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I'm going out on a limb here, just for fun. If I'm wrong, someone with more detailed knowledge of Soviet history than I can correct me.
Ronald Wilson Reagan's reputation as the victor of the Cold War seems to me more an accident of timing, than a result of the US military buildup or other US policies of the 1980s. Soviet Communism promised a healthy economy with greater equality and fewer social ills than capitalism; its failure to deliver, not a small bump in military spending (and I suspect that the Afghanistan campaigns probably cost more than the anti-Reagan buildup), was ultimately what caused the loss of loyalty and legitimacy that translated into the collapse of the Soviet Empire and communism within Russia. Communism became doomed in the 1970s, when the industrial and consumer gap with the West became incontrovertible. I mean, does anyone seriously think at this point that the Soviet system was going to survive into the 21st century?
Why doesn't George Herbert Walker Bush get more credit for the end of the Cold War? He had a long career of public service, much more relevant to the Cold War than Reagan's ancient red-baiting and governorship, including being vice-president for all the years Reagan was president. Bush was the one in charge when the Berlin Wall fell, when Gorbachev turned power over to Yeltsin, and who took a very effective cautious approach to the successor states. Yet when Saddam Hussein decided to test the power vacuum created by the Russian turn inward, Bush responded pretty strongly, though carefully not to give the appearance of overreaching (however much we wish today that he had).
For that matter, why doesn't James Earl Carter, Jr. get more credit? Afghanistan was Carter's initiative, it now appears, as was the beginning of the arms buildup. Carter also built formal relations with the USSR and PRC that set the stage for Reagan to get personal.
I'm not arguing that George H.W. Bush was a great president, but rather that Reagan's reputation is overblown by post hoc ergo propter hocfallacies and ideology. Reagan gets credit, in my book, for not messing it up, but so does Bush. Reagan gets more credit for his personal diplomacy which created ties which aided the"soft landing" transition to post-communism.
supplement: I had this all ready to post, when I got an e-mail from long-time HNN reader Jerry West with a pointer to this William Blum column in Counterpunch which makes a more narrow version (though it's an excerpt from his longer book) of my argument. Those of you looking for more lefty non-tributes should check out the other articles on that page, too.
personal note: due to circumstances, I will be taking a break from blogging for the next four weeks. After averaging a post every other day for the last five and a half months (plus several HNN main page articles), it's a good time to step away and see what I think about this amateur pundit/public intellectual business. I'm not leaving, mind you: I enjoy this way too much and Cliopatria is a great platform which I share with really smart and decent people. I've just been too much in the thick of it to think about what it means, publicly and personally. Enjoy the rest of June, and I'll see you in July!
The Samuelson quote seems to me to be used out of context. What Samuelson said was true of the USSR in both the 30s and the 50s, as well as of the US during World War II. Command economies can create rapid growth but only for short time periods and for specific purposes such as industrialization, war mobilization, or economic rebuilding. What command economies can't do very well is innovate which hampers long term growth.
Richard Henry Morgan -
6/9/2004
Again, I think you are right, Derek. Reagan's view was not based on any great analysis of data. And Gorby was the greater cause of the collapse.
People tend to run together the two things -- the economic and the political. I was never convinced that the Soviet Union had anything more than a weak economy. But precisely because I believed that, and because the Soviet Union had survived so long with such a weak economy, I never saw the collapse coming. In fact, without Gorby, the Soviet Union might have limped along for another generation or two, with a dwindling economy as they devoted even greater proportions of it to military expenditures.
Again, I never believed the Soviet statistics on their economy, nor the CIA's imputed figures. I thought the Soviet Union was stable despite the lack of an economy -- and maybe, without Gorby they still were to a certain extent. I suspect that smart people who are otherwise informed, argued (or convinced themselves) from the stability of the Soviet Union, to the truth of economic statistics (official or imputed), and the productivity of the Soviet economy. Galbraith had served on the War Price Board, and was a long a proponent of government wage and price controls. Thurow and Samuelson have both long argued for government intervention in, and management of, the economy to an extent much greater than, say, Milton Friedman. All three seem to have overvalued the efficiency of command economies. I can't for the life of me see how these bright guys could buy either the Soviet Union's statistics, or the CIA's, without having been directed there by their own ideological tendencies.
And, giving Gorby credit as a cause, should be distinct from giving him credit as a person. I doubt that the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Communist Party, and the Soviet Bloc, was within the intended ojects of Gorby.
