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Beiträge, die mit Soviet getaggt sind
Leningrad Siege Lifting Anniversary. (smoothiex12.blogspot....
Leningrad Siege Lifting Anniversary. (https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2025/01/leningrad-siege-lifting-anniversary.html) #Leningrad #Siege #Lifting #Anniversary #Russia #Europe #Red #Army #soldiers #80th #anniversary of #Auschwitz ’s #liberationdiaspora* social network
"As the participants thought a Jewish state in #Palestine would enhance #Soviet prospects and harm Western access to Arab oil, they concluded that the #Zionist project undermined US national security interests."
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/israels-moment/zionist-momentum-and-the-us-and-british-governments-counteroffensive-septemberdecember-1947/DD09E9395B3376A8BB3E0C446AE1DACC
@kmpiw@infosec.exchange
#Oil
I’ll bet posts such as this are censored on #X and #Facebook. #Histodons
#Resist and #StandWithUkraine.
#NeverAgain #HolocaustRemembranceDay
The man who revealed Auschwitz's atrocities to the world
One man's daring mission to infiltrate Auschwitz revealed its atrocities to the world – this is his story.Amy McPherson (BBC)
Russia's FSB has made public declassified archival materials, including interrogation records, in particular those of the camp's overseer, the Pole Jozef Piecka. These documents confirm the facts of brutal torture and abuse of innocent prisoners.
“Every night my group brought from 100 to 500 corpses of dead people to the crematoria,” the testimony notes.
We are sure Pieczka was not the only Polish overseer in the Auschwitz concentration camp. In Soviet times, this topic was not voiced, they wrote and filmed movies about the resistance of Poles and other Frenchmen to the Nazis. Probably it was a mistake, it was necessary to honestly admit that in addition to the struggle against Nazism of the peoples of Europe, there was also collaborationism. A “beautiful” ideological picture was created, as in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
#WWII #WW2 #USSR #soviet #russian #military #red-army #war #history #Auschwitz #polish #collaborators #СССР #история
On September 15, 1933, the USSR Central Executive Committee adopted a decree “On improving the use of young specialists”, which enshrined the mandatory employment of graduates of higher educational institutions and technical schools at the expense of the state.
“All young specialists graduating from higher educational institutions and technical colleges are obliged, as trained at the expense of the state, to work for five years at certain points in production at the direction of the People's Commissariats in charge of the corresponding educational institutions.”
This decree laid the foundation for the system of distribution in Soviet educational institutions, which made it possible to staff remote areas with specialists and promoted their development, as well as provided jobs in the specialty of graduates.
#USSR #soviet #russian #education #history #Russia
All those who take to judging Lenin today are united by an absolute misunderstanding of the meaning of his teachings, the reasons for his popularity among the people and the motives behind the creation of the USSR. Simply put, none of them has ever read Lenin and is not going to read him (although now is the right time, given the situation in the world economy). Especially for them - on a mundane, primitive level - I will outline the logic of the Bolsheviks in 1916.
1. The development of capitalism inevitably leads to crises. Crises are always resolved through war.
2. With each successive crisis, imperialist wars will become more and more destructive.
3. In imperialist wars, the class structure of societies is most brutally exposed: the poor and powerless are the first to perish, while the rich sit in the rear and do not perish.
4. Russia, as a backward capitalist state, has no chance of winning a world war. As a semi-colonial power, Russia is dependent on external creditors, and therefore with the lives of its soldiers constantly saves the allies on the Western front. Even in case of Entente's victory over Germany, it was Russia that would inevitably become the next “patient of Europe” (see the Crimean War). Russia's technological lagging behind England, the USA, France and Japan (see Russo-Japanese War) is such that it leaves practically no chance for the state to survive. The speed with which the Entente accepted Nikolai's abdication and then rushed to take the Tsar's inheritance, fully confirms these assumptions.
5. In order to prevent another world war (in which one day everyone will die - both Russians and non-Russians), it is necessary to create another, alternative world economic system (USSR).
