How the Cold War Ended

John Tirman is the author of Making the Money Sing: Private Wealth and Public Power in the Search for Peace (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). He directs the programme on global security and co-operation at the Social Science Research Council in New York.

The 1990s were filled with conjectures about the Cold War’s demise, typically centring on winners and losers—that the United States and its allies were victors, that everyone lost, or that the Soviet Union exhausted itself and surrendered with a whimper rather than a bang. In the ten years since the Soviet Union’s collapse, however, relatively little scholarship, journalism or polemic has addressed the question of how this decades-long and uniquely perilous rivalry ended.

 

This curious lacuna possibly stems from the power of ideology itself. Few saw a need to question the sturdy tenets of the dominant intellectual framework, namely, that the Cold War was a rivalry, a “twilight struggle”, fought in a matrix of expansion and containment with military and economic power and antagonistic values. There was a winner and a loser, and victors rarely feel the need to question their triumph. So the popular version of history accepts the winning edge of military might, combined with the Soviet Union’s inferior capacity to sustain the competition at such exacting levels. The explanatory power of this straightforward causality is not satisfying, however, because it does not account for change—and astonishing, swift change at that.

 

Looking at the last decade of the Cold War through a different set of optics provides some new colouration and clarity. The Cold War’s endgame was played out in two stages, the first being the voluntary termination of the military confrontation, and the second being the final, interior decomposition of legitimacy in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. While both were influenced by American military power and bluster—how could they not be?—neither was a direct result of that power. They were, instead, the consequences of changing international norms that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to use to his advantage but could never master.

Reagan’s Mythic Role

The thrust of the cruder forms of the popular explanation is that the last cold warrior—Ronald Reagan—was responsible for the final victory. The arrows in his quiver were moral denunciation, support for anti-communist insurgents worldwide and, above all, a strategic military expansion that bankrupted the Soviet Union. American conservatives are now supplementing this canon. Consider this concise assertion from Richard Pipes, the conservative Russian-studies scholar:

 

Although not a learned man, [Reagan] had the true statesman’s intuition. He understood the nature of the conflict with the communist bloc and he had a sound grasp of the balance of power; instead of allowing himself to be mesmerized by Moscow’s military arsenal and paralyzed by the fear of nuclear war, he grasped that the ideological poverty of the USSR and its desperate economic straits made it a weak if blustering opponent. This understanding led him to disregard most of the advice he was receiving. Instead, he formulated an offensive strategy based on the premise that the Soviet system, being incurably sick, could be forced in the direction of reform and possible collapse by a determined military buildup and measures of economic denial, both reinforced by bold rhetoric. He was the first U.S. president to challenge not just Soviet aggression but the communist system itself as its direct cause.¹

 

Ten years ago, the American right would have pointed to “Star Wars” and MX missiles, the Nicaraguan contras and Afghan mujahideen, and the “evil empire” speech as the hard-edged instruments of Reaganism. Now their explanations turn on Reagan’s remarkable ability to see that the Soviet Union could be reformed and indeed terminated very quickly.

 

Little evidence supports this new revisionism. The reports of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), headed by Reagan’s most trusted adviser, William Casey, predicted no worse than 1–2 per cent growth in the Soviet economy during the 1980s, and presented in early 1981 a picture of Soviet military power as exceptionally strong and growing, outstripping US capabilities. Everything Reagan did and said in the ensuing three years was consistent with the view that the Soviets, while suffering from ageing leadership, remained an implacable, muscular foe. In fact, it was an article of faith among conservatives that Soviet communism was incapable of liberal reform, and that it was out-competing the West in all categories. Reagan and his political cohorts may have harboured fantasies about winning the Cold War, but none articulated this strategy as anything more than a remote wish. All their actions and rhetoric were aimed towards long-term competition with a resilient and wily enemy.

