I’m fairly familiar with Reafan’s policies. Back in ‘84 I wrote an ecomons paper predictimg they would collapse based on econ data they published in the UN. Clearly they had cooked the books for decades. I’m curious about why one day they just said “screw it”.
The ruble was inconvertable and they could have simply inflated as they had in the past. They could also have restructured foreign payments, as Russia subsequently did.
Any ideas?
The Reader’s Digest Version: “In fact, the amount of Moscow’s annual borrowings in the West was roughly equivalent to the total cost of all of the Soviet Union’s foreign commitments. In other words, the West in the 1980’s was unwittingly providing crucial financial life support to the Soviet regime on the order of 100% of the cost of its external empire. President Reagan believed that this remarkable set of facts offered the U.S. a non-military means of rolling back Soviet global power and repression while creating a financial train wreck within the country from which Moscow would probably not recover. As history has shown, it didn’t.
When Soviet forces began to mass on the Polish border in 1981 and later forced the imposition of martial law in that country, President Reagan responded with a number of policy measures, including implementation of what we called the “strategic trade triad.” Specifically, this meant sharply limiting Moscow’s access to:
1) Western Europe’s natural gas markets; 2)officially subsidized lending arrangements; and 3)sophisticated, militarily-relevant U.S. and Western technologies.
The so-called Siberian gas pipeline dispute within the Atlantic alliance in 1982 occurred in this context and tested America’s resolve that the second 3,600-mile strand of this huge two-strand pipeline project not be built. The already-committed first strand would also be delayed by embargoing key U.S. oil and gas equipment and technology which was unavailable elsewhere. The cost to Moscow of losing the second strand of the Siberian gas pipeline was to be roughly $10-15 billion annually — a debilitating sum — not to mention the costs of a two year delay in bringing the first strand on-line. (This effort was complimented by the Reagan Administration’s intervention with the Saudi’s urging them to increase oil production and thus lower prices – representing another blow to Soviet hard currency earnings.) These three major economic initiatives to curtail Western life-support to the USSR were combined with a massive U.S. military build-up, the launch of the Strategic Defense Initiative and head-on U.S. engagement against Soviet aggression in the Third World to accelerate, if not cause, the end of the so-called “Evil Empire.” It is no coincidence that the Kremlin defaulted on some $90 billion in Western debt a mere two days before the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991.” - Remarks of Honorable Roger W. Robinson, Jr.
President and CEO of RWR Inc. and former Senior Director of International Economic Affairs at the National Security Council
Alaskan World Affairs Council May 7, 1999
The ruble was inconvertable and they could have simply inflated as they had in the past. They could also have restructured foreign payments, as Russia subsequently
Well, all their satelite countrys around them rebelled and refused to cooperate as did most of the east bloc states, russia was unlikely to make it on it’s own without using Stalinistic methods, and they could probably not get away with that in the ninetis.
You must be tired. LOL
ReaFan’s....
Because it was a feint to fool us What really.happened is that they won by pretending to lose.
Why? There was still nothing to buy.
Economics had some to do with it but was not the driving force that actually overthrew the government. Somebody mentioned Walesa and I agree that's where it started.
Fact is the fall of communism in Eastern Europe was unraveling the Warsaw Pact in 1989. By August 1989 some of the old Soviet guard decided enough was enough and something had to be done before the storm hit the USSR. So they staged a coup to oust Gorbachev and install a government more "traditional".
The funny part was they used all the same boilerplate words and deeds their client state banana republics used whenever they staged a coup. As a result, from the beginning nobody ever believed Gorbachev was "ill".
The coup itself was staged by two legs of the Soviet triad: The KGB and the CPSU. There were always three so two could beat back an attack by one. The third leg was the military.
The military was never in this game. The plan to defeat "reactionary forces" in Moscow was to involve KGB troops and Special Forces. A parade division, populated by loyal troops, was really the only conventional unit tasked to support the defenders. In the end, they hardly mattered. The coup leaders were supposedly calling the Army for help but very few commanders took the bait. They finally got a commitment for some Airborne units to deploy to Moscow but they never arrived. Troops in garrison could be controlled. Troops moving down the road are subject to "external forces"