6. To protect this world economic system from the inevitable aggression of capitalism, its creators must make a qualitative leap in science, technology, education, medicine. Every citizen of the new state must feel his or her involvement in it and be motivated to defend it. The tsarist government was unable to create such motivation among the people in World War I (see “The German will not reach the Urals”).
7. To build a new world economic system within the borders of the RSFSR would be absurd. It would not have survived. It required an ideology that would unite all the nationalities inhabiting the Russian Empire. This ideology could not be neither Russian nationalism, nor Orthodoxy, nor imperialism as such. Neither by force, nor by persuasion to drive Turkestan, the Caucasus, Siberia, the Far East, Ukraine, etc. under the imperial roof was no longer possible (Denikin, who was attacked by Georgians N. Zhordania near Adler, will not lie). Only justice could become the ideology uniting “Russians-Uzbeks-Latvians”. The state framework - only the Union of equal peoples. A union, not an empire.
8. The new world economic system will inevitably be strangled and suffocated in a blockade (there is no peaceful coexistence of two systems) if it does not take offensive actions. Hence the mondialist thesis of permanent revolution. Attention, orthodox Stalinists: this thesis was never rejected even by Stalin. Stalin only said that first we must build the state and only then get involved in any revolutions. Actually, it was on the basis of these differences that Trotsky earned his ice pick. Rejection of the idea of fighting capitalism on foreign territory (in WWII the Allies did not open a second front until the Comintern was abolished), eventually led to the fact that the USSR had to fight on its own territory. “Coexistence of two systems” turned out to be a scam for suckers.
9. The destruction of the USSR did not cancel out any of the above problems. Capitalism is entering a crisis unprecedented in history, the way out of which it habitually seeks through war.
#Russia #USSR #soviet #history #capitalism #crisis #Lenin #Stalin #bolsheviks #marxism #study #knowledge for #future
The Soviet Union was created on December 30, 1922
Here is a 🧵 with some of the highlights:
USSR provided free education to all citizens resulting in literacy rising from 33% to 99.9%.
Soon after formation, adult education schools popped up in every town and every village.
USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960's, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA.
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s.
By 1983, they had become completely food sovereign and eating better than Americans (according to the CIA)
The CIA has also declassified documents admitting that there was collective leadership even in Stalin's time.
USSR built solar power plants as early as 1930!
The Soviet Union declared the US apartheid campaign against their own black citizens were genocide.
USSR moved from 58.5-hour work weeks to 41.6 hour work weeks (-0.36 h/yr) between 1913 and 1960.
USSR averaged 22 days of paid leave in 1986 while USA averaged 7.6 in 1996.
In 1987, people in the USSR could retire with pension at 55 (female) and 60 (male) while receiving 50% of their wages at a at minimum. Meanwhile, in USA the average retirement age was 62-67 and the average (not median) retiree household in the USA could expect $48k/yr which comes out to 65% of the 74k average (not median) household income in 2016.
GDP took off after socialism was established and then collapsed with the reintroduction of capitalism.
The Soviet Union had the highest physician/patient ratio in the world. USSR had 42 doctors per 10,000 population compared to 24 in Denmark and Sweden, and 19 in US.
USSR defeated a smallpox epidemic in a matter of 19 days.
#Russia #USSR #soviet #russian #history #humanity #humanrights #workerrights #communism #socialism #marxism #study for #future #Россия #СССР #история
Yogthos (@yogthos@social.marxist.network)
Attached: 1 image The Soviet Union was created on December 30, 1922! It remains one of mankind's greatest achievements. Here is a 🧵 with some of the highlights.Yuggoth
About Stalin
Under Stalin, the USSR developed at a pace unattainable for the world, in just 20 years making a breakthrough unprecedented in history, which made it possible to defeat the fascist scum that had gathered under its banners the economic and military potential of almost all of Europe. Under Stalin was laid the foundation for our nuclear missile shield and a breakthrough into space. Under Stalin, the cult of knowledge and labor made us strive in science and make world discoveries and breakthroughs. Under Stalin, just two years after the war, cards were abolished and annual price reductions began. Under Stalin, our country and our people enjoyed worldwide recognition and respect.
