What if the US did nothing?

[Rum]

It seems likely that the USSR would have become a bloated inefficient command economy it was one way or another even without the spending it did on arms. The arms race and 'spend race' probably hastened the end. MisterMack is relying on Wikipedia. I am relying on my own analysis based on rather wider reading than that.

'The will of the people' is ultimately about how much pain they will tolerate and the spending on arms in the eighties and the freeze on consumer goods which they introduced at the same time (more or less) would have been pretty hard on the population at large and hugely unpopular. Reagan had a plan which involved to get them to spend their way into penury. How much that plan influenced the ultimate downfall of the USSR is a question for debate and emphasis I guess. It was of course a multi-faceted strategy. The Yanks undermined them in any way they could.

I am also pretty sure they would have taken Europe. Their army was huge. Without America in West Germany in 1946 and beyond they could have almost walked in.

[mistermack]

MisterMack is relying on Wikipedia. I am relying on my own analysis based on rather wider reading than that.

No, I quoted wikipedia to illustrate that what I was saying wasn't unique to me. I formed that opinion from multiple sources, which I've encountered over that last 35 years plus.
I'm not suitably qualified to write the wikipedia article on the fall of the USSR. I doubt if Rum is.

But the guy who wrote it probably is, and I'm betting he knows more about it than me, or Rum.
And I'm sure that HE would have drawn on more than one source.

If the USSR had not kept up a large military, they would STILL have had to find money for all of those people to live.
They didn't have much of an export trade, apart from arms, so they would have been employed domestically, and still been a drain on the national purse. And many of them never got paid anyway.

Much of the Soviet spending and capability was exaggerated, to bluff the west.

And the USSR had not shown much sign of wanting to rule the world, until they were attacked. You can hardly blame them for keeping the territory that they gained during the war, when you consider the price that they paid for it, and the fact that Churchill was wanting to keep on going all the way to Moscow, at the end of the war.

[Rum]

Well now we hit the nub of your agenda. America was the big bad bully and if only they had behaved themselves the poor innocent Soviets would have minded their own business, gone quietly about building true communism and the worker's paradise would have arrived on the 5.15 from Moscow.

The fact is that the world doesn't work that way. The way the world works is if you have two powers, competing for resources and influence and with ambitions for expansion, which they both did in their own ways and mix in fear and paranoia you get what we got - the Cold War. A nasty case of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

The USSR would no more have kept themselves to themselves than the USA.

[klr]

Reagan Doctrine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_Doctrine

But what about the Sinatra Doctrine?

[Warren Dew]

'The will of the people' is ultimately about how much pain they will tolerate and the spending on arms in the eighties and the freeze on consumer goods which they introduced at the same time (more or less) would have been pretty hard on the population at large and hugely unpopular. Reagan had a plan which involved to get them to spend their way into penury. How much that plan influenced the ultimate downfall of the USSR is a question for debate and emphasis I guess. It was of course a multi-faceted strategy. The Yanks undermined them in any way they could.

Indeed. The flip side of that strategy was just as important - for example demonstrating to Soviet leaders that the American system could put meat on the table for the average person every day, something the Soviet leaders only dreamed of.

http://www.csmonitor.com/1984/1121/112123.html

I am also pretty sure they would have taken Europe. Their army was huge. Without America in West Germany in 1946 and beyond they could have almost walked in.

Without the Marshall Plan, resistance would have been minimal.

[Seabass]

And the USSR had not shown much sign of wanting to rule the world, until they were attacked.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2 ... ntrop_Pact
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War


I'm sure if the U.S. did nothing, the world would be all rainbows and unicorns and world peace and free ponies for all children. Just like before the Cold War!

[cronus]

And the USSR had not shown much sign of wanting to rule the world, until they were attacked.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2 ... ntrop_Pact
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War


I'm sure if the U.S. did nothing, the world would be all rainbows and unicorns and world peace and free ponies for all children. Just like before the Cold War!

Simply because shite is a consequence of one a priori condition doesn't mean it is of all conditions. There may be a narrow irretrievable s'et of events that would have led to heaven on earth by now. I doubt if nation states would be part of that though since it would require a very fine grained set of consequences and re-actions.

