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Interesting article. Actually quite interesting albeit for the fact that after all this years it seems that the hidden threat advocated by the writer does not seem to have happened. Thanks to Reagan's policies the USSR basically collapsed on itself. Reagan was basically just what the doctor ordered for the US due to his prudent acts (which required a lot of guts since before he came along the Soviets were actually ahead in a myriad of areas yet Reagan had the b@!!$ to do what was necessary even when certain parts of congress screamed and hollered).

Hence these 'fallacies' are, in my humble opinion, not fallacies but facts. The USSR is basically dead and buried, and it had been dead for quite some time ....it just had not realized it (just like a cockroach that gets its head chopped off yet remains alive for over a week). The system espoused by the Soviets just could not work, and it was essentially a matter of time before the whole system imploded under its own weight.

And do not get me wrong ....i am not saying the Soviets were no threat. Actually according to most delvings into the matter before Reagan took office the Soviets had a substantial military edge over the US. Some even say the US troops in Germany would have been overwhelmed by a Soviet thrust before they could do anything (i guess that is why nukes can be a good thing since it can make the other side think twice or thrice).

However when Reagan came in he basically shocked the Soviets into overspending! Whether it was through Reagan implementing such stuff as Starwars that made the Soviets shovel state funds into missile counter-measures .....or when the latest US hunter-killer submarines started coming out that were just deathly quiet (eg the LA class) and could shadow Soviet boomers (nuclear ballistic-missile subs) from the moment they left the port, and yet the Soviets were not able to reciprocate since the US subs were just too darn stealthy .....or even the lesser known but still important (when it comes to draining the coffers of Soviet money) case of the Buran! The Buran was the Soviet answer to the NASA Space Shuttle (it looks exactly like the Shuttle apart from instead of having a US flag it has the CCCP markings .....and as an aside the Soviets copied a lot of Western designs ranging from the Tu-144 which is a Concorde copy to even IR AAM designs .....one case that i found particularly interesting was when during the 60s some KGB agents managed to steal a SideWinder, in the 60s that was a big steal, and cut it into little pieces and send it to Moscow ....and the darn customs agents never wondered what the heck the cylinders sticking out were?)

Anyways back to the main point! Once Reagan came on line the USSR discovered that it could no longer match spending power with the US. After all the US was the largest capitalist nation in history, and the USSR was a floundering central economy! It was just a matter of time ....and when you add the Soviets trying to match submarine tech (i managed to retrieve a report that listed that particular area as one of the major areas that bled Soviet money as they tried to paly catch-up) and even the Buran (not as major as the Sub faux pas, but it dried up virtually all the money of the Soviet space program, just when Reagan's Star Wars was being yapped about and scarying every Communist general East of the GreenWich Meridian LOL).

Now Gorbachev implements Perestroika but by then it was just too darn late. End result: No more Soviet Union!

However today Russia has a great chance to re-invent itself, and it is doing so. In another 10 years the mention of the word 'Russia' may once again have a major clout and reverberence around the globe! Russia's economy is one of the fastest growing in the globe, and in most years since 1993 it has been the fastest. Even with the Mafiya (Russian Mafia) and the Oligarchs (like the behemoth Oneximbank) and their Semibankirschina (rule of 7 bankers where nepotism rules) the Russian economy has been booming! Even though the perception by most is that it is cash strapped it is actually growing quite fast ....and much better than the Zastoi (stagnation) of the Soviet era. And when it comes to the military there have been changes meant to make it leaner and more efficient. Most of the pictures of rotting rusting ships posted on FR are just of the obsolete ships being retired and moth-balled from the Black-Sea fleet! If you check you can notice that the Russians are actually churning otu new designs ranging from a new boomer sub to an advanced concept guided-missile hovercraft corvette (armed witht he equally new Yakhont missiles that have no analog in the world). However pics of such stuff never pop up here ....just the rusted shells of discrepit ex-Soviet ships.

