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THE EVIL EMPIRE DISAPPEARS

Then Gorbachev tore down that wall. . . .

For more than forty years, the United States and the Soviet Union stared each other down. It was a strategic stalemate between ideologies: democracy vs. communism, free-market capitalism against Marxist central planning.

Both sides had massive armies, air forces, and fleets ready to fight a war that did not happen. Nuclear missiles were always ready to destroy the other side in twenty minutes. The red button was never pushed.

Americans are very familiar with their side of the story, from the Berlin Airlift to the presidency of Ronald Reagan. We thought the Soviets were acting from strength, but we never saw their weakness. Their side of the story was a mystery, which is why the fall of the Soviet Union was a surprise.

No one saw it coming. How did it happen?

The answer rests with one man: Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union. In the US and Europe, he is admired for having the courage to change his country, even though the result was a noble failure. In Russia today, he is despised for giving away the Soviet Empire.

Communism Reaches Its Limits

The Soviets looked like they were winning the Cold War in 1980. They had invaded Afghanistan and were backing newly won red regimes in Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola, and Nicaragua. Wherever communism advances, it shall not retreat, proclaimed Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

The US was in disarray. The Americans lost the war in Vietnam, screwed up the Mayaguez Rescue, saw its pet dictators overthrown everywhere, and was now paralyzed by the hostage crisis in Iran. The US even accepted nuclear parity with the Soviet Union in two successive arms control treaties. American power was either checked or clearly in retreat, depending how you looked at it.

But appearances were deceiving. The Soviet economy had stopped growing. It had gotten this far by ripping economic growth out of the people through threats, weak incentives, and finally mass deception. “They pretend to pay us, so we pretend to work,” was how one joke described it.

The capstone of this rickety structure was the Politburo of the Communist Party, headed by Brezhnev. The cronies and hacks running the ministries were either old or ill. And they were dropping like flies.

Brezhnev kicked the bucket in 1982. Yuri Andropov followed him to the office, and eventually to the grave in 1984. Next came party hack Konstantin Chernenko, who became general secretary of the party while already in ill health, then shuffled off this mortal coil in 1985.

Mikhail Gorbachev, then a youthful fifty-four, won the game of musical chairs that typified Soviet succession. Gorbachev knew he was being dealt a bad hand. To revive the economy, he had to stage a revolution from above.

When the United States hits a bad patch like this, it usually reinvents itself, like it did after the Civil War and the Depression. That was not the case in the Soviet Union. Its last big change was the Russian Revolution of 1917. Gorbachev wanted to change a system that was built to stay the same.

Appearances and Buzzwords

Gorbachev began his premiership by trying to renew workplace discipline. This went nowhere. His decision to quit the unwinnable war in Afghanistan made sense, but could not be implemented until an Afghan army was trained to take the place of Russian soldiers. A summit conference with Reagan in Reykjavík, Iceland, proved fruitless, as neither leader could find a way to cut nuclear arsenals. The massive Soviet defense budget would continue dragging down the economy.

Gorbachev changed course in 1987 by announcing a policy of glasnost, or openness. No longer would the Soviet Union control the media and the press. Gorbachev was banking on the media’s exposure of the Soviet Union’s flaws to set up the climate for his next policy, perestroika, or restructuring. Some kind of limited free-market reforms would be instituted to jump-start the moribund economy.

But Gorbachev, a lifelong Communist, hadn’t a clue as to what a free-market economy looked like or how it would work. The Communist Party was filled with conservative deadwood, and they resisted change. The reforms did nothing to alleviate the shortages of just about everything. Russians still lined up to get milk and bread. The Communist Party maintained its monopoly on everything.

To bypass Communist resistance at home, Gorbachev put in place a parliament and allowed people to elect candidates from multiple parties. To remove the American threat, he pursued a policy of acquiescence with the West. He even signed a treaty with Reagan to zero nuclear arsenals in Europe.

Don’t threaten anybody. This policy would soon be put to a brutal test.

The Year That Changed Everything

Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, and Czechoslovakia were the captive states of the Soviet Union. They acted as a buffer, keeping NATO away from Russia while the latter based multiple-tank armies there—aimed at Western Europe’s core.

