Other Voices

"Early in the presidency of George Bush, there came the most dramatic developments on the international scene since the end of World War II.  In the year 1989, with a dynamic new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, at the head of the Soviet Union, the long suppressed dissatisfaction with "dictatorships of the proletariat" which had turned out to be dictatorships over the proletariat erupted all through the Soviet bloc.

There were mass demonstrations in the Soviet Union and in the countries of Eastern Europe which had long been dominated by the Soviet Union.  East Germany agreed to unite with West Germany, and the wall separating East Berlin from West Berlin, long a symbol of the tight control of its citizens by East Germany, was dismantled in the presence of wildly exultant citizens of both Germanies.  In Czechoslovakia, a new non-Communist government came into being, headed by a playwright and former imprisoned dissident named Vaclav Havel.  In Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, a new leadership emerged, promising freedom and democracy.  And remarkably, all this took place without civil war, in response to overwhelming popular demand.

In the United States, the Republican party claimed that the hard-line policies of Reagan and the increase in military expenditures had brought down the Soviet Union.  But the change had begun much earlier, after the death of Stalin in 1953, and especially with the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev.  A remarkably open discussion had been initiated.

But the continued hard line of the United States became an obstacle to further liberalization, according to former ambassador to the Soviet Union George Kennan, who wrote that "the general effect of the cold war extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union by the end of the 1980s."  While the press and politicians in the United States exhulted over the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kennan pointed out that, not only did American policies delay this collapse, but those cold war policies were carried out at a frightful cost to the American people:

We paid for forty years of enormous and otherwise unnecessary military expenditures, We paid through the cultivation of  nuclear weaponry to the point where the vast and useless nuclear arsenal had become (and remains today) a danger to the very environment of the planet . . ." 

- Howard Zinn, from A People's History of the United States