Soviets Peak and Disintegrate

The Soviets Peak and Disintegrate

Were the United States and its allies overreacting when, in the late 1940s, they began to rebuild their military machines in anticipation of a worldwide communist offensive?

The great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn — the Nobel laureate for literature in 1970 — certainly didn’t think so. In his novel The First Circle (first published in English translation in 1968), the writer presents us with his compelling view of Stalin’s mindset and ambitions.

Solzhenitsyn’s Stalin is pictured toward the end of his life, at the age of 70, when the merciless toils of his quarter-century in high office have eaten away at his health. His memory is faulty and his energies at a low ebb. Even the best food tastes terrible in his mouth. An unpleasant sense of pressure pervades his head, leaving him to suffer in deep despair through restless nights. Even when sleep comes there is no refreshment.

This Stalin trusts nobody and has nary a friend in the world. Though a group of Soviet journalists wants to rename the moon in his honor (as "Stalin’s Stone"?), and millions of fearful people would literally kiss the soles of his boots if offered the chance, Stalin is far from satisfied by the results of his life’s efforts.

In spite of his growing weakness, Solzhenitsyn’s Stalin plans to live to the age of 90 and even expects to meet his greatest challenges during old age. For the battle against the capitalists and all their reactionary stooges is far from over. It will not end until Stalin’s Soviet Union leads all the armed proletarians on earth to victory in World War III.

And then he would be — what? "Emperor of the Planet?" he suggests to himself in Solzhenisyn’s imagination. He settles on "Emperor of the Earth! And then, all right, he could die — the Greatest of the Great, without equal in the history of the earth."

Of course the historical Stalin didn’t live to be 90 or lead the masses in a third and final world war or become Emperor of the Earth — even if, at times, he actually cherished such grandiose dreams.

Instead, he was felled by a severe stroke in early March of 1953, and none too pleased was Comrade Stalin to find his dreams of universal dominion reduced in the end to a narrow deathbed and a fading crack of tortured consciousness. Afflicted on March 1, he died on March 5.

Surreal Portrait of Stalin in Death

Because Stalin kept his own counsel, we can never know whether his expectations were accurately portrayed by Solzhenitsyn in The First Circle. He was not a blabbermouth like his successor Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971), whose posthumous memoirs have provided us with some sense of what was going on behind the scenes in the Kremlin during the Stalin years and the first decade after Stalin’s death.

In his memoirs as well as his life, Khrushchev was eager to communicate his conviction that capitalism really is at the root of all the world’s problems, and that every reasonable person on the planet is bound to convert to Marxism in the long run.

Even the scarring experience of long service as one of Stalin’s lieutenants didn’t destroy Khrushchev’s faith in communism, but it did cause him in 1956 to publicly denounce the dead tyrant in the strongest terms. The result? National rebellions in two major satellites, Poland and Hungary. The latter had to be put down by a brutal Soviet intervention while the world stood shuddering by.

Khrushchev did, however, preach the doctrine of "peaceful coexistence," which meant that the global communist offensive would concentrate on supporting the guerilla warriors of numerous "national liberation movements" in undeveloped countries rather than confronting the military forces of the US and its allies head-on in Europe.

The rationale for this change in policy, which was justified by modest tweaks to Marxist dogma, was the desire to avoid destroying civilization in a nuclear war before the socialist paradise ever had a chance to blossom around the world. So the Soviets decided to push for the destruction of international capitalism at a completely different level of violence. By and large they were true to the new strategy, but with several notable exceptions.

The most dramatic came in Cuba, and was played out against the background of the nuclear arms race. There the Soviets experienced a propaganda windfall when, after overthrowing a corrupt capitalist government, Fidel Castro announced that he was in fact a Marxist-Leninist who would welcome a close relationship with the USSR.

Fidel Castro and Che Guevara
in Havana, 1961

In his excitement over this unexpected coup, Khrushchev gambled on a move that arrayed his new doctrine of peaceful coexistence with a severe military threat to the continental United States.

To shore up the precarious position of communism in Cuba and to help redress the imbalance in strategic weapons that the US then held over the Soviet Union, Khrushchev and his colleagues offered to ship Castro a number of nuclear-tipped missiles that would be capable of killing millions of Americans if fired at the US.

Predictably, President John F. Kennedy (1917-63) "went ballistic" when he heard about the secret construction of Soviet missile bases in Cuba. His ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, told the Security Council in late October of 1962 that, by accepting the missiles, Cuba "has aided and abetted an invasion of this hemisphere," and therefore identified itself as "an accomplice in the communist enterprise of world domination."