Derek Charles Catsam -
6/8/2004
Richard --
I also think that even the most expert of experts have proven remarkably maladroit at predicting the future. I am pretty certain that Reagan's speech was as much rhetorical as it was predictive. In the end, I still think that if we are going to elevate one individual above any others, that figure should be Gorbechev and not Reagan, but as I've sad elsewhere reagan certainly deserves some of the credit.
As for economists, they are part of one of those fields that thinks it is a science just because it involves numbers. I think economists have probably been worse even than political scientists and historians in predicting future trends. My view is that historians have something to offer when it comes to commentary on the present, that we have skills to bring to bear. But when it comes to predicting the future, we are as bad as anyone else. And in any case, when ideology comes to the fore, even the analysis of present and past tends to fail. That is not to say that one can never bring ideology to the table, but rather that it should be part of the equation only after a fair assessment of the evidence. Presumably most of us developed our ideologies as a result of our reading of the evidence.
dc
Richard Henry Morgan -
6/8/2004
You're right, Derek. I can't think of anybody on the right, either, who thought the demise of the Soviet Union was imminent -- except Ronald Reagan, of course. In 1981, during an address to the students and faculty of Notre Dame, he said that even then the final chapters of the history of communism were being written. I'll bet the profs had a good snigger at Ronald's expense.
I think the only people who knew it was cracking, right or left, were those on the ground who could feel the tremors (like cows anticipating an earthquake). The sovietologists missed it completely.
Though both left and right missed it, I was struck by the fact that three economists were quoted (as opposed to merely believed) who not only didn't see it coming (neither did I, nor anyone else), but who actually felt that command economies have advantages. I can't help but suspect that, in a classic case of overdetermination, they were led to their sanguine views about the Soviet Union based not only by the common wisdom (the common wisdom of those with an expertise the economists did not share), but by their positive views of command economies. In other words, which was cause and which effect?
I don't remember that I, during the period in question, offered a definitive statement on the future of the Soviet Union, though my understanding was informed by the common wisdom. Experts sometimes have a hard time believing that other experts can be dead wrong.
Derek Charles Catsam -
6/8/2004
A view on this, at least obliquely, comes in today's Boston Globe at
He's certainly a Sovietologist (which, like "cosmonaut", sounds remarkably like a word from a different era.
dc
Derek Charles Catsam -
6/8/2004
Richard (and anyone else) --
Andrew Sullivan quoted that same line about Schlesinger in his blog yesterday. I took on his take on it on Rebunk (one of the HNN blogs) a little while ago.
Further, I'd need someone to show me that thre were those on the right who were writing that the Soviet Union would collapse soon. If not, why go after Galbreath or Schlesinger? It seems hypocritical to say that liberals X, Y, and Z were fools and charlatans for believing the Soviet Union would not collapse without at the same time showing that there were not doom and gloom Republicans also arguing that the USSR was likely to endure for a while (or at least showing that there were plenty of conservatives whom people toom seriously who were predicting the opposite.) This is pretty selective and poor use of evidence.
On top of this, Reagan was not creating policy out of whole cloth -- much as it may pain folks to hear it, he got at least some from Carter, and since things like budgets have to go through Congress, I suppose it might be worthwhile to know something about the party makeup of those Congresses throughout the 1980s . . . None of this existed in a vacuum.
dc
Richard Henry Morgan -
6/8/2004
How do you think it is that those historians that favor big government, and see the enormous possibilities for a command economy, bought the CIA line, hook, line and sinker on the Soviet Union, and yet were not out front repeating the CIA assessment on WMD? One might think they find the CIA credible only when it fits their purposes.
I certainly believe that the CIA believes there was WMD -- a question separate from whether there is any or not. They didn't like Chalabi, or trust him, and yet said it was a "slam dunk" that there were WMD -- that suggests other sources to me, or a great capacity for lying. In any case, one is tempted to remove the 'ology' suffix from 'Sovietology'. I'm reminded of those great tracts published by the Webbs, celebrating the Soviet Union and filled with pages and pages of glorious Soviet statistics, all of them fraudulent.
Ralph E. Luker -
6/8/2004
Well, we certainly know that the New York Times was repeating what the CIA thought it knew about WMD in Iraq.
