was quick to claim that Reagan had such communication powers as to bring the wall a full two years after making that statement. Of course, Mr Gorbachev had nothing at all to do with it nor did he have anything to do with the dissolution of the USSR. Nor did the unseemly and illegal invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR have anything to do with utterly destroying the Russian economy, opening the way for massive corruption drunken indifference of the Russian people to what was going on around them. It was all Ronnie's doing.

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/nov/05/berlin-wall-ronald-reagan-david-hasselhoff

Mikhail Gorbachev who actually did lead a totalitarian regime ended the Soviet Union with glasnost and perestroika.

Falsely attributed to Reagan's Star Wars blatherings, too.

The myth of Ronny rolls on.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/03/soviet-leader-chernobyl-nuclear-accident-caused-the-collapse-of-the-ussr.html

in former Soviet Bloc states. They give him full props. I think he just happened to be there at the right time. It was the result of 40 years of determined effort, led by Democrats.

Kennedy ran against Ike's alleged missile gap.

Vietnam was bad enough...

Reagan was a meat-puppet President.

The Soviet Union imploded by the weight of it's own corruption.

Reagan had nothing to do with it.

There are many metaphors for what happened, but most of them have to do with the concept of getting out ahead of what was already happening.

I think the most honest characterization is that Gorby was making a lot of international "hay" by pushing his whole Glasnost concept and the Administration didn't really believe him. They thought of it as a lot of hype. The purpose of the speech wasn't so much to actually try to get him to tear the wall down, as it was to highlight that in fact you can't claim "openness" and still maintain the wall. What the administration didn't really understand was that Gorby was serious. They also didn't realize that Gorby didn't realize that if he let loose of the noose around most of the USSR, it would completely implode, which it did.

To some extent, at the time, the administration was guilty of the admonition that one should be careful for what they wish for, they might just get it. When the wall came down, and the collapse of the USSR started, they were beyond clueless. Quite honestly at the time they were frightened. I don't think the German unification bothered them so much as all of those independent states and the potential for a lot of conflict on the border of Western Europe, worse yet with Russia trying to still enforce some sort of "loyalty" to them. They feared that Russia would behave with respect to all of them they way they have with respect to the Ukraine and Crimea.

It took the GOP until Bush 1 to get over their cold war habits. And really, at the start of Bush II, they were still hell bent about Russia (Condie's specialty was Russia, not the middle east or terrorism).

But he did say it, and it did come down, and a bit like the whole "chemical weapons out of Syria" situation, whether they intended it, or even really wanted it, Reagan said it, Russia did it, and Germany is happy.

countless other dissidents within the USSR were as responsible as (if not more than) Reagan for the collapse.

The rigid orthodoxy running the USSR and the costly defeat in Afghanistan also led to atrophy in its economy and politics.

The popular will was tilting against the Soviet Union in the late '80s.

So when the Wall finally started coming down, the Eastern Bloc was already in a deeply weakened, compromised position.

I do think that when Reagan re-ignited the arms race, he did help to push the Soviet Union toward bankruptcy, imo. But that also ended up doing the same to the US, so it's kind of hard to dance a jig over that.

That's my two cents, anyway.

Arguably he may have contributed to the collapse of the Soviet system with his huge military build up which the Soviets tried to emulate and the arming of the Afghan rebels which we paid for on Sept 11, 2001.

The whole Soviet bloc was teetering before he became president in 1981.
USSR invaded Afghanistan 1979-1989, (My father said in 1979 that this would be the end of the USSR. as usual he was a Cassandra.)
Tito dies in 1980 leading ultimately to the dissolution of Yugoslavia.
Solidarnosc union founded in Poland 1980 which lead to Poland leaving the Soviet bloc.
The fall of the Wall in 1989.

All these things and more are connected with the fall of the Berlin wall. Raygun may have played a small part in nudging the house of cards that was the USSR and its allies, but no more than that.

Lech Wałęsa says Reagan's belicosity encouraged him in his activities that kicked off the Velvet Revolution and the collapse of communist regimes in Europe.

On the other hand, the Reagan administration did everything they could stop the spread of capitalism to eastern Europe despite Gorbachev's decision to permit it. He fought American businesses all the way through the US Supreme Court to the International Courts in an effort to prevent them doing business in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

Sorry to any lurking Conservatives, but he really did do exactly that. Even the part where he tried using Interational Courts to overrule our own courts which I know is the height of blasphemy to you guys.

