The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part I

A  common and consequential misunderstanding is that the Soviet Union, by the mid-1980s, had no option but to end the Cold War. It’s asserted that the Soviet leadership accepted defeat  because they could not keep up with the West either economically or militarily. President Ronald Reagan’s hard line is often credited with being the tipping point. Reagan’s anti-Soviet rhetoric was accompanied by greatly increased American military spending. In an American triumphalist view of the Cold War’s ending, special emphasis is placed on Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (an ambitious, long-term and vastly expensive programme to develop US anti-missile defence), announced in 1983.

The Soviet economy in many respects lagged behind that of advanced Western countries and it was also being outpaced in technological innovation and the speed of economic growth by countries of East Asia. However, its defence sector was the great exception to a more general economic sluggishness. Allocated vast resources, Soviet military industry employed many of the country’s best scientific and engineering brains. 

In the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union had a comparable nuclear arsenal to that of the United States, and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact had larger conventional forces than NATO. There was an approximate military parity between the Soviet Union and the USA from the early 1970s which still prevailed when Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1985. Earlier – from 1945 until the end of the 1960s – the US had military superiority over the Soviet Union.  

It is a strange argument that holds that the Soviet Union had no choice other than to make concessions in the pursuit of peace when they were militarily as strong as the US, whereas the times when they were militarily weaker than their main Western adversary were years of Soviet-backed Communist expansion. When, in the second half of the 1940s, only the United States had nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union took over Eastern Europe. The number of Communist states, with more indirect Soviet support, continued to expand into the 1970s. 

Although achieving and maintaining military parity with the United States required a significantly larger share of the Soviet budget than US military spending occupied in the larger American economy, this was seen by successive Soviet leaders as a price worth paying. They took pride in their military ‘superpower’ status, as did many Soviet citizens. Moreover, in the Cold War as seen from the Soviet side, it was an aggressive capitalist West that was the enemy, and citizens’ perceptions of a foreign threat made them less likely to challenge their rulers, while simultaneously making it easier for their rulers to portray criticism of the system, or even of specific policies, as a form of treachery.