Give Us This Day Our Daily Quiz

We now inaugurate a new feature of this blog, supplementing the huge success achieved by CAPTAIN OBVIOUS. Today's quiz question concerns the end of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union fell apart because

a) President Ronald Reagan ramped up the arms race so much that the USSR could not keep up, but ruined their economy trying.

b) Communism as a system cannot be sustained indefinitely. The arch-welfare system combined with political totalitarianism must eventually collapse.

c) They were Russians, for crying out loud, and sooner or later the Russians muck up pretty much everything they're connected to.

d) All the above are good answers.

It's entirely true that the USA spent much more on weapons systems beginning in 1981. It's also true that the Soviet economy was reeling by 1985 as they tried to match American rearmament. It's also true that substantial amounts of that American cash went to the Salvadoran government in its effort to squash a leftist revolution there, including money for the infamous "death squads." Money also went to the "Contras" in Nicaragua, fighting against the elected government of that country - admittedly leftist. Finally, our country funded the Mujahadeen resistance to the Russian forces in Afghanistan.

Operating on the theory that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," President Reagan hosted Mujahadeen leaders in the White House and saluted them as the "Moral equivalent of our founding fathers." The Mujahadeen were the immediate precursors of the Taliban.

Sometimes we teachers of history use a poker analogy concerning all this. Ronald Reagan raised his bets so much that Mikhail Gorbachev had no choice but to fold his hand. In poker when that happens, the winner gets the pot, which is mostly composed of his own bets. In the world of power politics, money spent as we did is simply lost. There was supposed to be a "peace dividend" after the Cold War, but that has been lost beginning with the 9/11 attacks and the wars of George W. Bush.

Communism as a system has been consigned, as Reagan hoped, to the scrap pile of history. We can say the Soviets were hardly real Communists in the sense that Karl Marx intended, but the system produced nothing but tyrants and seems to be invalidated by that fact alone, if no other. The misery that Communist governments inflicted on their populations outweighs any benefits they might have received. Nowadays, only  Cuba seems to be keeping  the secular faith.

(We can, however, applaud the Cuban government for the achievement that infant and child mortality has been greatly reduced there, and the literacy rate there is very high.)

Oh those Russians! Can they do anything right? Fifty years ago they were menacing. They had launched Sputnik, and had beaten us to manned space flight. Their rockets worked, while ours had a distressing tendency to blow up. By 1964 they were producing more steel than we were, back then  considered the true measure of industrial might. The Red Army was really terrifying.

Beneath the surface there was dissent, and an economy that was slowly deteriorating. The Russians became wheat importers. Their consumer goods were shoddy and often produced in such small quanitites that they were unavailable. Russian automobiles were a joke. After Leonid Brrezhnev went into decline, the country was ruled for almost ten years by a succession of sick old men and nothing was done to modernize the country. Ethnic identification grew and became a centrifugal force within the empire. The Russians foolishly tried to prop up a socialist government in Afghanistan and that became a running drain on their economy and the graveyard for 20,000 Russian soldiers.

When Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985 he tried to implement a controlled set of reforms, but by then the situation was so bad that events soon surpassed his efforts to channel and control them, and nothing less than a revolution took place. The final dissolution came after the failed military coup of 1991 and the ascent of Boris Yeltsin.

Now Russian prosperity - concentrated in a small number of plutocrats - is based on oil and gas exports. Eventually they will run out and where will the Russians be than?

So, why did the Soviet Union fall apart? We can argue about the importance of the choices mentioned at the start of this  blog, but the answer would seem to be "all the above."