Union of Soviet Socialist Republics/Who Was Right about the Soviet Union?

Who Was Right about the Soviet Union?

by Tim Starr

Not the dreaded neocons, according to Lew Rockwell:

“The neocons were as wrong about the Soviet Union as they were about Iraq’s WMD. In both cases, of course, they were lying. The USSR was always an economic and military basketcase…”

This was Rockwell’s comment on the declassification of the CIA’s 1976 Team “B” assessment of the Soviet Union’s strategic threat to the U.S.

Soviet history proves that the neocons were right about the Soviets, and the Rothbardians were wrong. This is most easily proven with Rockwell’s claim that the Soviet Union was “always” a military basketcase. That would’ve come as a great surprise to the German Army at Stalingrad and Kursk, not to mention the rest of the Soviet drive to Berlin. While the Red Army may have been a basketcase at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War (although not as much as at the beginning of the Winter War), as Richard Overy writes in Why The Allies Won, the explanation for the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany must include a definite qualitative improvement in Soviet military power, and not just mere quantitative superiority alone. After all, the Soviets had quantitative superiority over Germany the whole time that Germany was driving to Stalingrad. After WWII, the Red Army was undefeated until it was forced to retreat from Afghanistan by the Mujahideen.

Furthermore, in his analysis of the Team B estimate, intelligence historian John Prados says that Team B faulted the CIA’s regular estimates of the Soviet threat for failing to take into account the possibility that Soviet strategy was aggressive, not just defensive. Prados says this as if it were obvious that Soviet strategy was purely defensive, not the least bit aggressive. However, about a dozen countries around the world fell to the Soviets or their proxies during the 1970s: Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Laos, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Vietnam, etc. All of those Soviet proxies either fell with the Soviet Union, or quickly realigned with another great power. If the CIA’s regular estimate of the Soviet threat omitted the possibility that Soviet strategy was offensive, right in the midst of all this evidence that Soviet strategy not only was offensive but was succeeding, then its methodology was fatally flawed.

The question of whether the Soviet Union was always an economic basketcase is a little more complicated. The Soviet economy was always inferior to that of the USA, but the Soviets did achieve real economic gains. As Paul Krugman rightly pointed out, Soviet growth during the Khruschev era was so fast that it scared Western economists, until they figured out that it was entirely due to an unsustainable increase in economic inputs.

Economic stagnation did set in during the Brezhnev era, but the Soviet economy was propped up by several things:

• High oil prices. Soviet Russia, like Russia today, was an oil exporter, with one of the lowest costs of production in the world. The OPEC embargo resulted in high oil prices, which enabled the Soviets to export oil for large amounts of hard currency. The lifting of oil price controls and collapse of the OPEC embargo resulted in low oil prices, ending this way for the Soviets to prolong their rule.

• Grain subsidies. As part of detente, the US sold grain to the Soviets at bargain-basement prices. This relieved the Soviets of the need to make their agriculture more productive so as to feed their people, and enabled them to spend more of their GDP on their military. The end of these subsidies took this prop from underneath the Soviet edifice, too.

• Unchallenged lead in the Arms Race. As Peter Schweitzer points out in Reagan’s War, no U.S. President before Reagan ever made it a policy goal for the US to have global military superiority over the Soviets. Reagan’s adoption of this policy amounted to a form of economic warfare against the Soviets. Once the USA seriously challenged the Soviets in the arms race, there was no way the Soviet economy could match the productive might of the USA.

So, if the Soviet economy was a basketcase, until Reagan’s Presidency it was one that was running so fast on crutches provided by the US or other foreign powers that it was still winning the arms race and expanding its sphere of influence all over the world. Reagan’s foreign policy team reversed that situation, with full knowledge of what it was doing. When Richard Pipes was Reagan’s National Security Advisor for the Soviet Union, he wrote an official prediction that a reformer like Gorbachev would take the lead in the Soviet Union after a few years of the sort of pressure the US was in the process of applying.

Pipes was right about that, Team B was right that Soviet strategy was offensive, and we have Reagan’s anti-Soviet policies to thank for the Soviet implosion, the liberation of all the millions of people who used to live under Soviet tyranny in Russia and all the Warsaw Pact countries, and the end of the Soviet nuclear threat to the USA. Rothbard’s prediction that only a US return to an isolationist foreign policy could end the Cold War was wrong.