Перестро́йка / гла́сность ~ Perestroika / Glasnost

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Dinesh ^club

"We can't go on like this," Mikhail Gorbachev had confessed to his wife in 1985, just hours before he was appointed Soviet premier. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Gorbachev, recognizing that the Soviet Empire's will to resist was ebbing away, staked everything on one big bet. He would restart economic growth by promoting restructuring (perestroika) and transparency (glasnost) while -- at all costs -- avoiding recourse to violence, which could only end badly.

Many Americans assumed that this must be another clever move in the game of death (so clever, in fact, that they could not quite figure out what the Soviets might be trying to do). "I was suspicious of Gorbachev's motives," National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft later confessed. "My fear," he explained, "was that Gorbachev could talk us into disarming without the Soviet Union having to do anything fundamental to its own military structure and that, in the decade or so, we could face a more serious military threat than ever before."

. . . . In October 1986, Regan and Gorbachev sat across a table in Reykjavik and actually started talking about banning all nuclear weapons. This threw American defense experts into a panic. The Soviets might be terrified of NATO's new, high-tech arsenal, but Americans -- who knew that few of these wonder weapons were yet in service -- were equally terrified that without nuclear deterrence their conventional forces in Europe would be hardpressed to hold off the much larger Soviet armies. Gorbachev, however, was not trying to trick anyone, and is slowly became clear that he really was serious about playing the game without using force. No one knew what to make of it. ~ Page 328

The events in Romania suggested that Gorbachev was right, but by the summer of 1989 the Soviets probably had no winning moves left. Changing one policy just led to irresistible pressure on the next policy. Less than three months after the Berlin Wall came down, East Germany's prime minister told Gorbachev that the two Germanys wanted to merge into one. This could only happen, Gorbachev replied, if the united Germany were demilitarized and neutral. A proposal was put to the Americans, but Bush refused to withdraw the quarter of million American personnel in West Germany. Gorbachev pulled his 300,000 troops out of East Germany anyway, and the new, reunited Germany joined NATO.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is perhaps not surprising that once the Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, and Bulgarians had walked away from the Soviet Empire, the Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Georgians, Azeris, Chechens, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, and Mongolians would follow. What does still seem remarkable, though is that the Russians themselves decided that they wanted nothing more to do with their own empire and announced their withdrawal from the Soviet system. On Christmas Day 1991, Gorbachev signed a decree formally dissolving the Soviet Union. ~ Page 330

6 years ago. Edited 17 months ago.

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