Give this to anyone who says: "Reagan won the cold war by destroying the USSR."

[Hamlette]

Donald Graves, a top American Kremlinologist died recently. It's an interesting obit, especially this paragraph:

In 1986, his insights led him to predict that the Soviet Union would collapse internally in the near future. This analysis, which contradicted the Reagan administration's foreign policy positions, was not welcomed. Mr. Graves was removed as head of Soviet internal affairs, although he continued to work in the intelligence field. He later returned to the bureau under the first Bush administration.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/17/AR2008071703056.html

We all need reminding why we hated Reagan so much. He didn't start an illegal, unnecessary war without end but he was just as big an ideologue as W.

I also loved this story from the article. Not so much about politics but the talent of Mr. Graves himself:

Regional Soviet newspapers in 1980 were reporting an unusually large number of deaths of rocket scientists, and the obituaries were running a bit later than usual.

Donald Graves, who collected facts and data about the Soviet Union with a zeal matched by few others in the U.S. government, noticed the reports and suspected something was up. Several high-level officials who had an interest in Soviet space matters had also recently died, but the dates and places of the deaths had been obfuscated.

Putting bits of information together, Mr. Graves soon realized the scientists and officials had died simultaneously, probably in an accident at the Plesetsk launch site. Mr. Graves, widely considered one of the best American Kremlinologists of the era, wrote and circulated a memo about his findings to his State Department superiors and other high-ranking U.S. officials. The official Soviet press said nothing.

The rest of the world learned nine years later that more than 50 people had been killed when a Vostok rocket exploded during fueling at Plesetsk, the world's largest space facility, March 18, 1980.

[elehhhhna]

1. the afghan "war" did more to destroy the USSR than Reagan's flapping gums EVER did.

[L0oniX]

2. The Russians put everything they had into their military and thats what fucked them up just like...

it's going to fuck us up too.

[benddem]

3. anyone who traveled

in the east bloc during the 80's knew the USSR was on its last legs. My god the people had no food. They were lined up on the streets to get a few moldy apples or oranges. Chernobyl didn't help either.

[Hav]

4. .

The one thing that I disliked the most about giving so much credit to Reagan or any other single politician, was that it takes so much away from hundreds of thousands who took it to the streets to protest. They were the ones who were taking the risk and not the politicians with their slogans.

[Igel]

5. People shouldn't simplify just to make a point.

Both sides do it.

The USSR's collapse had a lot of causes. Eliminate one, and it might have collapsed later, or differently.

Aghanistan sapped morale. Reagan helped that along, as did his militaristic push. The USSR had to spend more on the military than they'd have liked. Gaidar's point is that agriculture, as an index of other economic output, had frozen at 1960s levels. Glasnost' showed that not only were the country-internal claims of the Soviet apparatchiki false, but they were horribly, horribly false.

However, Graves was an outlier. At the 1992 AAASS panel discussion in Phoenix entitled something like "How we got it wrong" (i.e., how everybody had been wrong about the USSR's collapse), there were 4 long-tenured faculty and a young moderator. The moderator played it straight as each of the four, in turn, quoted their research showing that they hadn't gotten it wrong at all.

The moderator then said the panel discussion would run overtime. He took apart each of the four grand old men. One of them quoted accurately from a paper he wrote, but left out the beginning of the sentence where the words were said to be somebody else's, and the end where he said they were obviously wrong. Sort of like quoting from "John says that the USSR is headed for imminent collapse, but this is obviously wrong" by saying, "And, in my 1983 paper, I wrote, 'the USSR is headed for imminent collapse'." He showed that apart from a few scholars, who were marginalized, and a few scholars who said in footnotes that their analysis could be wrong, they all had it completely wrong. Then he dismantled the field, saying how Slavists in academia, whose tenure depended on connections with Soviet colleagues, could ever risk doing more than justifying the party line, esp. when by saying "the USSR was stable" they'd get grant money, but by saying, "In two years, no more USSR" they'd be sure to miss out on the 5-year grants.

The guy even took on the CIA folk then widely reported in the media. Agents were crawling out of the woodwork saying they, i.e., the Agency, were right all along, but it was hushed up by politicians. He pointed out the declassified portions of CIA reports in which the consensus opinion was long, or at least intermediate, term stability, with a minority--sometimes a very small minority--arguing otherwise. Those who argued otherwise were marginalized--not always by politicians, but by the majority. The "majority" weren't politicians.

Don't know if the young scholar got job offers or not. I think he heads a think tank, now.

It would be of interest to see who removed Graves as head of the "Soviet internal affairs division of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research". The reporter decided for a passive; perhaps the obit writer didn't know, either. The INR was also a dissenter for the Oct. 2002 NIE, it seems.

[scarletwoman]

6. What? No recs for this thread? This is interesting stuff, including the comments. rec'd (nt)