It was Gorbechev not Reagan who ended Soviet communism

[glarius]

As I remember it, he went to England, where Margaret Thatcher talked with him and declared, "we can do business with this man."....Also he came here to Canada and toured our country, studying how things were done in a democracy....I think he was ready to democratize his country....Reagan does not deserve the credit he has been given....IMO

[NightTrain]

1. You got that right!

Even Bill Clinton liked to claim that "America won the Cold War," but that's a load of shit. We didn't beat the Soviet Union; it fucking imploded!

[RaleighNCDUer]

7. Well, technically we won because they collapsed first. Kind of

a win by default.

[Silverhair]

13. That was the objective of the doctrine of containment.

George Kennan, under the Truman administration formulated the containment theory that would guide US foreign policy until 1991. It was obvious that the Soviets had been bitten by the world conquest bug and were willing to use military force if they thought they could win. Everybody was afraid of another big war at a time when the country was tired after WWII. Then the Truman administration realized that if the Soviets could be contained, then they would eventually collapse.

I remember reading a prediction, in 1965, from Kennan, that communism was on the road to collapse and would do so in about 20 years. He didn't miss it by much.

It wasn't Gorby or Reagan. It was the forces of history. Communism was a theory from a different age that could no longer survive in the dawn of the information age.

[jmcgowanjm]

14. The result: the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen

At the time(1981), the United States was attempting to
block Western Europe from importing Soviet natural gas.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4394002/

"That is really far fetched."-Masha Lipman-CSPAN
120504
Answering a caller asking about The Ukraine Election
being about control of oil/gas.

Russia to boost gas transportation via Blue Stream pipeline
http://www.russiajournal.com/news/cnews-article.shtml?nd=46588

The Gas Princess:
Lazarenko was the chief patron of one of Yushchenko's
biggest supporters, Yuliya Timoshenko of the United
Energy Systems of the Ukraine (UESU), who made
fantastic profits at a time of economic recession.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=4072

Russian energy companies such as Lukoil and
Gazprom,
which have close links to the Russian state, operate
in
Ukraine as de facto branches of the Russian foreign
ministry, and the former Russian prime minister and
Gazprom chairman, Victor Chernomyrdin(Russia's
James Baker), has
been ambassador to Ukraine since 2001.

http://wsws.org/articles/2004/dec2004/ukra-d01.shtml

Ukraine took a step in accommodating Russia as well
and announced that it had agreed to allow for the transport of
up to 85 million tons of Russian oil over a 15-year period as
part of a comprehensive oil and gas agreement signed
between Ukraine's Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych
and Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov. The
document noted that annual amounts, rates and
directions would be assigned by Ukraine's Ministry of Fuel
and Energy in cooperation with Russia's Ministry of Industry
and Energy.

The agreement basically rejected any possibility of
transporting oil from the Caspian Sea region via
the Odesa-Brody line. President Kuchma said that
the Odesa-Brody pipeline would now be utilized for the
transport of Russian oil.

http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/2004/340401.shtml

[alfredo]

19. You are correct.

Reagan's ego was so big, he wanted them to fall on his watch. Instead of allowing them time for an orderly reconfiguration of their system, he pushed them into chaos.

You can blame all those loose Russian nukes and the power of the Russian Mafia on Reagan.

[sharman]

26. Exactly!

Really fries me that no one makes the comparison between the Cold War and Bushie's war. You wanna talk about "grave threats" "brutal dictators" and countries that openly talked of burying us. And aren't we damned glad we didn't go screaming off into WWIII?

Of course, the difference between Russia in 1948 and Iraq in 2003 is that Iraq was a weak nation that we could kick in the teeth, make ourselves feel all big and tough.

Works like a charm for your popularity ratings.

You know, the Roman emperors kept the masses in place with bread and circuses. The clever Repugs have figured out that all they need to do is give circuses--endless flag-waving, ass-kicking, shock-and-awe wars--and this stupid populace will forget the fact that they have no jobs

[Anarcho-Socialist]

2. I agree 100%

If a hard-liner (not Gorbechev) had been in charge, the Soviet Union would still exist today, edging ever further to economic collapse.

[LiberalAndProud]

3. I have often wondered

if the economic impact of the Chernobyl incident didn't contribute greatly to the fall of the wall. I never believed that Reagan's "evil empire" rhetoric did anything except to polarize his base here in the US.

[Poiuyt]

4. I think Lech Walensa had a lot to do with the downfall

of the Soviet Union.

But we Americans like to hear that we had something to do with it.

[RaleighNCDUer]

5. Isn't it funny how American fundamentalists think we brought down

godless communism, and Islamic fundamentalists think they did?

[doubleplusgood]

6. Bill Gates, etc. did in the USSR

I've always thought that the advent of PC technology in industry helped do in the Soviets by being one of the factors in increasing productivity in the West, leaving the Russians hopelessly behind. Would a paranoid Soviet state have given people access to PC's to keep up with the West...in essence letting people have access to the equivalent of printing presses ?

[yellowdogintexas]

8. I am so damned sick and tired of Saint Reagan getting all

the credit for something that would have happened anyway. That system was collapsing under its own weight and would have fallen if PeeWee Herman were president!

