The Fall of the Berlin Wall

Reassessing the Causes and Consequences of the End of the Cold War

Peter Schweizer

• Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780817998264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

In February 1999 key players in U.S. foreign policy during the 1980s gathered in Washington to discuss the policies and initiatives undertaken by the Reagan administration to challenge Soviet power. The Fall of the Berlin Wall: Reassessing the Causes and Consequences of the End of the Cold War is a collection of essays based on presentations made at that historic event.

1

The Fall of the Berlin Wall after Ten Years

AN ESSAY

Peter Schweizer

A DECADE AGO the most visible symbol of the Soviet empire was destroyed as the Berlin Wall was broken into rubble. The image of thousands of German citizens standing on the wall with chisels and hammers in hand, striking a blow against the large, gray, once imposing structure, is still one of the most enduring images of our time.

The dissolution of the Soviet Empire was a central event of the twentieth century—but it is also one of the most puzzling. To borrow from the poet T. S. Eliot, the end of the Soviet system “came not with a bang but a whimper.” Soviet communism was not the victim of a noisy civil war, which has befallen other empires throughout history. Nor did the end result from an orderly, planned retreat from power, as with the British Empire after the Second World War. Rather, the Soviet edifice simply collapsed under its own weight.

For decades, perhaps centuries, historians will debate which factors weighed most on the Soviet system. Was it the bankruptcy of the Marxist-Leninist ideology? Was Soviet failure preordained because communism proved so contrary to human nature? Did the calcified and rusting Soviet economy finally bear such a burden that it imploded, much like a weak roof collapsing under the burden of heavy snow?

The answer, in short, is all of these explanations and many more. Yet there is the curious but critically important question of timing. Why did the collapse occur precisely when it did? This question is of fundamental importance when assessing causes. Ideological failures, systemic crises, and economic catastrophes in Soviet history were nothing new and had been present from the beginning. They were in a real sense fundamental to the system. Marxism-Leninism had been discredited in the eyes of the public and even in the hearts of many Communist Party members well before 1980. Likewise, economic failure was a constant in Soviet life. As the growing collection of materials in Russian Archives Research Projects at the Hoover Institution makes clear, economic trauma was a problem for Moscow dating back to the 1920s.¹ Given these constants, something changed in the 1980s that pushed Soviet communism over the brink.

One factor that deserves serious exploration is the external pressures that were brought to bear on the system. During the 1980s, the United States adopted a series of policies designed to burden and undermine the Soviet system. The Reagan administration was clearly the most anticommunist administration of the Cold War era. Far from representing a continuation of the policy of containment that had guided U.S. post-war Soviet policy since Truman, Reagan administration policies represented a profound change in dealing with Moscow. Were these policies the critical ingredient that pushed the Soviet Union to collapse?

Despite a large library of books on the end of the Cold War, there has been scant investigation of the role U.S. policy might have played in hastening the collapse of the Soviet Union. Rather, the focus of study has been almost exclusively on the policies of Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. This lack of interest as to whether the United States hastened the demise of the Soviet Union is particularly unusual given the long-standing belief among scholars and policymakers that U.S. policy could influence and affect domestic developments in Russia.

Since the earliest days of the Cold War, both hawks and doves largely embraced the notion that the West could influence the course of events in the Soviet Union. The only real debate was over how best to achieve such influence. Hawks tended to argue, for example, that Moscow’s behavior could be modified through military deterrence. This provided the basis for U.S. military policy throughout the Cold War period. Doves, on the other hand, held that Moscow could be influenced by diplomacy and accommodation. Détente was an effort to use both approaches. Henry Kissinger, usually a hawk on military affairs, argued that the West could “moderate” Soviet conduct through economic contact. “In a crisis,” he wrote as Secretary of State, “we thought that the fear of losing markets and access to raw materials, Western technological innovations or bank credits, would produce Soviet caution.”²

This belief that Washington could influence events in Moscow was not confined to U.S. policymakers and scholars. Russian observers shared the view that the United States could directly influence internal events in their country. Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, the most outstanding dissident figure of the Cold War era, said human rights improvements in Russia were possible only as a result of Western influence.³

