Greg Gaut: Rewriting the history of the end of the Cold War
[Greg Gaut teaches Russian and European history at St. Mary’s University of Minnesota in Winona.]
We fight each war twice — once in real life, and a second time with words, as contending forces try to mold our collective memory of the conflict. The Vietnam War, for example, ended decades ago, and today the United States enjoys friendly relations with the communist government of Vietnam. But Americans still battle over the meaning of the war and what lessons it teaches. The same is true of the Cold War, the great standoff between the United States and the USSR, which provided the rationale for American intervention in Vietnam.
The battles for collective memory have turned out better for conservative pundits than the actual wars. Everything went wrong in Vietnam, but conservatives have convinced many Americans that the military could have won the war if it had not been “stabbed in the back” by the press, the antiwar movement and the Democrats.
The Cold War presents a different scenario. Here conservatives claim credit for winning. Ronald Reagan, they would like us to believe, brought the USSR to its knees. The conservative view of history has become the conventional wisdom of the mainstream press, textbooks and even some social studies standards that guide how history is presented in high schools.
Their familiar story goes like this: The Soviet Union was a totalitarian dictatorship, and therefore unreformable from within. But its socialist economy was failing, and when Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, the country was reaching a crisis. Reagan’s military buildup, especially the Strategic Defense Initiative, forced the Soviet leadership to surrender. Mikhail Gorbachev had no choice but to withdraw from Afghanistan, free Eastern Europe and reduce nuclear arms. When Reagan said in Berlin, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” the Soviets quaked in their boots and Germany was united. Then Boris Yeltsin led a democratic revolution and the subsequent “collapse of communism” in 1991 was a victory for Western-style capitalism. Yeltsin and his appointed successor, Vladimir Putin, then waged two bloody wars against Chechnya, but these were a legitimate part of the “global war on terror.”
The two books discussed here challenge this triumphalist mythology. In Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective, Archie Brown, the distinguished Oxford University specialist on Soviet politics, demonstrates that Gorbachev rather than Reagan deserves most of the credit for ending the Cold War. In A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin’s Russia, Anna Politkovskaya, a courageous Russian journalist, makes painfully clear that Russia is moving away from rather than toward democracy. Perhaps this is why she was murdered at the entrance to her apartment building Oct. 7, 2006, one of at least 12 journalists killed in Russia since Putin came to power.
Archie Brown’s 1996 book, The Gorbachev Factor, is the standard work on the remarkable transformation of the Soviet Union that began when Gorbachev was chosen as general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985. In his new book, he analyzes Gorbachev’s restructuring of the Soviet system from the historical perspective of two decades.
Mr. Brown deflates many myths, starting with the notion that the USSR was near collapse in the 1980s. To the contrary, the country had full employment, low foreign debt, excellent credit, no serious civil disorders, a formidable military and thousands of nuclear weapons. The economy was stagnating, but a real breakdown, Mr. Brown thinks, was still a few decades in the future. In any case, there is no reason to expect that an economic crisis would have resulted in the democratization at home and mutual cooperation abroad championed by Gorbachev. More likely, the Communist Party would have retreated into repressive Stalinism.
How can Gorbachev’s liberalizing turn be explained? Mr. Brown believes that the answer lies in the realm of ideas. Overlooked by the U.S. “intelligence community,” the supposedly monolithic Communist Party had many members who held divergent views based on differing experiences....
Gorbachev was the most visionary politician of the second half of the 20th century. He believed that the long-term interests of humanity took precedence over the short-term goals of the government he led, and he mostly walked the talk. The fact that the leader of a superpower could transcend narrow national interests is one of the great surprises of history. He is the standard against which we should measure the candidates currently auditioning to be the president of the only remaining superpower.
Read entire article at National Catholic Reporter
We fight each war twice — once in real life, and a second time with words, as contending forces try to mold our collective memory of the conflict. The Vietnam War, for example, ended decades ago, and today the United States enjoys friendly relations with the communist government of Vietnam. But Americans still battle over the meaning of the war and what lessons it teaches. The same is true of the Cold War, the great standoff between the United States and the USSR, which provided the rationale for American intervention in Vietnam.
The battles for collective memory have turned out better for conservative pundits than the actual wars. Everything went wrong in Vietnam, but conservatives have convinced many Americans that the military could have won the war if it had not been “stabbed in the back” by the press, the antiwar movement and the Democrats.
The Cold War presents a different scenario. Here conservatives claim credit for winning. Ronald Reagan, they would like us to believe, brought the USSR to its knees. The conservative view of history has become the conventional wisdom of the mainstream press, textbooks and even some social studies standards that guide how history is presented in high schools.
Their familiar story goes like this: The Soviet Union was a totalitarian dictatorship, and therefore unreformable from within. But its socialist economy was failing, and when Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, the country was reaching a crisis. Reagan’s military buildup, especially the Strategic Defense Initiative, forced the Soviet leadership to surrender. Mikhail Gorbachev had no choice but to withdraw from Afghanistan, free Eastern Europe and reduce nuclear arms. When Reagan said in Berlin, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” the Soviets quaked in their boots and Germany was united. Then Boris Yeltsin led a democratic revolution and the subsequent “collapse of communism” in 1991 was a victory for Western-style capitalism. Yeltsin and his appointed successor, Vladimir Putin, then waged two bloody wars against Chechnya, but these were a legitimate part of the “global war on terror.”
The two books discussed here challenge this triumphalist mythology. In Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective, Archie Brown, the distinguished Oxford University specialist on Soviet politics, demonstrates that Gorbachev rather than Reagan deserves most of the credit for ending the Cold War. In A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin’s Russia, Anna Politkovskaya, a courageous Russian journalist, makes painfully clear that Russia is moving away from rather than toward democracy. Perhaps this is why she was murdered at the entrance to her apartment building Oct. 7, 2006, one of at least 12 journalists killed in Russia since Putin came to power.
Archie Brown’s 1996 book, The Gorbachev Factor, is the standard work on the remarkable transformation of the Soviet Union that began when Gorbachev was chosen as general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985. In his new book, he analyzes Gorbachev’s restructuring of the Soviet system from the historical perspective of two decades.
Mr. Brown deflates many myths, starting with the notion that the USSR was near collapse in the 1980s. To the contrary, the country had full employment, low foreign debt, excellent credit, no serious civil disorders, a formidable military and thousands of nuclear weapons. The economy was stagnating, but a real breakdown, Mr. Brown thinks, was still a few decades in the future. In any case, there is no reason to expect that an economic crisis would have resulted in the democratization at home and mutual cooperation abroad championed by Gorbachev. More likely, the Communist Party would have retreated into repressive Stalinism.
How can Gorbachev’s liberalizing turn be explained? Mr. Brown believes that the answer lies in the realm of ideas. Overlooked by the U.S. “intelligence community,” the supposedly monolithic Communist Party had many members who held divergent views based on differing experiences....
Gorbachev was the most visionary politician of the second half of the 20th century. He believed that the long-term interests of humanity took precedence over the short-term goals of the government he led, and he mostly walked the talk. The fact that the leader of a superpower could transcend narrow national interests is one of the great surprises of history. He is the standard against which we should measure the candidates currently auditioning to be the president of the only remaining superpower.