Reforms in the Soviet Union lead to easing of Cold War tensions and precipitate that country's collapse (1 gen 1985 anni – 1 gen 1991 anni)

Descrizione:

glasnost:The policy introduced by Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev during the 1980s that involved greater openness and freedom of expression and that contributed, unintentionally, to the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.
perestroika:The economic restructuring policy introduced by Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev during the 1980s that contributed, unintentionally, to the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.

Ronald Reagan entered office determined to confront the Soviet Union diplomatically and militarily. Backed by Republican and Democratic hard-liners alike, Reagan unleashed some of the harshest Cold War rhetoric since the 1950s, labeling the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and vowing that it would end up “on the ash heap of history.” However, by the end of his second term, Reagan was actively cooperating with Mikhail Gorbachev, the reform-minded Russian Communist leader. The downfall of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended the nearly fifty-year-long Cold War, but new international challenges quickly emerged.

U.S.-Soviet Relations in a New Era
When Reagan assumed the presidency in 1981, he broke with his immediate predecessors — especially Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter — in Cold War strategy. Nixon had regarded himself as a “realist” in foreign affairs. Put simply, his realism meant advancing the national interest without regard to ideology. Nixon’s policy of détente with the Soviet Union and China embodied this view (see “Nixon in Vietnam” in Chapter 27). President Carter endorsed détente and strove to further ease Cold War tensions. But the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan empowered hard-liners in the U.S. Congress and forced Carter to take a tougher line — which he did with the Olympic boycott and grain embargo. This was the relationship Reagan inherited in 1981: a decade of détente followed by a year of tense standoffs over Soviet advances into Central Asia, which threatened U.S. interests in the Middle East.

Most conservatives rejected both détente and the containment policy that had guided U.S. Cold War strategy since 1947. Reagan and his advisors wanted to diminish, not merely contain, Soviet influence. His administration pursued a two-pronged strategy toward that end. First, it set about re-arming America. Reagan’s military budgets authorized new weapons systems and dramatically expanded military bases and the nation’s nuclear arsenal. This buildup in American military strength, reasoned Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, would force the Soviets into an arms race that would strain their economy and cause domestic unrest. To advance this plan, the Reagan administration entered into the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) with the Soviet Union, in which the United States put forward a plan calculated to increase American advantage in sea- and air-based nuclear systems over the Soviet’s ground-based system. Talks dragged on until a final settlement in 1991, but meanwhile Reagan and Weinberger had made their point to the Soviets: the Americans were ahead militarily.

Second, the president supported CIA initiatives to confront Soviet influence in the developing world, funding anticommunist movements in Angola, Mozambique, Afghanistan, and Central America. This policy often entailed supporting repressive, right-wing regimes. Nowhere was this more conspicuous than in the Central American countries of Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Conditions in those small countries followed a broad pattern: the United States sided with military dictatorships and oligarchies when democratically elected governments or left-wing movements sought support from the Soviet Union. In Guatemala, this approach produced a brutal military rule — thousands of opponents of the government were executed or kidnapped. In Nicaragua, Reagan actively encouraged a coup against the left-wing Sandinista government. And in El Salvador, the U.S.-backed government employed secret “death squads,” which murdered larger numbers of political opponents. In each case, Soviet influence was thwarted, but at great cost to local communities and the international reputation of the United States.


The Soviet system of state socialism and central planning had transformed largely agricultural Russia into an industrial society between 1917 and the 1950s. This massive change had been wrenching, and created an inefficient economy. Lacking the incentives of a market economy, most enterprises hoarded raw materials, employed too many workers, and did not develop new products. Except in military weaponry and space technology, the Russian economy fell far behind those of capitalist societies, and most people in the Soviet bloc endured a low standard of living. Moreover, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, like the American war in Vietnam, proved to be a major blunder — an unwinnable war that cost vast amounts of money, destroyed military morale, and undermined popular support of the government.

