There were people and organizations whopredicted that theSoviet Union (USSR) would dissolve before ithappened in 1991.[1]
Arguably the first prediction can be credited toLudwig von Mises which he made already during theRussian Civil War in 1920 in hisEconomic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth arguing that the socialist system itself would inherently eventually lead to collapse. Authors often credited with having predicted thedissolution of the Soviet Union includeLeon Trotsky in his workThe Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (1936),[2]Andrei Amalrik inWill the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? (1970), French academicEmmanuel Todd inLa chute finale: Essais sur la décomposition de la sphère soviétique (The Final Fall: An essay on the decomposition of the Soviet sphere) (1976), economistRavi Batra in his 1978 bookThe Downfall of Capitalism and Communism and French historianHélène Carrère d'Encausse.[3] Additionally,Walter Laqueur notes that "Various articles that appeared in professional journals such asProblems of Communism andSurvey dealt with the decay and the possible downfall of the Soviet regime."[4] Some Americans, particularlyconservatives,[5][6] viewRonald Reagan'sStrategic Defense Initiative as not only predicting but causing the dissolution of the Soviet state.
Whether any particular prediction wascorrect is still a matter of debate, since they give different reasons and different time frames for the Soviet collapse.
Predictions of the Soviet Union's impending demise were discounted by manyWestern academic specialists,[7] and had little impact on mainstreamSovietology.[8] For example, Amalrik's book "was welcomed as a piece of brilliant literature in the West" but "virtually no one tended to take it at face value as a piece of political prediction." Up to about 1980, the strength of the Soviet Union was widely overrated by critics andrevisionists alike.[4]
In 1983,Princeton University professorStephen Cohen described theSoviet system as remarkably stable.
TheCentral Intelligence Agency also over-estimated the internal stability of the Soviet Union, and did not anticipate its rapid dissolution. FormerDirector of Central IntelligenceStansfield Turner in 1991 wrote in the US JournalForeign Affairs, "We should not gloss over the enormity of this failure to forecast the magnitude of the Soviet crisis . . . Yet I never heard a suggestion from the CIA, or the intelligence arms of the departments of Defense or State, that numerous Soviets recognized a growing, systemic economic problem."[9]
In a symposium launched in 1967 to reviewMichel Garder's French book:L'Agonie du Regime en Russie Sovietique (The Death Struggle of the Regime in Soviet Russia), which predicted a collapse of the USSR,Yale Professor Frederick C. Barghoorn dismissed Garder's book as "the latest in a long line of apocalyptic predictions of the collapse of communism." He warns that "great revolutions are most infrequent and that successfulpolitical systems are tenacious and adaptive." In addition, the reviewer of the book, Michael Tatu, disapproved of the "apocalyptic character" of such a forecast and is almost apologetic for treating it seriously.[10]
Analysts, organizations and politicians who predicted that the Soviet Union would one day cease to exist included:
The Austrian economistLudwig von Mises argued in his 1922 bookSocialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis that the Soviet system would eventually cease to exist. This book was written during the period ofwar communism in earlySoviet Russia and analyzes that system. Mises' analysis was based on theeconomic calculation problem, a critique of central planning first outlined in 1920 journal articles. His argument was that the Soviet Union would find itself increasingly unable to set correct prices for the goods and services it produced:
We may admit that in its initial period a socialist regime could to some extent rely on the preceding age of capitalism [for the purpose of determining prices]. But what is to be done later, as conditions change more and more? Of what use could the prices of 1900 be for the director in 1949? And what use can the director in 1989 derive from knowledge of the prices of 1949?