The people living in these countries were not fond of the Soviet “presence.” Russian troops brutally suppressed the Hungarian uprising of 1956. They occupied Czechoslovakia in 1968. They almost invaded Poland in the early 1980s, backing off when the Polish army staged a coup d’état to suppress a trade union movement.

These peoples of Eastern Europe noticed Gorbachev loosening the Communist grip on the Soviet Union. So in 1989, they made their move. One by one, mass gatherings in public squares and mass movements of people over the border to the West happened. The Berlin Wall finally came down, chipped to pieces by protesters as border guards watched, awaiting orders that never came.

Gorbachev did not call out the Red Army to stop any of it. By year’s end, all six nations had non-Communist governments. East Germany reunified with West Germany, with US president George H. W. Bush brokering the deal.

Gorbachev had the Soviet parliament elect him as president of the USSR, diminishing his role as chairman of the Communist Party. He then worked on loosening the relationship between the Soviet Union and its component “republics.” A Russian federated republic would be created. The subordinate republics would be free to do as they wished, but Russia would retain control over the military and foreign policy. The Communist Party’s monopoly on power would end.

The true Communists had finally had enough.

Coup de Blah

In August 1991, Vice President Gennady Yanayev, Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov, and KGB Chief Vladimir Kryuchkov staged a coup d’état to overthrow the Gorbachev regime. They decreed that all political activity was to cease and all newspapers were to be shut down. Gorbachev was placed under house arrest while vacationing in the Crimea.

The plotters hoped the Russian people would rise up and join their cause. And the masses did rise to form a ring around the Russian White House, Russia’s parliament building—to protect their democratically elected government. Special forces dispatched to take the building chose not to. Russian Federation president Boris Yeltsin stood atop a tank, speaking to the crowd, encouraging resistance.

In three days, the coup collapsed due to popular indifference. The plotters were arrested. Gorbachev returned to Moscow, his grip on power gravely weakened. The coup proved Gorbachev was in charge of nothing.

The recently elected Yeltsin was now the de facto leader of Russia. By year’s end, the component republics of the Soviet Union, like Ukraine and Kazakhstan, declared independence. Their agreement with Yeltsin, known as the Belavezha Accords, was ratified by Russia’s soviet (council), declaring the foundation of the Commonwealth of Independent States on December 8, 1991, as the Soviet Union’s legal successor state. But it would not control the military or foreign policies of the former Soviet republics.

All Gorbachev could do was resign from his meaningless presidency on December 25. The red banner of the Soviet Union that flew over Lenin’s tomb was hauled down. A tricolor Russian flag was raised.

And with that final whimper, the Soviet Union disappeared.

Say You Want a Revolution . . .

For the United States, seeing the Soviet Union vanquished without a fight was great! This was a hundred times better than fighting World War III. And it left the US as the world’s sole superpower.

What followed next was a hundred times worse.

Yeltsin captained an unsteady Russia from crisis to crisis. It was another “Time of Troubles” for Russia, much like the lost decades before the Romanov Dynasty came to power in the early 1600s. Only this time, Russia was not being invaded by foreign hordes.

Russia lost a war to insurgents in Chechnya. A currency crisis in 1998 gutted the nascent capitalist economy, now run by former Communist hacks. Corruption and chaos were common. An ill Yeltsin chose a former KGB unknown named Vladimir Putin to succeed him as president in 1999.

Putin understood how to steal and use power. It took a while, but he turned Russia from a democracy back into a dictatorship, and has vexed the West with armed interventions in Georgia (2008), Ukraine (2014), and Syria (2015).

Now it becomes clear that Gorbachev’s failure was not such a good thing after all. If Gorbachev had successfully rebuilt the Soviet Union as a decentralized state with a market economy, Russia could have staged a stable, successful comeback. Gorbachev’s reelection, followed by orderly succession, would have cemented democracy as Russia’s form of government.

Putin would have remained obscure, more a victim of history, when the Berlin Wall came down and communism disappeared. Instead, those events shaped the man now running Russia. And that sore loser wants to make Russia great again—at our expense.