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The Soviet economy was in freefall from the late 1950's. Oil prices in the 1970's kept them alive. Afghanistan did little to change that. However, if you want to claim it was Afghanistan, give the credit to Brzezinski, not Reagan. In 1978, Pope John Paul II's first papal tour was to his native Poland. There, a young electrician in Gdansk was asking Gdansk's working class to join a trade union, Solidarnosc, which he and his fellow shipyard workers had established. Times were economically difficult in Poland then - workers were not being paid, thousands of Poles travelled to the USSR to sell gold and buy goods they could sell in Poland in order to buy enough food to live for six months, and yet, the population was still enough under the communist party's control, that Solidarnosc could not attract members. Pope John Paul II's first visit was electric. He endorsed Solidarnosc. He preached to the people to ,i."Be not afraid." That was the moment the Eastern bloc was doomed. The last gasps of totalitarian rule occurred with the imposition of martial law in Poland and similar crackdowns throughout the Eastern bloc (Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia excepted - the latter because it had been completely under Moscow's yoke for well over a decade). In little more than a decade after Pope John Paul II's famous act of faith, the Berlin Wall had collapsed, most of Eastern Europe was free of the Soviet menace, and the USSR was well on its way to the collapse of totalitarian rule. At the time of the Soviet coup, all communications in all republics were cut. No radio. No television. Other than symphony music. Why did the coup not succeed? Because Yeltsin, as president of the RSFSR, had the RSFSR KGB under his personal control. They moved him from harm's way, so he was not immediately arrested. They refused to follow the orders of the Soviet KGB. And Yeltsin still had access to Moscow's media, and asked that they broadcast that people come out on the streets to protest. Which Muscovites did. In the tens of thousands. They did this for Yeltsin. And for Russia. You see, people tired of living under totalitarian rule. They, and not some foreign power, decided the rotten system they were living under no longer deserved to survive. They freed themselves. But it was John Paul who shook the tree.