 

This desire to place Reagan in the vanguard of a small cognoscenti who recognised imminent Soviet decay and collapse probably arises from an expanding understanding of what was occurring inside the Soviet leadership and Russian society in the late 1980s. As Soviet archives are opened, and more people are interviewed, and the like, we are learning that the old shibboleths about the Reagan strategy as the cause of the Soviet collapse are at best half-truths.

 

They remain resilient half-truths all the same. Consider the three planks of the case for Reagan’s decisive role in winning the Cold War:

 

1. The strategic nuclear build-up, including the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI). This not only showed the Soviets that Washington would compete forcefully, but ultimately bankrupted Moscow, which could not keep up with America’s high-tech wizardry.

 

2. The willingness to combat the Soviets in the global South through support for or creation of insurgencies aimed at toppling communist regimes in Angola, Mozambique, the Horn of Africa, Central America, Afghanistan and elsewhere, which became known as the Reagan Doctrine.

 

3. The articulation of a set of norms rejecting “moral equivalency” and insisting that Western (and especially American) values of freedom were superior.

 

All three have a measure of merit. What is missing, however, is a sense of proportion, both in the claim that these were uniquely products of the Reagan period and in the assertion that they were paramount causes of the Soviet collapse. Examining each leg of the Reagan tripod is a useful way to build a more complex and inclusive structure of explanation.

Reaganism Reviewed

The Strategic Nuclear Campaign

The simplest answer to the notion that the US build-up of nuclear war-fighting capability (and military spending more generally) led to Soviet surrender is to examine where Reagan’s actions fit in the longer history of American (and West European) military preparedness. The peak expenditure for the US military in the Reagan years was 6.6 per cent of gross national product, lower than peaks in the Eisenhower and. Kennedy administrations. There was, of course, growth in spending from the 1970s, but even here the numbers can be misleading: virtually all the important nuclear systems deployed in the 1980s—the Trident submarine and the Trident 2 missile, the MX missile, the B-1 bomber and the so-called Euromissiles—were initiated during Jimmy Carter’s administration in 1977–81. Strategic defence programmes had been ongoing since the 1950s.

 

The advent of SDI is almost always cited as the definitive turn in the 1980s, the winning weapon that shocked the Soviet leadership and pushed it towards self-immolation. It is true that SDI was worrisome to the Soviets, as it presented a potentially destabilising change in the nuclear balance. Even an inefficient “Star Wars” system, which could not work as a defence against a Soviet first strike, could provide a much more robust defence against a Soviet second strike, and therein lay its utility and its threat—as a component of a US first-strike capability. Coupled with statements from the US secretaries of state and defence about nuclear “warning shots” or “winnable nuclear wars”, the scenario of a hyper-belligerent United States arming itself for the final battle looked all too real. What is remarkable about the Soviet response is that, apart from diplomatic huffing, it was so muted: no significant increase in military spending in the pre-Gorbachev 1980s, and later, a willingness to reduce strategic nuclear arsenals even without constraints on SDI—exactly the opposite reaction one would expect if Moscow were so panicked about the technology.

The Triumph of the Reagan Doctrine

The two key victories cited in support of this strategy are the CIA’s arming of both the Islamic groups opposing the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the contras trying to destabilise the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. In this line of thinking, the Reagan Doctrine of insurgency against communist regimes supported by Moscow forced more diplomatic, economic and political expenditures by the Soviet Union, created a crisis of legitimacy and contributed to the decline of the Soviet empire. The list of interventions is in fact quite lengthy, and includes direct or indirect military operations in much of Africa and elsewhere, and “soft” intervention by support of dissidents in Eastern Europe particularly.

