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#11 - JRL 8253 - JRL Home
Moscow Times
June 15, 2004
Revising Reagan's Role in Soviet History
By Alexei Pankin

"Never speak ill of the dead," the old saying goes. Journalists, scholars and politicians have heaped so much praise on the late Ronald Reagan that you begin to wonder whether they believe what they're saying. As a staunch supporter of European values, I will invoke the ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that releases journalists from the general norms of morality in their coverage of public figures and attempt to provide an unbiased account of history.

My thesis is that thanks to Reagan, perestroika might never have happened. Credit for the fact that communism gave up without a fight belongs chiefly to Josef Stalin.

For the Soviet Union, the arms buildup was not a means to an end, but a goal in itself. If an intelligence agent reported to his superior that NATO planned to acquire 50 new tanks, for example, that figure would balloon as the information made its way up the chain of command. By the time it hit the general secretary's desk, the report would claim that NATO planned to acquire 5,000 new tanks. And it would contain an addendum stating that since Soviet tanks were of inferior quality, we would need to respond by producing 10,000 new tanks.

During periods of detente, it was more difficult to justify these addenda, and the generals lived in fear that someone would check up on them, at which point half of the General Staff would have been hauled in front of a court-martial. Reagan's tough rhetoric during his first term in office and his Strategic Defense Initiative were the perfect gift for the Soviet military-industrial complex. The brass had no intention of trying to compete with the United States in high-tech weapons, but they were always ready to roll out more tanks and missiles. Not to mention that the combined impact of U.S. and Soviet propaganda in those years brought Soviet citizens back to a familiar refrain: "It doesn't matter that we don't live high on the hog so long as there is no war."

During a recent seminar at the British Embassy, Grigory Yavlinsky noted that no one was starving in the Soviet Union on the eve of perestroika. The economy was lagging behind the industrialized West, but it was not on the verge of collapse. In other words, the Soviet Union could have happily carried on producing tanks and missiles. And Gorbachev's rise to power looks like a historical aberration. Thanks to Reagan's efforts, a die-hard communist monster should have taken up residence in the Kremlin instead.

Now for the much ballyhooed victory over communism. Simon Kordonsky is a man with a dissident past and a level head. He is not given to emotion in his analysis of events. And he is now a speechwriter for President Vladimir Putin. At the dawn of perestroika, he uttered a phrase that still gives me chills when I think of it: "Stalin built this system on tens of millions of corpses. Destroying it will inevitably require the sacrifice of millions of lives." Why didn't this happen? After all, to establish their hold on power, the democrats killed more people in Nagorny Karabakh, Georgia, Moldova, Tajikistan, Moscow and Chechnya than the communists did in their attempt to hang on to power.

Why did the brass and captains of the defense industry, who stood to lose everything from perestroika, follow Gorbachev submissively, like lambs to the slaughter? It would have been a simple matter to stage a coup d'etat in the Soviet Union. All the leaders of the nine defense-related ministries had to do was meet in the office of the chief of the General Staff and invite the general secretary for a little talk. They wouldn't even have had to replace him.

The memory of Stalin's terror remained fresh in the minds of the military and industrial leadership -- that time when generation after generation was cut down not on suspicion of hatching a plot against Stalin, but on the suspicion that such a thought might occur to them. The Soviet military-industrial complex lacked independent political thinking. The prospect of going after the general secretary was more terrifying than losing power and even losing the country. The only reserve that Gorbachev could draw on had he wanted to push forward more aggressively with reform was the almost mystical authority of his office: general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. He chose not to tap this reserve fully because he wanted to please the democrats and the West. Yet all those bold newspaper articles, demonstrations, elections and world public opinion were child's play to those in the leadership who could have acted, but did not. For that we thank you, Comrade Stalin!

And all the talk about Reagan, SDI and the "evil empire" just makes me laugh.

Alexei Pankin is the editor of Sreda, a magazine for media professionals.

[www.sreda-mag.ru].