans the hard drives, the Bulgarians the keyboards, the Czechs the DRAMs, the Poles the floppies, etc. When the 286 was in full-scale production along with 20MB hard drives, and the 32-bit 386 was sampling in the US, the Soviet CPU was a slow, 8-bit 8088 equivalent and the East German hard drive was a 5MB model that crashed all the time. The Polish floppy was three generations behind, and the Bulgarian keyboard had to be build on Hong Kong switches. The cost was incredible, and the people had new access to videotapes from the West that showed a lifestyle vastly out of their reach as well. The evidence that their system was a failure could no longer be hidden, and the people were restless for change.
The Soviets and their stooges knew full well that they would never be able to bridge the technical gap, and that its inevitable outcome would be the destruction of their system, peacefully or otherwise. So they did the only sensible thing, laid down their arms and asked Reagan and Thatcher for help in transforming their system, knowing that help would be forthcoming.
Without Reagan and SDI, it would have happened anyway, but at least a generation later, and at the cost of many more lives and much more suffering. And that’s why Reagan is considered a saint within the former Soviet bloc today, and a demon within the Postmodern Gulag.
Geez, Richard, you just don’t get politics, do you?
Gorbachev had to say these things, precisely because that power wasn’t concentrated entirely at the top.
The facts of history speak for themselves.
Oh, and in Poland they don’t give such credit to Ronald Reagan, despite what Lech Walesa wrote in Wall Street Journal the other day.
They give credit to themselves, and Carol Wojtila.
Three days in Warsaw and you understand the Poles better than Walesa? I’m amazed by your insight.
While I’m sure you understand the Stalinist system better than I, your statement about power contradicts everything I’ve ever read about it. Where was the power, and why is Gorby still trying to take all the credit for himself?
He appears to be a bitter and angry little man, judging by remarks he’s made in recent days.