Soviet Communism Imploded. No One Person Brought It Down

Years of being a brutal dictatorship, restricting personal freedoms and dissent, and over-spending on the military is what brought down Soviet Communism, not Reagan and not the Pope.

"brutal dictatorship, restricting personal freedoms and dissent, and over-spending on the military" ... a recipe for BushCo. Let's hope they all topple soon.

During Reagan's funeral all we heard is that he brought down communism, now we are hearing it about the Pope. I once read that the anti-war protests of the 60-70's did as much as anything to bring it down as the world saw what a democracy allowed. It certainly was a convergence of many things.

into space to being a nation where a Xerox machine was considered a high form of technology. It was a nation in the throes of a decline. It was hyped as being a super-power in order to justify massive defense spending here in the U.S. and Western Europe.

That time he took on the Crimson Dynamo, that showed them Americans wouldn't back down in the face of their aggression.

Bryant
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His arch-enemies were ex-Nazis and secret societies bent on manipulating events in order to rule the world, just like us.

Oh, my poor, aching brain for knowing that....

of posters who repeat the memes that Reagan and the Pope had a hand on bringing down the Soviet Union. The enormous cost in lives and rubels of the Afghani War in the early '80s brought down the Soviet Union, as well as other economic factors.

I may not agree with you on babeball, but your post is right on the money! :-)

Becuase we are talking about large scale societal movements it is the product of a very large set of cause and effect relationships, making it essentially chaotic. No single person or even group of people could possibly be determined as the primary cause.

People dont cause history, they are history.

cold warriors for 40 years (like my dad), who fought that hidden, dirty little war.

The greed and corruption of the "Communist" system of state capitalism rotted from within, just as the corporatist Murkan system is doing now.

People were learning about what other people in the world enjoyed and wanted to partake. Without worldwide communication and catalogs such as the Sears & Roebuck's catalog they would still be standing in five hour lines waiting to get a loaf of bread..

It may or may not have been the USSR's biggest nuclear accident, but it was big enough that they couldn't cover it up. That alone helped the push for "openness" and "restructuring" (glasnost & peristroika).

did everyone forget about gorby?

He started it before Reagan came into office. The Solidarity Movement could have survived without Reagan but not without John Paul II (the Great). Besides, it makes the conservatives nuts when you leave out Ronnie.

Societies don't just collapse and in the case of the Soviet Union the beginning of the end was the Polish Solidarity Movement in 1980-81. The Polish Pope did have something to do with that. Poland is like 98% Catholic and Catholicism is tied in with nationalism. Then in 1988 Solidarity arose again and the rest is history.

If Reagan and the Pope could bring down communism in the USSR, then why couldn't they do the same in China?

Foreign interference. The Chinese control the Chinese and that's it. No outside help.

The Pope gave Solidarity a spiritual basis that gave it immense power.

Besides, the Chinese were not really viewed as the "spreaders" of Communism like the Soviet Union.

It was faltering in the late 70's. Old production systems, lack of trade, just a bad economic system. The over spending on the military is not completely true either.

provided that it was not given a challenge, such as an arms race, that it was unsuited to meet.

Had the West acquiesced in the invasion of Afghanistan and continued the atrophy of their militaries, the USSR could have become more powerful and spent less on armaments by simply cutting their rate by less than the West.

Power is relative, not absolute. History may seem inevitable in hindsight, yet it is not.

*claps hands over ears* LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA...

You're right, of course. It was not Reagan and the Pope--the Soviet Union destroyed itself, with a little outside help from Lech Walesa and Jimmy Carter.

and when I discussed the points of the article with people, I was considered to be loony.

The article was written by a doctor who had been working with the Soviets for several years. He drew his conclusions from seeing statistics on the level of alcoholism, the failure of all industry (even Vodka factories were failing), the third world level of crop production, and the terrible health and life expectancy of the Soviet citizen.

He was exposed to these internal reports because he was consulting with the Soviets on how to establish a better health system, and as he worked with various agencies, startling facts were disclosed. He believed that no one in the government understood the whole picture, or if they did, were unwilling to speak out.

Unfortunately I cannot remember the author's name, nor the publication I read it in, but it was dead on correct about the state and fate of the Soviet Union.