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human needs.
American and Western anticommunists (myself included) were
wrong only in one important respect: they attributed more strength and
staying power to these systems than they actually possessed. They credited
their leaders with a stronger grip on power; they thought their peoples
more docile, helpless or intimidated than was actually the case . Perhaps
this had something to do with the totalitarian model (which I also re–
garded useful for understanding these systems through much of their ex–
istence) or simply with lack of imagination . In any event nobody in the
West had anticipated the rapid unraveling of these systems - it was not a
singular failing of their anticommunist critics. On the other hand this
unraveling does not justify the retroactive claim that these systems, and
the Soviet Union in particular, have
never
represented a threat to the
West or the United States, that Soviet aggression was a cold-war myth
invented by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the military-industrial com–
plex.
At the same time I am not sure how much the military build-up of
the Reagan administration and its support for anticommunist guerillas
hastened the decay of the Soviet Empire, as is often claimed by conserva–
tives. The Soviet Union shouldered huge military burdens throughout its
existence, and its leaders did not flinch from imposing the attendant
hardships on their people. Afghanistan was more important, and without
American help the guerillas would not have inflicted significant losses on
the Soviet forces; in turn the failure to impose a military solution in
Afghanistan was a notable factor in Soviet demoralization, both a cause
and symptom of the loss of political will.
I do not believe that a more accommodationist American policy -
such as was incessantly recommended by the liberal-left and the peace
movement - would have been helpful in reducing Soviet expansionism,
let alone would have contributed to domestic liberalization. (For exam–
ple, not installing intermediate missiles in Western Europe was such a key
demand; for others even Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were
unwise "irritants" in the relationship between the United States and the
Soviet Union.) Today everyone agrees that the domestic changes in the
Soviet Union came about under the pressure of immense economic
problems and not because of a sense of political security and material
well-being that many Western sources stipulated as the only basis of
democratization.
Much as I rejoice in the failures of communism, I find the "end-of–
history" viewpoint also bizarre; I believe that while Western pluralistic
political sysems, and in a large measure contemporary capitalism too,
have been vindicated, we have no idea what the future will bring and no
