SOVIET HISTORY LESSONS

Soviet History Lessons would like to thank the Westminster Institute and Isaac Publishing for their kind permission to publish this piece. 

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At the heart of the Reagan policy toward the USSR was a strategy to address squarely and ultimately eliminate the causes of tension between East and West. Despite little consensus in the American foreign policy establishment about these causes, the Reagan Administration proceeded from an unambiguous interpretation of what they were: nothing less than the nature of the Soviet regime. From this view, it followed that U.S. policy had to find a way to change that nature, and do so, if possible, without risking total war.

Whereas in previous administrations, U.S. policy toward Moscow was principally reactive and defensive, the Reagan strategy proceeded from a fundamentally offensively-oriented premise: the identification of the principal weaknesses of our adversary. To identify weaknesses required a proper understanding of the nature of the Soviet system — again, a matter over which there was no consensus among experts in the field. Once these were identified, the Reagan administration set forth a multifaceted strategy whose ultimate goal was to bring about regime change from within.

IDENTIFYING THE SOURCES OF EAST-WEST CONFLICT

The Reagan strategy was based on the premise that the source of the conflict between the two powers was neither the existence of nuclear weapons — if it were, then we should also have had cold wars and arms control negotiations with other nuclear powers such as Britain, France, China, and Israel — nor economic rivalry, nor any other material factor. Such elements were not causes of the conflict, they were its symptoms. The Cold War, rather, was political in nature, and it would not end until its political causes were addressed.

So what were the political causes? From the American perspective, they had to do with the USSR’s domestic policies — particularly its treatment of its own people — and its aggressive, subversive, and expansionistic foreign policies. And what was the foundation of these policies? It was the political system of the Soviet state that had been established by the founding ideology of communism. If the ideological nature of the Soviet system could be changed, then the source of tension could be eliminated.

Similarly, from the Soviet view, their concerns were not so much with capitalism which their propaganda could more easily attack, as with the nature of Western democratic republicanism and its founding philosophy of consent of the governed — a philosophy, which, if ignited in the minds of the peoples of the Soviet empire, threatened the seemingly unchangeable monopoly of Communist Party rule.

THE ASSUMPTIONS UNDERLYING PREVIOUS U.S. POLICIES TOWARD THE USSR

The absence of consensus about these matters within the U.S. foreign policy community — both in government as well as in the academic and research communities — lay at the root of the inability of the United States to conduct a coherent, long-term U.S. policy to resist Soviet expansionism. After years of consensus that underlay the policy of containment, large swaths of the foreign policy community had come to believe that the nature if the Soviet regime had changed at one time or another. Some believed that its fundamental genetic code changed with the death of Stalin and with Soviet Communist Party chief Nikita Khruschev's "secret speech" at the twentieth party Congress in 1956 on the "crimes of Stalin." This initiated a gradual rejection by the American Sovietological community of the "totalitarian model" as an accurate description of the nature of the Soviet regime.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the new conventional wisdom held that the USSR was moving in a more liberalized direction, as some authorities began to describe it as an "authoritarian welfare state" and an "administered society." Some scholars like Jerry Hough of Duke University and the Bookings Institution went so far as to describe the Soviet Union as a "pluralist" society. The logic behind this analysis was that there existed "interest groups" in the USSR, each competing for its own influence and resources. [1] Not everyone agreed with this assessment, however. Indeed, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the new President of the post-Soviet Russia, Boris Yeltsin, declared that the USSR under Soviet Party chief, Mikhail Gorbachev, was none other than a "totalitarian" system. What then could it have been twenty years earlier under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev? If Brezhnev’s USSR was a "pluralist" society, then the same could be said for every political system in human history, including that of the Pharaoh, Genghis Khan, and even Adolph Hitler, under all of whom existed "interest groups" as defined by the Sovietologists who rejected the totalitarian model.

The corollary to the rejection of the totalitarian model and the subscription to one of the more optimistic interpretations of the nature of the Soviet system was a general acceptance of the unspoken but nevertheless operational assumption that the underlying ideology of the Soviet system was in such a state of decay that hardly anybody — even among the ruling Soviet elite — believed in it anymore, and thus that ideology could no longer be operational within the system, except as an atavistic window dressing. In effect, this assumption led to a subsequent assumption that the Soviet system had thereby changed to such an extend that it no longer necessarily possessed the attributes of a "communist" system, especially those attributes which, as a matter of genetic necessity, required it to maintain unlimited global strategic objectives. And what were those objectives? They were to transform the world into as much of its own image as necessary for that world to recognize the Soviet regime as a legitimate regime. Once this assumption had taken root, two conclusions became possible:

1. that Soviet goals were now limited, and in contrast to the unlimited goals that prevailed before, they could be at least partially accommodated. Hence, it became possible to believe that a "spheres of influence" policy could be shared with Moscow, and that other arrangements of ostensibly mutual interest could be realized, such as an arms control agreements with which both sides complied.