Mikhail Gorbachev, a relatively young Russian leader who became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, recognized the need for internal economic reform and an end to the quagmire in Afghanistan. The iconoclastic Gorbachev introduced policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring), which encouraged widespread criticism of the rigid institutions and authoritarian controls of the Communist regime. To lessen tensions with the United States, Gorbachev met with Reagan in 1985, and the two leaders established a warm personal rapport. By 1987, they had agreed to eliminate all intermediate-range nuclear missiles based in Europe. A year later, Gorbachev ordered Soviet troops out of Afghanistan, and Reagan replaced many of his hardline advisors with policymakers who favored a renewal of détente.


The Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and his wife Raisa, meeting with American students. Both Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev changed the political outlook of their nations. As Reagan undermined social-welfare liberalism in the United States, Gorbachev challenged the rigidity of the Communist Party and state socialism in the Soviet Union. Although they remained ideological adversaries, by the mid-1980s the two leaders had established a personal rapport, which helped facilitate agreement on a series of arms reduction measures. Cultural exchanges between the two nations, which were uncommon during the height of the Cold War, grew more frequent as well.


Reagan’s sudden reversal with regard to the Soviet Union worried conservatives — perhaps their cowboy-hero president had been duped by a duplicitous Gorbachev. But Reagan’s gamble paid off. The easing of tensions with the United States allowed the Soviet leader to press forward with his domestic reforms. Encouraged by the loosening of control in Russia, between 1989 and 1991 the peoples of Eastern and Central Europe began to protest their own Communist governments. In Poland, the Roman Catholic Church and its pope — Polish-born John Paul II — joined with Solidarity, the trade-union movement, to overthrow the pro-Soviet regime. Twice in the 1950s, Russian troops had quashed similar popular uprisings in East Germany and Hungary. But under Gorbachev, they did not intervene, and a series of peaceful uprisings — “Velvet Revolutions” — birthed a new political order throughout the region. Communism’s fall even reached into Germany, the birthplace of the Cold War. The destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989 symbolized the end of Communist rule in Central Europe. Millions of television viewers worldwide watched jubilant Germans knock down the hated wall that had divided the city since 1961 — a vivid symbol of communist repression and the Cold War division of Europe.

As the communist government of East Germany collapsed, West Berliners showed their contempt for the wall dividing Berlin by defacing it with graffiti. Then, in November 1989, East and West Berliners destroyed huge sections of the wall with sledgehammers, an act of psychic liberation that symbolized the end of the Cold War. Here, in a calmer moment, a man chisels away at a section of the wall.


Alarmed by the reforms and the increasing calls for independence from republics within the USSR, Soviet military leaders seized power in August 1991 and arrested Gorbachev. But widespread popular opposition led by Boris Yeltsin, the president of the Russian Republic, thwarted their coup and broke the dominance of the Communist Party. Inspired by the Velvet Revolutions and the weakening of the Communist Party, several Soviet republics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus) broke away as independent nation-states. Finally, on December 25, 1991, the USSR formally dissolved to make way for an eleven-member Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) (Map 29.3). The remarkable and total collapse of the Soviet Union largely resulted from internal economic failure, while external pressure from the United States played an important, though secondary, role.


The collapse of Soviet communism dramatically altered the political landscape of Central Europe and Central Asia. The Warsaw Pact, the USSR’s answer to NATO, vanished. West and East Germany reunited, and the nations created by the Versailles treaty of 1919 — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia — reasserted their independence or split into smaller, ethnically defined nations. The Soviet republics bordering Russia, from Belarus in the west to Kyrgyzstan in the east, also became independent states, although remaining loosely bound with Russia in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).


“Nobody — no country, no party, no person — ‘won’ the cold war,” concluded George Kennan, the architect in 1947 of the American policy of containment, in a 1992 New York Times editorial. The Cold War’s cost was enormous, and both sides benefitted greatly from its end. For more than forty years, the United States had fought a bitter economic and ideological battle against its communist foe, a struggle that exerted an enormous impact on American society. Taxpayers had spent some $4 trillion on nuclear weapons and trillions more on conventional arms, placing the United States on a permanent war footing and feeding a vast military-industrial complex. The social costs were equally high, including anticommunist witch-hunts and a constant fear of nuclear annihilation. Most Americans had no qualms about proclaiming victory, however, and conservative advocates of free-market capitalism celebrated the outcome. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself, they argued, proved that they had been right all along.

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