 

The victories these tactics earned were bloody and probably unnecessary, though raising the costs of the Afghan operation for the Soviets was significant. But by the time that most of the US covert aid was being delivered (the mid-1980s), the Soviets had made the decision to withdraw and were searching for ways to exit. The Soviet leadership supported the Sandinista regime, but when the time came to gain political advantage from cutting back its assistance, Gorbachev was quick to abandon them. Only Cuba remained as a key symbol in the western hemisphere, unfazed by Reagan administration tactics and still firmly in the Soviet orbit. In southern Africa, progress towards post-colonial or post-apartheid settlements was by and large made in spite of Reagan-era actions, which ranged from overt support for the white supremacist regime in Pretoria and arms supplied to Jonas Savimbi’s opposition in Angola, to more indirect forms of support for anti-communist forces. Much of this was not new in US foreign policy. Some Reagan Doctrine policies had consequences, of course, as the millions of casualties in Angola and Mozambique attest, but few hurt Soviet interests and some simply revealed American hypocrisy, as in South Africa. The sole exception of Afghanistan, where prolonging and complicating the occupation possibly did intensify public and elite restiveness in the Soviet Union, had costs for the United States, too. Even the most avid believer in the Reagan Doctrine would be hard pressed to say that the Afghan operations contributed substantially to the Soviet Union’s demise.

The Moral Crusade

The military build-up and the attempt to roll back Soviet gains in the developing world were politically awash in a constant flow of speech-making intended to saturate these policies with moral nutrients. Denouncing Soviet communism as the focus of evil in the world and exalting America as the locus of freedom and prosperity are credited by some analysts as an incisive instrument, a worldwide mission alerting all to which side was morally superior.

 

This information strategy was present in American political culture since the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, however. One can recall Kennedy’s inaugural address: “Let every nation know ... that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty”—words he backed up with military action far more than Reagan ever did. No president of the United States, and very few mainstream politicians, veered far from this hortatory language. Reagan’s use of this trope only seems particularly effective because he came to the White House after a difficult decade for his country—Vietnam, Watergate, oil price shocks, recession, hostages in Tehran—and touched a desire to reinvigorate American stature by tapping this tradition, and of course he did so with gifted theatricality. Little of it mattered to the Soviet leadership, apparently, as Anatoly Chernyaev, a key Gorbachev adviser, recalled in 1998:

 

I do not believe that the anti-Communist, anti-Soviet rhetoric, and the increase in the armaments and military power of the United States played a serious role in our decision-making. I think perhaps they played no role whatsoever. The United States is a colossal power, a military superpower, it was clear to us, but it was a constant.²

Rhetoric and Reality

The norms this speechifying promoted were not only of several decades’ vintage, but they also never became the dominant discourse. The calls to freedom were undercut by the administration’s support for authoritarian regimes, its professions of peace undermined by the loose talk about winning nuclear wars and supporting shadowy guerrillas. The norms never translated into expanding liberty if that meant more contact, dialogue and partnerships with those in the Soviet sphere; in this, the Reaganites misunderstood the potential power of their own rhetoric. There was also too much that was contradictory or false in this discourse (as there is for virtually any American president) to be effective as a weapon in the Cold War; instead, it polarised the West and sometimes even played into the hands of Soviet apologists. The words of Reagan and his most right-wing lieutenants (e.g., Caspar Weinberger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Elliott Abrams and Alexander Haig) often provided ammunition for opposition movements in the United States and Western Europe: consider the near-justification of death‑squad killings of activist nuns and priests in Central America, which helped fuel a broad-based movement to reverse Reagan policies in that region.

 

For four decades, the US government acted with remarkable consistency in its confrontation with the Soviet Union. One can argue that the Americans were too belligerent, constructed an unnecessarily large national security state, too often backed a coterie of brutal dictatorships, and frequently played a dangerous game with nuclear weapons. But the apparent threat from Soviet despotism was the spur to these policies. The American historian John Lewis Gaddis has described the Cold War as having ended when Stalin died; everything afterwards was a residue. In a sense that is true: the sheer monstrosity of Stalinism—the tens of millions murdered in the pogroms, the purges, the seizing of Eastern Europe—so alarmed Truman, Churchill, Eisenhower and a handful of other leaders in the West that a sweeping strategy of encirclement was embraced, and this labyrinthine policy of containment was pursued faithfully in economic, political and military actions. Every US president and Congress adhered to containment; even détente and arms control were endeavoured in this context.