2.  that Moscow’s intentions might indeed have changed significantly enough that the West

     no longer needed to be concerned about the putative Soviet "threat" and there may

     even have been no need to worry about containing expansionism.

During the 1970s, U.S. policy toward the USSR operated to one degree or another based on these assumptions. Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford insisted on a policy of "détente" that was premised on the possibility of long-term peaceful coexistence with the Soviet system. President Jimmy Carter epitomized the regnant assumptions underlying détente when he castigated many Americans' "inordinate fear of communism."

THE ASSUMPTIONS UNDERLYING THE REAGAN POLICY

With the election of President Reagan, U.S. policy could change based on new assumptions — principally that the Soviets still were communists and that their policies proceeded from this central fact. Underlying this analysis was the assessment, shared by many on his team (but by no means all), that, however much the Marxist-Leninist ideology may have been in a state of decay, and however fewer people in the USSR accepted all its tenets, it still remained operational in the Soviet system and thus remained as both a guide and a constraint to policy.

It was this assessment alone that could explain the persistence of political tensions between East and West. But how could a decaying ideology still be operational, especially if fewer and fewer people even in the Party could accept all its dogmas? How could it still impel the Soviet regime to pursue tyranny at home and aggression abroad? And what difference did all this make for U.S. policy?

The answer to these questions lay in a proper understanding of the role of Marxist-Leninist ideology within the Soviet system. That ideology originally served as the animating force that brought together the Bolsheviks to prosecute their coup d'état against the weak, democratic, Provisional Government in post-Tsarist Russia. It served as a guiding theory of knowledge, of history and historical change, of economics, of politics, and of society. Less understood was the fact that it also served as a theory of the use of power, which included maxims of how to advance, remain steady, or retreat, as dictated by a "scientific" measurement of the "correlation of forces." [2] Vladimir Lenin also used the ideology as an instrument to enforce conformity of thought among the revolutionaries, as this ensured conformity in the realm of action, which, in turn, was the only way by which a minority could seize power over an unorganized majority. Once in power, Lenin used this strategy  to address the principal weakness that his Bolshevik government suffered: its internal security problem, which fast became the most important fact of political life in the new USSR and which dogged it throughout its existence. This internal security problem was the central weakness that the Reagan strategy first identified and then succeeded in exploiting.

The internal security problem derived from one essential reality: the lack of legitimacy of the regime. The Bolsheviks knew that if the peoples of the new Soviet Union were free to give their consent as to who governed them, they would not choose the Bolsheviks. This fact was made manifest with the  loss by the Bolsheviks to the non-communist Socialist Revolutionary Party in the first post-revolution elections to the Constituent Assembly. The Bolshevik reaction to this loss was summarily to execute the various delegates who assumed their seats in elected office.

The extent of the internal security problem can be usefully measured by the actions the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) took to address it. These can be briefly summarized as follows:

• the Party’s monopoly of information and communications, including its vast propaganda system, its monopoly of printing, copying, paper, newspapers, radio, television, etc.;

• its jamming of foreign radio broadcasts;

• its monopoly of education;

• its monopoly of entertainment and culture: books, music, art, film, theater, etc.;

• its monopoly of economic power and its control over: employment, promotion, job transfer, production and distribution, and the enforcement of "parasitism" laws;

• the KGB and its various structures and methods, such as block committees, forced recruitment of citizens to be informants, and pervasive surveillance;

• the various other organizations with police-type functions that would monitor the lives of individuals and enforce Party policy throughout society, including local Party organizations, "trade union" organizations (which were Party-controlled bodies that had nothing in common with trade unions as understood in the West), the internal security militsiia, the armed forces, etc.;

• the Gulag Archipelago, its slave labor camps, its death camps, and its "psychiatric clinics" as well as various lesser punishments;

• the Party’s control over and penetration of religion;

• its arbitrary use of the legal system to serve its political ends;

• its control over all internal travel, through the internal passport system and other required documents;

• its control of the borders and all external travel; and

• its penetration of all organized social bodies — including clubs, fraternal organizations, hobby groups, sports organizations, and even the family — to prevent them from becoming fronts for organized opposition;

• creating such an atmosphere of distrust (due to the pervasive coercive cooptation of people as secret police informants) that it produced the atomization of society — i.e., the separation of each individual from all others so that he or she was isolated an incapable of organizing with others in resistance to the regime; and finally,

• the use of the ideology and the attendant use of foreign expansionism. This deserves further explanation, for even after all our historical experience with communist rule, it is still little understood how the ideology was not only the prescription  for how to achieve the radiant future and a guide to the exercise of power, but also, arguably, the most important element of the internal security system.

