Reagan's Contribution of the Fall of Russian Communism



Reagan's Contribution of the Fall of Russian Communism

Introduction

In December 1988, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the USSR surprised the world when he appeared before the United Nations and promised to cut Soviet forces in Eastern Europe by half a million troops and ten thousand tanks over the next two years. The people of Eastern Europe must have pinched themselves to make sure they were awake and that it was all really happening. When President Reagan was elected in 1981, the strategy of de'tente described the relationship that existed between the United States and the USSR President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissenger had advanced this strategy in the 1970s and it had remained fundamentally unchanged by both the Johnson and Carter administrations until 1979. While Webster defines de'tente as a relaxation or reduction, as of tension between nations, President Reagan believed the leadership of the USSR was interpreting de'tente as "freedom to pursue whatever policies of subversion, aggression and expansionisn they wanted anywhere in the world."

Discussion

Some scholars believe that the fall of Russian Communism has been quoted as President Reagan's most significant political accomplishment. Communism fell since it was not a realistic system, both philosophically and economically. And this coincided with Reagan's presidency. Many things worked as catalysts in the weakening of the USSR. Among them, the the quagmire in Afghanistan, oppression by their secret police, Cuban missile crisis,Iran's Islamic Revolution bolstering the Soviet repressed Muslim republics, lack of freedom of expression, legacy of fear, discriminations of the Soviet Western population over its Eastern population and monopolization of power by the Russians over non-Russians, Stalinism and the gulags. Added to the above, the political and military repression of the Warsaw Alliance and the Soviets by NATO, the U.S. and the West, catalyzed the unavoidable downfall of the Russian Communism. The downfall would happen anyway despite who slept in the White House.

President Reagan believed the United States had lost its hard-earned edge over the USSR and that President Carter's administration was foolish to believe the USSR had any other goal but their historically stated one of destroying democracy and replacing it with Communism. President Reagan saw the Soviet leaders as moral and mortal enemies and believed that, by surrendering the initiative to the USSR, Carter had sent a dangerous message that America was prepared to accept, as inevitable, the advance of Soviet expansionism.

From President Reagan's point of view, the world in January 1981 was one fully engaged by the Brezhnev Doctrine. The Soviet leadership, undeterred by the previous administration was aggressively pursuing their goal of world domination. President Reagan saw USSR sponsored "wars of national liberation" in El Salvador, Angola, Ethiopia, and Cambodia. The Soviet Union was on a roll they had taken Indochina by proxy, sent military advisers to interfere in Ethiopia, and helped engineer events in South Yemen. The USSR was involved in Mozambique and Angola, and was advancing in Granada, Central America ...