 

Reagan’s presidency should be seen as simply another chapter in this history. He was a cold warrior of the more stalwart type, but little in his policies was innovative. The Soviets had stood up to stronger rhetoric and more belligerent actions. The Russian people had endured the cruellest conditions imaginable during the 1930s and 1940s, and the idea of bankrupting them with a $3 billion space-laser chimera and somewhat greater spending on the military, or Third World bumptiousness, or more talk of “iron tyranny” or prevailing in the “twilight struggle” (Kennedy’s phrases again), was dubious to all informed observers.

 

That containment itself was a crucial factor in ending the Cold War cannot be doubted. But containment is too broad a canvas on which to paint a convincing picture of how the Cold War ended. Why not sooner, why not later, or why not differently? Containment as an answer to why the Cold War ended is not satisfying. Something else, more disruptive and causative, had to occur. And if it was not Reagan, what was it?

The Transformation of Norms

Two phenomena advanced across the world’s political landscape in the late 1970s and early 1980s and combined, like typhoons at sea, to create a colossal storm that swept away the Cold War and with it the Soviet Union. One phenomenon was the desire within the Soviet Union to reform and revive itself, to liberalise economically and to open itself to the world. The second was the transnational social movements demanding disarmament and human rights. As explanatory factors regarding the end of the Cold War, each was discounted in the early 1990s but has gradually gained credence.

 

The Soviet story is the more difficult to parse, not only because of the state’s secrecy and essential duplicity, but because the story itself is complex. Much rests on the brief reign of Gorbachev as the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, his unique, risk-taking leadership and his evident determination to transform the party, economy and society. But the Soviet story begins before March 1985, when the Politburo elevated Gorbachev after Konstantin Chernenko’s death, and may indeed begin with Stalin’s death in 1953. For those thirty-two years, the Soviet leadership struggled with its bloody history, a need to reform and a fear of losing control. The elements of reform—mainly economic reform, but also political and social liberalisation—were in constant tension with the more rigid ideologues in the party. Nikita Khrushchev’s premiership is remembered as a flickering moment of this reform, a denunciation of Stalin and a mild loosening of the Kremlin’s shackles, but it was brief and limited. The subsequent Brezhnev period (1964–82) is typically seen as a dark night of neo-Stalinism, Soviet military assertiveness and social decay; the low point of Brezhnev’s reign for would-be reformers was the crushing of Alexander Dubcek’s liberalising government in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Still, the tendrils of a reform movement were being woven in the 1970s, particularly as the strong economic expansion of the 1950s and 1960s waned.

 

By 1980, there was a broad recognition within the Soviet leadership that the USSR was falling behind technologically and politically in the world. Possibly the most dramatic example of this was the Politburo’s decision not to intervene in Poland against the rise of Solidarity in 1980–1. Yuri Andropov, the KGB chief and successor to Brezhnev, told the Politburo that “even if Poland were to be ruled by Solidarity, so be it”. Agreeing with Andropov, Brezhnev’s chief ideologist Mikhail Suslov opposed intervention because the Soviet Union’s embrace of détente would make it “impossible for us to change our position. World public opinion will not allow us to do so”.³

 

The economic situation was even more worrisome and occasioned a series of fitful attempts to address the decline under Brezhnev. As described by Georgy Shaknazarov, one of the reformers of the Gorbachev generation, during the 1970s there was a long consultation between economists and managers that proposed

 

to change our planned socialist economy, make it accelerate by adding some kind of capitalist fermentation to it and some kind of entrepreneurship ... At the last moment Brezhnev got scared [because] he was aware that if he took these new steps, he would be obliged to change the basic principles of the political system … The main cause of what transpired was not economic but the falling behind of the Soviet Union technologically, ... separated from the main market of innovation ... It was this that made us lose ground [and] played the crucial role in the deterioration of the Soviet economy.⁴