First and foremost, the Party promoted Marxist-Leninist ideas, and discredited competing ideas, particularly those  having to do with democratic republicanism and those philosophical and religious ideas that posit the existence of a transcendent, objective, universal moral order that exists independently of the will of those (here, the Communist Party) who would use force to impose their ideas of moral order upon society. The metaphysical (or even theological) element of this ideological strategy was key: if there exists an authority higher than the Party — say, for example, God — then those whose primary allegiance is to God represented a threat to Party control. Such people were, from the very beginning, non-conformists upon whom the Party could count neither for loyalty nor submission. This explains the pervasive, intensive, and necessary focus on atheistic propaganda and why the existence of 700,000 churches in pre-revolutionary Russia was reduced to 7,000 by the Gorbachev era.

At a less profound level, the ideology had to demonstrate the legitimacy of the regime by showing that there was a practical, rational, or moral reason why the Communist Party deserved to be in power. This was the first step in creating a psychological attitude of public acceptance of the regime. The Marxist doctrine of the worldwide inevitability of communism then served to bolster this attitude. If the laws of history were inexorable, if no act of human will could stop the march of history toward the final establishment of communism, then any attempt to exercise such will was futile. Thus, the ideology served to induce among the people not just acceptance of the regime but a sense of "futile resignation" — a fatalistic attitude that resistance to Communist rule was impossible.

How exactly did the ideology justify the Communist Party in power? It did so by a doctrine that was summarized by the Marxist axiom, "freedom is comprehended necessity." As the Party argued, one frees oneself from the consequences of phenomena in nature by understanding the laws of nature. Hence, by knowing that dark clouds portend a rain storm, one can free oneself from the consequences of the storm by seeking shelter and then, through this knowledge, harness the power of flowing water to run a mill or generate electricity. Similarly, by understanding the "laws of history," the Party can free itself from the consequences of historical developments — such as suffering oppression at the hands of the ruling class — and then harness the forces of history in order to help guide it to its "inevitable" goal. This is the meaning of Marx’s explanation of the role of true philosophy": "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." [3] In other words, since philosophical theory without the test of praxis is useless and unverifiable, that philosophy which is true is that which, having properly understood the "laws of history", verifies its validity by the praxis of working to change the world in the direction of communism. The Party thus justified itself in power because it understood the laws of history better than anyone else. With this special knowledge, it could help guide the force of history by serving as the "vanguard" of a working class that was too ignorant of its own oppression to be able to do anything about it.

This ideological justification of the Party’s rule was simply another form of Gnosticism: "we possess unique, esoteric knowledge and therefore we have earned the privilege of ruling society and ultimately the world."

Just as the ideology was used as a method to establish a "Party Line" to which the Bolshevik revolutionaries had to conform in order to overthrow the ancien regime, so was it used as an instrument to enforce conformity of thought and action throughout the Soviet system.

Internal security was achieved in this way because ideological conformity served as an analog to a drum beating for soldiers marching: it set the standard against which deviationism could be measured. Among its most effective methods was to insist that everyone — from Party member to ordinary subject of the regime — repeat falsehoods that were a key element of the Party Line. In many respects, it was easier to establish conformity with a falsehood than with the truth, which could have different shades of valid meaning.

This system was analogous to Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the "Emperor’s New Clothes"; everyone in the court had to proclaim that the naked emperor was wearing beautiful clothes, and they did so either out of loyalty or out of fear. Anyone who stated the truth could be immediately identified as a deviationist and the threat to the established regime that he in fact was.

The Lie of the clothed emperor in the USSR could be understood in several ways. At one level, it could be understood as the steady stream of misrepresentations of daily and past realities.

But on a more profound level, the Lie lay at the root of the ideological foundations of the regime. At this level, the Lie could be understood as the central premise of Soviet socialism: that there is no transcendent universal moral order in the world, and that what moral standards exist are determined entirely by man, specifically by his personal preferences, and more specifically by those with the greatest power, will, and ruthlessness to enforce those preferences. In dialectical materialist terms, this idea was expressed by Lenin when he denied the existence of objective moral standards and posited instead that whatever aids the revolution is good whereas whatever hinders it is evil. [4] Although this theory is said to mean that "history makes right," the fact is that the making of history — and whether it moves in the direction of revolution or not — is under the control of willful men. Thus, all moral standards are established by man and not by any transcended source whether it be nature or God. As a practical matter, this means that society determines moral standards by power struggle: whoever has the greatest number of votes or, when things get serious, the biggest guns and the greatest will to use them, determines the morals of society. This is nothing less than the doctrine of "might makes right." So, whatever the Party said is just was just, and there was no independent justice — no natural moral law — to which dissidents could appeal to seek redress in the case of arbitrary and capricious administration of man-made "law." In other words, there was no basis upon which to claim that a law might be unjust.

