The Fall of the USSR

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"William F. Hummel" wrote:

> Henry I can't believe you would write such stuff as this.
> >
> >The USSR also made impressive gains in the 1920s.  Reagan's star war arms race broke the USSR > >and Mao's China was held back entirely by US embargo and isolation of China.
>
> USSR broke because its command economy and totally corrupt political system couldn't compete in the > civilian goods and quality of life arena with the western democracies, and the Kremlin couldn't hide the > facts from its citizens any longer.  Why else would a national glasnost develop within?  The collapse of > the Soviets was inevitable.  Star Wars was a joke and Soviet scientists knew it.  As an engineer, I > worked on an aspect of it for the US, and know a little something about it.

> Your own credibility on other issues is placed in question with such stuff as you have been writing > lately.
>
> William

Well, let us hear from some Americans of impeccable credibility:
 

The Fall of the USSR

"The Soviet Union is not now, nor will it be during the next decade, in the throes of a true systematic crisis, for it boasts enormous unused reserves of political and social stability that suffice to endure the deepest difficulties."
--Seweryn Bialer, Professor of Political Science, Columbia University, Foreign Affairs Magazine, 1982/3.

"I found more goods in the shops, more food in the markets, more cars on the street ... those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse, ready with one small push to go over the brink are wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves."
--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., 1982.

"All evidence indicates that the Reagan administration has abandoned both containment and detonate for a very different objective: destroying the Soviet Union as a world power and possibly even its Communist system. [This is a] potentially fatal form of Sovietphobia ... a pathological rather than a healthy response to the Soviet Union."
--Stephen Cohen, Princeton University Sovietologist, 1983.

"That the Soviet system has made great material progress in recent years is evident both from the statistics and from the general urban scene...One sees it in the appearance of well-being of the people on the streets...and the general aspect of restaurants, theaters, and shops... Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower." --John Kenneth Galbraith, Professor of Economics, Harvard University, 1984.

"On the economic front, for the first time in its history the Soviet leadership was able to pursue successfully a policy of guns and butter as well as growth ... The Soviet citizen-worker, peasant, and professional - has become accustomed in the Brezhnev period to an uninterrupted upward trend in his well-being ..."
--John Kenneth Galbraith, Professor of Economics, Harvard University,
New Yorker Magazine, 1984.

"What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth... The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth."
--Paul Samuelson, MIT, Nobel laureate in economics, 1985.

"It's clear that the ideologies of Communism, socialism and capitalism are all in trouble."
--James Reston, New York Times, 1985.

"Can economic command significantly compress and accelerate the growth process? The remarkable performance of the Soviet Union suggests that it can. In 1920 Russia was but a minor figure in the economic councils of the world. Today it is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States."
--Lester Thurow, Professor of Economics, MIT,
The Economic Problem, 1989.

All the above were correct observations in their time because no one expected the US would engage in economic war against the USSR.

Then, the Reagan coordinated defense policies kicked in:

"Ladies and gentlemen, if it had not been for the Reagan defense buildup, if the United States had not demonstrated that it is willing not only to stand up for freedom but to devote considerable sums of money to defending it, we  probably would not be sitting here today having a free discussion between Russians and Americans."
--Boris Pinsker, Soviet Economist.

"American policy in the 1980s was a catalyst for the collapse of the Soviet Union."
--Oleg Kalugin, former KGB general (Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union, page xi.)

"[Reagan administration policies] were a major factor in the demise of the Soviet system."
--Yevgenny Novikov, former senior staff member of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee (CPCC) (Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union, page xi.)

In a introduction to Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union, Newt Gringich wrote:

Much of the news media and liberal academia would have you believe that Gorbachev was the hero who modernized the Soviet Union and liberated it from the past.  Schweizer outlines in detail the long strategic effort to defeat the Soviet Union through a multiplicity of specific strategies.  From delaying and minimizing the natural gas pipeline to western Europe, to working with the Saudis to bring down the price of oil (the number one source of hard currency for the Soviet Union), to actively working to cut off technology from reaching the Soviet Union, to launching an arms race of high technology systems that would bloc obsolesce the old systems and force the Soviets into an exhausting effort to keep up, to financing opposition forces in Afghanistan, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Central America.

Now, several Reagan advisors have written that they advised Reagan that in the 1980s the Soviets had more planes and tanks.  When Reagan asked what the US had more of, the answer was money.  Then the strategy was born to out spend the USSR, resulting in the biggest deficit in history.  The strategy worked, but it was not communist ideology that did the USSR in. It was economic war from the US.

As for China, I have already answered and the subject is now off limit on this list. My final post on China was rejected.

Henry C.K. Liu