When the Hammer (and Sickle) Fell

Thirty years ago, the New Year’s midnight bells also ushered out the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 

image (not from article) from, with caption: 

Ringing the bells at Ipatiev Monastery in Kostroma, Russia.

By David Satter [jb - see], The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 30, 2021 6:34 pm ET; compare this article to another re the USSR (from a different perspective) recently published by WSJ 

At midnight on Dec. 31, 1991, the chimes rang out from Savior Tower in the Kremlin and fireworks lit up the sky, marking the final end of the Soviet Union, which claimed to have created heaven on earth.

During its 70-year life, the Soviet regime killed at least 20 million of its citizens for political reasons. It also had the mesmerizing quality of a mirage. Its citizens were forced to be actors, playing the part of inhabitants of a new utopia in keeping with the infallible predictions of Marxist-Leninist ideology.

As history showed, however, the Soviet Union wasn’t indomitable. In 1988 the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev allowed a space for free information in Soviet society, creating a contradiction between free speech and a system based on lies. When glasnost wasn’t repressed, it led to the collapse of the system. In the end, only a false reality could justify total power.

Two forces led Mr. Gorbachev to begin the reforms that sealed the Soviet Union’s fate. The first was the dissident movement, which offered a moral alternative even under conditions of totalitarianism. The second was the West’s firm opposition, despite missteps and hesitations. Both challenged the Soviet Union at the level of values.

The dissidents were important because they insisted that words have meaning. The Soviet regime promulgated “democratic rights,” then used terror to make sure citizens never exercised them. The dissidents demanded that the regime take its own laws seriously.

In August 1975, the Soviet Union signed the Helsinki Accords, which recognized the division of Europe but included promises to respect human rights and the free flow of information. The dissidents created committees to monitor the regime’s compliance. These committees became the best and often the only source of information for the West on the Soviet violation of its Helsinki pledges. The Soviet regime reacted with mass arrests, but the dissidents’ courage in defying the regime and their readiness to face labor-camp sentences became an example for the whole country.

The Soviet Union was characterized by monolithic censorship. Everything that was published, broadcast or pronounced in a public forum was subject to Communist Party control and had to affirm the validity of Marxism-Leninism and the heroic leadership of the party.

Dissidents began to circumvent the censorship by typing out banned literary and political works in four or five carbon copies and circulating them secretly. The authorities reacted to this self-publishing, or samizdat, with arrests. The dissidents publicized the arrests, often in the underground journal Chronicle of Current Events, nurturing a subculture that rejected submission and soon included a significant part of the intelligentsia. Samizdat sustained a sphere of intellectual freedom that defied totalitarian control.

The Soviet Union also faced a West whose integrity and institutions were still largely intact. The giant Soviet SS-18 missile was highly accurate, shocking Central Intelligence Agency analysts who had believed the Soviets couldn’t develop such an accurate missile within 10 years. The Soviet nuclear stockpile reached 45,000 to 60,000 bombs and warheads. In seeming preparation for war, the Soviets also built a 217-mile second subway deep under the Moscow metro and 2,000-foot-deep shelters to protect the party elite.

President Reagan rejected the idea that the West had no alternative to accommodation. In the words of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, he took the offensive “ideologically and geostrategically.” The Pentagon budget nearly doubled, from $158 billion in 1981 to $304 billion in 1989. Money devoted to research and development doubled between 1981 and 1986. As for his strategy, Reagan said it was simple: “We win. They lose.”

Soviet efforts to force the West to back down were unsuccessful. The Soviets installed movable multiwarhead SS-20 missiles targeted on Western Europe. The U.S. responded with plans to deploy Pershing missiles of a similar range in West Germany and Tomahawk ground-launched nuclear cruise missiles in three other North Atlantic Treaty Organization member states.

The Soviets launched a massive propaganda campaign against the deployment. German novelist Günter Grass compared it to the Nazis’ Wannsee Conference, which prepared the Holocaust. The Red Army Faction in Germany carried out terrorist attacks against U.S. and NATO facilities with weapons and training from the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. Despite huge protests, the West held firm and the missiles were deployed.

At the same time, the U.S. rearmament drive began to bear fruit. In June 1982, Israeli pilots—flying American F-15 and F-16 jets and taking advantage of the latest advances in microelectronics and computer technology—destroyed 81 Soviet-made Syrian MiG-21 and MiG-23 jets over the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon without losing a single plane. On March 23, 1983, Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, aimed at making it possible to intercept Soviet missiles in space.

Stunned by these developments, the Soviets eventually decided to take the risk of major reforms.

Thirty years later, we no longer face an adversary like the Soviet Union, which threatened to overrun Europe and was capable of making its influence felt in every corner of the globe. Yet the perseverance and sense of honor that defeated the Soviet Union are still needed today.

The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is a painful reminder of how far we have come. Communism and radical Islam are ideologies that divide the world into the elect and the profane, deny individuality and suppress free will. Both treat man-made dogma as infallible truth and seek to impose it by force.

Against this background, the Afghan war was lost the minute Americans began repeating “no more endless wars” and cynically disregarding those we would leave behind, announced we were heading for the exits.

The Soviet Union is part of the past, but our task is to draw the proper lessons from its demise. Instead, the U.S. has turned inward. The defense of universal values has been replaced with internal political fights over such issues as climate change and gender identity. This is a tragic and dangerous situation. Soviet communism was defeated, but history moves in cycles. It is foolish to think we will never face an ideological challenge again.

Mr. Satter is author of “Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union.”