The Lie also took a corollary form: that man's capacity to do good or evil is determined by his material environment and not by individual moral choice. According to this vision, rooted in 18th century thought, man is an empty vessel with no permanent human nature and thus the capacity to be molded and perfected into the "new Soviet man" as his sculptors saw it. Thus, according to the communist vision, the human person has no transcendent dignity, and he or she can be manipulated, used, experimented with, degraded, and destroyed according to the needs of the revolution, which, as a practical matter, meant the needs of the Party.

Ultimately, the Lie held that the regime was legitimate and should be recognized as such by everyone both inside and outside the empire.

In the USSR, the ideological Lie served many purposes:

• It was a test of loyalty (or submission) to the regime.

• It concealed the ruthless methods used by the state

• It created "enemies" which were used to justify repressive measures.

• It concealed policy failures.

• It concealed evidence which challenged the ideology and thus the legitimacy of the regime.

• Together with the KGB’s system of forced recruitment of informants, it destroyed trust between individuals and among the people as a whole.

• It forced people to live in what Alain Besancon has called a "pseudo-reality" whereby the individual would have to pretend he was living in a society of fully realized socialism and thus adopt an attitude of gratitude and appreciation toward those who had bestowed this "benefit" upon him. [5]

• It served the goals of political socialization and mass mobilization for the purpose of creating the "new man."

• Its pervasive coerciveness then served, in the words of Leszek Kolakowski, "to remind the people who had the gun." [6]

When combined with the historical determinism of the ideology which said: "It is futile to resist the forces of history," the Lie thus served to disarm and demoralize the people. As Solzhenitsyn explained, the Lie penetrated to the depths of men's souls:

In our country, the lie has been incorporated into the state system as the vital link holding everything together, with billions of tiny fasteners, several dozen to each man. This is precisely why we find life so oppressive…. When oppression is not accompanied by the lie, liberation demands political measures. But when the lie has fastened its claws on us, it is no longer a matter of politics! It is an invasion of man’s moral world and our straightening up and refusing to lie is also not political, but simply a retrieval of our human dignity. [7]

The Cold War, then, as President Reagan saw it, was not only a conflict between East and West, it was in essence a moral conflict — even within the Soviet empire and within the West — which, at its heart, took the form of a war between truth and falsehood.

Soviet foreign policy was designed to serve the security interests of the regime, the most important of which was the internal security interest. Foreign policy had to demonstrate that the ideology was correct, so that it could continue to serve as the accepted instrument of establishing the legitimacy of Party authority. So long as Soviet foreign policy could help advance the spread of communism worldwide, the ideology could be plausibly presented as correct. And so long as communism advanced, Moscow could show that Soviet power was unstoppable, that it could not be resisted even by U.S. military might, and that therefore it was futile for anyone within the empire even to consider resisting communist rule.

A key element of the Soviet regime's foreign policy was its ability to use nuclear blackmail, intimidation, and manipulation of the atmospherics of tension in East-West relations to demoralize its subject peoples. This was achieved by intimidating the West into silence, thus precluding the possibility of external moral-political resistance to communism. And if external resistance was impossible, then how could internal resistance succeed?

If Western leaders wanted to avoid a barrage of Soviet threats and an atmosphere of Cold War tension that could harm their domestic political fortunes, they had to censor themselves. This was the Soviet price for maintaining peace and quiet. Soviet foreign policy used intimidation and manipulated the truth to compel other states to accept their version of the "truth" as a sign of either loyalty or submission. This was nothing more than the Emperor's New Clothes on an international scale. If the Kremlin could not compel everyone in the "court" to utter the Lie, it demanded, at minimum, that the "courtiers" stand silent. This is what is called "Finlandization," with all due respect to the Finns, who have a proud tradition of resisting totalitarian aggression. The reality of Findandization was that the shadow of Soviet power was so great that it compelled even such courageous people as the Finns to censor themselves.

Western silence and self-censorship, of course, were seen by the peoples of the Soviet empire as a sign of weakness in the face of Soviet power. If the American President was too frightened to tell the full truth about Soviet human rights violations at home and Soviet aggression, espionage, and subversion abroad, if he was too "prudent" in his management of East-West relations that he could not counter the lies of Soviet disinformation and propaganda with plain truth, then how could the peoples of the Soviet empire even contemplate telling the truth, even about the smallest things? As the empire’s subject peoples saw it, if Soviet power was so great that the American President would not publicly reveal the truth about Soviet arms control treaty violations, then, as a practical matter, Soviet power could compel those violations to "vanish" as if they never existed.