Vladimir Lenin, who firmly believed that aninternational revolution was coming after theOctober Revolution, said in the7th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks):
You wanted the revolution to reckon with you. But history has taught you a lesson. It is a lesson, because it is the absolute truth that without aGerman revolution we are doomed—perhaps not in Petrograd, not in Moscow, but in Vladivostok, in more remote places to which perhaps we shall have to retreat, and the distance to which is perhaps greater than the distance from Petrograd to Moscow. At all events, under all conceivable circumstances, if the German revolution does not come, we are doomed.[11]
Although this was said before the German Revolution, it still shows the attitude Lenin could have had after the failure of the German Revolution.[citation needed]
One of the founders of the USSR, later expelled byJoseph Stalin,Leon Trotsky devoted much of his time in exile to the question of the Soviet Union's future. In time, he came to believe that a new revolution was necessary to depose thenomenklatura and reinstateworking class rule as the first step tosocialism. In 1936 he made the following prediction:
In order better to understand the character of the present Soviet Union, let us make two different hypotheses about its future. Let us assume first that the Soviet bureaucracy is overthrown by a revolutionary party having all the attributes of the oldBolshevism, enriched moreover by the world experience of the recent period. Such a party would begin with the restoration of democracy in thetrade unions and theSoviets. It would be able to, and would have to, restorefreedom of Soviet parties. Together with the masses, and at their head, it would carry out a ruthless purgation of the state apparatus. It would abolishranks anddecorations, all kinds of privileges, and would limit inequality in the payment of labor to the life necessities of the economy and the state apparatus. It would give the youth free opportunity to think independently, learn, criticize and grow. It would introduce profound changes in the distribution of the national income in correspondence with the interests and will of the worker and peasant masses. But so far as concerns property relations, the new power would not have to resort to revolutionary measures. It would retain and further develop the experiment ofplanned economy. After the political revolution—that is, the deposing of the bureaucracy—the proletariat would have to introduce in the economy a series of very important reforms, but not another social revolution.
If—to adopt a second hypothesis—a bourgeois party were to overthrow the ruling Soviet caste, it would find no small number of ready servants among the present bureaucrats, administrators, technicians, directors, party secretaries and privileged upper circles in general. A purgation of the state apparatus would, of course, be necessary in this case too. But a bourgeois restoration would probably have to clean out fewer people than a revolutionary party. The chief task of the new power would be to restoreprivate property in the means of production. First of all, it would be necessary to create conditions for the development of strong farmers from the weakcollective farms, and for converting the strong collectives into producers'cooperatives of the bourgeois type into agriculturalstock companies. In the sphere of industry, denationalization would begin with the light industries and those producing food. The planning principle would be converted for the transitional period into a series of compromises between state power and individual "corporations"—potential proprietors, that is, among the Soviet captains of industry, the émigré former proprietors and foreign capitalists. Notwithstanding that the Soviet bureaucracy has gone far toward preparing a bourgeois restoration, the new regime would have to introduce in the matter of forms of property and methods of industry not a reform, but a social revolution.
Let us assume to take a third variant – that neither a revolutionary nor a counterrevolutionary party seizes power. The bureaucracy continues at the head of the state. Even under these conditions social relations will not jell. We cannot count upon the bureaucracy's peacefully and voluntarily renouncing itself in behalf of socialist equality. If at the present time, notwithstanding the too obvious inconveniences of such an operation, it has considered it possible to introduce ranks and decorations, it must inevitably in future stages seek supports for itself in property relations. One may argue that the big bureaucrat cares little what are the prevailing forms of property, provided only they guarantee him the necessary income. This argument ignores not only the instability of the bureaucrat's own rights, but also the question of his descendants. The new cult of the family has not fallen out of the clouds. Privileges have only half their worth, if they cannot be transmitted to one's children. But the right of testament is inseparable from theright of property. It is not enough to be the director of a trust; it is necessary to be astockholder. The victory of the bureaucracy in this decisive sphere would mean its conversion into anew possessing class. On the other hand, the victory of the proletariat over the bureaucracy would insure a revival of thesocialist revolution. The third variant consequently brings us back to the two first, with which, in the interests of clarity and simplicity, we set out.[12]
