Rock & Radiation, not Ronald Reagan, Brought down the Soviet Union

[Q]

Published on Thursday, June 10, 2004 by the Free Press

Rock & Radiation, not Ronald Reagan, Brought down the Soviet Union

by Harvey Wasserman


No greater nonsense will accompany Ronald Reagan to his grave than the idea that he brought down the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War.

Among the many causes of Soviet collapse two words stand out, and they aren't Ronald Reagan.

They are rock and radiation.

The GOP military's 1980s attempt to "spend the Soviets into oblivion" certainly feathered the nests of the defense contractors who contributed to Reagan's campaigns here, and who still fatten George W. Bush. Lockheed-Martin, Halliburton and an unholy host of GOP insiders have scored billions in profits from Iran-Contra to Star Wars to Desert Storm to Iraq.

But these were not the people who brought down the Kremlin. If anything, they prolonged Soviet rule with the unifying threat of apocalyptic attack. No, it was rock & roll that wrecked the USSR. From the late 1960s on, the steady beat of the Beatles and Motown, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, shattered Stalinism at its stodgy core. Precisely the things most hated by the Reagan's rightist culture warriors here eroded and helped dissolve the old-time Soviet culture there. Beamed in by radio, smuggled in on records and tapes, the "youth music" was unstoppable.

When Mikhail Gorbachev announced Perestroika, it was at least in partial response to the irresistible subversion of the western counterculture. Rock and roll was doing to the remnants of Stalin's Russia what it had already done to Eisenhower's America.

The final blow came not from Ronald Reagan's beloved nuclear weapons, but from the Soviets' own Three Mile Island. --- http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0610-12.htm

[Taylor Mason Powell]

1. Kick,

I think there's a lot of truth to this.

Although, if you say "Rock and radiation" really really fast, it almost kinda sounds like "Ronald Reagan." :-)

[kentuck]

2. And the song that most inspired the revolution.....

"Back in the USSR" by the Beatles? I do recall that was a popular tune in the 1970's. I do think rock & roll had more to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union than did Reagan...