I was taught that Ronald Reagan ended the cold war and gave us the longest lasting economic boom.
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When i took Russian, we watched a Soviet propaganda film : it bragged about asbestos exports as a sign of Soviet strength, and i think the teachers (one native Russian speaker) perhaps showed it to emphasize what a disaster had already been created (this was shortly pre 2000).
Let's also ignore that little thing that Russia is now doing in Ukraine, and put up a "mission accomplished" banner on the clusterfuck that happened in 1991.
The USSR didn't fall apart because of any goodwill, but it did fall apart because Gorbachev fucked up.
Reagan deserves as much credit for this as Obama does for the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceleand in 2010.
If you disagree, note that the burden of proof is on you here; and you're welcome to point out which specific effects of actions of Reagan's administration caused the collapse of the USSR, along with an explanation why much more severe hardships experienced by people of the USSR in the earlier decades did not.
Having read a couple of Cold War histories, most recently Tony Judt's excellent Postwar, I learned that what's often missing from American pop-level summaries is the work put in by the people behind the Iron Curtain to bring it down -- for examples, the Polish Catholics and union members, and the Czech dissidents such as Vaclav Havel.
Generally American pop-level accounts like to emphasize American agency in what happened.
what?!
It was pretty much the USSR policies that forced them into bankrupcy.... as it did in every other socialist state.
source: am from another former socialist country, that also doesn't exist anymore.
Gorbachev played the critical part. He let the East European satellite states go rather than sending troops to restore status quo. Within the USSR, his reforms gave the democratic opposition some room to breathe. Once Gorbachev's power started to fail, that allowed the opposition to win, rather than the hardliners who attempted a coup.
With another kind of leader on the opposite side, Reagan's policies could have won but not ended the cold war. The USSR could have become something like North Korea, but much bigger. It would have been stable but no longer a global superpower. (That may also be where Russia is headed today, as there are no viable alternatives to Putin's regime.)
(It's also hard to assert that generally: Russia is by many metrics worse off than it was under the USSR, while most of the rest of Central and Eastern Europe is better off.)
The Cold War wasn't a good thing, but it didn't have to end with the dissolution of the USSR, and the dissolution of the USSR didn't have to end with a coup, followed by chaos, which nevertheless kept all the appartchiks in charge.
30 years later, we can see how the people who were in charge of the USSR are the reason if fell apart: because they are still running Russia, and are running it into the ground (Putin, Shoigu, Lavrov, etc are all USSR apparatchiks).
Thieves and criminals, the whole lot of them.
The USSR ate itself, because it didn't succeed in figuring out a way to refresh the power structures. And so that fish rotted starting from its head.
I was adding to your comment, perhaps too tangentially - the GP remark may suggest that USA benefited more than USSR.
> It's also hard to assert that generally: Russia is by many metrics worse off than it was under the USSR
Economical, cultural, political environment were greatly improved as the direct consequences of the end of the Cold War, up until ~2010, so I'm not sure why do you think the Russia is worse off. What metrics do you choose?
In 1995, eastern europeans were so thankful to be free from Russia.
In 2035, you can expect eastern europeans to be thankful again. Not sure who'd it be this time.
The US has many "superfunds" dedicated to cleaning up "cold war radioactivity" issues.
A bit more info on the Quebec asbestos issues. Canada didnt stop exporting it until 2012.
" Canada led world production of asbestos before the country’s two largest mines (both in Quebec) halted operations in 2012. The closure marked the suspension of the country’s asbestos production for the first time in 130 years. "
Exporting this wasn't unique to the Soviets.
> What metrics do you choose?
I was thinking of life expectancy and the generally high overall mortality rate in Russia, some of which is attributable to rising alcoholism. But it looks like their life expectancy has also improved somewhat over the last decade, so I can't claim that unequivocally.
We may almost always wish things were better than they actually were. For example, USA went through a minor recession at the end of the Cold War - was it necessary? In case of USSR things could be much worse - some argue we pass now through the violent ending of that Cold War, in a form of actual "hot" war, partially because some Soviet people didn't reflect enough on the events of XX century.
Hardship is something USSR went through many times - until it didn't. And there were many reasons, on many levels, why the situation in late 1980-s was bleak. What was with the oil prices at the time?
> The USSR didn't fall apart because of any goodwill, but it did fall apart because Gorbachev fucked up.
One of his phrases was "socialism with a human face". Before Gorbachev, Andropov tried to "rule as it should be done", but, as a popular joke states, "has proven that if you rule seriously, you can't live longer than a year". Stalinist times have ended, and more soft, Brezhnev-like ruling turned out to be too incapable. Gorbachev managed to do few mistakes, while trying to rule mostly well - and ended up with opening the country, in the form of many states, to the beneficial external world.