In 1941Adolf Hitler ofNazi Germany decided to attack the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa). In June 1941 the GermanWehrmacht and other Axis military forcesinvaded the Soviet Union, and theRed Army retreated. Hitler predicted, "we have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down".[13]
Military observers around the world watched closely. It appears that most of them shared Hitler's opinion, expecting that Germany would win, destroy the Soviet system, and establish aNaziNew Order in Europe.[citation needed] Very few American experts thought the Soviet Union would survive.[14] TheGerman invasion began on 22 June 1941. Subsequently, theUnited States Department of War advisedFranklin D. Roosevelt that the German army would conquer the Soviet Union within one to three months.[15] In July 1941 the American general staff issued memoranda to the American press that a Soviet collapse was to be expected within several weeks.[16]British analysts held similar views, believing that Germany would win within three to six weeks without heavy losses.[17]
Predictions of an expected Soviet defeat had an important impact on President Roosevelt; while the United States was not at the time at war, Roosevelt favored theAllies (represented primarily at that time by the British Empire and the Soviet Union), and decided to try to avert the collapse of the USSR by extending to the Soviets (October 1941) the supply of munitions throughLend-Lease (which had started in March 1941), and also to pressureJapan not to attack while the USSR was so vulnerable. TheRed Armyheld the line at the outskirts ofMoscow (December 1941) and predictions[whose?] of Soviet collapse changed to "uncertain".[14][failed verification]
George Orwell, author ofAnimal Farm andNineteen Eighty-Four, wrote in 1946 that "the Russian regime will either democratize itself or it will perish".[18] He was regarded by US historianRobert Conquest as one of the first people who made such a prediction. According to a Conquest article published in 1969, "In time, the Communist world is faced with a fundamental crisis. We can not say for certain that it will democratize itself. But every indication is that it will, as Orwell said, either democratize itself or perish...We must also, though, be prepared to cope with cataclysmic changes, for the death throes of the more backward apparatus may be destructive and dangerous".[19]
American diplomatGeorge F. Kennan proposed his famouscontainment theory in 1946–47, arguing that, if the Soviet Union were not allowed to expand, it would soon collapse. In theX Article he wrote:
[T]he main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies... Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be constrained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvres of Soviet policy.[20]
The United States would have to undertake this containment alone andunilaterally, but if it could do so without undermining its own economic health and political stability, theSoviet party structure would undergo a period of immense strain eventually resulting in "either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power."[20]
Kennan later regretted the manner in which his theory was received and implemented, but it nevertheless became a core element of American strategy, which consisted of building a series ofmilitary alliances around the USSR.[21]
Winston Churchill made repeated claims about the imminent fall of the Soviet Union throughout his political career. In January 1920, he denounced Bolshevism as a "rule of men who in their insane vanity and conceit believe they are entitled to give a government to a people which the people loathe and detest... The attempt to carry into practice those wild theories can only be attended with universal confusion, corruption, disorder and civil war."[citation needed] Later, he made a similar prediction in a journal article in 1931. After World War II, speaking about the recently established Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe, he stated in 1954: "The forces of the human spirit and of national character alive in those countries cannot be speedily extinguished even by large-scale movements of populations and mass education of children." And in the epilogue to the one volume edition of his World War II memoirs, published in 1957, Churchill wrote: "The natural forces are working with greater freedom and greater opportunity to fertilize and vary the thoughts and the power of individual men and women. They are far bigger and more pliant in the vast structure of a mighty empire than could ever have been conceived by Marx in his hovel... Human society will grow in many forms not comprehended by a party machine."[22]