Richard Henry Morgan -
6/8/2004
BTW, there's some more great quotes from the times concerning the Soviet Union, available at:
Ralph, I think you just repeated the thrust of the first line of my first response to Jon. I sincerely doubt that Thurow, Galbraith, and Schlesinger have any real expertise in Sovietology, nor did any real independent analysis -- they were just riding along on prevailing opinion, and adding to it. I certainly had no reason to believe that the Soviet Union was on the edge of collapse, dependant as I was on others analyses -- then again, I didn't feel compelled to indulge my ignorance by repeating what I couldn't know to be either true or false. I'm not really all that familiar with current controversies on the decryption of Mayan glyphs, either, but I wouldn't be surprised if Schlesinger will give you a quote on the matter. BTW, what do you think are the chances that these guys were repeating the CIA's assessment of Iraq's WMD program, pre-invasion? Just wondering.
Ralph E. Luker -
6/8/2004
Richard, You know full well that CIA assessments of the Soviet economy in the period these statements were made were as certain that it was sound and growing. Do you or Postel think Galbraith, Schlesinger, and Thurow should have known something the CIA didn't? Did you know it? Did I? If so, why didn't we report the information to the CIA? Really, citing these passages only demonstrates how much the West generally was ill-informed about the condition of the Soviet economy. Did someone in Ronald Reagan's administration have special knowledge and fail to report it to the CIA?
Richard Henry Morgan -
6/8/2004
from Virgina Postrel's website:
--------------
"It's a vulgar mistake to think that most people in eastern Europe are miserable" declared economist Lester Thurow, adding that the Soviet Union was "a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States." (I wonder if Thurow had ever flown on a Soviet airkiner?). John Kenneth Galbraith went further, insisting that in many respects the Soviet economy was superior to ours: "In contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower."
Arthur Schlesinger, just back from a trip to Moscow in 1982, said Reagan was delusional. "I found more goods in the shops, more food in the markets, more cars on the street -- more of almost everything," he said, adding his contempt for "those in the US who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse, ready with one small push to go over the brink."
------------
Thank you Thurow, Galbraith, and Schlesinger, for your deep insights.
Anne Zook -
6/8/2004
I sympathize with your desire to take a break, I'm considering doing the same myself (suffering from that "outrage overload"), but don't forget to come back in July. I'll miss your posts.
Richard Henry Morgan -
6/8/2004
Well, I suspect that the military spending role is only one strand of a collapse that had so many causes that it would take a team of sociologists, economists, etc., to sort them all out and try to give each its relative due. There were people living in the Soviet bloc that said it was all falling apart, but it pretty much escaped the analysts stateside. We're not really good at modelling transition phenomenon in either the physical or social sciences (turbulence is as poorly understood as revolution).
One can't explain it simply on the basis of the costs to the state and the economy of the machinery of repression, either. The KGB had one officer per 5,800 citizens, the Nazis one Gestapo officer per 2,000 citizens, and the Stasi one per 166 citizens -- and the GDR economy outperformed the Soviet economy. Good luck in your search for a Sovietologist.
Jonathan Dresner -
6/8/2004
It's interesting, but it's still mostly theory. I don't see a direct connection between the logical but unsubstantiated fiscal crisis and the way in which the collapse happened. I want a Sovietologist....
Richard Henry Morgan -
6/8/2004
I don't know what people think at this time about Soviet survival into the 21st century, but damn few people were predicting its downfall in the 20th.
I remember going through intel school at the time, and being blown away by the numerical advantages in weapons (tanks, artillery, etc.) enjoyed by the Soviets. I think we were limping along at 5% to 6% of GDP going to the military, while I think the Soviets were closer to 15%. Much worse, I think their capital/output ratio in the military sector was something like 3 times ours. That suggests that they were devoting something like 40% of their capital to the military. With these types of figures, I think you can understand how even modest increases in Soviet military spending can put a great strain on the economy and the social fabric. Add to that their overextension economically overseas. For instance, they bought Cuban sugar at inflated prices in order to pump billions a year into a feeble Cuban economy, and similarly sold military goods at subsidized prices.
It happened on Reagan's watch, true. He also deployed missiles in the face of great opposition from the left, here and in Europe, and he actually was the only one to state rollback as a goal. Everyone else wanted detente, and the Soviets thought, foolishly, they could achieve better terms if they had an even greater military advantage, which Reagan was determined and explicit in denying them.