However the important thing is that Russia is set to become one of the US's greates allies in the future. The whole Cold War 'I am gonna nuke ya if ya nuke me' era is dead and gone! Russia's best bet is to stick close to the US (although expect some occasional loggerheads over some stuff ....but nothing serious). And the US has a lot to gain from Russia due to things like its oil reserves and the fact that a strong Russia is a great deterrent to China if Beijing smokes too much Opium and decides to act foolishly!

And talking of China ....instead of wondering about Soviet stratagems that will never be people should be looking at China!

China will be the greatest threat to the US this century, both militarilly and economically. And while China is not yet a direct threat to the US (right now if they tried anything fishy we could still manage to nuke the heck out of them, and then have sufficient nukes left to nuke them all over again several dozen times) the main Chinese advantage is the way they have been stealing (or been given) US industry and secrets, and also their long-term patience (meaning they can wait until a Clintonesque president is elected and implements stupid policies). The Chinese basically have very protracted time-frames .....some ranging in half-centuries. With good POTUS' like GW this inherent danger is negated ....however inevitably a president like Clinton will be elected who seems more willing to help the Chinese that Americans, and hence the Chinese will get some extra 'aid' (maybe instead of nuclear warhead tech maybe this time they might get a next-generation US submarine).

Whooo ....let me stop. Basically this whole Soviet-stratagem thing is just a fallacy. The USSR is dead and gone, and Russia will be an ally not an adversary.

Now China on the other hand .....

I actually did quite a bit research on this at the time it was happening and wrote a few papers on it. I even predicted the coup attempt against Gorbachev - but that was an easy call.

Golitsyn is about half right.

Gorbachev was an unrepentant communist and even says so in the books he wrote explaining perestroika. Gorby was a something of a "reformer" when he was a regional party boss down south. He came to the attention of Andropov who became Gorby's mentor so to speak.

When Reagan was elected, the Soviets had both conventional and nuclear arms superiority. Both quatatatively and qualitativly. Their qualitative superiority was largely due to stolen Western technology that the west itself had yet to use for its own military advantage.

The US military modernization that came under Reagan was going to take that away from them. Add to that the computer revolution that was occuring and being incorporated into next-generation U.S. weapons systems, and the Soviets were looking at losing their edge -- their industry could not reproduce this stuff even if they knew how it was made (the KGB and GRU in the 80's shifted emphasis from stealing advanced plans to stealing computers and machine equipement they could use but not make themselves).

The attempt to keep up, especialy with Star Wars, was breaking an already shakey Soviet bank. They were, as struwwel said, "circling the drain".

The only organization in the Soviet Union in a position to know just how bad it was and where the problems really were, was the KGB. Andropov was impressed by both Gorby's communist Zeal, as well as his seeming ability to think outside the Soviet box.

Once Gorbachev had the way cleared for him by Andropov, and took control of the Politburo (which was essentially clueless about the real problem), he instituted Perestroika (restructuring), in an attempt to fix it. But it stumbled badly. Party bosses at all levels refused to admit anything was wrong and continued to toe the "party" line.

In order to circumvent the party bosses, so he find out what needed to be fixed, Gorby came up with Glastnost (openness). Even so, it took a while to convince Soviet citizens that they could speak up about what was broke without ending up in the Gulag or in a basement cell off Dzerzhinsky Square.

Glastnost broke the damn. Once the soviet people got a taste of freedom the rest, as they say, was history. Gorbachev tried to stay ahead of it and direct it towards reforming Communism, but failed.

After the military coup that made him decide to leave the Motherland, he starts up an environmental activist organization (I forget the name), that now operates out of the former Presidio Army installation in San Francisco. That fact still makes me sick to my stomach.

If you examine the policies of Gorby's new organization, it's easy to see that it's all about taking property rights away from people in the name of some greater socialist good. In that respect, Golytsin is right.

As for saying that Reagan had nothing to do with it, Golitsyn is wrong. Reagan, by forcing the Sov's into a technological arms race they could not win, moved the time-table of the Soviet collapse ahead 10 to 20 years.

As for Golitsyn's assertion that Perstroika preceded Gorbachev, it may well have been Andropov's idea originally, and was certainly meant to take the Soviet Union to the next stage, but I doubt any current Russian leaders look at it with anything but passing amusement or disgust.