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Introduction
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I N T R O D U C T I O N Soviet visits to the West persuaded them to trust us more and fear us more, while Western visits there persuaded us to trust them less and fear them less. — . , former president, Federation of American Scientists What caused communism to collapse and the Cold War to come to a close? Some say it was Ronald Reagan who sullied the Soviet Union with his “evil empire” speech. Others point to Pope John Paul II and his visits to Catholic Poland, which challenged Soviet rule in Eastern Europe and ultimately the entire Soviet bloc. Still others recognize the role of the U.S. military buildup, the threat of “Star Wars,” and the simple solution that we spent the Soviets into submission. Also credited are international radio broadcasts—the Voice of America, BBC, and Radio Liberty—that exposed the fabrications of the Soviet media. There are also Western Sovietologists who maintain that the Soviet Union brought about its own demise through mismanagement at home, overextension abroad, an unwise intervention in Afghanistan, failure to cope with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and suppression of innovation in politics, economics, and the arts. As former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock has put it, “The Communist dictatorship collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions and irrationality.”1 Also given credit for the Soviet demise is glasnost—the end of state control over the media—and the resultant information explosion in the Soviet Union that exposed the horrors of the past and the realities of the present. Yet another notion credits the abatement of fear among the Soviet people and the emergence of a dissident movement encouraged by the Helsinki Accords on human rights that challenged the authority of the Communist Party. There is even a theory that rock and roll, a Western import, seduced Soviet youth and eroded the authority of the Party’s ideologists. And finally, many Russians tell us that glasnost and perestroika , and much that followed, were purely domestic developments that resulted from a reform movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. There is a grain of truth is some of these explanations, and more than a grain in others. But in the following pages readers will find many grains of another explanation —that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism were . Jack F. Matlock Jr.,“The Poor Neighbor,” New York Times Book Review, April , , . consequences of Soviet contacts and exchanges with the West, and with the United States in particular, over the thirty-five years that followed the death of Joseph Stalin in . Moreover, those exchanges in culture, education, information, science , and technology were conducted by the United States openly, for the most part, under agreements concluded with the Soviet government, and at a cost that was minuscule in comparison with U.S. expenditures for defense and intelligence over the same period of time. The result was an increase in Western influence among the people in Russia who count—the intelligentsia. As U.S. political scientist Michael Mandelbaum wrote in : “Western values have been incubating for two decades. Changes took place under the surface of events during the Brezhnev period. In private conversations, in technical and specialized journals, and in more general publications couched in Aesopian language, controversy, debates, and Western themes began to appear. . . . [T]he intelligentsia of today are certainly better attuned to Western values than were their predecessors a generation ago.”2 The reach of the West was delineated by Vasily Aksyonov, the renowned Russian writer who now divides his time between Russia, France, and the United States: “Far behind the indestructible iron curtain we had somehow managed to develop a pro-Western mentality—and what could be farther West than America?”3 Official Washington, however, tended to downgrade the importance of the West’s attractions during the Cold War, focusing instead on the Soviet Union’s missiles and ground forces. Concerned mainly with Moscow’s ability to project its power abroad, Washington underestimated its ability to influence the Soviet intelligentsia , and through them the entire nation. How all that came about is the theme of this book. . Michael Mandelbaum,“Western Influence on the Soviet Union,” in Seweryn Bialer and Michael Mandelbaum, eds., Gorbachev’s Russia and American Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, ), . . Vassily Aksyonov, In Search of Melancholy Baby, trans. Michael Henry Heim and Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, ), . ...