For one of the last times, the Soviet flag flies over the Kremlin at Red Square in Moscow, on Saturday night, December 21, 1991. The flag was replaced by the Russian flag on New Year's. (AP Photo/Gene Berman)
Robert Farley, National Interest: Did Russia Ever Have a Shot at Winning the Cold War?
Could the Soviets have won the Cold War? In retrospect, Soviet defeat seems overdetermined. The USSR suffered from a backwards economy, an unappealing political system, and unfortunate geography. But even into the 1980s, many Cold Warriors in the West worried that Red Victory was imminent.
We can think of Red Victory in two ways; first, if the fundamental rules of the competition between the United States and the USSR had operated differently, and second if Moscow and Washington had made different strategic decisions along the way.
Changing the Rules
The idea of socio-political “rules” that dictate how the world works runs counter to a lot of work in the social sciences. Still, certain social and political experiments initiated at the start of the Cold War ran aground on the shoals of social and human capacity. If we imagine the loosening of some of these “rules” then the Soviet and American experiments might have performed differently.
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WNU Editor: I never believed that the Soviet Union had a chance to win the Cold War .... nor did anyone else that I knew at the time in the Soviet Union. If there was a conventional war .... no invading army would succeed in conquering the Soviet Union .... that was universally believed in the Soviet Union (myself included). But the Cold War evolved into an economic and ideological conflict .... a conflict that President Reagan accelerated .... and one that I knew that the Soviet Union could not hope to win for the simple that at the time I was one of the few Soviet citizens who had the opportunity to really know what the West was all about .... its strengths and its resilience .... and not what the Soviet media was trying to portray. And when the lines of communication between the West and Russia opened up even further under Gorbachev .... when the people in the Soviet Union could finally compare their standard of living to those in the West .... I knew that the ideological battle would be lost. The only surprised that I had from the Cold war was at the end .... when I stood with my father in Red Square and we saw the Soviet flag brought down from the Kremlin, and the Russian flag put in its place. We both knew that the Soviet Union had to change ..... it is that we never thought it would happen so quickly.
4 comments:
I think a better question is " did the United States have a chance to win the Cold War?" I find it fascinating that no one you knew believed the Soviet Union could prevail. The same could be said about the United States as well. Pretty much know one in America believed th4 America could actually win.
In America, the only real hope it was believed was to have a robust enough nuclear deterent that the inevitable Soviet victory would be pyric enough that the Soviet Union would not consider the attack in the first place. The same calculus seemed to apply to pretty much all of America's "allies" at the time as well.
Perhaps this is why Cold War I never went "hot." If neither side thought they could win, this would explain allot!! Obviously neither side would launch an attack if they didn't think they can win.
As for Cold War II that we are currently in, I think it would be foolish to compare with Cold War I as both Russia and the United States are much different countries today than they were in the 1980s. Also, today Russia is unshackled by the ideology of communism, has large network of capable allies, is excellent at getting tis message out, has some of the best human intelligence services in the world, and has superior cyber warfare capabilities. If the odds were against the United States in Cold War I, the odds are even further against the United States during Cold War II.
Of course, as has been stated, there is no way to "know" the outcome of a war until it is fought. I hope and pray we never get to "know."
Well, being a Jr. High/High schooler in Evergreen, Colorado during the 1980's, I sure thought they could. And we also believed that if the USSR thought it could actually win a large scale nuclear or conventional war, it would start one.
/Pikes peak was only about a hundred miles away from our town. and Red Dawn was based on Colo. ;)
As I write before, they have needed to evolve the system at the begin of '70, instead to only protect the bureaucracy.
The Soviet aereo-space sector had a better model than the rest of the economy of the USSR.
But I personally see a bit of the Sun of the Future and I want more.
RussinSoCal,
Don't forget Rocky Flats their boy! A big target much closer to that location. Machine facility for Plutonium triggers. At one point they produced 16 triggers a day. Huge ecological disaster, left many kilograms of Plutonium dust dispersed throughout the Denver Metro area.
A prime target, but not compared to Cheyenne Mountain.
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