One would be hard pressed to find many observers during the Cold War who argued that the United States had no influence on events in the Soviet Union. In the post–Cold War era, however, this has essentially become the model for studying the end of the Cold War. The demise of the Soviet system resulted from internal events exclusively, the argument goes. To the extent that Reagan administration policies are discussed in the context of the ending of the Cold War, they are described as a impediment to the process of reducing tensions.⁴

This approach is not only intellectually inconsistent and dubious, but it also makes for poor history. Examining the demise of the Soviet Union in isolation from U.S. policies during the crucial years just prior to the collapse is somewhat akin to studying the collapse of the Confederacy at the end of the American Civil War by studying Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee without looking at the strategies employed by Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. Although certainly not the sole cause of the Soviet demise, the policies adopted by the Reagan administration nonetheless played an important role in the drama.

COURAGE AMIDST BLEAKNESS

In retrospect it is difficult to put into perspective how out of tune with established opinion the early Reagan administration was in its views toward the Soviet Union. Early on President Reagan declared that the Soviet Union was “an evil empire” that “could not be trusted.” He went on to call the Kremlin a “brutal and thuggish regime.” In these heady post-Cold War days it is easy to assume that this moral tone and the call for hard-line anti-Soviet policies were widely accepted.

Today there is a general consensus that Soviet communism represented a bleak period for human history. Russian President Boris Yeltsin made this moral assessment fashionable in a June 1992 speech to the U.S. Congress. “The world can sigh in relief,” he declared. “The idol of communism, which spread everywhere social strife, animosity, and unparalleled brutality, which instilled fear in humanity, has collapsed.” Yeltsin was implicitly aligning himself with Reagan’s view of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and he received thunderous applause from everyone in the chamber.

In the early 1980s, however, such views were hardly welcome in leading Western circles. The United States and the West had witnessed a rapid expansion of Soviet power during the previous decade, and the Kremlin had made serious advances around the globe. In Vietnam, along China’s southern border and astride the sea lanes that brought Persian Gulf oil to Japan, they had a new ally. By occupying Afghanistan, Soviet forces came 500 miles closer to the warm-water ports of the Indian Ocean and to the Strait of Hormuz through which came the oil essential to Western Europe. In the Horn of Africa, new allies dominated the southern approaches to the Red Sea and the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula. In southern Africa, proxies held the sources of minerals the industrial nations required. Moscow even had allies in the Caribbean and Central America, on the very doorstep of the United States.

During the 1970s the West granted Moscow cherished political objectives. Détente provided the Soviets with de facto recognition by the West of their imperial holdings in Central Europe. Various treaties that the Brandt government in West Germany concluded with the Soviet Union, the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, and the deliberations of the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe gave them the political legitimacy they had long yearned for.⁵

In the shadows of the Vietnam War, U.S. leaders had been openly reassessing the merits of anticommunism. President Jimmy Carter, in a 1977 speech to Notre Dame University, blamed the Indochina imbroglio on “our inordinate fear of communism.” He went on to argue that the U.S. defeat in Southeast Asia was therapeutic for the nation. “Through failure we have found our way to our own values,” he declared.

These views reflected established opinion throughout the West, which saw U.S. power on the wane and communist authority as legitimate. The New York Times greeted victory for Pol Pot in Cambodia with the headline “For Most, a Better Life.” When it became apparent in 1980 that martial law might be declared in Poland, German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt said such a move was “necessary” to stabilize the country. Some U.S. officials even went so far as to openly and publicly question the ethics of using the nuclear deterrent in the face of Soviet aggression. Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, for one, repeatedly declared his view that the U.S. nuclear deterrent was an illusion because no president in his right mind would dream of using it to counter a Soviet attack. “In long private conversations with successive presidents—Kennedy and Johnson,” he revealed, “I recommended, without qualification, that they never initiate, under any circumstances, the use of nuclear weapons. I believe they accepted my recommendations.” This statement constituted an admission that the centerpiece of NATO’s whole strategy had been a bluff since its inception.⁶

