Christmas Day, December 25, 1991. The Kremlin in Moscow lowered the red flag of the Soviet Union for the last time. Its hammer and sickle fluttered in the wind. Was it resistance, or to say farewell, or to laud the new tricolor of the Russian Republic?
In the West, there was jubilation. Many thanked God for delivering the world from a “godless, communist monster.” Others were full of swagger and metaphorically thumped their chests. Despite President George H. W. Bush’s public distain for gloating, he often reminded Americans that they won the Cold War. “By the grace of God,” he said in his 1992 State of the Union Address, “America won the Cold War.” The rhetoric told the world that the Cold War was always about winners and losers; one had to dominate, the other had to submit; one was God’s chosen warrior, the other was an evil empire despised by all.
To say that the U.S. won the Cold War conjures images of patriotic, self-sacrificing Americans determined to defeat the “Red Menace” wherever he stood. Tax dollars bought new weapons. Propaganda announced that Latin American Dictators heroically keep reds at bay, and that opponents of the war in Vietnam communist dupes. Americans had little empathy for how others behind the Iron Curtain not only fought valiantly against communist occupation, but endured terrible deprivations so that Moscow could stand against capitalist hegemony. Americans did not consider how Soviet and American interests were both concerned with material ambitions and regional dominance. Americans were constantly told that the Cold War was a contest between opposing ideologies: godless communism, which sabotaged economic prosperity and oppressed the people, and democracy, which championed private enterprise and defended liberty. The conflict was the age-old contest between empires, each seeking to expand its influence, cultivate allies, acquire resources and markets, and crush its enemies.
Those behind the Iron Curtain deserve far more credit for the collapse of communism than they have been given. The worker’s strikes and popular revolts against Moscow’s heavy hand in East Germany,1953, Hungary, 1956, Czechoslovakia, 1968, Poland, 1980, testify to the constant resistance of those forced into the Soviet Bloc. Dissidents in the Soviet Union such as Alexander Solzhenitsen, Joseph Brodsky, Andre Sakorov, and thousands of others who led public demonstrations and published underground newspapers risked their lives to openly oppose the Kremlin. Then there was the Soviet masses who lived in cities and villages that had not yet recovered from World War II — where a pump in the city square was the only source of water, where bullet holes pocked buildings, where horses and carts traveled along dirt roads in the absence of trucks and pavement, where there was little to no electricity, and where food and consumer goods were chronically unavailable. This is what I saw when I traveled throughout Russia and Ukraine in 1989, 1991, 1992, and 1993. During those remarkable trips, many Soviet citizens told me that it cost them a fortune to defend nations behind the Iron Curtain and to supplement their budgets. They also spoke of systemic corruption, such as extortion, black markets, embezzlement, and falsified reporting that stalled construction, infrastructure repairs, and food distribution (Schwartz, 1979).
The U.S. and Soviet Union did not start their post-war journey on an equal playing field. Nazis occupied Russian territory from the Baltic to the Black Seas and from Brest-Litovsk to Rostov-on-Don — roughly the equivalent of the Atlantic Coast to Chicago. The U.S. was not occupied. Around 2,000 Soviet cities and villages were destroyed and hundreds of museums and churches were pillaged and leveled in the war while the U.S. lost Pearl Harbor. To prevent Nazis from taking control of factories vital to the war effort, the Soviets moved over 1,500 factories from Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine to locations across the Ural Mountains and into Siberia. The U.S. undertook no such feat. The U.S. lost about 350,000 lives in World War II and the Soviet Union lost about 27 million (Overy, 1998).
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet premier, (1985-1991), inherited an unstable, corrupt, and disillusioned nation. Images of abundance in the West contrasted chronic shortages of everything in Soviet life. In 1986, Gorbachev announced Perestroika (restructuring of the economy and governance) and Glasnost (greater open debate and government transparency). Gorbachev wanted to privatize certain parts of the economy and to cooperate more with the West. His plans required billions of dollars in foreign loans. Germany, well on its way to reunification, saw financial aid as a means of “buying” Russia’s permission for a united and autonomous Germany. Gorbachev proved he was sincere about creating a radically new Soviet Union when he declined to send tanks to stop German unification, free elections in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary that tore them from the Soviet Bloc.
The U.S. under the presidency of George H.W. Bush and the United Kingdom, under the leadership of Margaret Thacher saw the Soviet’s vulnerability as an occasion to bury an old enemy and make the world anew with their global agenda at the forefront. While asking for loans from the West, Gorbachev also shared his commitments to environmental protection, peace, arms reduction, and global humanitarianism, which earned him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. Bush and Thatcher offered a rather frosty reception to Gorbachev’s vision. To get loans from the U.S. and U.K., the U.S.S.R. had to decrease its store of nuclear weapons, cease supporting communism in Cuba, allow the Baltic nations (Lativia, Estonia, and Lithuania) complete independence, ease emigration laws, and quickly adopt capitalism on Western terms (Keininger, 2019 and Service, 2015). The conditions were a bold reach into the domestic affairs of a sovereign nation.
As Grobachev was trying to appease the West and secure funding, his enemies plotted against him. He was apprehended in a coup on August 18, 1991, but the perpetrators failed to hold power in the face of growing populism in Moscow. Subsequently, Gorbachev was forced to sign a new constitution which dissolved the Soviet Union. Nationalism in the Soviet Bloc and in the Soviet Union, the inefficiency of and corruption throughout the centralized economy, the failure of reforms, and the burden of maintaining an empire took its toll. When Bush denied Gorbachev what could have been a modern Marshall Plan and a prophylactic against imperialist tyrants like Vladimir Putin, he was like a boxer entering the ring to replace a Goliath who had pummeled and crippled an old man. All Bush had to do was to spit in his face and the match was over.
References.
Bacevich, Alexander. The American Empire. The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2002.
Bush George H. W. Bush. Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union, January 28, 1992. American Presidency Project. Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union | The American Presidency Project.
Keininger, Stephen. “Money for Moscow: The West and question of Financial Assistance for Mikhail Gorbachev.” In D.S. Hamilton and K. Spohr (Eds.) Exiting the Cold War Entering a New World, 281-96. Washington, D.C.: foreign Policy Institute, 2019.
Overy, Richard. Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet Effort: 1941-1945. New York: Penguin, 1998.
Schwartz, Charles A. “Corruption and Political Development in the U.S.S.R.” Comparative Politics, 11(4): 425-33. (1979).