Not sure which Eastern Europeans you mean, but I can assure you most of those 150 mil people were not happy they got conquered by nazis or commies, it was the same amount of genocide and societal damage from both sides.
Why do you think the key phrase of the end of the cold war is "Mr. Gobachev, tear down this wall!". Reagan challenged him to dismantle something that they both knew couldn't stand, and that would result in the eventual collapse of the GDR (it was, after all, built to save the GDR from all of its citizens voting with their feet to abandon communism and leave for the west). Ironically, the "domino theory" ended up being correct, but it was the east and the soviets that couldn't sustain the effects of satellite states being lost, not Asia and America.
Gorbachev gets a lot of credit for not behaving like his predecessors had, with violent crackdowns and marching armies whenever the rule of the party was threatened. Most say this was due to Gorbachev not understanding - but I think it's simpler. Gorbachev simply knew that the state could no longer do so - and in fact the one time he tried, it completely failed on him.
Gorbachev also lied (and changed his story) vis-a-vis NATO expansion something that Putin has used to build a "NATO betrayed us story" to justify his invasion of Ukraine much as Hitler used the "stab in the back".
Does that take away from Gorbachev? Maybe not, but Gorbachev was presiding over a failing state the second he took power. He simply rode it out, with as little violence as possible. That's something to be celebrated.
https://www.rferl.org/a/nato-expansion-russia-mislead/312636...
That's a very American perspective. I mostly associate that quote with Civilization V, because it wasn't a big deal at the time, at least in Finland. The speech itself didn't receive that much attention in 1987. When the Berlin Wall fell, the scene that really grabbed people's attention was people breaking the wall with hammers. And if had to choose a single scene to symbolize the end of the cold war, it would be Yeltsin giving a speech on top of a tank.
Applying diplomatic and military pressure to break the Soviet block was not a new thing in the 1980s. The closest it came to succeeding was in 1968. Reforms and the protests didn't lead anywhere at the time, because the USSR had the will and the resources to respond decisively. The situation was different in the late 1980s, thanks to Gorbachev's reforms and Reagan's economic pressure.
The dissolution could have happened afterwards, in an organized manner, as a process — not a cataclysm.
That way we could have ended up with the new countries not having old apparatchiks as little tsars. Maybe we'd have an independent Yakutia, Siberia, Tatarstan too
The problems it caused to people in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and many other former Soviet republics aren't minor by any account — and they are a direct reason for why Putin managed to hold power for so long.
The way in which the USSR dissolved itself is why we have a war in Ukraine now.
And that set a basis for Putin being revered in early 2000s for bringing in "stability".
The war in Ukraine is an outgrowth of that.
In a way, he was putting "the human face" on socialism in the same hamfisted manner that the "should be done" socialism was pushed down people's throats before.
His bright idea to solve the alcoholism problem by having a Prohibition 2.0 is a prime example.
What with the oil prices? Forget that, look at the vodka prices.
That's solely on Gorbachev. And it worked as well as you'd expect.
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/08/27/world/soviet-liquor-price...
With this conviction he was able to defuse tensions. He was a great, if flawed, president (and as a Latino, Im on the receiving end of his mistakes)
The only way to stay away from the old apparatchiks would have been management by occupational forces for several decades. And that occupational forces should have kept USSR market closed instead of pushing their own produce. Which is hardly possible.
True, it was a quite big transformation of lives for everybody - fortunately without a major civil war, though with many lesser wars in less centralized regions. Yet the result was an improvement on average, in Russia it started to feel in 1999, and even earlier in Baltic countries. Wouldn't be sure about Asian countries though.
>The way in which the USSR dissolved itself is why we have a war in Ukraine now.
Agree.
Here in Lithuania we narrowly avoided a similar issue as well with an attempt to establish an „autonomous republic“ in early 90s.
Which is what Ukraine has suffered these last 30+ years.
We have glaring evidence of their struggle to maintain power over their old buffer countries like Chechnya and Ukraine, so one can only imagine what they must have done to the others.
Edit: Just one example of how the transition wasn't without opposition is the January 1991 events in Lithuania when Gorbachev tried to re-establish soviet rule and this ended in 14 Lithuanian citizens dead.
Reagan was instrumental in the USSR's final years and even more instrumental in the policies that built the oligopoly that followed it. But singling him out for laurels does not accurately reflect either the USSR's internal politics or the 50 years of US foreign policy that brought us to 1991.