“The many deeds of our Party and people will be perverted and slandered first of all abroad, and in our country as well. #Zionism, aspiring to world domination, will cruelly avenge us for our successes and achievements. It still considers Russia as a barbaric country, as a raw material appendage. And my name will also be slandered. Many atrocities will be attributed to me.”
J.V. Stalin, 1939
#Russia #USSR #soviet #russian #history #Stalin #quotation
The End of the Cold War
Surrender in Malta
On December 3, 1989 during the Malta Summit - the negotiations between US President Bush Sr. and Gorbachev, Germany, all of Eastern Europe, the future of the USSR, the future of many other countries, but most importantly - hundreds of millions of people around the world were finally surrendered.
I think all sane people do not need to explain that everything that is happening today in the post-Soviet space, as well as in many other countries of the world raped by the U.S., is the result of the geopolitical catastrophe of 1991.
However, it was in December 1989 that the bets were finally placed. Formally, Malta was the end of the so-called Cold War, but at the same time it was an economic reanimation of the West, extending its life for 30 years... Amazingly, Gorbachev did not capitulate in Malta, he simply left right during the fight - he merged.
The content of the negotiations is still only partially known. Some of the documents were published only in 2010.
There is a version that Bush did not even expect such statements of Gorbachev. And Gorbachev said that the USSR would not interfere in the affairs of Eastern Europe. He said it unilaterally. Bush said that the U.S. supported reforms in the USSR.
Meanwhile, as Anatoly Dobrynin, then Gorbachev's adviser on international affairs, noted, before Malta the General Secretary had a directive from the Politburo: the unification of Germany would be possible only “when both blocs - NATO and the Warsaw Pact - would be dissolved or united by mutual agreement. About Eastern Europe - pure voluntarism.
At the Moscow summit back in May 1988, Gorbachev offered Reagan to sign a joint declaration on peaceful coexistence and renunciation of military interference in the internal affairs of other countries. Reagan rejected it. He was not an idiot. But Gorbachev was deliberately moving toward surrender. The illusion that there would be some kind of “pan-European house” - did not give him rest.
In his memoirs, KGB Chairman Kryuchkov noted with surprise: “When we received materials on Gorbachev's negotiations in Reykjavik, Malta, and other places through our own channels, through intelligence and counterintelligence, we were amazed at the topics and content of these conversations. Even at that time they talked openly about the sale of the GDR. About the change of the political order in our country...”.
The Americans understood him very well, if nothing else. Back in 1985, on his return to the U.S. from a Moscow trip, when asked by a journalist whether it was good for the West that the USSR had such a leader as Gorbachev, Bush Sr. (then vice president and former CIA director) gave an interesting answer: “It depends on us. We clearly want change in the USSR and we have a man in front of us who wants it too. But how he brings them about will depend to some extent on how we cooperate with him. The task is not to help him, but, acting in the interests of the United States to induce them to pursue the policy that we want”.
This phrase is the essence of U.S. policy.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9537101.html
#Russia #USSR #soviet #russian #history #perestroika #Gorbachev #europe #easterneurope #DDR #GDR #coldwar #NATO #FRG #germany #Reagan #CIA #Bush #USA #US #politics
If the Russians didn't have nuclear weapons ....
Well, it is actually a secret of Polichinel - if we did not have nuclear weapons, the U.S. and NATO would have attacked us long ago. It is the nuclear shield, which in its time was created under Stalin and brought to completion under subsequent leaders, is the main defense of the country and the people from Western aggressors who want to plunder our country once again, as it was in the 90s.
