POLL: The Fall of the U.S.S.R.

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OK, I admit it - this poll is the result of my thinking about the results of the Greatest American poll - which based on nation-wide voting in the U.S. Ronald Reagan won.

The question of this poll is who is most responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union (note I didn't say Communism)? There are are few points I think we have to agree on from the start: That while many people played a role in this, that the three prinicple people involved were Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Mikhail Gorbachev. And certainly a case can be made for all of them.

It is beyond any reasonable argument to try and say that RR did not provide the political and certainly the military impetus for such a monumental change. Much the same can be said of JP2 in the socio-religious realm. On the other hand, it took a great deal of bravery on the part of Gorbachev - a move that ultimately proved to be politically suicidal - the affect this change.

For those who would argue that the fall of the Soviet Union was inevitable - that if not under Gorbachev it still would have happened in another 3, 5 or 10 years, this obviously heightens the improtance placed on RR and JPII. For those however, who feel that whoever in the Soviet Union who was in power at the time had way too much to lose - which certainly applies to Gorbachev - to ever move away from the Soviet Union and the associated Iron Curtain, then it heightens Gorbachev's position in this argument. Finally, JP2 cannot be disregarded in the argument because although he lacked any type of political power to affect a change, the pope does have a great deal of influence, which excluding power is the next best thing to have.

Poll Information
This poll contains 1 question(s). 50 user(s) have voted.
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Poll Results: The Fall of the U.S.S.R. (50 votes.)

Who is the most responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union? (Choose 1)
* Ronald Reagan - 12% (6)
* Pope John Paul II - 4% (2)
* Mikhail Gorbachev - 44% (22)
* Other (please state in reply) - 40% (20)

 

The Soviet Union fell due to the various power groups within the union who all wanted to have their own little countries back.

 

My faith in humanity strengthens when I see 0% have voted on Reagan.

 

I voted Gorbachev as I think he is the individual who had the most responsibility for the USSR falling when it did.

The main reason as I see it though was the constant arms race between the US and the USSR. THe Russians simply went bankrupt and couldnt keep up any more. They had for decades inflated their own might and the US had bought it hook, line and sink and even thought they were masking their strength. It couldnt keep up forever.

What Reagan did and other American politicians before him was in my opinion to toss the coin. Either nuclear holocaust or a collapse of teh Soviet Union. Thankfully the Union collapsed but the American cowboy style many times brought the world to the brink of destruction and even if the gamble may be seen as having paid off it was a gamble too risky to have ever been tried in my opinion. Reagan and the people like him may be viewed as heroes by many today but they might as well have been viewed as the people who annihilated human civilization. It scares me to think how close we were to the one instead of what became.

 

Heh, no one's voted for RR yet. *awaits the arrival of Hacken Slash*

Of course, hard to place the praise/blame with one person; if I had to maybe Truman, just because he was around for the establishment of the strategy of containment and the beginning of the Cold War. Negotiations for dividing territory between Russia and the other allied forces had begun with FDR and Churchill, drawing up lines on the map that later became the policed boundaries between communism and capitalism. Especially at the Yalta Conference. Russia and the rest of the allies raced into Germany knowing such boundaries would be set, trying to claim as much territory as possible. And certainly Truman (or his advisors) were thinking about the USSR when they approved the nastiness of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Russia had just declared war, and the US wanted to make sure that it claimed the victory and thus control of post-war Japan.

And then there's the rest of the post-war era, with all of its proxy wars, technical innovations, and strangelovean excesses. It's kinda hard to attribute all the success of this to one symbolic figure. Like kids whose fathers have convinced them they could magically open up the garage door by saying "open sesame", all the while hiding the remote behind their backs, so the Reaganites have up believe that Reagan's "Gorby, tear down this wall" was responsible for the collapse of the USSR...

 

I think that when Gorbachev started changing the laws to open up the process of Government, that opened the floodgates of change and it became too late to put that Genie back in the bottle.

