Gorbachev and Reagan

www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/audiovisual/white-house-photo-collection-galleries/summits-mikhail-gorbachev

Superpower Summit 1985 At their meeting U.S. President Regan and Soviet leader Gorbachev vigorously debated arms control and the many issues that separated their governments. Smiling frequently for the press and locked in an intense campaign for public support, especially in western Europe, they agreed only to meet again (Wide World Photos)

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Dinesh ^club

When the ailing Brezhnev finally died in 1982, his successor, the long-time chief of the secret police, Yuri Andropov, tried to invigorate the system. Andropov introduced modest reform to improve economic performance and campaigned against worker absenteeism and high-level corruption. Relatively little came of these efforts, for both Andropov and his successor died in office in little more than a year. But Andropov’s efforts combined with dreary procession of state funerals in Red Square to set a stage for the emergence in March 1985 of Mikhail Gorbachev, the most vigorous Soviet leader in a generation.

The fifty-four-old Gorbachev was smart charming, and tough. As long-time Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko reportedly said, “This man has a nice smile, but he has got iron teeth.” In his first year in office, Gorbachev attacked corruption and incompetence in the upper reaches of the bureaucracy. Gorbachev launched a strong campaign against alcoholism and drunkenness, which were also deadly scourges of Soviet society. He seemed determined to see through measures fo make both the elite and masses “shape up,” so the economy would perform better while the Communist party as a whole maintained firm control

The new Soviet leader also seemed tough and determined in international affairs. He and his colleagues made clear that they would not permit any major deviation from the Communist model in eastern Europe, like the one that had only recently occurred in Poland. Gorbachev repeatedly attacked President Reagan’s plan to build a space shield against nuclear missiles, popularly known as “Star Wars,” and tried to exploit existing differences between the United States and the European allies on defense matters. The outcome of all these initiatives was uncertain in early 1986, but Mikhail Gorbachev seemed firmly in command and a leader to be reckoned with. ~ Page 1037

6.1 years ago. Edited 6.1 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

6.1 years ago. Edited 23 months ago.

Dinesh ^club

. . . .In the 1980s, American voters developed a genuine emotional attachment to Ronald Reagan, but that emotional attachment may have blurred a more detached and discerning assessment -- not of his politics, but of his health. In a startling passage of his 2005 book, ‘The Wisdom Paradox’ neuroscientist Elkhonon Goldberg claims to have spotted unmistakable signs of early Alzheimer’s disease in Regan while he was still in office, simply by watching several public appearances. Since Goldberg assess dementia for a living at New York University School of Medicine, this can’t be dismissed as an armchair diagnosis. Watching Regan nod off during George H. W. Bush’s inauguration, Goldberg said to himself, “Brain Stem gone.” He added, “I was convinced that a significant portion of Regan’s second term had taken place in the shadow of his slippage toward early dementia.” How good a political guide are out emotions if they prevent us from discerning a politician’s deepening cognitive deficits (or any other serious flaw, for that matter)?

5.2 years ago. Edited 23 months ago.

Dinesh ^club

Nuclear winter seized attention because it blew away the position -- built up over the years by strategists on both sides -- that nuclear war could be survivable, let alone winnable. New Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was shaken by the argument, as was President Regan, who said that the nuclear war “could just end up in no victory for anyone because we would wipe out the Earth as we know it.” The stakes of nuclear conflict were now plausibly infinite. “A nuclear war imperils all of our descendants, for as long as there will be humans,” Sagan wrote in 1983. “Extinction is the undoing of the human enterprise.” ~ Page 112

Surely though, there’s some kind of military plan to handle an alien invasion, one that might bring all of humanity together, finally fighting on the same side? President Ronald Reagan told an audience of high school students in Maryland in 1985 that the arrival of hostile aliens might broker peace between the United States and the Soviet Union. “If suddenly there was a threat to this world from some other species from another planet outside in the univers,” he said, “we’d forget all the little local differences that we have between our countries and we would find our once and for all that we really are all human beings here on Earth together. ~ Page 291 ( “End Times” ~ Bryan Welsh - author)

3.3 years ago. Edited 23 months ago.

Dinesh ^club

In the Soviet Union, General Secretary Gorbachev emerged as a new kind of leader. President Regan recognized in Gorbachev a different mind-set and the potential to help forge a new era in U.s - Soviet relations, one of genuine progress between the two major world powers. Though there was still fundamental chasms between the two superpowers, for the most part the relationship took on a more civil tone and for the first time there was a real sense that change might indeed be possible. ~ Page 276

23 months ago. Edited 23 months ago.

Dinesh ^club

This was the closest call since the Cuban crisis in 1962, and it left both Regan and Thatcher eager to engage the Soviet circle again. Fortunately for both, the leader of politburo appointed in 1985 was Mikhail Gorbachev – ‘the sort of guy you can do business with’, Thatcher’s advisers thought. More fortunately still, after four decades, containment had finally boxed the Soviet economy into such a corner that Miscow found itself forced into a going-out-of-business sale. With his revenues failing just as the West ramped up another arms race, Gorbachev tried to revive growth by liberalising and holding an audit of empire. When this concluded that imperialism did little for the Soviet economy, Gorbachev cut half a million men from the army, retreated from Afghanistan, scrapped his intermediate- range missiles and announced what some called the ‘Sinatra Doctrine’ – each East European government must do communism its own way, without Soviet support against its own people. In just 1989 Hungarians rolled up the barbed wire along their border with the West; five months later, the Berlin Wall came down. The Soviet Empire had dissolved even faster than the British. ~ Page 438

22 months ago. Edited 22 months ago.

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