In general, thanks to Stalin, Beria, Kurchatov and all those who from the 40s until today, who forged and updated our nuclear shield.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9494321.html
#USA #US #american #Western #NATO #warmongers against #Russia #USSR #soviet #russian #nuclear-weapons #Stalin #Beria #Kurchatov
THE MILITIA ARE SERVANTS OF THE PEOPLE
107 years ago the Soviet militia was created.
Despite the renaming of the holiday, as well as the militia in the police, the holiday of internal affairs officers continue to be celebrated on the day when the Soviet militia was created, as actually continue to celebrate the holiday primary sources of other power structures of the Russian Federation.
#USSR #soviet #russian #Russia #history #militia #holiday
About the length of the working day
“...it would be wrong to think that it is possible to achieve such a serious cultural growth of the members of society without serious changes in the present state of labor. For this purpose it is necessary first of all to reduce the working day to at least 6 and then to 5 hours. This is necessary in order to give the members of society enough free time for a comprehensive education. For this it is necessary, further, to introduce compulsory polytechnic education, necessary for the members of society to be able to freely choose a profession and not be chained for life to one profession....
Joseph Stalin, “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR,” September 28, 1952”
After Stalin's death, the USSR leadership removed from the agenda the need to move to a six-hour day for the masses.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Шестичасовой_рабочий_день
#USSR #russian #soviet #history #Stalin #communism #socialism #workerrights #humanrights #study for #future
For more details (in Russian) on the methods and mechanisms of the collapse of the Soviet Union, see S.G. Kara-Murza, Manipulation of Consciousness -
#USSR #soviet #russian #revolutions #Lenin #Stalin #bolsheviks #ideology #communism #socialism #history #study for #future
Comment Khrouchtchev a fait dérailler la locomotive de l’histoire
Nous sommes entre nous... dans ce blog qui a rompu les ponts avec les réseaux sociaux et qui cherche à construire dans notre petit collectif un lieu de réflexion collective puisque cela n'est pas permadmin5319 (Histoire et société)
Anti-Communism Is A Fundamentalist Religion, Now Followed By Billions| Countercurrents
it is not the socialist revolution that provokes mass violence, but the bourgeois counter-revolution, that begins when capital realises that it is losing its property and power.#capitalism #imperialism #europe #Western #intervention #mccarthyism #anticommunism #anti-Russia #USSR #Stalin #bolsheviks #socialism #communism #soviet #russian #history #China
...
Beyond that, the picture was of a “triumphal procession of Soviet power” (this heading in Soviet textbooks was no accident). In the winter of 1917-1918 the relationship of forces saw half a million members of the workers’ militia, the Red Guard, pitted against a few tens of thousand White Guard members in the south of Russia. Everything was quiet until the counter-revolution received vast sums of money from the Triple Alliance (primarily from Germany) as well as from the Entente, and all these imperialist countries launched aggression against the young Soviet power.
...
And this applies to countless examples, all over the world, where the West first provoked and brutally antagonized socialist or communist countries, then accused them of cruelty, and finally “liberated” them in the name of freedom and democracy, literally raping the will of their people. All this just so European and North American imperialism would survive and thrive.
...
Ask the common men and women of the streets of London, Paris or New York, what they know about Stalin’s era, or the famines in the early years of the USSR, or in Communist China?
99.99% know nothing. Where these famines took place, or why? But they are absolutely certain that they took place. No doubts, whatsoever. No doubts that they happened “because of Communism”. Westerners are intellectually obedient, like sheep. Most of them do not question the propaganda unleashed by their regime. Are they really “free”?
The famine in the Soviet Union actually took place because the young revolutionary country was totally devastated by the Western and Japanese invasions, which tried to break and plunder the country. British, French, U.S., Czech, Polish, German, Japanese invasions, to name just a few.
But ask, for instance, the Czechs, how much they know about their Legions that controlled the Trans-Siberian railroad, on their way from Europe to Vladivostok. Plundering, rape, and mass killing. I tried. I asked, in Prague and Pilsen. They thought I was a lunatic. The Legions are portrayed as heroic, in their history books.
...