The Soviets knew that military and economic strength alone were insufficient to determine the outcome of any conflict. They knew that we lost the Vietnam War, not because of either military or economic weakness, but because of moral-political weakness and vulnerability to North Vietnamese and Soviet propaganda — i.e., vulnerability to the Lie (see, for example, the almost completely ignored testimony to this effect by the victorious North Vietnamese generals). [8] Perceiving such weakness in the moral-political realm, and the consequent inability of the United States to resist the advance of communism, the Kremlin could minimize its internal security threat. This assessment of American weakness in the Soviet calculation of the "correlation of forces" (the systematic measurement of the relative strengths and weaknesses of both sides in the Cold War) prompted Moscow to believe that it could make strategic advances throughout the 1970s in Somalia, then Ethiopia, in South Yemen, and simultaneously with Cuban help in Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Central and South America, in Grenada and other islands of the Caribbean, and finally in Afghanistan. [9]

Ideological warfare was an essential part of Soviet foreign policy. It was based, first, on a recognition that all socio-political order derived from the material, or economic, "basis" of society, which, in turn, produced class struggle. [10] In the international arena, this took the form of a "struggle" between the two social systems" — socialism and capitalism — and a consequent struggle between two worldviews  and thus two concepts of international relations, international law, and world order.

Soviet foreign policy was thus devoted to promoting a "new form of international relations"; "proletarian internationalism." This concept described relations that would no longer be conducted between "states" — since the state, according to Marxism-Leninism, was the instrument of the oppressor class — but rather between "peoples." (Why the Soviet state continued to exist as late as the 1960s rather than "withering away" once the bourgeoisie had been smashed was the subject of considerable ideological contortions during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. The upshot of these exertions was the formulation of a new concept: the "state of the whole people" whose existence was justified by the fact that it was surrounded by threatening "imperialist" states). Mezhdunarodnaya otnosheniia, which is conventionally translated as "international relations," is, in fact, literally translated as "relations between peoples." As a practical matter, for the Soviets, this meant relations between the proper representatives of the people: the communist parties. Hence, the Soviet relations with a communist satellite country such as Cuba were not conducted by the Soviet Foreign Ministry, but rather by the Bloc Relations Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Similarly, "genuine" inter-people relations between the USSR and the U.S. were conducted between the CPSU Central Committee's International Department and the Communist Party USA. Diplomatic relations with non-communist countries conducted by the Soviet Foreign Ministry were merely a temporary arrangement, designed largely to deceive the West into believing that the USSR was a conventional and not a revolutionary state and thereby into treating it accordingly.

The International Department was the modern successor to the erstwhile Moscow-directed Communist International ("Comintern") and the subsequent Communist Information Bureau ("Cominform"). Its goal was to bring about the revolutionary transformation of non-communist states to the Soviet model of communism. These new communist states would then recognize the Soviet Party-state as a legitimate regime, thus ending their potential ideological threat to Soviet rule.

The ongoing attempt to promote communist takeovers required a massive investment in ideological warfare. This consisted of:

• promoting Marxist-Leninist ideology worldwide;

• assistance to various Marxist-oriented revolutionary movements (including education in political ideology, political action, and irregular warfare, as well as assistance in propaganda, communications, intelligence, armaments, and other logistical matters);

• the vilification and subversion of enemy regimes, institutions, and cultures; and

• the isolation of anti-Soviet countries, political parties, organizations, and individuals.

The incremental erosion of the Free World and the addition of new revolutionary states to the Soviet column would thus gradually bring about a new world order. The groundwork for this order would also be laid by continuing Soviet efforts to replace "bourgeois International law" with communist international (or, more properly, inter-people) law. Part of this effort involved matters of a moral tactical nature, such as attempting to rewrite the international laws of war in such a way as to legalize terrorist activity and irregular warfare. And part of it involved a grand strategic effort to establish new "rules of the game" in international relations by creating a psycho-political environment that would define the parameters of legitimate conduct by the respective protagonists in the "struggle between the two social systems."

The latter strategic effort first involved dividing the world into two zones much in the same way that Islam does: the "war zone" — the non-communist world — and the "peace zone" — the communist world (otherwise known as the "socialist community of states.") [11] The first derived its appellation from the Leninist theory that the cause of war was "imperialism" — the highest stage of capitalism — wherein advanced capitalist countries resort to war in their rapacious struggle amongst themselves for new markets abroad. The second derived its name from the theory that true "peace" prevails where capitalism has been vanquished and can no longer cause any more war. The new  rules (inter-people laws) that derive from this conceptual framework require that anything within the "peace zone" is off limits to the scrutiny of any non-communist state or international organization, while anything within the "war zone" is fair game for any International scrutiny, criticism, interference, and intervention. Thus, to make an analogy with American football, a scrimmage line was drawn, and no one in the West could cross that line. Instead, it was the Kremlin, its allies, and its proxies who would possess the ball, determine the timing of the next play, choose whether to run or to pass, go left or right, shallow or deep, and keep the West psychologically, strategically and tactically on the defensive and in a reactive frame of mind. Any violation of this scrimmage line would face a threat of nuclear war. [12]

