Sarah Paine: belief

Transcript context

…know why the Russians think they’re so special. Another false assumption: Gorbachev believed that if the Warsaw Pact, the military alliance of the Eastern Bloc, disappeared, then NATO would disappear. He also believed that if the Comecon, which is their trading organization, went away, then the European Community in those days—it becomes the European Union later—would disappear. Not quite. It turns out that organizations that are coercive versus those that are voluntary, they dissolve for different reasons. And then Gorbachev also assumed that the United States would share a continental outlook of not wanting strong powers and that the United States therefore would not want a unified Germany, let alone a strong unified Germany. So when all the unrest is happening in Germany, Gorbachev is off taking a vacation. Poor life choice, because at that moment, President George Bush Sr. and Chancellor Kohl of Germany are working on fast-tracking German unification of a fully sovereign, unified Germany—both halves in NATO. So many of Gorbachev’s closest supporters at the end of it all blamed him. They said, “Look, his foreign policy mistakes were a function of his domestic policy mistakes and it destroyed the Soviet Union.” Back to this America expert, Vladimir Lukin: “Gorbachev was no Deng Xiaoping.” And Arbatov, who’s their premier America expert: “The stupidity of our leaders caused the disintegration of the Soviet Union.” So the big bozo was playing with plastic bags, stuck one on his head, committed suicide. It was by mistake. Lukin continued: “In the West, they love Gorbachev because everything took place so easily and cheaply, basically like that, but only for you. For us, it was expensive.” But you could argue the time to reassess all the Stalinist stuff was long overdue. Here’s a completely different way of looking at it. I’ve been giving you sins of commission, and now I’m going to do sins of omission. It’s a good framework. It’s useful for other things. The sins of commission are all the things Gorbachev did. Now what I’m going to do is what the army didn’t do. Some would argue that the Red Army should have done exactly what Deng Xiaoping ordered his army to do. You just send the tanks against civilian demonstrators and they truly crush them and it’ll be over. Communist Party is still in power in China 30 years later. So there are some people who believe that this was a terrible mistake. So this argument would be that timely tank deployments—TTD, my contribution to military acronyms—would have changed the outcome of the Cold War. Others would be back to the great men of history and sins of commission, and they wouldn’t be picking on Gorbachev but his successor Boris Yeltsin. There are two big pieces of evidence when we look. He removed Article 6 from the Soviet Constitution, which guaranteed that the Communist Party would always monopolize power. And then in addition in the following year, Yeltsin’s the head of Russia, he gets together with the heads of Ukraine and Belarus, and they signed the Belavezha Accords, which then formally dissolved the Soviet Union. So according to this way of thinking, it’s his fault. It’s suicide on purpose. the heads of Ukraine and Belarus, and they signed the Belavezha Accords, which then formally dissolved the Soviet Union. So according to this way of thinking, it’s his fault. It’s suicide on purpose. And what it does is it opens the door for multiple parties and for the nationalities within the Soviet Empire to become independent. So I’ve given you internal explanations. I’ve given you external explanations. Now I’m going to give you some umbrella explanations. They’re based on all the preceding evidence, and they come to opposite conclusions. The first one was, well, any of the above, it’s inevitable. The opposite conclusion from the same evidence is that no, it took all of the above. The West barely won. I’m going to start with “any of the above”. You could argue with this many serious problems, it was a matter of time before the Soviet Union collapsed. It was an objectionable system for precisely the reasons the West didn’t like it. It had a brutally inefficient economic system. Russians who invented the thing, at the end of the day, didn’t want it either. By this way of looking at it, you have people like Yuri Ryzhov, a genuine rocket scientist, who says, “Look, the main reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union is the rottenness of its system. ” Then here’s a journalist, Teimuraz Stepanov, who said, “Look, I think from the beginning the genes of disintegration were contained in the genetics of this governmental political formation. ” Don’t you love the products of the Soviet educational system? Don’t ever use wording like that. So you could argue that the Soviet Union was destined to fail with this many problems. Others would come to the opposite conclusion. They would say, “No, it took every single one of them for the Cold War to end on Western terms.” Back to Anatoly Kovalev, the deputy foreign minister, he said, “Look, all these factors merge—internal, ideological, economic, military—it’s all of them. You remove any one of them and you get a different outcome. Maybe the Cold War ends, but it might end completely differently.” So by this line of reasoning, the West barely won and should feel very fortunate that it did. One can take this last argument and say it was more than that. It also took the confluence in office of two very talented leaders: Helmut Kohl of Germany and George Bush Sr. of the United States, not the son who got into those forever wars, but the dad who didn’t. George Bush Sr. had one of the most amazing resumes of any person ever to become president of the United States. Just look at him. When he’s really young, he’s a war hero in World War II. He’s a Navy pilot, a dangerous thing to do. He did it. Then he comes back and he gets his BA at Yale and graduates with honors. Then he becomes a representative for this district in Texas after he’s already made himself a millionaire in the oil business that he started. Then he became ambassador to the UN, followed by US representative to the PRC, before we had formal diplomatic relations. So he’s the guy who’s setting that up. He becomes director of the CIA, and then he is Ronald Reagan’s understudy for eight years as vice president. He is incredibly fit for the job. lomatic relations. So he’s the guy who’s setting that up. He becomes director of the CIA, and then he is Ronald Reagan’s understudy for eight years as vice president. He is incredibly fit for the job. Helmut Kohl is equally fit for the job. He is the longest-serving chancellor in German history since his illustrious predecessor, Otto von Bismarck. He starts out getting a PhD in history and political science. He also starts out in business, but then he works for state government, initially as a representative, then as a governor. He becomes chairman of his political party, the Christian Democratic Union, for a quarter of a century. Once he gets in, he decides he’s going to buy up East Germany one tourist at a time. How does that work? East Germans, it turns out, really like to travel. West Germans had always been able to travel to East Germany, or they long had been able to travel to East Germany, but East Germans definitely could not easily travel to West Germany. Why? Because they have a habit of staying. But all of a sudden, East Germany eases up on the travel regulations. You might ask why, and the answer would be money. Just like the Poles, the East Germans were deep in an economic mess of their own making. Would-be tank man Erich Honecker, who got the boot at the very end, well, his staying-in-power paradigm that he implements in 1971 is that he’s going to live off debt. He needs to make certain social benefits available and consumer benefits available for labor stability, to not have labor unrest. The way he’s going to do that is he’s not going to do many domestic investments and he’s going to do a lot of borrowing, particularly from West Germany. Well, that’s unsustainable long-term. By the time you get to the end of the Cold War, if he’s going to fix that and even out the accounts, it would be a 30% decline in the East German standard of living. So he really needs the pocket change from the tourists. So what Kohl does is a brisk business of tourists and things. What he does in return for the easing of travel restrictions, he pays East Germany several hundred million Deutschmarks extra to allow that to happen. And then he gets the Hungarians to go along. He gets the Hungarians to open up their Austrian border to let East Germans out that way, and he gives them a half a billion Deutschmarks for that little favor. When Kohl introduces his 10-point unification program—because now he’s thinking he’s going to get both Germanys together—this is when he starts doling out big bucks to the Soviet Union, whose economy is unraveling. Gorbachev is going to be desperate for this cash as that’s happening. So West Germany provides 100 million in food, especially in meat, for the Soviet Union that doesn’t have these things. Nevertheless, the unrest just keeps on going. The Berlin Wall, as I’ve told you, is breached, and then you wind up with a West German caretaker government, and the financial situation in Russia itself is unraveling. By the time you get to January 1990, Bush and Kohl get together and they decide they want to really fast-track German reunification. Why?…

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