People around the globe held their breath during the Cuban missile crisis, and Khrushchev himself detected "a smell of burning in the air." In the end he and Kennedy made a deal that traded the removal of the offensive weapons (about 40 missiles and 36 nuclear warheads) from Cuba in return for an American guarantee to refrain from attacking Castro’s island.

Khrushchev took the brunt of the criticism for orchestrating this dangerous foreign policy fiasco, and his colleagues, led by Leonid Brezhnev (1906-82) ousted him from office in 1964.

Under Brezhnev, the Soviet Union appeared to be going from strength to strength. With the US bogged down in the catastrophic Vietnam war, the USSR established a reputation around the globe as the only one of the two superpowers that truly valued peace. Throughout the Third World, national leaders came to power that were either openly Marxist or tilting enthusiastically to the left.

It was also during the Brezhnev years that Soviet militarism got into full stride. As the US armed forces shrank along with the nation’s will to power in the early 1970s, the Soviet leaders realized that their system, if incapable of producing Western levels of affluence for their individual citizens, could at least support the world’s largest military establishment.

For the first time in history, the Soviet navy began to rival the US navy, and the Soviet air force developed a military airlift capability that gave Brezhnev and his comrades the means to intervene anywhere in the world.

Once again in the mid-1970s, as before in the late 1940s, American planners began to feel thoroughly intimidated by the formidable power of the communist colossus. But global reach is not enough to insure international domination — as the US has proved again and again in the post-World War II era. In addition, the USSR could still be destroyed by US nuclear weapons if it pushed Washington to the brink.

US Nuclear-Tipped Missile
Poised to Strike USSR, circa 1970

In the end it was the old story of imperial over-stretch. As the US had been inspired by its immense military power of the early- and mid-1960s to intervene in Vietnam, in 1979 the mighty Soviets yielded to the temptation to unleash their war machine on the people of Afghanistan. In either case, the superpowers suffered enormous setbacks.

In America, public pressure led to an earlier withdrawal from Vietnam than many US strategists were advising. In the absence of such a force in the Soviet Union, the Afghan adventure went on and on, until it became a factor in helping to bankrupt the Soviet state.

Even more important, the "command economy" of the USSR lacked the flexibility to keep pace with the increasing speed of capitalism’s creation of new technology and wealth, and inefficiencies throughout the Soviet system meant that the USSR could no longer compete with the West.

When Ronald Reagan became president in January of 1981 and set off a whole new spiral of military spending, the Soviet military-industrial complex fell into a still deeper crisis.

With its economy on the ropes, it was only a matter of time before the great boom in Soviet military spending turned into a great bust. To crown its humiliation, the USSR experienced such drastic shortages in the civilian sector that the average life expectancy of its people, which had already begun to decline in the 1960s, continued to plummet. Living conditions deteriorated until they were almost as bad as China’s.

Clearly, communism had failed in its attempt to supplant capitalism. It was a system whose time had gone.

Still faithful to the broad outlines of Marxism-Leninism at a time when more progressive politicians like Boris Yeltsin were publicly swearing them off, Mikhail Gorbachev was at least realistic enough to abandon the Soviet push for world military supremacy.

Boris Yeltsin, First President
of Post-Communist Russia

Secretary General Gorbachev also faced the plain fact that the USSR could no longer afford to support client states like Cuba, South Yemen, and Vietnam — especially not Cuba, where Castro had long been adept at causing huge piles of rubles to disappear without a trace.

"Gorby" was even forced to let the satellite states of Eastern Europe escape from their Soviet orbits, and the long-sought retreat of Soviet forces and influence finally gained momentum. Stalin’s work of 1947 and 1948 was almost entirely reversed in 1989 and 1990, and the latter year even saw the reunification of East and West Germany.

President George Bush was greatly relieved to witness the failure of the Soviet military machine and see the liberalization of Soviet policies under Gorbachev, but in one of those never-ending ironies of history, Bush wasn’t particularly eager to see the USSR split up into the national components that communist ideology, propaganda, and coercion had held together for over 70 years.

Better the devil you know, was Bush’s apparent attitude. To be suddenly confronted with 15 new nation-states whose peoples had long been controlled from Moscow seemed a prescription for instant international chaos. And the sudden appearance of three newly independent nuclear powers — Ukraine, Kazakstan, and Belarus — was hardly the least of US concerns.

Still, belated American support was not enough to save Marxism in the Soviet Union. In December of 1991, the communist empire splintered into the republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

Of course, if Joseph Stalin had still been around, he’d have offered some intriguing suggestions for stabilizing Soviet power before it fell completely to pieces.

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