In both cases, Western propaganda made people believe that the real cause for the loss of lives in Russia and China was Communism! The brainwashing has been so successful, that even in Russia and China, millions of people have been fully indoctrinated by these countlessly repeated lies coming out of the West.
But ask in London, whether people know anything about the fact that under the British occupation of India, tens of millions of people died from starvation; victims of the famines triggered by London, for many reasons, one of them being an attempt to lower the population. Over 50 million Indian people, cumulatively, died in these famines, between 1769 to 1943, in British administered India.
Should we, as a result, ban the British political system? I am convinced that we should! But that is usually not what the people of the world, including the victims of the British colonialist barbarity, are demanding.
...
The goal of Western propaganda has always been to equate Communism and Fascism, the two most antagonistic systems in history, in the world. It was the Soviet Communist system, which smashed Nazism to pieces, saving the world, at an enormous cost of approximately 25 million human lives.
Only Western imperialism can be compared to German Nazism. The two are made of the same stuff.
Anti-Communism Is A Fundamentalist Religion, Now Followed By Billio...
Anti-Communism Is A Fundamentalist Religion, Now Followed By Billions| Countercurrents — https://countercurrents.org/2020/06/anti-communism-is-a-fundamentalist-religion-now-followed-by-billions/diaspora* social network
Happy Victory Day!
East Germany’s Soviet Heritage – The Treptow War Memorial in Berlin
#WW2 #WWII #war #europe #germany #USSR #soviet #russian #Victory #history
East Germany’s Soviet Heritage – The Treptow War Memorial in Berlin
Photo report on the impressive Soviet War Memorial in Berlin's Treptower Parkxflo:w (xflo:w - Photography and lots of Travelling)
May 2, 1945, the Berlin operation ended
#WWII #WW2 #Berlin #soviet #russian #USSR #red-army #history #photo #СССР #история
How the French invaders were expelled from the Black Sea
...
The main goal of the interventionists, although not proclaimed, was already quite prosaic at this point: colonization of the territories of the former Russian Empire - France's recent Entente ally. Therefore, the French first of all put local resources and transportation networks under their control.
#europe #european #france #french #intervention #soviet #russian #history #Russia #Sevastopol
Как французские интервенты были изгнаны с Черного моря
105 лет назад, во второй половине апреля 1919 года, в Севастополе вспыхнуло восстание французских моряков.ВЗГЛЯД.РУ
"Reminder: If we don’t have Ukrainians killing Ukrainians in Eastern Ukraine with American weapons, Russia will first invade Europe, then America, then the world." https://twitter.com/yashalevine/status/1208486243530444800
Ukraine can’t defeat Russia no matter how many American military advisers train Ukrainian troops or how many millions the good and totally not corrupt people at Raytheon Inc make selling their Javelins. The point isn’t for Ukraine to win the war. The point is to make Russia bleed — economically and militarily. And it doesn’t matter how many people die or suffer or how much of Ukraine and its economy is laid to waste in the process.
As I’ve written in bits and pieces before on here before, America’s foreign policy establishment — its diplomats, spies, and politicians — have seen Ukraine as a key field of battle against the Soviet Union going back to late 1940s. For decades, Ukraine and its diaspora were considered prime weapons for destabilizing the Soviet Union. It’s why America, Canada, the UK, and other western countries opened their doors to Ukrainian fascists and Nazi collaborators after World War II. Their hardcore ideology and their willingness to die for their lost nationalist cause were seen as important qualities in the fight against communism. Some of the earliest covert armed CIA operations against the Soviet Union involved parachuting Ukrainian Nazi collabo guerrillas behind Soviet lines to sabotage and whip up rebellion among Ukrainian peasants.
#CIA #western #us #canada #uk #ukrainian #puppets #fascism #nazism on #civilwar against #russian #Donbass #Russia after #Maidan #soviet #USSR #history
Trump's Impeachment, Ukraine, and War With Russia
Let me get all official and DC-like and call it the “Ukraine Doctrine.”Yasha Levine (weaponized immigrant)
1960s, its a reference to classic Russian literature quote (epigraph for Pushkin's story "Lady-peasant"), literally means - my darling (my soul), you look lovely in every outfit/every outfit becomes you.