To a remarkable degree, American foreign policy during large parts of the Cold War accepted this conceptual framework. The United States did not want to risk crossing the communist scrimmage line:

• to achieve victory in the Korean War;

• to help the Hungarians in their uprising and their defense against the ensuing Soviet invasion in 1956;

• to stop the construction of the Berlin Wall;

• to achieve victory in Vietnam; or

• to help defend the Czechoslovaks against the Soviet invasion in response to the "Prague Spring" in 1968.

The corollary to this demarcation of the larger battlefield was the systematic effort to define the terms of international political discourse. Here the Soviets made massive investments in semantic warfare. Every imaginable political term with normative connotations was subject to ideological manipulation. In addition to its definition of "peace," the Kremlin worked overtime to ensure that such prominent terms of international discourse were endowed with their own unique communist definitions:

• "Peaceful Coexistence" — a form of struggle between the two social systems where all forms of struggle are permitted except all-out armed struggle;

• "Freedom" — freedom from capitalist exploitation: i.e., those conditions that pertain under communist rule;

• "Security" — security from imperialist aggression, i.e., again, those conditions that are enjoyed under communism; 

• "Democracy" — rule by the people; i.e. rule by the people's true representatives, the Communist Party;

• "Cooperation" — agreeing with the Soviet position in international negotiations;

• "Arms race" — the policy of arms buildup conducted solely by imperialist powers (in other words, it was only the U.S. and its allies which did any "racing," and never the USSR);

• Etc. [13]

The semantic effort was manifested constantly in Soviet official rhetoric as well as in selected theaters of ideological combat. An example was the cataloging system in the library of the United Nations. Here Soviet agents of influence engineered the entire subject catalog of the UN library to conform to Soviet terminology and concepts. A literature search on "imperialism" or "colonialism" would reveal books solely on Western imperialism both genuine and alleged, with no references to Soviet / Russian imperialism, whether in the Caucasus, the Baltic states, Central Asia, or elsewhere in the extended system of communist states. [14]

Pursuant to these ideological semantic efforts came policies such as the Soviet proxy efforts by Cuba to raise U.S. "imperialism" in Puerto Rico before the U.N. Decolonization Committee — this, in spite of the fact that regular referenda in Puerto Rico revealed that 49 percent of the people wanted to maintain the existing "commonwealth" status, 49 percent wanted Puerto Rico to become a full state of the United States, and only 2 percent sought national independence.

Soviet ideological warfare initiatives found their way into every imaginable theater of potential subversion, whether by direct Soviet agents or their socialist or "New Left" "fellow travelers" — i.e., those with similar or shared ideological roots:

• Efforts to indoctrinate, alienate, and coopt ethnic and religious minorities within the West. [15]

• Efforts to subvert religion, not only among the churches within the communist realm but throughout the non-communist world. This included the promulgation of "liberation theology" among Christian churches worldwide. [16]

• Efforts to promote sexual libertinism and narcotics usage to undermine traditional mores and to substitute license for liberty. [17]

• Insertion of agents of influence in the media, philanthropic foundations, the film industry, and the literary and artistic communities of non-communist countries. [18]

• Infiltration and promotion of ideological propaganda in schools, colleges, and universities, and their various educational materials. Included in this effort was the lowering of educational standards and the rewriting of history, with heavy emphasis on: promotion of "class-based" perspectives on social history, emphasis on the victimhood of oppressed groups within the capitalist world, distortion of diplomatic history so as to put the blame for the Cold War on the West, etc.

• Infiltration and cooptation of the labor movement in the West.

• Cooperation of Western business leaders to serve Soviet interests, and in some cases, the use of business leaders, such as Occidental Petroleum Chairman, Armand Hammer, as agents of influence. [19]

• Etc. [20]

THE RESULTANT POLICY: DEMONSTRATING THE FALSITY OF THE IDEOLOGY, THE ILLEGITIMACY OF THE REGIME, THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCCESSFUL RESISTANCE, AND THE BANKRUPTCY OF THE SOVIET WORLDVIEW

