TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/110491/1104640.000

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.1 KB | 121 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 98

Just Why Did Communism Fail?


By Michael Kinsley


    In 1977 President Jimmy Carter gave a speech renouncing
America's "inordinate fear of communism." This line came to haunt
Carter and established his reputation for global naivete. It is
often contrasted with President Ronald Reagan's "evil empire"
speech of 1983, although the two phrases are not logically
contradictory. Carter didn't say inordinate moral revulsion from
communism, or inordinate military opposition to the Soviets. He
said "fear," meaning an inordinate belief in the power of
communism as a political and economic system.

    And hasn't history borne him out? Even after six years of
remarkable change, the fragility of communism after the August
coup attempt surprised nearly everyone. Meanwhile in Washington,
the hearings on Robert Gates for CIA director exposed the
mechanisms that produced inordinate fear.

    Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan has developed a magnificent
obsession with the CIA's odd role in the cold war as a
cheerleader for the success of the Soviet experiment. "Every
President since Dwight Eisenhower has been told that the Soviet
Union [had] growth rates vastly in excess of ours," he says. The
CIA regularly predicted that the Soviets were catching up. In the
late 1970s, it claimed, absurdly in retrospect, that the Soviet
economy was two-thirds the size of America's. While exaggerating
the importance of communist regimes in such places as Angola and
Nicaragua, the agency also completely missed the ethnic and
nationalist time bombs inside the Soviet Union itself.

    At the Gates hearings Senators struggled to determine the
nominee's role in past CIA enterprises and whether he was acting
out of principled belief or narrow ambition. Whatever your
conclusion on those issues, the hearings revealed the CIA in the
1980s as an institution determined to portray Soviet communism as
an ever growing threat, no matter what the evidence. The agency
produced an intentionally one-sided report on possible Soviet
involvement in the assassination attempt on the Pope and
presented it as a balanced view -- in support of Director William
Casey's conviction that the Soviets were behind all international
terror. It offered retrospective justification for selling
weapons to the Ayatollah on grounds that the Soviets were making
inroads in Iran -- something that even Gates now admits was
incorrect.

    The argument between liberals and conservatives about what
caused communism's fall and who got it right or wrong will go on
for a long time. On the main cause -- the utter hopelessness of
communism as an economic system -- both sides got it right in their
hearts but somehow wrong in their heads. They knew communism
couldn't work but forgot it. Of the two sides of the argument,
though, it seems to me that conservatives were wronger here. They
are the ones who kept emphasizing that military strength could
grow indefinitely, no matter how decrepit the economy.

    On the second most important cause -- the spirit of freedom in
individual people, which survived 70 years of totalitarian rule --
both sides were caught by surprise. The communists had more than
three generations in which to mold a New Soviet Man. Few
outsiders suspected they had failed so completely. Given half an
opportunity, it turned out, people knew immediately what they
wanted and demanded it. The freedom-enhancing advent of
electronic gizmos like televisions and computers -- so different
from the role Orwell envisioned for them in 1984 -- helped but
can't fully explain it. Perhaps conservatives deserve an edge on
this item for their greater doubts about social engineering in
general.

    The third cause of the Soviet downfall was the decades-long
American, and Western, policy of containment. Both sides of the
argument can take equal bows for this one.

    The real bone of contention, of course, is the role played
by Reagan's military escalation of the 1980s. It's hard to argue
that this was worthless or counterproductive and impossible to
know how the world would look today if America had followed a
different course. But a few skeptical points might be kept in
mind.

    First, Reagan certainly never advertised his strategy as one
of capitalizing on growing Soviet weakness by engaging the
U.S.S.R. in an arms race in which it couldn't hope to compete for
long. Quite the opposite: per those CIA estimates, the arms
buildup of the 1980s was presented as a question of desperately
trying to keep up with the Joneskis. So, at the very least,
Reagan misled the American people into a highly aggressive policy
by presenting it as defensive.

    Few will object to having been misled if the policy worked.
But did it? All you can say for sure is that if things had turned
out differently -- if communism were still standing tall, the
Soviet army and its proxies were still marauding around the
world, and the CIA were still churning out rosy estimates of
Soviet growth -- that also would be held to vindicate the Reagan
policy.

    On the question of what degree of hostility is best designed
to hasten the collapse of a communist regime, it is at least
worth pondering the example of Castro's Cuba. That is the
communist country to which American opposition has been most
consistently implacable. For four decades, no trade, no detente,
no summits, no nothing. It is the last totally unreformed
communist country left, though probably not for long. Is that
just a coincidence?

    And in considering whether, just maybe, a Soviet system
whose economy is currently shrinking at the rate of 10% a year
might have collapsed even without the help of an extra push from
America, remember that the push was enormously costly to our side
as well. Although defense spending is down from its peak and
heading lower, the U.S. will be paying off the bills run up in
the early 1980s for decades to come. If those weapons made the
difference, it was money well spent. But maybe we were merely
victims of our own "inordinate fear."