Zbigniew Brzezinski,National Security Advisor to US PresidentJimmy Carter, predicted the dissolution of the Soviet Union on several occasions. In a 2006 interview, Brzezinski stated that in his 1950master'sthesis (which has not been published) he argued that "the Soviet Union was pretending to be asingle state but in fact it was amultinationalempire in the age ofnationalism. So the Soviet Union would break up."[23]
As an academic atColumbia University, Brzezinski wrotenumerous books and articles that "took seriously the option of collapse", includingDilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics (1969) andBetween Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era (1970).[24]
Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics contained fourteen articles dealing with the future of the Soviet Union. Six of them, by Brzezinski himself,Robert Conquest,Merle Fainsod,Eugene Lyons, Giorgio Galli, andIsaac Don Levine, considered "collapse as a serious possibility although not immediately."[25]
On the other hand, in 1976 Brzezinski predicted that thepolitics of the Soviet Union would be practically unchanged for several more generations to come:
A central question, however, is whether suchsocial change [modernization] is capable of altering, or has in fact already altered in a significant fashion, the underlying character of Soviet politics. That character, as I have argued, has been shaped largely by political traditions derived from the specifics ofRussian /Soviet history, and it is deeply embedded in the operational style and institutions of the existing Soviet system. The ability of that system to resistde-Stalinization seems to indicate a considerable degree of resilience on the part of the dominant mode of politics in the Soviet context. It suggests, at the very least, that political changes are produced very slowly through social change, and that one must wait for at least several generations before social change begins to be significantly reflected in the political sphere.[26]
In 1989, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall and thecollapse of Soviet power throughoutEastern Europe, Brzezinski publishedThe Grand Failure: The Birth and Decay of Communism in the Twentieth Century. In that work he wrote:
Marxist-Leninism is an alien doctrine imposed on the region by an imperial power whose rule is culturally repugnant to the dominated peoples. As a result, a process of organic rejection of communism by Eastern European societies—a phenomenon similar to thehuman body'srejection of atransplanted organ—is underway."[27]
Brzezinski went on to claim that communism "failed to take into account the basic human craving forindividualfreedom." He argued there were five possibilities for USSR:
Option #5 in fact took place three years later, but at the time he wrote that collapse was "at this stage a much more remote possibility" than alternative #3: renewed stagnation. He also predicted chances of some form of communism existing in the Soviet Union in 2017 was a little more than 50 per cent. Finally when the end did come in a few more decades, Brzezinski wrote, it would be "most likely turbulent."[27]
Ferenc Farkas de Kisbarnak, an exiled Hungarian general and leader of theAnti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), predicted the dissolution of the Soviet Union due tonationalist pressures. From 12–14 June 1950, the Convention of the ABN was held inEdinburgh,Scotland under the auspices of the ScottishLeague for European Freedom. At the conference, Farkas gave a speech entitled "The War Against Bolshevism and the Military Factors Represented by the Subjugated Nations" where he predicted the disintegration of the USSR alongethnic lines which would eventually leaveEuropean Russia isolated. He predicted the eventual independence ofUkraine, theBaltic states,Turkestan, theIdel-Ural republics, andSiberia. The third resolution of the ABN convention further called for "The destruction of Russian imperialism and the guarantee of world peace by splitting the USSR up and re-establishing on ethnic principles, the independent national states of all nations living under bolshevist oppression bearing among other things, in mind that whole national groups have been forcible [sic] deported and are awaiting the moment when they could return to their native land."[28]
Only a handful of thinkers, ranging from French PresidentCharles de Gaulle to the Soviet dissidentAndrei Amalrik, foretold the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, and even they saw it as likely to happen as a result ofdisastrous wars withChina or pressures from theIslamic Soviet states ofCentral Asia.[29]
On 23 November 1959, in a speech inStrasbourg, de Gaulle announced his vision for Europe:Oui, c'est l'Europe, depuis l'Atlantique jusqu'à l'Oural, c'est toute l'Europe, qui décidera du destin du monde. ("Yes, it is Europe, from theAtlantic to theUrals, it is Europe, it is the whole of Europe, that will decide the destiny of the world.")[30] This phrase has been interpreted in various ways—on the one hand, as offeringdétente to the USSR,[31] on the other, as predicting the collapse of communism throughout Eastern Europe.[32][33]
