The Sorrows of Empire Read Online Free PDF

mid-1980s, revised CIA estimates of Soviet spending on weapons procurement indicated that the actual rate of increase had been a measly 1.3 percent a year, not the 4 to 5 percent the CIA had previously reported to the president, and that Russian appropriations for offensive strategic weapons had actually declined by 40 percent. Such estimates were ideologically unacceptable to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who sent them back to the CIA. There Director Gates “ordered SOVA [the CIA’s Office of Soviet Analysis] to send Weinberger a memo focusing on Soviet economic strengths.” 5
     
    In fact, U.S. intelligence agencies did not see the crisis of the Soviet Union coming and never gave our political leaders an accurate assessment of the initiatives undertaken by Mikhail Gorbachev. On August 19, 1991, the USSR finally succumbed to a domestic coup d’état thanks to an internal process of delegitimization that Gorbachev himself had initiated. The United States had little or nothing to do with it.
     
    While Gorbachev was attempting internal perestroika (economic restructuring) and glasnost (the end of secrecy and the release of political prisoners), the defining event that made clear to the world how far the process of reform had gone occurred on the night of November 9, 1989. The Berlin Wall fell. Here again, the crucial acts were not American but West German. In his scholarly dissection (commissioned by the GermanBundestag) of what he calls “one of the biggest paternity disputes ever,” Hans-Hermann Hertle explains: “Following a secret agreement with Bonn, they [the Hungarians] opened the border to Austria for GDR [German Democratic Republic, i.e., East German] citizens on 10 September [1989]. In return, the Federal Republic gave Hungary credit in the amount of DM 500 million and promised to make up losses that Hungary might suffer from retaliatory measures by the GDR. Tens of thousands of East Germans traveled to the Federal Republic via Austria in the days and weeks that followed. The GDR experienced its largest wave of departures since the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. This mass exodus demonstrated the weakness of the SED [Socialist Unity Party of Germany, i.e., the Communist Party] leadership on this issue and undermined the regime’s authority in an unprecedented manner.” 6
     
    It is a commonplace in the teaching of international relations that empires do not give up their dominions voluntarily. The USSR was a rare exception to this generalization. Inspired by Gorbachev’s idealism and a desire to become members of the “common European house” and to gain international recognition as a “normal” state, some reformers in the Soviet elite believed that rapprochement with Western European countries could help Russia resume its stalled process of modernization. As the Russian historian Vladislav Zubok has observed, “At certain points, ... Soviet political ties to France and West Germany became more important and perhaps warmer on a personal level than relations with some members of the Warsaw Pact.” 7 Much like the Hungarian Communist Party chief Imre Nagy in the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising in Budapest and Czech Communist Party first secretary Alexander Dubcek in the 1968 Prague revolt, Gorbachev had turned against the imperial-revolutionary conception of the Soviet Union inherited from Stalin. He willingly gave up the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe as the price for reinvigorating the Soviet Union’s economic system.
     
    The American leadership did not have either the information or the imagination to grasp what was happening. Totally mesmerized by academic “realist” thought, it missed one of the grandest developments of modern history and drew almost totally wrong conclusions from it. Atone point after the Berlin Wall had come down, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union actually suggested that the Soviets might have to intervene militarily in Eastern Europe to preserve the