And it certainly delayed the fall of the Soviet Union. In addition, many former Soviet officials have stated that, where Reagan's belicosity encouraged revolutionaries in eastern Europe, it just as strongly encouraged patriotic Russians who would have otherwise supported Eastern Europeans. That, plus the war in Afghanistan gave the Communists one last rally 'round the flag, boys!

There is a reason the Soviet Union did not fall until Reagan was out of office. As long as he was shouting threats at the Soviet Union, the Russian people were going to back their country.

That is one of the many things I have never understood about Conservatives. If Putin was threatening the United States, you would respond with a big ole, "fuck you, Putin!". Why do they think Russians (or Iranians) would respond any differently?

...with a pickaxe!

Not.

Reality: reagan made a boiler-plate speech on front of the Brandenburg gate. Any president since the Wall went up could have given the same speech.

By 1989, however, the Soviets were clearly failing in all the areas where communism was supposed to be better than capitalism: they were technologically backward, had a lower standard of living, and it was no longer possible too keep major failures secret the way they used to (e.g., Chernobyl, Afghanistan). Even Gorbachev's reforms were at best barely adequate.

By that summer there was a wave of defections across the borders of the Warsaw Pact countries to the West, and they were successful. Each one and each group encouraged others. In the end, a big group in East Berlin tried, big enough that the border guards figured something was up and nobody had told them, so they held off on their orders to shoot defectors. Someone up in their chain of command told them to stand down, and once Berliners realized the would be no shootings they went after the wall.

Reagan's fanboys credit him with killing a bear that was sick, wheezing, ready to collapse, and died in its own waste. But he shook his fist at the scary bear, so people who want to give him credit (and not share it with (ewww) Democrats) give him credit.

I really appreciate reading so many points of view and sources about the history and the narrative built around it. I look forward to reading more.

The ultra-reductionist but still quite accurate version is this:

Mikhail Gorbachev, being a smart, reality-based sort of fellow, faced up to the irrefutable fact that the USSR was winding down like a cheap clockwork toy because of paralyzed, sclerotic economic system. He picked up his ball and went home, seeing nothing further to be gained by pouring money down the ratholes of the Warsaw Pact and the attempt to maintain superpower status.

Looking at the revolutions of 1989, some political scientists hardly discuss popular movements at all. Instead, they focus on economic and geopolitical developments. They stress how the long-term strain caused by competition with the West and the perpetual economic crises in the Eastern Bloc fomented unrest. They highlight Mikhail Gorbachev's signals that the Soviet Union would tolerate reform rather than replicating the Chinese crackdown at Tiananmen. These stances are part of a wider trend: political analysts commonly describe the timing and fortunes of mass uprisings as the product of historic conditions rather then the decisions of citizens themselves.

Prominent examples of trigger events include the accident at the Three Mile Island power plant in 1979, which suddenly made nuclear safety a hot button issue. Just days after the accident, a previously planned anti-nuclear rally in San Francisco that ordinarily might have attracted hundreds of participants instead drew a crowd of 25,000. Similarly, the 1955 arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to move to the back of a segregated bus prompted a community-wide boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. And the self-immolation of Tunisian fruit seller Muhammad Bouazizi set off the revolts of the Arab Spring in 2011.

http://inthesetimes.com/article/17332/reagan_and_gorbachev_didnt_tear_down_the_berlin_wall._a_peoples_movement_di

You have no idea how many of us thought that movie should have been called "Reagan."

By the time he left office, he was not only still a lazy, incurious man, he was also a very sick man, something that had been hidden from the public his whole second term. I don't think he was particularly compos mentis after he was shot and that's no reflection on him, most old folks can't survive trauma, extreme blood loss, and shock and remain as sharp as they once might have been.

And Reagan was never sharp. His years as a corporate pitchman gave him a faux folksy, believable speaking style if you didn't listen to the words, and most didn't listen to the words.

He didn't have a grand design to crush the USSR and mean old Communism. He only did what men like the Kochs told him to do, ramping up the military and increasing their wealth. He delivered his speeches and napped through meetings. He was a total disgrace in that office, yet people on the street made him into some sort of mythological hero because of that Hollywood gloss. Cronies around him stole and committed outright treason and he floated above it all, as Jimmy Carter said, "like a balloon, barely tethered by a string."

He even blew that "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall" line. That's when I knew how sick he really was. I was not surprised when they announced it was Alzheimers. I'd spotted it for years.