Konrad Adenauer has been cited predicting thereunification of Germany[4] as early as the 1950s,[34] but according toHans-Peter Schwarz, in the last few years of Adenauer's life he repeatedly said that Soviet power would last a long time.[35]
In 1966, at theChristian Democrats'party conference, Adenauer stated his hopes that some day the Soviets might allow the reunification of Germany. Some analysts[which?] say it might be considered a prediction:
I have not given up hope. One day Soviet Russia will recognize that the division of Germany, and with it the division of Europe, is not to its advantage. We must be watchful for when the moment comes... we must not let it go unexploited.[34]
In a posthumously published 1964 book entitledCold Friday, CommunistdefectorWhittaker Chambers predicted an eventual Soviet collapse beginning with a "satellite revolution" in Eastern Europe. This revolution would then result in the transformation of the Sovietdictatorship.[36]
In the late 1960s, economistRobert A. Mundell predicted the collapse of the USSR.[37]
Michel Garder was a French author who predicted the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the bookL'Agonie du Regime en Russie Sovietique (The Death Struggle of the Regime in Soviet Russia) (1965). He set the date of the collapse for 1970.[10]
In 1968 Egon Neuberger, of theRAND Corporation, predicted that "[t]hecentrally planned economy eventually would meet its demise, because of its demonstrably growing ineffectiveness as a system for managing a modernizing economy in a rapidly changing world."[38]
Sun Myung Moon, founder of theUnification Church repeatedly predicted that Communism was inherently flawed and would inevitably collapse sometime in the late 1980s. In a speech to followers in Paris in April 1972, he stated:
"Communism, begun in 1917, could maintain itself approximately 60 years and reach its peak. So 1978 is the borderline and afterward communism will decline; in the 70th year it will be altogether ruined. This is true. Therefore now is the time for people who are studying communism to abandon it."[39]
In 1969, prominent dissidentAndrei Amalrik wrote in his bookWill the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?:
Amalrik predicted the collapse of the regime would occur between 1980 and 1985.[40][41] The year in the title was after thenovel of the same name.
Soviet authorities were skeptical.Natan Sharansky explained that "in 1984KGB officials, on coming to me in prison" when Amalrik's prediction was mentioned, "laughed at this prediction. Amalrik is long dead, they said, but we are still very much present."[42]
HistorianMarian Kamil Dziewanowski "gave a lecture titled 'Death of the Soviet Regime' at the Russian Research Center atHarvard University. The same lecture was delivered atCambridge University inEngland in 1971 and 1979. The text of the lecture (titled 'Death of the Soviet Regime: a Study in American Sovietology, by a Historian') was published inStudies in Soviet Thought. In 1980, he "updated this study and delivered it as a paper at the International Slavic Congress atGarmisch; titled 'The Future of Soviet Russia,' it was published inCoexistence: An International Journal (Glasgow 1982)."[43]
Emmanuel Todd attracted attention in 1976 when he predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, based on indicators such as increasinginfant mortality rates and foreign trade data in his workLa chute finale: Essais sur la décomposition de la sphère Soviétique (The Final Fall: an Essay on the Disintegration of the Soviet Sphere). Todd deduced that the Soviet Union had stagnated in the 1970s and was falling behind not only the West but its own Eastern European satellite states economically. In addition to this, low birth rates, a rising suicide rate, and worker discontent all were factors in an increasingly low level of productivity in the economy. Todd also predicted that poorly carried-out political and economic reforms would lead to a break-up of the Soviet Union with non-Russian republics seceding.[44][45]
Bernard Levin drew attention in 1992 to his prophetic article originally published inThe Times in September 1977, in which an uncannily accurate prediction of the appearance of new faces in thePolitburo was made, resulting in radical but peaceful political change.[4][46]
U.S. SenatorDaniel Patrick Moynihan in a series of articles and interviews from 1975 onward discussed the possibility, indeed likelihood, of the breakup of the Soviet Empire. But Moynihan also expressed the view thatliberal democracy, too, faced an uncertain future.[4] He argued in January 1975 that the Soviet Union was so weak economically, and so divided ethnically, that it could not long survive. However he said it "might have considerable time left before ethnicity breaks it up." By 1984 he argued "the Soviet idea is spent.History is moving away from it at astounding speed."[47] Some of his essays were published asSecrecy: The American Experience in 1999.
