Sarah Paine — Why Russia Lost the Cold War

**Sarah Paine** (0:02)
Thank you for coming. It's a treat to be with you and sharing all this stuff. Since we seem to be in a second Cold War, maybe it's a good time to revisit the last one, to see why it turned out the way it did, and why the participants in it thought it turned out the way it did. So I'm going to pose the question, why Russia lost the Cold War? And people have loads of different answers to that question. So this is going to be a tour of the counterarguments. I'm going to start with an answer that many Americans have, very simple one that's like, Ronald Reagan single-handedly defeated the Soviet Union. So that's one possible answer. But then I'm going to give you all kinds of counterarguments to that. And some of them are going to be other external explanations of what others did to the Soviet Union. Others are internal ones of what the Soviet Union, the cards that didn't play particularly well. And then I've got some umbrella explanations. So that's my plan for this evening. The story that Ronald Reagan did it, well, here's a picture at the Reagan Ranch after the Cold War is over. You see the Gorbachev's and you see the Reagan's and they seem to be having a grand old time, which suggests there's something maybe off of that explanation. But anyway, the way the Ronald Reagan did at school is Ronald Reagan did a massive military buildup and that some would argue it bankrupted the Soviet Union. He was a man of words and deeds. He made really good speeches that were memorable. Here's one before Parliament where he says, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than 30 years to establish their legitimacy, but none, not one regime has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root. Then here he is before the Brandenburg Gate. This is in Berlin, long a symbol of German greatness, but then it was a locked gate on the Berlin Wall. And here's Ronald Reagan. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev opened this gate, teared down this wall, and who can forget the evil empire speech, which he gave to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, and they skipped Disneyland to hear it. All right. Reagan did a very significant military buildup that actually had started under Carter when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Big mistake, as we discovered.
He also deployed missiles in Europe. He was busy funding anti-Communist insurgencies, and also others who didn't like the Soviet Union all over the world, starts doing more aggressive military patrolling, and by the time he's out of office, he's like half a dozen ships short of this 600 ship Navy or whatever it is he was planning to make. He also was trying to build a missile shield, a strategic defense initiative. And the problem is the Soviets tried to match him on this. And if you add up the GNPs of the United States, NATO allies in Japan, well, that would be seven times larger than the Soviet GNP. And you got to be aware of symmetric strategy. So the CIA thought during the Cold War that perhaps Russia was spending up to a 20% part of its GNP on defense. After the Cold War ended, when you're getting more accurate statistics, it turns out it was at least 40 or 50%. And some people say it was up to a truly economy-busting 70% if you take into account all the infrastructure investments that were associated with military things. If you look during the Cold War, the United States was spending less than 8%, Germany less than 6%, Japan less than 2%, and Nazi Germany, which is no piker, 55%. So you look at all this and it was difficult. So I am going to be quoting lots of Russians today because they have thought deeply about the fate of their country, how life as they knew it disappeared, the Soviet Union gone, the Empire gone. They thought a lot about it. And here is a former Soviet ambassador to West Germany, Valentin Fallin. And here is his take. Following the American strategy of our exhaustion in the arms race, our crisis in public health and all the things have to do with standard of living reached a new dimension of crisis. And then if you add to the arms race of the United States, the arms race that was going on with China on that border, the arms race plunged the Soviet economy into a permanent crisis. And here you have Georgi Arbatov, who is the Soviet Union's, late Soviet Union's finest expert on the United States, or at least his most famous one. He's looking at the Soviet War in Afghanistan. He said, it is quite clear that the Afghan War was most advantageous for the United States. And we got our Vietnam, because the United States is busy funding the other side. And it's costly. And Gorbachev is looking at this, as he's telling the Politburo, a year after he came into power, he said, look, the Americans are betting precisely on the fact that the Soviet Union is scared of this SDI missile, the strategic defense initiatives, a missile defense. That's why they're putting pressure on us to exhaust us. Correct. So some would argue that the US victory in the arms race guaranteed victory in the Cold War. It'd be go-running. That's one explanation. But I'm going to give you a tour of the counterarguments and some other explanations, starting with Presidents Ford, Carter and the Helsinki Declaration. So after World War II, the Soviets had wanted to convene a conference of European states to confirm its expanded World War II borders. And for a long time, nobody was interested. And then the Western Europeans are sick of all the drama. The United States still doesn't want to show, but we go along where they're allies. And our allies insist on including human rights provisions. And we think this is crazy, because we know the Soviets are never going to enforce those things. But you get the Helsinki agreements, accords that have all sorts of human rights provisions. Well, lo and behold, unbeknownst to anybody, dissidents across the Eastern Bloc and human rights activists across the West, start holding the communists to account for the agreements that they have signed. And start contrasting the liberation that communism promises versus the dictatorship actually delivered. And this human rights movement took on within the Soviet Bloc and abroad. It took on a life of its own. So here you have the former director of the CIA and former head of the Department of Defense Robert Gates saying, The Soviets desperately wanted this big conference and it laid the foundations for the end of their empire. We resisted it for years, only discovered years later that this conference had yielded benefits beyond our wildest imagination. Go figure. And here is Jimmy Carter with his human rights initiative and it was Gorbachev's English language translator who said that actually Carter's emphasis on precisely the human rights that were denied to Soviets really resonated and it made people think that they wanted a more democratic, open, liberal society. So here's Carter giving an address, graduation address at Notre Dame. He said, we have reaffirmed America's commitment to human rights as a fundamental tenet of our foreign policy. What draws us Americans together is a belief in human freedom. We want the world to know that our nation stands for more than just financial prosperity. We're bigger than that. And here is Edward Shevardnadze, Gorbachev's foreign minister, echoing some of these sentiments. He said, look, the belief that we are a great country is deeply ingrained in me. But great in what?