[Rum]

Quite. I think Mistermack wears rose tinted glasses regarding the reality of communism as it has so far manifested itself. I am a socialist and a liberal, but I can only accept it in terms of an evolutionary/developmental process, backed up by a sense of social justice. There is sadly no escaping the fact that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian organisation which chose to try to reach its goals by whatever means it felt it could, including the oppression of its people and the abandonment of any values associated with individual liberty.

[Cormac]

Quite. I think Mistermack wears rose tinted glasses regarding the reality of communism as it has so far manifested itself. I am a socialist and a liberal, but I can only accept it in terms of an evolutionary/developmental process, backed up by a sense of social justice. There is sadly no escaping the fact that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian organisation which chose to try to reach its goals by whatever means it felt it could, including the oppression of its people and the abandonment of any values associated with individual liberty.

This is a familiar refrain these days.

[Rum]

Quite. I think Mistermack wears rose tinted glasses regarding the reality of communism as it has so far manifested itself. I am a socialist and a liberal, but I can only accept it in terms of an evolutionary/developmental process, backed up by a sense of social justice. There is sadly no escaping the fact that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian organisation which chose to try to reach its goals by whatever means it felt it could, including the oppression of its people and the abandonment of any values associated with individual liberty.

This is a familiar refrain these days.

Your point? It is clearly a matter of fact.

[mistermack]

You can bang on all you like about what you THINK that the soviets would have done. You obviously believe that they were hell-bent on world domination but you're only guessing. I don't agree.

If you look at what ACTUALLY happened, it was the RELEASING of control of countries that they had in the palm of their hands. So the facts of history point the other way. You could claim that this was down to a change of personnel.
I would claim that the country as a whole, had no appetite for further conquests. You can talk about the USSR as if it just consisted of the men at the top. But I think that they knew what the public would go along with, and what they wouldn't.
And trying to take over the world wasn't something the Russian people would have supported.

It's different with the fear of Nazi Germany, or the memory of WW2 fresh in their minds. But as that faded into history, the public appetite for going into other countries just wasn't there. The Afghan war was hugely unpopular, and that's just a poxy little place.

[Warren Dew]

You can bang on all you like about what you THINK that the soviets would have done. You obviously believe that they were hell-bent on world domination but you're only guessing. I don't agree.

If you look at what ACTUALLY happened, it was the RELEASING of control of countries that they had in the palm of their hands.

You mean like they did with Czechoslovakia?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Pac ... hoslovakia

[laklak]

Then there was the Hungarian incident...

[Cormac]

Quite. I think Mistermack wears rose tinted glasses regarding the reality of communism as it has so far manifested itself. I am a socialist and a liberal, but I can only accept it in terms of an evolutionary/developmental process, backed up by a sense of social justice. There is sadly no escaping the fact that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian organisation which chose to try to reach its goals by whatever means it felt it could, including the oppression of its people and the abandonment of any values associated with individual liberty.

This is a familiar refrain these days.

Your point? It is clearly a matter of fact.

I wasn't criticising.

I do see that happening everywhere these days, and it has been the common refrain for all authoritarian governments as they seek to garner more power, and seek to have the people conspire in their own oppression.

My comment may have been a bit of a derail, but hey, this is Ratz!

[piscator]

Rum's killin' it in this thread. Bravo!

I think it's easy to gloss over how badass the Red Army was. They broke the Blitzkrieg by laying low until the tanks passed over, then belt-grabbing the Wehrmacht and pitfighting man on man like cornered rats. This not only took the German tanks, and planes, and guns out of play for fear of slaughtering too many of their own, but it relied on the strengths of a pissed off peasant army to do their worst.
Both Josef and Little Nicky were total stone killers who personally blew the heads off of more people than we'll probably ever know, and Europe represented a shitload of money just sitting for the taking to them. The only thing that stopped them from doing the obvious was the Allied armies in their way and their fears of a reverse Napoleon's retreat.
That, and there was that 4-year gap before they got the Bomb that took their inertia...so they chose a more roundabout approach to Universal Socialism. Hence the Cold War.