In her 1978 bookL'Empire éclaté,historian (and later member of theAcadémie française and theEuropean Parliament)Hélène Carrère d'Encausse predicted that the Soviet Union's political legitimacy would be fatally strained by diverging fertility between its culturallyRussian/Eastern European parts (dominant in government and industry but with plummeting birth rates) and its culturallyAsian and/orMuslim parts (with growing birth rates but little representation in the established "gerontocracy").[48]L'Empire éclaté generated substantial media interest at the time, winning the 1978Prix Aujourd′hui.[49]
Various essays published insamizdat in the early 1970s were on similar lines, some quite specifically predicting the end of the Soviet Union.[4][50]
In 1973 the Marxist,Hillel H. Ticktin, wrote that the Soviet "system is sinking deeper into crisis".[51] In 1976 he entitled an article: "The USSR: the Beginning of the End?".[52] In 1978 he predicted that theSoviet Union would "break asunder and develop either to capitalism or to socialism".[53] And in 1983 he wrote that "the system is drawing to a close".[54] (For a summary of Ticktin's approach, see Wikipedia'sStalinism entry.)
David Fromkin wrote ofRaymond Aron's prediction,
I know of only one person who came close to getting it right: Raymond Aron, the French philosopher andliberalanti-Communist. In a talk on the Soviet threat that I heard him give in the 1980s at theInternational Institute for Strategic Studies inLondon, he reminded the audience ofMachiavelli's observation inThe Prince that 'all armed prophets have conquered and all unarmed ones failed.' But what happens, Aron asked, if the prophet, having conquered and then ruled by force of arms, loses faith in his own prophecy? In the answer to that question, Aron suggested, lay the key to understanding the future of the Soviet Union.[29]
The economistRavi Batra predicted the collapse of the USSR in his 1978 bookThe Downfall of Capitalism and Communism.
In 1980 the sociologistRandall Collins presented his paper "The future decline of the Russian empire" at theUniversity of South Florida and atColumbia University and published his predictions in the book "Weberian sociological theory" (1986).
In 1980, the political scientist Robert M. Cutler published an article "Soviet Dissent under Khrushchev"[55]that concluded that the following events were likely: (1) that in the generational turnover of elites after Brezhnev died (which began when he died in 1982), the Soviet regime would seek to increase public participation (which began in 1985 viaglasnost, after two more top gerontocrats had died); (2) that the Communist Party's rule would be challenged in Central Asia (which occurred in the 1986 rioting in Kazakhstan before the Baltic republics erupted); and (3) that Party leaders at the local level would go their own way if the Party did not give them a reason to remain loyal to the Moscow center (which occurred in all republics in the late 1980s, but most dramatically when the newRCP and the RSFSR sapped some of the power of the CPSU and the USSR in 1990–1991).
James Dale Davidson andWilliam Rees-Mogg predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union in their bookThe Great Reckoning in the early 1980s.
Milton Friedman and his wifeRose mentioned briefly in their bookFree to Choose (1980) that "the collapse of communism and its replacement by a market system, seems unlikely, though as incurable optimists we do not rule it out completely."