The overall strategy to "contain and reverse Soviet expansionism" and to "weaken the sources of Soviet imperialism" became codified in "National Security Decision Directive 75 (NSDD-75) on U.S. Relations with the USSR" and several other presidential directives. NSDD-75 began by observing that "Soviet aggressiveness has deep roots in the internal system" and therefore U.S. policy must "promote … the process of change in the Soviet Union toward a more pluralistic political and economic system in which the power of the privileged ruling elite is gradually reduced." [21]  The NSDD contained a specific section on Political Action (later in the text described as a "major political / ideological offensive") which prescribed the necessity of "an ideological thrust which clearly affirms the superiority of U.S. and Western values of individual dignity and freedom, a free press, free trade unions, free  enterprise, and political democracy over the repressive features of Soviet Communism." It then directed U.S. policy to: 1) support democratic forces within the Soviet Union; 2) highlight Soviet human rights violations; 3) strengthen U.S. broadcasting to the Soviet Union; 4) expose the double standards used by the Kremlin in dealing with its own domain and the capitalist world (the treatment of labor, policies toward ethnic minorities, the use of chemical weapons, etc.); and 5) prevent the Soviet propaganda machine from seizing the semantic high ground in the battle of ideas through the appropriation of such terms as "peace." [22]

A key element of the NSDD was its directive to exploit weaknesses within the Soviet empire, including efforts to "encourage Soviet allies to distance themselves from Moscow in foreign policy and move toward democratization domestically." [23] This meant "loosening Moscow’s hold" on Eastern Europe and putting greater pressure on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and Soviet-Cuban designs in the Western Hemisphere and Africa.

As a practical matter, following the directive to weaken the sources of Soviet imperialism by promoting the process of change within the USSR toward a pluralistic political-economic system in such a way that diminishes the power of the ruling elite meant that U.S. policy had to counter all these methods by which the Soviet regime and its satellites prevented internal political competition and resistance to their rule. This required undermining the Marxist-Leninist ideology, its ability to provide plausible legitimacy for the regime, and ultimately the ability of the regime to induce that sense of "futile resignation" among the peoples of the Soviet empire. To do this, U.S. policy had not only to prove that the ideology was false, but to show the peoples of the Soviet empire that resistance was indeed possible. The strategy to achieve these objectives had both material and non-material components.

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The Material Dimension: How It Had Strategic Effects in the Political-Ideological War

The material elements of the Reagan strategy were designed first to discredit the Party’s claims that "scientific socialism" was the most advanced form of social-political-economic organization. Since the Bolshevik revolution, the Party had maintained that the communist system would produce the greatest wealth for the greatest benefit of society as a whole. Khrushchev, for one, predicted that the Soviet economy would outrank that of the U.S. by the 1980s. In response, the Reagan policy set out to put strains on the Soviet economy that would undermine both these ideological claims and also the ability of the Soviet economy to maintain militarily competitiveness.

The inability of the Soviet economy to be innovative meant that for decades it depended on the purchase or theft of Western technology. The Reagan policy of technology security and export controls made it increasingly harder for Soviet industries to produce modern goods, particularly military equipment. The Reagan strategy of sabotaging the technology that it permitted Moscow to purchase or steal exacerbated this situation.

The Reagan arms buildup put increasing pressure on the Soviet military economy to maintain military competitiveness. The creation of revolutionary new technologies, such as the computer systems that enabled President Reagan to propose the Strategic Defense Initiative, demonstrated a sprint capability in the West that was a lethal challenge to the Soviet military economy. The dual strategy of stopping the Soviet gas pipeline to Europe and cooperating with the Saudis to increase oil production and lower world oil prices deprived Moscow of its ability to earn hard currency that could enable it to purchase foreign goods in general and Western technology in particular.

The Soviet civilian economy began its ongoing crisis in 1917. Soviet consumer goods production always lagged far behind the immense output of Western economies. For years, the peoples of the USSR made enormous sacrifices in hopes that the radiant future of socialist prosperity would be just around the corner. The failure of the Party to overcome the permanent systemic crisis became clear during the Brezhnev era — the "era of stagnation" — and it was at this time that even the loyal Soviet intelligentsia began its gradual slide toward alienation from Soviet socialism. By the time of the Andropov and Chernenko Administrations, each of which was subjected to the pressures of the Reagan economic strategy, that alienation was virtually complete.

In effect, that alienation was an enormous internal symptom of a crisis over the very legitimacy of Communist Party rule. If the Soviet economy could not produce the benefits to society as a whole that Marxist-Leninist ideology promised, then perhaps the ideology was wrong. And if the ideology was wrong, then how could the regime justify itself in power?

A similar purpose was served by the Reagan military buildup and the policies of technology denial, technology sabotage, and economic warfare (e.g., stopping the Yamal gas pipeline and lowering world oil prices to deprive Moscow of hard currency) — all of which struck major blows to the Soviet military economy and thus Soviet military competitiveness. These policies prevented Moscow from advancing the communist cause worldwide with impunity. They prevented the Kremlin from issuing such threats that could amount to nuclear blackmail. They undermined the ability of the Soviets to use military power and threats to show that communism was the wave of the future, that it was able to overcome all foreign "imperialist" resistance, and that it was an inexorable force propelled forward by nothing less that the "laws of history." If the advance of communism could be stopped by human will — in the form of Ronald Reagan’s defiance of the accommodative policies of détente — then, once again, perhaps Marxism-Leninism was wrong and there was no plausible ideological basis for Soviet Communist Party legitimacy.

