Reagan and the Cold War

Hey, my first diary entry!

I've been thinking about the common meme that President Reagan "ended the cold war". I'm an amateur student of the USSR, and I've always thought it was crap. Lately I've been thinking of why I disagree with it.

First of all, I don't know if you can ever say one person 'ended the cold war'. There were a lot of people. Someone on another blog offered up the foreign minister of Hungary that opened the Hungarian borders in 1989 (a fine choice). There's Gorbachev. Sheverdnadze. Lech Walesa. There's a number of people.

And yes, Reagan played a part. Even us lefties can't deny that. The way he played a part was abandoning the stale rhetoric and realizing that Gorbachev was someone he could 'do business with' (though Thatcher saw that first). But that just makes him a cog in the machine.

However, if you want to identify one person, you have to go back further, back to long before Reagan ever even ran for the presidency. Back to when Gorbachev was a nobody, Walesa was a young electrician, and Thatcher was a back-bencher.

Because I believe that the man most responsible for the demise of Communist Eastern Europe was Alexander Dubcek.

Throughout the communist years in Eastern Europe, you could find three types of people in the Communist Parties of those various countries. They varied by time period and country, but most people in the party fell into one of three catagories.

The first, and smallest, were the butchers. These you found generally at the top level. I'm talking about the Stalins, the Berias, people like that. They became harder to find as time went on, though Ceaucescu probably qualifies somewhat.

The second were the apparatchiks. These were the people who were in the Party because that's what you did to get somewhere in those countries. These were the people to whom "Communist Party Member" meant better salaries, their own little work fiefdoms, special shopping priviledges at special stores, dachas in the country and vacations on the Black Sea, and so on. They were the careerists, the time-servers. All they cared about were their priviledges.

The third were the true believers.

They didn't exist in every country. Romania had few, as did Poland.

The USSR had quite a few, and they came in a couple of waves. The earliest ones, the Old Bolsheviks, were gone by the time 1968 rolled around, most purged by Stalin. However, in the fifties and sixties, a new wave of them had come around. They were bolstered in their belief by two big things: the first was the patriotic feeling that socialism had helped the USSR win WWII (which, in the USSR, remember, was called the Great Patriotic War.) THe second was Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956, which the True Believers saw as the 'cleansing' of socialism from cult-of-personality abberation.

However, other countries in the Eastern Bloc had true believers as well. They tended to arise where two things had happened: first, a pre-war Communist party, usually small, that had arisen as a protest for social justice in those countries. Second, a strong Communist presence in the WWII resistance in Nazi-occupied countries.

Yugoslavia was one of them. Czeckoslovakia was another.

Dubcek was a true believer. He was a pre-war Communist. He was active in the Slovak Resistance, fighting in the Slovak National Uprising in 1944. (He was injured in the Uprising; his brother Julius was killed.) He truly believed that Communism was the path towards social justice.

But he was no butcher, and his attitude towards the apparatchiks seems to be that he thought of them as 'useful idiots'. Being an extremely courtly man, he never would've said that--but, reading his autobiography, that's the impression I get.

So, this true believer worked his way up in the Czeckoslovak system--and he saw the rot. He saw it before anyone else did. He saw that Communism had to democratize or it would calcify. Prague Spring, "Socialism with a Human Face", was an attempt at that.

And we all know what happened--it was crushed. Morever, it was crushed by Brezhnev. Brezhnev was the Ultimate Apparatchik.

The important part about that in what we're talking about, the end of Communism, was the effect. Because the crushing of Prague Spring had the side effect of killing off almost all the True Believers.

This happened everywhere, and most prominently in the USSR. I can't even begin to say how many stories I've read, from people who say they were committed Communists--until 1968. The crushing of Prague Spring completely wiped them out. It was the ultimate victory of the apparatchiks, and the True Believers knew it.

Communism needed the true believers. That's evident in what happened after 1968, especially in the USSR--the rot, the cynicism. And, most of all, the stagnation. The USSR became the most conservative society in the world, in terms of conservative meaning 'preserving the status quo'. Because the apparatchiks had won, and that's all they wanted--to keep what they had. Anyone that might have pushed to make things better had given up. Thus, the USSR calcified into rigor mortis right along with Brezhnev.