Stewart Brand said when introducing the work ofPhilip Tetlock that Brand's partner had given a talk in the 1980s to topCentral Intelligence Agency people about the future of the Soviet Union. One scenario he raised was that the Soviet bloc might break up; a sign of this happening would be the rise of unknown Mikhail Gorbachev through the party ranks. A CIA analyst said that the presentation was fine, but there was no way the Soviet Union was going to break up in his lifetime or his children's lifetime. The analyst's name wasRobert Gates.[56]
On the other hand, in hearings before the U.S. Senate on March 19, 1986, when Gates (then head of the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence) was asked "what kind of work the Intelligence Community was doing to prepare policymakers for the consequences of change in the Soviet Union," he responded: "Quite frankly, without any hint that such fundamental change is going on, my resources do not permit me the luxury of sort of just idly speculating on what a different kind of Soviet Union might look like."[57]
In 1984,Anatoliy Golitsyn, an important KGB defector published the bookNew Lies For Old,[58] wherein he predicted the collapse of the communist bloc orchestrated from above; but he didn't mention any possible collapse of the USSR itself.
He claimed this collapse was part of a long-termdeception strategy designed to lull the West into a false sense of security, abolish all containment policies, and in time finally economically cripple and diplomatically isolate theUnited States.
Among other things, Golitsyn stated:
Collaborating opinions can be found in an archive of classified documents collected byVladimir Bukovsky, a defector also.[59]
In 1981, Andrew Greeley gave these predictions:[60]
Before 1990
- The present Communist government in the Soviet Union will be overthrown either by a violent internal revolution or more likely by a “social democratic” faction within the party.
- Some of the constituent republics (the Ukraine, for example) will obtain authentic separate status. The Soviet colonies in Eastern Europe will then go the same route.
In 1985 German economistWerner Obst published a book entitledDer Rote Stern verglüht. Moskaus Abstieg - Deutschlands Chance (The Red Star is Dying Away. Moscow's Decline - Germany's Chance), Munich: Wirtschaftsverlag Langen-Müller/Herbig, third edition in 1987, in which he predicted the collapse of theSoviet bloc and the reunification ofGermany within the immediate future for about 1990, based on the analysis of economical statistics and trends.
United States PresidentRonald Reagan, throughout his 1980 election campaign and first term in office presented a public view that the Soviet Union had been growing in power relative to the United States. In 1981 he stated that "the Soviet Union has been engaged in the greatest military buildup in the history of man."[61] and the next year stated that "on balance the Soviet Union does have a definite margin of superiority" compared to the US military.[62]
The Reagan administration used a perceived strength of the Soviet Union to justify a significant expansion of military spending according to David Arbel and Ran Edelist. In their studyWestern Intelligence and the dissolution of the Soviet Union they argue it was this position by the Reagan administration that prevented the American intelligence agencies from predicting the demise of the USSR. Arbel and Edelist further argued that CIA analysts were encouraged to present any information exaggerating the Soviet threat and justifying the military buildup, while contrary evidence of Soviet weakness was ignored and those presenting it sidelined.[63]
At the same time Reagan expressed a long range view that the Soviet Union could eventually be defeated. On March 3, 1983, President Reagan told theNational Association of Evangelicals inOrlando,Florida: "I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last—last pages even now are being written."[64]
In his June 1982 address to theBritish Parliament he stated:
It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens. It also is in deep economic difficulty. The rate of growth in the national product has been steadily declining since the fifties and is less than half of what it was then. The dimensions of this failure are astounding: A country which employs one-fifth of its population in agriculture is unable to feed its own people. Were it not for the private sector, the tiny private sector tolerated in Soviet agriculture, the country might be on the brink of famine.... Overcentralized, with little or no incentives, year after year the Soviet system pours its best resource into the making of instruments of destruction. The constant shrinkage of economic growth combined with the growth of military production is putting a heavy strain on the Soviet people. What we see here is a political structure that no longer corresponds to its economic base, a society where productive forces are hampered by political ones. ...In the Communist world as well, man's instinctive desire