Public opinion, if less accepting of communist legitimacy, was nonetheless tepid in the face of the Soviet challenge. In 1982, for example, polls indicated that 70 percent of the U.S. population believed that a freeze of nuclear weapons was the best means for dealing with the Soviet military threat—even if such a deal guaranteed Soviet strategic superiority.⁷ Public opinion in Western Europe was hardly more encouraging. In a 1981 survey, 40 percent of West Germans unconditionally opposed the stationing of U.S. missiles on their soil, regardless of how many missiles the Soviet Union deployed and targeted on Germany. Nearly the same proportion rejected resorting to nuclear weapons ever, even in retaliation for Soviet nuclear strikes.⁸

Given the temper of the time, Russian novelist and Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was left to declare in 1980 that the West seemed “exhausted” in the face of the Soviet threat, lacking the moral strength to challenge the legitimacy of Soviet power. “No weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side.”⁹

The psychological climate of the time reflected more than a waning commitment to anticommunism. Many leading Western intellectuals, while not embracing the tenets of Marxism-Leninism, concluded that the Soviet system worked and could meet the basic needs of the populace. Indeed, Soviet communism was often described as a legitimate alternative to the free market economies of the West. In 1977, for example, Pierre Mauroy, soon to be France’s prime minister and later first secretary of the Socialist Party, wrote in a book called Inheritors of the Future, “In 1975 I went to the Soviet Union and in Kharkov, Kiev, and elsewhere I always found the same vitality. In elementary schools, in high schools, I found the faith and the enthusiasm which had characterized the schools of the Third Republic. They had made astounding economic gains; their victories in the field of technology are victories for all the people….” This from a man who was in charge of France between 1981 and 1984.

Attitudes among intellectuals and leaders in the United States were hardly much better. The distinguished historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. declared after a 1982 trip to Moscow that the Soviet system worked quite well. “I found more goods in the shops, more food in the markets, more cars in the street—more of almost everything, except, for some reason, caviar.” Noted economist John Kenneth Galbraith lauded the Soviet system in 1984 as in some respects superior to the liberal economies of the West. “The Russian system succeeds because, in contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower,” he claimed. “The Soviet economy has made great national progress in recent years.” Professor Lester Thurow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said in his textbook The Economic Problem that the Soviet economy was comparable to our economic machine. “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.”

Distinguished Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University argued in Foreign Affairs that the Soviet system was stable because of how well it functioned. “The Soviet Union is not now nor will it be during the next decade in the throes of a true systemic crisis for it boasts enormous unused reserves of political and social stability that suffice to endure the deepest difficulties.” Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson put it even more strongly in his textbook Economics (1981) when he challenged the assumption that communism couldn’t work: “It is a vulgar mistake to think that most people in Eastern Europe are miserable.”

It was into this intellectual and political malaise that Ronald Reagan stepped in 1981. However, far from embracing this prevailing orthodoxy, the president and his closest advisers rejected it. The administration boldly and openly challenged the moral basis of communism and the view that accommodation with Moscow was a necessary fact of life. To the astonishment and consternation of leading intellectuals, the president and members of his administration made no bones about the fact that they saw the Soviet Union as the eventual loser in the Cold War. “The years ahead will be great ones for our country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization,” the president told students at Notre Dame University in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword—John Raisian and Roger W. Robinson Jr.
• Introduction—Peter Schweizer
• 1. The Fall of the Berlin Wall after Ten Years: An Essay—Peter Schweizer
• 2. Ronald Reagan: An Extraordinary Man in Extraordinary Times—Richard V. Allen
• 3. “The World Is Our Oyster”: Meeting the Soviet Military Challenge—Fred C. Iklé
• 4. NSDD-75: A New Approach to the Soviet Union—William P. Clark
• 5. Rollback: Intelligence and the Reagan Strategy in the Developing World—Edwin Meese III
• 6. Lessons to be Learned … and Applied—Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
• The Participants