 

If I had to say it was down to one person, than its Gorbachev, however I think it was down to many people, but he probably had the most influence.

 

One vote for Reagan.

 

The system, as it was, was fundamentally rotten. Gorbachev's unwitting achievement was to allow that system to be overthrown, mainly by opening it up sufficiently to allow the dissent (and the reaction.) to come to boiling point.

Without Gorbachev, I'm sure the USSR would have gone much the same way as China.

 

I don't think the USSR would have gone the same way as China at all. The USSR was never unified as one country the way China was; most of the "satellite" countries deeply resented the Russians, and didn't see themselves as Russians at all. I know people from Bulgaria, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia who had to study like 8 years of Russian in school, and can't speak the language at all; they didn't learn almost as a kind of protest. And think about all the failed rebellions that occured before Walesa and Havel; the USSR had a hard time keeping control of its satellites, and had already realized that it needed to make alot of concessions. Again, this pressure was on from the very beginning of the Cold War...

 

When I said like China, I meant an the abandonment of a strict adhearence to the Command economy, whilst retaining tight political control. I suspect it would have been intensely difficult for the USSR to achieve anything like the relative success of China in this regard, but it could still have been done.

The Warsaw Pact countries (Which were not actually a part of the USSR proper) are more of a mystery, although a more brutally-minded leader than Gorbachev could have, and would have, intervened militarily in the Eastern Bloc a la 1956 and 1968. It would have been much more strongly condemned by an ascendant West, and it may have only created a snowball effect, but it would still certainly have been done.

Oh, and the USSR was very solidly politically unified and had been for nearly seventy years before it broke up. This was a forced, and to quite a large extent a superficial unity, of course, but it was still quite real. The USSR was always much more cohesive and politically settled than it's satellites, and there was no inevitability that it would join them in falling to internal pressures when they did.

 

It was really Nancy -- she hated Mrs. Gorbachev (always showing up to parties with a better dress than the First Lady).

I really don't think you can tie it to one person. Reagan's 'out spend the other guy' mentality was certainly the last straw in a weakening economy (and the death blow to the USSR), but I'd say it really started with Ike.

Gorbachev saw the collapse was inevitable and had the foresight to make the transition without much bloodshed. I believe he is one of the greatest leaders of the past century.

 

Has to be Reagan.

Gorby saw the writing on the wall and sought to soften the USSR so it could participate in global markets...but his intent was never to dismantle the USSR.

Pope John Paul II worked for human rights everywhere in the world...not just against the Soviet Union. Yes, he fought against religous repression in the USSR, but that repression was due almost as much to the Russian Church as it was due to the Communist regime.

Practically every move of the Reagan Administration was designed to attack, weaken, undermine or deny the Soviet Union. He is the only one of the three who actively sought the fall of the Soviet Union.

There really is no other choice.

 

Err, the poll question was 'Who was most responsible for the collapse of the USSR?', not 'Who wanted to be most responsible for the collapse of the USSR?'

 

I loved John Paul II but it's Gorbachev for me, for reasons already stated.

 

Personally I would say that Stalin was the single individual that was most responsible - he was the main architect of the how the USSR came to be structured not to mention the fear and paranoia that became so much a part of it. After that it was just a matter of time.

 

It's my opinion that they all has something to do with it -- and don't forget Prime Minister Thatcher -- but the overwhelming problem that the USSR had was --

It was communist -- the system just does not work.

 

Gorby deserves no credit for the collapse of the USSR. He tried to keep it together any way he could, including by force. Anybody remember Soviet troops hacking protesters with entrenching tools in Tiblisi?

 

I did not think Gorbachev ordered that. Why do you think so?

Not that I think he was wonderful -- I just do not remember ever hearing that he ordered those attacks.

 

Accepting the largely non-violent fall of the entire Eastern bloc, and assisting Germany to peacefully re-unify is a strange way of keeping the Communist system in Eastern Europe together by force.