#USSR #soviet #russian #poster #propaganda #Russia #womensday #history
Prison Conditions
A 1957 CIA document entitled “Correctional Labor Camps in the USSR: Transferring Prisoners Out of Camps,” on pages two through six, reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag:
‒ Until 1952 prisoners were given a guaranteed amount of food, plus extra food for exceeding the norms.
‒ From 1952, the Gulag system operated on the basis of “economic calculation,” so that the more prisoners worked, the more they were paid.
‒ For over-fulfillment of standards by 105%, one day of imprisonment counted as two, which reduced the time spent in the Gulag by one day.
‒ Also, when the Soviet government had more funds as a result of post-war socialist reconstruction, it increased the food standards for prisoners.
‒ Before 1954, prisoners worked 10 hours a day, while free laborers worked 8 hours a day. Since 1954, both prisoners and free laborers worked 8 hours a day.
‒ A CIA study of a standard camp sample found that 95% of the prisoners were habitual criminals.
‒ In 1953, 70% of the “common criminals” of the sample camp studied by the CIA were granted amnesty. Within the next 3 months most of them were re-arrested for new crimes.
…
Thus, according to the CIA, approximately two million people were sent to the Gulag in the 1930s, while according to declassified Soviet archives it was 2,369,220 up to 1954. When compared to the population of the Soviet Union at the time, as well as statistics In a country like the United States, the percentage of the Gulag population in the USSR throughout its history has been lower than in the United States today or since the 1990s. In fact, according to a study by Souza (1998), the United States had a higher percentage of prisoners (relative to the total population) than the USSR ever had:
"In a small news report that appeared in newspapers for August 1997, the FLT-AP news agency reported that the United States had never before had as many people incarcerated as it did in 1996-5.5 million people. This represents an increase of 200,000 since 1995 and means that the number of criminals in the U.S. is 2.8 percent of the adult population. This data is available to anyone who works for the North American Department of Justice… The number of people convicted in the U.S. today is 3 million more than the maximum number ever held in the Soviet Union! In the Soviet Union, no more than 2.4% of the adult population was incarcerated for their crimes, but in the U.S. the figure is 2.8% and rising! According to a press release issued by the U.S. Department of Justice on January 18, 1998, the number of people convicted in the U.S. in 1997 increased by 96,100.
#USSR #history #soviet #gulag #Stalin #USA #CIA #lang_ru #lang_en
About GULAG
About GULAG About GULAG by CIA https://aftershock.news/sites/default/files/u17682/pasted%20image%200.png Prison Conditions A 1957 CIA document entitled "Correctional Labor Camps in the USSR: Transferring Prisoners Out of Camps," on pages two through …diaspora social network
January 27, 1944
Today we honor the heroes who defended the city and fought for the freedom of the Fatherland. We congratulate veterans, residents of the Siege of Leningrad, distinguished colleagues and all Petersburgers on our memorable day.
Happy holiday and Victory to all!
#soviet #russian #history #WWII #WW2 #USSR
Michael [Кошак] Skolsky (R1BLH)
#[zrl=https://hub.cats-home.net/search?tag=fedi22]fedi22[/zrl]hub.cats-home.net
How We Won the Cold War
SOMETIMES American foreign policy debates seem governed by a Newtonian law stipulating that for every stupid, overstated, politically inspired argument there is an equally stupid, overstated, politically inspired counterargument. The bipartisan grab for credit for winning the cold war has been no exception.
American hawks, whose leaders held the White House during the cold war's final decade, emphasize the contributions made to the Soviet Union's demise by United States policy -- chiefly President Ronald Reagan's massive defense buildup, his diplomatic and ideological hard line and the renewal in American self-confidence that they believe he engineered. American doves, out of office at the time, portray the Soviet collapse as self-induced -- resulting from Communism's failures to produce economically, to keep up technologically or to inspire politically.