[GoldenOldie]

9. The ignorant idiots who believe that the few words spoken

by Ronald Reagan "Mr. Gorbachov (sp), tear down this wall," was the reason the wall was torn down, are truly naive. The USSR was already on the decline and the wall was going down one way or the other. Leave it to the mush-minds of the CON followers to believe that Ronnie single handed tore the wall down and was thus the savior of the new Germany and the world.

[JanMichael]

10. Yes and no. Look up interviews with him a few years later.

He didn't anticipate that the rejected Yeltson would ever send the country into cowboy (Read mafia) capitalism and Plutocracy.

IIRc he said if he'd thought it through better he'd send Yeltson to some far away place as an Ambassador just to shut him the fuck up.

He apparently wanted to steer the USSR into a Social democracy, Ie. still Socialist but a not Totalitarian.

[Hippo_Tron]

22. And sadly that wouldn't have been good enough for the US...

Who can't embrace other peoples' economic systems. It would still be communist and still be evil and thus we wouldn't have accepted an end to the cold war...

[Hippo_Tron]

23. Dupe n/t

Dupe

[Wolf1728]

11. Someone once said

that "Politics is taking credit for the inevitable."

[rman]

12. it never really ended

didn't Putin recently close down a whole bunch of independant media?

[jmcgowanjm]

15. USSR suffered 1st Peakoil 1989

meaning the oil industry could not deliver more
oil/gas under the current regime.
Something had to give.

"US oil production has been declining for 30 years and the
former Soviet Union’s production has been falling since
1989 (though with some recovery under Russian President Putin)"

http://www.asponews.org/ASPO.newsletter.031.php

We're about to go over the Oldevai Slope.

Get ready for the collapse of Major Empire
or similar Watershed event.

Every glitch in oil production transportation consumption
has been accompanied by such an "Event".

[jmcgowanjm]

16. The Politics of Tragedy

Classical tragedy, as typified best by the work of
Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and historian Friedrich Schiller,
does not focus, as Romantics do, on the alleged failure,
and defeated desires of leaders of society, such as the
pathetic puppet Bush, but on the failures of the cultures
which the society's selected leaders fail to overturn. On
that account, the great tragedians of our culture are the truest
of its historians.

http://www.larouchepub.com/lar/2004/3148crash_of_2005.html

[jmcgowanjm]

18. 'Russia in the New Millennium'-Mikhail Khodorkovsky 061801

Question. Your oil production is rapidly increasing while
your export capacities are restricted. How do you plan to
solve this problem?

Answer. It is a sore point at present. Competition for selling oil
is very heavy. That is why we support the project of
the construction of the pipeline to China, as well as the so-
called Baltic Pipeline System. We are also considering
other possibilities, like those at Omishalj( to show
how compex/vindictive- Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine,
canceled this) port. Anyway I hope
you will keep in mind that we are the biggest producers of
oil products in Russia, and we plan to retain this position. This
is all I wanted to say.

http://www.yukos.com/exclusive/exclusive.asp?id=6086

Transneft sources, along with oil industry executives in
Moscow, agree on one thing about the eastern option
for shipping Russian oil. The principal market for this crude
will be Asia, and not the US West Coast. But think for a
moment what might have happened if the Yukos owners
had managed to sell control of their company last July
to Chevron-Texaco or Mobil, as Khodorkovsky intended -
Russia as an independent oil exporter would have been on
its way to a level of independence that is less than Aramco,
the Saudi oil company. It is unsurprising that the US media
have failed to report the Yukos affair in this light, let alone to
have noticed that the US, the world's largest oil consumer,
has tried, but so far failed, to compel Russia, the world's
second or first-largest oil exporter, to ship and market oil in
the way Washington, or Houston, wants.

MOSCOW - For a decade Washington has backed the
Turkish and Azerbaijan governments to steer the export
of Caspian region crude oil away from Russia. Russia's
newest riposte has been to ally the Russian and Iranian
oil industries, and open up the shortest, cheapest and
most lucrative oil route of all, southwards out of the Caspian
to Iran.

http://www.axisoflogic.com/cgi-bin/exec/view.pl?archive=67&num=11269

Iran opens oil trading (in Euros)032105
Guess when Iran gets attacked by the US.

[SudieJD]

17. I Wondered When..

I wondered when someone else would say something to this effect! I'm really sick of the repugs taking credit for this! Regan just wanted to thump his over bloated ego over this. He didn't do a damn thing!

Sudie

[mtnsnake]

20. Good thread. It always drives me nuts when Reagan gets credited

for it. Without Gorbachev, Reagan would rank among the all-time losers for presidents.

[Jawja]

21. Right On!!

I have been saying that for years.

Without Gorbechev, this does not happen. I have always given Gorbechev the credit for this.

Thank you for your post.

[glarius]

24. You're welcome....I have wondered why no media people have ever

pointed out this fact...They all go along with..."Reagan ended communism!"....and it bugs me.

[Wolf1728]

25. Liberal bias??

Well that sure as heck knocks a hole in the "biased liberal media" mentality that the Repugs have.