 

This view, widely supported by others who were in the Soviet leadership, implies several consequences: that reformers had an opening to exploit, that resistance to political changes would be weakened, and that Soviet foreign policy would also be in play. Andropov was considered a Khrushchev-like reformer, but his brief time at the top saw little change except for one thing: he brought Gorbachev into the Politburo, and Gorbachev brought other reformers, such as Chernyaev, Shaknazarov, Alexander Yakovlev and Yevgeny Velikhov, closer to the inner sanctum of Kremlin power. When Chernenko concluded the gerontocratic crisis by dying in 1985, the Politburo knew it had to change generations, and Gorbachev was the obvious choice. Noteworthy here is that the recognition of a need for reform, and of the relationship of economic to political reform, predated the Reagan presidency and indeed accelerated during the Carter presidency. As one scholar of this process concludes, “the roots and ideas of later reforms were present under Brezhnev (and in some cases even earlier). Missing, however, were the international pressures and domestic political processes necessary to empower those ideas.”⁵

Gorbachev’s Revolution

The story from that point, March 1985, is better known. Gorbachev believed that internal reform required an end to the Cold War, that too many political and financial resources were being wasted on a useless and unnecessary confrontation with the West. He began his reform by directly attempting to dismantle the hostility, mistrust and military rationales undergirding that confrontation. His initiatives included, in rapid succession, unilateral restraints on nuclear testing and deployments, radical proposals for nuclear arms reductions (including outright abolition, proposed at the Reykjavik summit in 1986 but choked by Reagan to preserve SDI), abrupt acceptance of the “zero option” for nuclear weapons in Europe, leading to the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in December 1987, a change to defensive postures and deep cuts in non-nuclear forces in Eastern Europe, the pledge at the United Nations in December 1988 not to interfere in the political future of the Warsaw Pact countries (a promise he kept in the tumult of late 1989), and the sharp reductions finally enshrined in Start 1 and Start 2.

 

These measures, and others, were pursued not only to find resources to invest in domestic civilian production—the Soviet economy, while falling behind others, was still growing in this period—but to change the way the Soviet communists viewed and acted on a broad range of issues. “Gorbachev promulgated these concepts in his report to the 27th party congress in 1986,” writes American scholar Leon Sigal in a recent study:

 

The report provoked a “stormy reaction,” according to foreign minister Shevardnadze ... Gorbachev spoke of the dangers of nuclear war, environmental pollution, and depletion of natural resources, problems “on a global scale affecting the very foundations of the existence of civilization.” ... Gorbachev then introduced the concept of common security [the idea that security could only be mutual and that problems of international relations] can be resolved only by political means.⁶

 

Another scholar, Raymond Garthoff, agrees that this rejection of Marxist–Leninist class struggle as a global project was the most radical of Gorbachev’s initiatives, signalling a profound break with the bedrock of communist ideology.⁷

 

Gorbachev’s revolution proceeded at first with little recognition from the United States. In fact, he was regarded throughout the late 1980s as a wolf in sheep’s clothing by the opinion elite. (In a typically derisive comment, the Washington Post opined a year after Gorbachev’s ascension that he was “Brezhnevism without Brezhnev” and that in his devotion to a Soviet system “rigidly centralized under party control ... [he] remains, in that sense, a Stalinist”.)

 

But the American public was much more receptive to Gorbachev’s overtures. Despite the vitriolic anti-Soviet stance of the Reagan administration in the early 1980s, and the Democratic Party’s early acquiescence in this new phase of the Cold War, the public shifted from fear of Soviet intentions in 1979–80 to broad acceptance of the need to end the arms race and pursue better relations with Moscow.