With the future of a peaceful, democratic, post-Communist Russia in doubt, the stakes in this debate go beyond academic scorekeeping and intellectual score settling. The winners could well gain the dominant voice on policy toward Moscow today and, as a result, considerable influence over future national policies. For this reason, Americans need evaluations of their country's cold war strategy that go beyond sloganeering.
Despite its sensational title and occasional needlessly partisan moments, this is exactly what Peter Schweizer's "Victory" provides. Mr. Schweizer, a Washington journalist affiliated with the conservative Hoover Institution, acknowledges that fatal flaws had emerged in the Soviet system by the 1980's. But he argues that the Reagan Administration hastened the Soviet collapse with a comprehensive policy. It squeezed Moscow economically and switched from a defensive strategy of containment to one of challenging Soviet power in Afghanistan, throughout Eastern Europe and even on Soviet territory itself.
Basing his book on interviews with top Reagan policy makers (especially in the intelligence community) and Soviet officials, as well as on classified American documents, Mr. Schweizer describes how the President and his national security team got the surprise of their lives when they entered office in 1981. After spending most of the previous decade warning against the rise of Soviet power and aggressiveness, the Reagan Administration discovered that Moscow was wheezing economically. At the urging of the new Director of Central Intelligence, William J. Casey -- the mastermind of the victory strategy, according to Mr. Schweizer, and the focus of the narrative -- the United States launched an all-out overt and covert economic war on the Soviets.
MR. SCHWEIZER says the Reagan military buildup sought not only to strengthen American forces, but also to strain Moscow's limited economic base. The centerpiece of this military effort was a policy of greatly expanded research and development on high technology weapons. By pushing programs like the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was ostensibly intended to neutralize a Soviet nuclear attack, the Reagan White House attempted to wage the arms race in areas where American know-how, not Soviet numbers, would be decisive.
The United States also sought to shut off a major Soviet source of hard currency by blocking Moscow's oil and gas exports to Western Europe (with only limited success, as Mr. Schweizer recognizes) and by persuading Saudi Arabia to help drive down world oil prices (with much more success). The vise was tightened further, Mr. Schweizer contends, by restricting the eastward flow of Western credit and technology, thus denying the Soviets valuable financial resources and damaging the Soviet economy's military and civilian sectors.
In addition, to insure that the Kremlin would have to spend billions putting out fires in Poland and Afghanistan, the Administration began to funnel aid to Solidarity in Poland and to upgrade the weaponry and intelligence supplied to the mujahedeen, the Muslim guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan. Finally, Mr. Schweizer provides convincing reasons for concluding that Jimmy Carter, even a Jimmy Carter sobered by the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, would never have instituted a similar policy.
Whether or not the Reagan policies worked and did contribute decisively to winning the cold war, Mr. Schweizer's account adds significantly to our knowledge of the struggle's climactic stages. Although many of the tactics he describes were common knowledge, their strategic coordination has been largely unknown, and a number of the individual elements of the strategy have remained secret as well.
THE author's unfailing admiration notwithstanding, these policies add up to a puzzling and sometimes unsettling portrait -- of subtlety, guile and tactical brilliance existing side by side with what can only be called utter recklessness; of commendable audacity and ingenuity coexisting with serious disrespect for American political processes. Thus the same officials who orchestrated the delicate plan to depress world oil prices (clinched by telling Saudi Arabia's King Fahd of the dollar's coming devaluation) also urged the buzzing of Soviet air defenses not only with American fighter planes but with bombers as well. Those who secured tacit Vatican and active Swedish help for Solidarity also supported mujahedeen guerrilla operations inside the Soviet Union.
The revelations made by the author unintentionally are at least as stunning. American voters, for example, may be surprised to learn that in 1980 they elected a President who was not only tough on the Soviets, but who also soon became determined to back them into a corner, with all the risks that strategy entailed in those hair-trigger times. Indeed, Mr. Schweizer presents new evidence that Mr. Reagan's bellicose rhetoric and his Strategic Defense Initiative did in fact create fears in the Kremlin of an American nuclear attack.