for freedom and self-determination surfaces again and again. To be sure, there are grim reminders of how brutally the police state attempts to snuff out this quest forself-rule –1953 in East Germany,1956 in Hungary,1968 in Czechoslovakia,1981 in Poland. But the struggle continues in Poland. And we know that there are even those who strive and suffer for freedom within the confines of the Soviet Union itself. ...What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term – the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism–Leninism on theash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people. And that's why we must continue our efforts to strengthenNATO even as we move forward with our Zero-Option initiative in the negotiations on intermediate-range forces and our proposal for a one-third reduction instrategicballistic missilewarheads.[65]
Analyst Jeffrey W. Knopf has argued that Reagan went beyond everyone else:
Reagan stands out in part because he believed the Soviet Union could be defeated. For most of the Cold War,Republican andDemocratic administrations alike had assumed the Soviet Union would prove durable for the foreseeable future. The bipartisan policy of containment aimed to keep the Soviet Union in check while trying to avoidnuclear war; it did not seek to force the dissolution of the Soviet empire. Ronald Reagan, in contrast, believed that theSoviet economy was so weak that increased pressure could bring the Soviet Union to the brink of failure. He therefore periodically expressed confidence that the forces of democracy 'will leave Marxism–Leninism on the ash heap of history'.[5]
The leader of theAnanda Marga cult in West Bengal,P.R. Sarkar, predicted in the 1980s that Soviet Communism would fall with "a few blows from the hammer". He cited "inner and external stasis" as major weaknesses of communism.[citation needed]
On 7 January 1989,Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, supreme leader ofIran, sent aletter toMikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of theSoviet Union.[66] This letter was Khomeini's only known written message to a foreign leader.[67] Khomeini's letter was delivered by the Iranian politiciansAbdollah Javadi-Amoli,Mohammad-Javad Larijani, andMarzieh Hadidchi.[68] In the letter, Khomeini declared thatCommunism was dissolving within the Soviet bloc,[69] and invited Gorbachev to consider Islam as an alternative to communist ideology.[68]
Anders Åslund predicted the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1989 bookGorbachev’s Struggle for Economic Reform.[70]
According to Kevin Brennan:
Sovietology failed because it operated in an environment that encouraged failure. Sovietologists of all political stripes were given strong incentives to ignore certain facts and focus their interest in other areas. I don't mean to suggest that there was a giant conspiracy at work; there wasn't. It was just that there were no careers to be had in questioning theconventional wisdom. ... There were other kinds of institutional biases as well, such as those that led to the ... "Team B" Report."[71]
Seymour Martin Lipset andGyörgy Bence write:
Given these judgments of the Soviet future made by political leaders and journalists, the question is why were they right and so many of our Sovietological colleagues wrong. The answer again in part must be ideological. Reagan and Levin came from rightist backgrounds, and Moynihan, much like the leaders of theAFL–CIO, from aleftistanti-Stalinistsocial-democratic milieu, environments that disposed participants to believe the worst. Most of the Sovietologists, on the other hand, were left-liberal in their politics, an orientation that undermined their capacity to accept the view that economic statism, planning, socialist incentives, would not work. They were also for the most part ignorant of, or ignored, the basicMarxist formulation that it is impossible to build socialism in impoverished societies.Brzezinski's 1969 collection,Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics demonstrates this point, of "the fourteen contributors...Two-thirds (four out of six) of those who foresaw a serious possibility of breakdown were, likeLevin andMoynihan, nonacademics. Three quarters (six out of eight) of those who could not look beyond system continuity were scholars.[25]
Richard Pipes took a slightly different view, situating the failure of the Sovietological profession in the larger context of the failures ofsocial science:
It seems likely that ultimately the reason for the failure of professionals to understand the Soviet predicament lay in their indifference to the human factor. In the desire to emulate the successes of the natural scientists, whose judgments are "value free," politology (sic) and sociology have been progressively dehumanized, constructing model and relying on statistics (many of them falsified) and, in the process, losing contact with the subject of their inquiries—the messy, contradictory, unpredictable homo sapiens.[72]
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