I’d like to thank Mr. Auster for posting this amusing piece. I may shock him, however, by pointing out that the liberal rant may not have been as far off as it seems at first sight… though as usual this does not help the liberal case in the end. A substantial number of experts on the subject (Odom, Pryce-Jones, Keep) hold that the Soviets, while in serious trouble by the early 80s, were not in fact in the terminal phase of a crisis either then or when Gorbachev came to power. Rather, it was Gorbachev’s incompetence, more than his benevolence, that produced “reforms” that completely wrecked the system in a short time. Without him, the Soviet system might have stumbled on for some decades more. I may speculate that the reason liberals like G. so much is that he was just the sort of person who can turn a crisis into a catastrophe. Not everyone can do that.. their ideal of a statesman, I suppose. Those who lived under him had less use for him.

Before anyone reads the above as a suggestion that what Reagan did was not necessary, let me emphasize that that is emphatically not the case. Rather the reverse. The Soviets were NOT near the end of their rope in 1980 and their military buildup had to be countered. Nobody could have counted on a Gorbachev coming to power and it had to be assumed that the Cold War would go on more or less as usual. It was Reagan’s merit that he saw beyond a simple military buildup and sought something better— the much derided SDI— and measures to undermine the Soviet system — that offered hope even if the Cold War did go on. Moreover, the pressures put on the Soviets undoubtedly contributed to the downfall of the system, possibly above all by discouraging a more reckless foreign policy, which might have started with an early overthrow of Gorbachev…

But Mr. Levine leaves out _why_ the Politburo chose Gorbachev as leader, and _why_ Gorbachev embarked on and persisted in his (from the Communist point of view) disastrous reforms. It was because the USSR was in serious economic straits, which seemed even more serious under the pressure of the U.S. military build-up under Reagan. The Soviets felt they had to try drastic measures to make their system more productive, and as a direct result of that effort, their system cracked.

This would not have happened without Reagan. Imagine if a liberal, or a Nixon or a Ford, had been president in the ’80s. They would not have pushed the Soviets so hard, they would have made it possible for the Soviets to get various kinds of economic assistance from the West, perhaps, and the Soviet system would have survived.

My post of 4:50 was responding to Mr. Levine’s of 4:38.

Possibly I did not make myself clear enough! Mr. Auster and I are not that far apart. External pressures, thanks to Reagan, did help worsen the Soviet economic problem and encouraged the elite to bring Gorbachev to power and, perhaps more important, tolerate him till it was too late. (Apparently, however, he had long been the chosen heir of Andropov, and was passed over for Chernenko by a narrow margin) Moreover, I suspect he is right that a more liberal administration in the US — or even a Bush 41 administration — might have enabled the Soviets to extract enough aid to get by. I believe it is, however, an error to think that the Soviets were already tottering in 1981, one that can actually lead to underestimating the Reagan achievement.

I was responding to Mr. Auster’s post of 4:50!

Responding to Mr. Levine’s of 4:57, I don’t think Reagan or any supporter of Reagan said that the USSR was “tottering” in 1981. The USSR had profound, systemic vulnerabilities, economic, moral, and ideological, and if it was pressed, pressed materially, morally, and ideologically, something would crack. That was Reagan’s insight. This supposed intellectual lightweight saw something that no other leader in the world even imagined, and then he made it happen. It’s awe-inspiring. It’s hard to think of any parallel to it in history.

And then to think that Reagan lived to see the fall of the Soviet empire, and then the fall of the Soviet Union itself, so that in 1992 at the Republican national convention he was able to say: “I have seen the birth of Communism, and I have seen the death of Communism.”

And it is a moral and Christian parable about the nature of evil. Reagan saw the evil (which most others did not see and they hated him for seeing it), and he also understood the _nature_ of the evil, that it is false and unreal, so that if it is named and resisted, it will be defeated. If it is not named and resisted, it can go on forever and cause great destruction.