Similarly, "Victory" sheds new light on Reaganomics. It turns out that critics who faulted the President for running up unpre cedented peacetime budget deficits were missing the point. In the minds of Mr. Reagan and associates like Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, the cold war period was not peacetime. And yet the Administration refused to seek public sacrifices to fight this "war."
Since, as the author acknowledges, "Victory" is more journalism than history, it is no surprise that he raises more questions than he answers. A first group of questions concerns methodology. Even for a book in the "now it can be told" genre, Mr. Schweizer's work needs greater documentation. In particular, too much vital information is attributed simply to anonymous Soviet or American sources. Skeptical readers will also have problems with many of the Soviet sources who are named, for in the post-cold-war world many financially strapped former Soviet operatives have learned how profitable stroking Western egos can be. Further, although the author clearly has interviewed many of Casey's chief aides, we hear nothing from the late director's bureaucratic opponents. Surely the story Mr. Schweizer tells of C.I.A. infighting has more than one side.
A second group of questions concerns the costs of victory. Some were legal and political. Like Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and other cold war Presidents, Ronald Reagan purposely shut the American people and Congress out of decision making. Did the ends of victory always justify such means -- especially since the United States was always strong enough to avert foreign policy catastrophe? How long could huge covert paramilitary operations and arms-for-hostage deals have been continued without irreversibly damaging American political institutions and boosting public cynicism to levels no healthy democracy could tolerate?
Other costs were economic. Fighting a "war" without public knowledge or sacrifice may have helped Mr. Reagan win re-election. But in the process, many would argue, America's public finances were damaged, harming our economy and crippling our political capacity for dealing with a raft of growing domestic ills. And the Administration's obsession with victory in the cold war blinded it to growing threats on the industrial and technological fronts, with serious consequences for American living standards, for the country's long-term capacity to create wealth and even for its ability to support assertive foreign policies. As former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger sagely observed in a 1989 speech, the United States, too, crossed the cold war finish line gasping for breath. Some readers will undoubtedly complete "Victory" dismissing such complaints as nitpicking. Others will wonder if American democracy and prosperity can survive another such triumph in our still dangerous world. 'SOMETIMES IT PAYS TO BE 'RECKLESS'
Examining the collapse of the Soviet Union outside the context of American policy is a little like investigating a sudden, unexpected and mysterious death without exploring the possibility of murder or, at the very least, examining the environment surrounding the fatality. . . . The fact that the collapse and funeral of the Soviet Union occurred immediately after the most anti-Communist President in American history had served eight years does not prove cause and effect. But it does demand investigation. . . . Thus far, the investigation of Reagan policy in relation to the collapse of the Soviet Union has been scant. The focus has been almost exclusively on the policies of Gorbachev. This is somewhat akin to studying the collapse of the South after the Civil War by concentrating on the policies of Gen. Robert E. Lee without at least looking at the strategies employed by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.
Some believe that little or no connection can be drawn between American policies in the 1980's and the collapse of the Soviet edifice. . . . Former Soviet officials do not share this view. The fact is that Reagan administration policy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union was in many ways a radical break from the past. There is also irony in this view, in that those who now believe American policy had little effect on internal events in the Soviet Union counseled in the 1970's and 1980's for an accommodating stance toward the Kremlin because it might moderate Soviet behavior. Reagan was called a "reckless cowboy" who might steer us all to the nuclear brink.
The fact the greatest geopolitical event since the end of the Second World War happened after eight years in the Presidency of Ronald Reagan has also been described as "dumb luck." It might be wise to recall, however, that when the exploits of a French commander particularly unpopular with his colleagues were dismissed as "luck," Napoleon retorted, "Then get me more 'lucky' generals."From "Victory."1
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/10/books/how-we-won-the-cold-war.html
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