Stopping the advance of communism was the central tenet of the longtime policy of "containment." And while the essence of that policy was sound as a method of undermining the claims of Soviet ideology, Moscow could avoid a crisis of legitimacy by setting the parameters of the worldwide "struggle between the two social systems" in a timeframe of sufficient length. Thus, with a strategy of "protracted conflict," Soviet theoreticians could argue that the march of history always has a dialectical nature, takes unexpected turns, and thus can be seen as a process of "two steps forward, one step back." [24]

In the face of such logic, the Reagan strategy had an answer: the "Reagan Doctrine" of support for anti-communist resistance movements. This policy, pursued in theaters throughout the world, put further strain on the Soviet system. While, on the one hand, it put pressure on Soviet "imperial overstretch," on the other hand, it showed that the "forces of history" could be reversed and that, once again, the claims of the ideology were false.

The Reagan Doctrine had a further logic to it: it was designed to demonstrate to the peoples of the extended Soviet empire that resistance to communist rule was not futile, that, on the contrary, it was very possible indeed. If Nicaraguan campesinos could stop the consolidation of communist rule in Managua on their own and without the intervention of the U.S. military, if Afghan mujaheddin could drive out the Red Army and its spetsnaz troops, if Angolan guerrillas could resist the communist regime in Luanda that was supported by Cuban troops and Soviet bloc counterintelligence, then perhaps the peoples of the East-Central European satellite states and the Soviet peoples themselves could eventually cast off the communist yoke as well.

The Non-Material Dimension 

The Reagan Doctrine reached its zenith in the case of Poland. But here, for all the material support given to the Solidarity movement, the non-material support may well have been more strategically decisive than any other element of the Reagan strategy. This dimension of the Reagan Doctrine took the form of public diplomacy, "political warfare" and "ideological warfare" — tools that had been utterly neglected by the foreign policy establishment, both in its official incarnation and in the academic and think tank communities. It was these arts of statecraft, targeting the publics of East-Central Europe and the inner Soviet empire, that spurred the chain of revolts against Soviet rule that would prove decisive.

Before examining the specific case of Poland, it is necessary to review the entire scope of the public diplomatic effort and its centrality to President Reagan’s strategy. While methods of information policy and strategic communications were essential, the President recognized that the content and spirit behind the messages he wished to convey lay at the heart of his overall strategy:

While America’s military strength is important, let me add here that I’ve always maintained that the struggle now going on for the world will never be decided by bombs or rockets, by armies or military might. The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith.

Whittaker Chambers, the man whose own religious conversion made him a witness to one of the terrible traumas of our time, the Hiss-Chambers case, wrote that the crisis of the Western World exists to the degree in which the West is indifferent to God, the degree to which it collaborates in communism's attempt to make man stand alone without God. And then he said, for Marxism-Leninism is actually the second oldest faith, first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with the words of temptation, "Ye shall be as gods."

"The Western World can answer this challenge," he wrote, "but only provided that its faith in God and the freedom He enjoins is as great as communism's faith in Man."

I believe we shall rise to the challenge. I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written. I believe this because the source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual. And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man. [25]

The Reagan strategy in the non-material realm proceeded further from the President’s recognition that the political-spiritual heart of the Cold War had just undergone a strategic turning point: the election of a Polish pope, John Paul II, whose election and subsequent visit to Poland galvanized the Polish people as had few other developments in their thousand-year history. It was thanks to his witness to the truth and his use of the words of Jesus to inspire and encourage his Christian countrymen to "Be not afraid" that made possible the poetic justice of a worker' movement in the "workers' paradise." His electrifying appearances brought literally millions to the streets and to public celebrations of the Mass in a new spirit of hope for both earthy deliverance and spiritual salvation.

Building on what he knew was a revived movement for freedom, President Reagan adopted a public diplomacy strategy that amounted to a war of ideas resting, above all, on moral witness and conviction. It first took shape in his own rhetoric and was then supported by various programs in public diplomacy and political warfare which, in coordination with the other elements of the President’s  integrated strategy, were designed to: connect with the peoples of the Soviet Empire to show them that they were not alone; combat the falsehoods of Soviet propaganda, discredit communist ideology, totalitarianism and aggression; promote a positive alternative set of ideas and political solutions; and assist the efforts of individuals, groups, and movements that were adopting these ideas and resisting Soviet and communist rule.