The Peace Movement

There is only one plausible explanation for this shift: the peace movement, which changed the normative discourse dramatically in the early 1980s.⁸ The nuclear weapons freeze campaign in particular, allied with groups of doctors, educators, scientists and Central America activists, utterly transformed the debate beginning in 1980–1. It stigmatised the notion of “usable” nuclear weapons. It educated the public about the insanely large and costly nuclear arsenals. It forced the Reagan administration to re-engage the arms control process. When Gorbachev appeared, the public was ready for a change in policy.

 

The signing of the INF Treaty in 1987 demonstrates this most clearly. Reagan had been crippled by the Iran–contra scandal, which threatened for a time to bring down his presidency. He responded by moving closer to Gorbachev, a trend begun in early 1984 in response to public demands. The INF agreement was the first major consequence of Reagan’s transformation, signed just a year after the Iran–contra scandal became public. The “zero option”, cursed by conservatives and many arms controllers alike because it supposedly “decoupled” US and European nuclear security, became the first arms reduction treaty of the eighties. It was opposed by Senate majority leader Robert Byrd and Representative Les Aspin, both key Democrats, and numerous others in Washington’s higher circles, including Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon and Brent Scowcroft. But the overwhelming public approval of the treaty—more than 80 per cent—collapsed the opposition. The INF agreement, ratified by the Senate in 1988, was the first payoff for the sustained and clamorous public demand for an end to nuclear madness. Later that year, the odd couple of Gorbachev and Reagan sketched what would eventually become the two Start treaties, which sharply cut into strategic nuclear arsenals, again earning the enthusiastic approval of the American public.

 

One of the remarkable aspects of Gorbachev’s disarmament activism is that many of the specific proposals originated in the West and were transmitted to his circle (before and after he became premier) through scientists in the nuclear disarmament Pugwash movement and other such channels. These “policy entrepreneurs” went to Moscow to create some sense of momentum towards arms control that would resonate in the United States—creating an “echo effect” from West to East and back again. Less expected was how hungrily the Soviets would take up the suggestions for arms restraint and adopt the fresh thinking developed by peace researchers working on common security concepts, led by Anders Boserup in Denmark, Egon Bahr in West Germany and Randy Forsberg in the United States. Cornell University scholar Matthew Evangelista found in the Soviet archives that Gorbachev

 

seemed to welcome transnational contacts—and not only on technical issues of nuclear arms control. He paved the way for transnational activists to challenge the Soviet military’s competence within their core domain of planning for conventional warfare in Europe. The influences of foreign scientists and peace activists in preparing the intellectual ground for ending the East–West military standoff in central Europe contributed much to the peaceful demise of the Cold War.⁹

 

The activism was not limited to arms reduction proposals, however, particularly in the movement that took hold of Europe. “What made the peace movement of the 1980s different from earlier movements was the explicit link between peace, and democracy and human rights,” writes Mary Kaldor, a leading peace activist and intellectual.

 

E. P. Thompson, the eminent historian whose writings inspired the new movement, called for a transcontinental movement of citizens. The European Nuclear Disarmament Appeal of 1980, signed by millions of people all over Europe, called on its signatories, who included Vaclav Havel, Olaf Palme, and George Konrad, not to “be loyal to East or West, but to each other.” From the beginning, this new movement sought links with individual dissidents and groups in Eastern Europe.¹⁰

Helsinki

The connections to East European civil society, or its “anti-politics”, as Havel famously called it, were fostered by the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, the last treaty of the period of détente. Helsinki included a basket of human rights provisions, among them freer travel and association between and within countries. This accelerated civil society development, helped incubate the “new thinking” that Gorbachev would later embrace, and put new restraints on Soviet meddling. The treaty was the object of blistering derision by the American right, and bluntly opposed by Reagan (then running against President Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination for president) because it supposedly legitimised the Soviet Union’s sovereignty over the Baltic states. Such excoriation continued into the Carter years, because he elevated human rights to a moral centrepiece of his foreign policy. But it is now clear that this emphasis, spurred by the human rights movement, also emboldened dissidents throughout the Soviet sphere.

