Regards, Ivan
Posted on 06/08/2004 8:11:33 AM PDT by MadIvan
Ronald Reagan made things difficult for me in the mid 1980s. As a college student in New York City, I agreed with more or less everything my liberal friends thought of Reagan--except I thought he was right about the Soviet Union. No one had been so right before. To my friends, the words evil empire reflected the substance of Reagan's character: judgmental, tasteless, sanctimonious, imperious, impolitic. To me, they reflected the very character of the country, the USSR, where I had grown up, and even as a left-leaning 18-year-old in New York City, I was willing to forgive the American president almost anything for being the first head of state who finally spoke the truth. In this, I was a typical representative of both the roughly 400,000 Soviet political refugees who arrived in this country in the 1980s and the intelligentsia from which most of them hailed.
Back in the USSR we didn't have much of a sense of Reagan--the Iron Curtain did not let through enough information--but there was a clear sense in the early 1980s that the new American administration was a formidable opponent for the Soviet Union. "The '70s were a decade of unrelenting Soviet expansion that met virtually no resistance," says Alexander Gribanov, a philologist who emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1987 and who now works as the archivist at the Andrei Sakharov Archives and Human Rights Center at Brandeis University. "Reagan signaled that the period of non-resistance was over, and this gave us hope."
A final historical reckoning may show that it was the Carter administration that aided the demise of the USSR more than any other: Carter was the president who introduced the issue of human rights into his negotiations with the Soviets; and it may have been his Middle East polices that helped bring oil prices low enough to finally break the Soviets' back. But former residents of the Soviet empire are likely to remember Reagan instead. In Reagan, the Soviet leaders--he lasted through four of them--finally met their ideological equal: He matched them threat for threat and rhetorical flourish for rhetorical flourish.
"His rhetoric spoke volumes," says Gribanov. "It wasn't just 'the evil empire': entire chunks of his language rang true. And more important, he legitimized that language--he was the first president since Truman to use it." Dissident-minded Russian intellectuals wondered if there was truth to the rumors that Reagan once flirted with the American Communist Party, and if this formative experience might not account for his insight into the menace of communism.
More to the point, says Cathy Fitzpatrick, an old American Russia hand who now edits Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's "(Un)civil Societies" newsletter, Reagan was relentless. While President Carter talked about human rights, he could also backtrack or seem to forget which Soviet dissident he was supposed to be worrying about. The Reagan administration made Soviet political prisoners a clear top priority. "I met him about four times during his reign," says Fitzpatrick, who was America's leading expert on Soviet political prisoners in the 1980s, working first at Freedom House and then at Helsinki Watch. "[This] shows you that at least he did care about human rights if people like me got in to see him.
The Reagan-era episode that émigrés and former dissidents seem to remember most is one that made it into few of the American Reagan obituaries: the American president's insistence on deploying the Euromissiles--medium-range missiles trained on the Soviet Union, just as the Soviet Union had missiles trained on Western Europe. Europeans took to the streets to protest the planned deployment, and several of the demonstrations turned into riots. American anti-nuclear activists were in despair. But the guiding light of the disarmament movement, Soviet physicist-turned-dissident Andrei Sakharov, supported the deployment. "Andrei believed that the U.S. should do it so it would have a bargaining chip," says his widow, Yelena Bonner. Resolved to go ahead with the Euromissiles, Reagan introduced the concept of the "zero option"--a total bilateral pullout from Europe--in his negotiations with the Soviets.
The theory that Reagan's escalation of the arms race, with Star Wars on top of the Euromissiles, dealt the ultimate blow to the Soviet economy, has at least as much cache in the former Soviet Union as it does in the U.S. "The Soviet Union simply could not stand up to the force with which Reagan mounted the arms race," says Igor Yefimov, a Russian émigré writer and publisher, who gushes about Reagan's foreign policy. Former members of the Soviet government who have written memoirs disagree, as does Bonner: The country, they say, fell apart, pushed along by Reagan no more than by its own imploding society and overtaxed economy. Most of the relevant Soviet documents remain classified.
If and when all the facts of the end of the Soviet regime become known, it may well turn out that Reagan's main contribution lay in the realm of rhetoric. He was the first U.S. president who treated the demise of the "evil empire" as a historical inevitability. The certainty of his judgments, which so struck and attracted those of us who had grown up in the USSR, matched the times perfectly. He may have been the only American politician who had the oratorical gift and the force of conviction to have gotten away with saying, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." That the wall actually came down two years later, may or may not have been a coincidence.
In the end, there may be a symmetry to the legacies of the American and Soviet presidents who buried the evil empire. Reagan discomfited his natural allies in the fight against the Soviets--the American human rights activists, the anti-nuke scientists, and even the young émigrés like me, most of whom couldn't support his policies in just about any other area. Gorbachev, who freed political prisoners, liberalized the media, and tried to reform the economy, proclaimed his loyalty to the Communist Party to the very end, alarming and inciting the very people who benefited most from his reforms. But the grudging admiration they earned is not the only similarity. Even if each of them stumbled into his historic role by accident, almost certainly the cold war could not have ended without both of them. But only Reagan could claim victory.
Regards, Ivan
Ping
The world is a safer place because of Reagan's strength and vision.
The leftists made fun of him then, but he was right.
You're back!!! (Or maybe you've been back and I just didn't know)
I missed your posts.
Thanks for the ping Ivan.
And I must say, it is sure nice to see you again.
Cheers,
knews hound
Welcome back to one of my favorite freepers! You have been greatly missed, MadIvan.
Best wishes, and thanks for posting this.
Thanks, and welcome back.
HUH!!!!!?????? ROTFLM*A!!! Carter was a spineless wimp.
Regards, Ivan
Low oil prices, during Carter's term? What the heck is this guy smokin? I remember escalating prices and loooooong lines.
Reagan: "The bombing starts in five minutes." That's what ended the Cold War.
A final historical reckoning may show that it was the Carter administration that aided the demise of the USSR more than any other: Carter was the president who introduced the issue of human rights into his negotiations with the Soviets...
You're preaching not only to the converted, but one of the evangelists of that particular gospel.
Regards, Ivan
Looking at the picture,
Carter was in from 76-80, that looks like exactly when prices zoomed and peaked.
Thanks for the ping, MI...I REALLY love that picture of President Reagan.
Nothing is more telling than the experience of those who lived in the old USSR..I recall Martin Cruz Smith wrote two books that were revealing, Gorky Park and North Star...I don't know about Cruz's politics, but he sure got the sense of slavery to the state correct.
President Reagan is one of those rarities, a genuine hero for all the ages.
Thanks for the ping.
Great to have you back!
That explains that ;o) And the oil comment as well - I sat in those long lines watching the price change almost hourly.
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