My last post offered my reasons for believing that "peak Soviet" was on or about 1959. This offers an angle to a question: how do empires fall? How did that empire get from 1959 to 1991? What did NOT happen was a simple diagonal line decline. What did happen was a decline that was slow ... then still slow ... then again slow ... but then very fast. Several things happened in the decade 1959 - '69 that indicated the empire had reached a limit, but most of these developments did not seem at all like omens of impending collapse. There was the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Khrushchev did get something for his trouble: the US did through back channels agree to withdraw missiles from Turkey. But the whole thing looked like Nikita K. had pushed too hard and had been forced to back down: never a good look for an Emperor. The year 1963 saw a very bad harvest in the grain-bearing parts of the country, resulting in breadlines, and in the face-losing decision to expen...
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In the long historical arc of the Soviet Union, from creation in 1917 to death in 1991, what was the peak? The high point of that arc? I'd like to suggest: 1959. At this time, the Soviet Union was literally leading the human race into outer space, sending out its satellites and in time human beings and daring the other World Power to catch up. Also at that time, it acquired a new ally island-nation just 90 miles away from the United States -- indeed, 90 miles away from the metropolis of Miami. Further, to all appearances there was a great communistic concord between the Soviet Union of this moment and the Peoples' Republic of China. If, in 1959, you were one of the privileged elite in either Moscow or Peking/Beijing, you would have known that this concord was less than perfect, but you would surely have gone along with that facade. The break did not become an open one until years later. Soviet control over the eastern half of Europe was unquestioned -- indeed, it had confir...
Today and tomorrow I will present a timeline of the last 38 years. Just one event per year. With little organization. Just think of this as a lot of stuff that happened. If we try to think of them as the "most important events" of their respective years, some of the choices will seem a tad eccentric. 1984, The Sino-British Joint Declaration sets out plans for a transition of Hong Kong to PRC sovereignty. 1985, Microsoft releases Window 1.0 1986, The launch of the Fox Broadcasting Co. 1987. The US FDA approves the marketing of Prozac. 1988. This was the year of the peak of the insider trading scandal that made Rudolph Giuliani a person of importance. Drexel Burnham pleaded guilty this year. 1989. This was the year of the SATANIC VERSES controversy involving the Ayatollah Khomeini and Salman Rushdie. 1990. East and West Germany re-unite after decades of separation. 1991. The Soviet Union dissolves itself. 1992. The European Union comes into being, as a stronger an...
The Wind of Change was a power ballad by The Scorpions, released in 1990. The Scorpions, pictured here, are better remembered for Rock You Like a Hurricane, but TWoC was also a good-sized hit for them. The Berlin Wall had come down and the Soviet Union itself was on its last legs -- it would be dissolved formally the following year. The lyrics to TWoC make explicit reference to this situation. There is at least a little bit of evidence now that the lyrics were written within the bureaucratic bowels of the CIA, perhaps in the headquarters building in Langley, Virginia. It isn't by any means dispositive. But it is a possibility. Should lovers of the classic power ballads be ticked off or disillusioned by this? Should they knock that off their list of favorites? Nah. After all, it did no harm: and of how much of the output of that building can one say that? I do think government should stop subsidizing the arts, though. ;-) More: https://slate.com/culture/2020/05/win...
I recently received an expository challenge: identify three key events from the "cold war" and describe each in 3-4 sentences. A test of terseness, I suppose. Okay, gauntlet picked up. 1. Korean War. North Korea, a nation aligned with the Soviet Union and the newly declared People's Republic of China, invaded South Korea in June 1950. U.S. infantry units began arriving in the south on July 1. The North Korean army had been effectively destroyed by the middle of that October, but matters escalated with the entry of Chinese troops into the peninsula late that month, and their defeat of US troops at Unsan on November 1. Eventually, a military stalemate developed in the middle of the peninsula, which is where the default line of ceasefire was drawn in 1953, at war's end. 2. "Missile gap" charges. In the 1960 Presidential campaign in the United States, Senator Kennedy charged that the outgoing Eisenhower administration had allowed the Soviets to acquir...
JFK authorized the Attorney General, his brother, to cut the deal that the US for years thereafter would deny it had ever made, the deal agreeing that the US missiles in Turkey would be dismantled in return for a withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. Robert Kennedy wrote the following of the moment of the crucial contact, with Dobrynin. "We have to have a commitment by at least tomorrow that those bases [in Cuba] would be moved. This was not an ultimatum, I said, but just a statement of fact. He should understand that if they did not remove those basis, then we would remove them. His country might take retaliatory action, but he should understand that before this was over, while there might be dead Americans, there would also be dead Russians. He then asked me about Khrushchev's other proposal dealing with removal of the missiles from Turkey. I replied that there could be no quid pro quo --- not deal of this kind could be made ... If some time elapsed --- and ... I me...
Wojciech Jaruzelski, a man whose passing I cannot regret, RIP. Jaruzelski passed away on May 25th of this year, after suffering a stroke earlier in the month. His place in the history books is ignoble but secure. He was a General by trade, and he became the only military official ever to head a ruling European Communist Party when he became First Secretary in Poland, in October 1981. Two months later he became the General who declared martial law in Poland, acting at the cat's paw of the old Soviet Union. such actions are a sign of a regime's weakness not strength -- the Solidarnosc movement was becoming too much for him. Nowadays, the world still witnesses Russia's efforts to extend its control over its neighbors, largely through complacent local paws. But since the demise of the USSR and the discrediting of the once-marketable ideology of "actually existing communism" has left Moscow's imperial stretch weakened. The flash points now are to the...
A couple of quotes from the book Greekonomics by Vicky Pryce. Speaking of the countries other than Germany that agreed to the initial deal creating the exchange rate mechanism and later the single currency, she writes, ""[T]his was a political project sold as an economic one to the electorates across Europe. In the rush to bind Germany into a union covering most of the countries in Europe, very little thought was given to whether the result might bear any resemblance to an optimal currency area." A little later, speaking specifically of Greece and why it joined, she writes: "Interestingly, when the Greek nation expressed a real desire to join the EEC and then the euro, they were in reality secretly hoping that the Brussels bureaucrats would take over and free them from the control of their politicians, who they regarded as corrupt. Educated Greeks longed for a 'technocratic' government that would move them away from a rather Soviet-style economy su...