TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=91TT2482> <title> Nov. 04, 1991: Just Why Did Communism Fail? </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991 Nov. 04, 1991 The New Age of Alternative Medicine </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> ESSAY, Page 98 Just Why Did Communism Fail? </hdr><body> 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." </body></article> </text>