Of course, the irony is that there were a few True Believers left, and one of them was Mikhail Gorbachev. And he was a true believer on the Dubcekian model. Glasnost and Perestroika were remarkably similar (though very watered-down versions) to Prague Spring. Gorbachev saw what Dubcek had seen.

The problem was, he was too late. He didn't have a cadre of true believers to help him reach his aims, as Dubcek had had in 1968. The former True Believers, who'd become cynics, were on the outside. Some of them didn't trust Gorbachev. 1968 had poisoned Communism irretreavably for them. So Gorbachev, instead of reforming Communism, presided over the death of it.

This doesn't happen without Prague Spring.

So, Alexander Dubcek is the person most responsible for ending Communism. It took a while. But it all goes back to him.

•  Things that destroyed the USSR

  1. The decision in 1945 not to 'colonize' Germany and Japan and allow them to regain their industrial strength
  2. The 1960 split between China and the USSR and the subsequent development Chinese ICBMs and thermonuclear weapons
  3. The failed coup in 1969 of pro Soviet Chinese leader Lin Piao and the installation of a strong anti-Soviet government in Beijing.
  4. The massive economic growth of Germany, Japan, and China -- Russia's three historic enemies
  5. The development of stealth technology by the Carter Administration which rendered Soviet air defenses useless

  by barry s on Mon Jun 14, 2004 at 07:35:02 AM PDT

•  a really elegant argument

  I really like the argument, because it places so much more emphasis on individual actions--on people--than on governments (I think it's dangerous to assume the Cold War ended just because of the actions of Gorbie and Gip). But I suspect you'd need to accompany your argument with a view of history that explains how an event can have an effect 20 years after the first event.

  Anyway, an interesting argument...

  by emptywheel on Mon Jun 14, 2004 at 07:39:37 AM PDT

  •  Thank you

    ...as for that particular view of history? Oh, I could go on for days about that. Because that is precisely my view of history.

    There are so many examples of it. The most famous one is, of course, that the Versailles Treaty ending WWI was the direct cause of WWII.

    Here's a couple more to ponder:

    Does the civil rights movement happen in the sixties if Truman doesn't integrate the military in 1948?

    What effect did Goldwater's 1964 blowout have on Reagan being eleced 16 years later?

    If the USSR never invaded Afghanistan in 1979, would 9/11 have ever happened?

    If there were no James Brown, would we have rap music? :-)

    As I said, I could go on for days...

    by ChurchofBruce on Mon Jun 14, 2004 at 07:53:42 AM PDT

•  It was a remarkable time.

  And I was very glad that Dubcek lived to see some fruits of that winter into spring (as I remember it off the top of my head).  I was living in Switzerland with my mother when the dam broke and Czechs began to flee into Europe.  That time was the breakthru, the window into the future, inside it at all times was the harsh memory of Hungary in '56.

  All in all, 1968 was an amazing year around on the globe, here and there.  

  I read a poster here state that Reagan had people thruout Eastern Europe, the former East Germany and Russia who love him for what he did...  Not quite my experience, not on a great scale... but leave to Reagan the Republican and right wing (across many countries) hosannas, anyone alive or near that spring does not forget Dubcek.

  Good diary, thanks.

  by Marisacat on Mon Jun 14, 2004 at 07:41:45 AM PDT

  •  Dubcek not only lived to see it

    he took part in it. Dubcek was elected the chairman of the Federal Czecksolovak parliament in the first elections after the Velvet Revolution, and served as such until his death in 1991.

    A remarkable man. If you ever get the chance, check out his autobiography, which has the wonderfully beautiful title of "Hope Dies Last".

    by ChurchofBruce on Mon Jun 14, 2004 at 07:57:40 AM PDT

    •  Second that

      I also read "Hope Dies Last", DUbcek shows himself to be every bit the humane idealistic person his image always suggested.  The saddest part of the book concerned the months after the August 1968 crackdown, when Dubcek and his allies tried desperately to salvage scraps of the Prague Spring.

      by Dancing Larry on Mon Jun 14, 2004 at 08:08:55 AM PDT