 

This transformation of the normative climate of global politics—in short, a public demand for peace and human dignity—began to have its enormous, real-world effect once Gorbachev was in power. And it is this transformation that actually ended the Cold War. The nuclear arms race was essentially over by 1987, the first consequence of this bold articulation of the worldwide desire for a retreat from the nuclear precipice. The remainder of the military competition was steadily, if incompletely, disassembled over the next three years. Occurring simultaneously, and gathering momentum in the late 1980s, was the delegitimisation of Soviet rule internally. This both accelerated Soviet reform, making it more far-reaching and radical, and undermined the reformers as part of the old system of central control and repression. This unravelling emboldened civil society in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria and Romania, while enfeebling the communist parties in those states. In the Soviet Union something similar happened, though it was possibly more traumatic and made the direction of change, particularly towards openness, irreversible and corrosive of Soviet rule.

 

One of the best treatments of this comes from the American journalist David Remnick, who spent much of the period in Moscow as a correspondent for the Washington Post. While he lionises the dissidents, led by the extraordinary Andrei Sakharov, he recognises the pivotal role played by the “men of the sixties”, the reformers in the party who hoped to bring a Prague Spring to Moscow. But he also underscores how the law of unintended consequences was at work. In one of his first speeches to the Central Committee as party chairman, Gorbachev engaged, as Khrushchev had in 1956, the ghost of Stalin. According to Remnick, “Gorbachev seemed intent on replacing a clearly odious, untenable official history with a more liberal one, a model that proposed revised catchwords and icons for his stated goal: reforming socialism.”¹¹ But as history was re-examined in Russia, the poison of the party’s rule became unbearable for the body politic. Memory became the axe in the hands of the people, bringing down the lies of the Soviet state. Once that process of remembering began, a pent-up anger and despair was unleashed as political fury. In combination with an impossibly difficult economic restructuring and the newly amplified expectations about liberalisation in the Soviet sphere, this doomed Gorbachev and the Communist Party. Their final humiliation was the last murmur of the Cold War.

 

Those mounting and exhilarating demands for human rights and peace represent the indispensable difference in the long history of the Cold War. The policy of containment posited, in George Kennan’s version, that the internal contradictions of the Soviet system would be its undoing, but the industrial and military power of the Soviet Union in the 1980s did not suggest that undoing was near. The new and powerful element was the demand for change, inside and outside the Soviet empire. It is the most astonishing tale of how and why ideas matter in the course of human events, a noble triumph of humanistic values to be celebrated and enlarged. 

Endnotes

1. “The Cold War over CNN’s Cold War”, Hoover Digest, no. 4 (1999).

 

2. See Nina Tannenwald, ed., “Understanding the End of the Cold War, 1980–87” (proceedings of conference at Brown University, 7–10 May 1998), p. 81. At the same conference, General Edward Rowny, Reagan’s chief arms negotiator, stated flatly that SDI was not intended to bankrupt the Soviet Union.

 

3. Minutes of Politburo meeting, 10 December 1981, quoted in Vojtech Mastney, “The Soviet Invasion of Poland in 1980/81 and the End of the Cold War”, Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Working Paper no. 23 (September 1998).

 

4. Tannenwald, “Understanding the End of the Cold War”, pp. 22, 27.

 

5. Jeffrey T. Checkel, Ideas and International Political Change: Soviet/Russian Behavior and the End of the Cold War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 76.

 

6. Leon V. Sigal, Hang Separately: Co-operative Security between the United States and Russia, 1985–1994 (New York: Century Foundation Press, 2000), p. 19.

 

7. Garthoff’s main contribution is The Great Transformation: American–Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1994).

 

8. For a longer treatment of this question, see John Tirman, “How We Won the Cold War”, Nation, 1 November 1999.

 

9. Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 21.

 

10. Mary Kaldor, “Who Killed the Cold War?”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (January 1995).

 

11. David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 61.