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Originally posted by sgtclub
Those are good questions, but I would posit, again, that Gorby didn't have much choice in the matter. It was either reform and attempt to hold power, or not reform and . . .
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Why do you think that? Why didn't (e.g.) Chernenko think that? Why was 1987 different from 1977 that way? Maybe there are answers to those questions, but I'd like to hear them from someone who knows Soviet politics and economics (which I do not).
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I assume what you mean, among other things, is that revenues far outweighed "necessary" expeditures (i.e., military)?
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I'm not sure what you mean here. A massive proportion of GDP was going to the military. That's just a symptom of more fundamental problems with the sort of system they had. This spending certainly wasn't necessary to defend Mother Russia, but, OTOH, there were political and structural reasons why they could just cut military spending.
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From my recollection, Reagan doubled military spending. I can't remember over what period, but I'm pretty certain our military spending doubled, and to me that is not relatively small. It wasn't to most of the doves at that time either. Don't you remember all the protests? the "Day After" TV show? The "War mongerer" moniker? And to answer your question, basd on my readings this was a conscious decision.
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I think you've got the rate of increase a little high, but I could be wrong. I just Googled it unsuccessfully. This build-up started under Carter, and there is no question that military spending was going to have increase considerable in his second term to pay for all of the new weapons systems that were in the works in the late 1970s. Let us not forget that Carter had a military background, and was no dove. So the question there is, how much difference did Reagan have on the margin? Maybe some, but not much, I submit.
The doves were upset more by things other than spending. The threat of nuclear annihilation, e.g. Notwithstanding that the gamble paid off, one can argue whether it was wise to choose a path of confrontation which increased the chances of conflict with the USSR. I'm not wanting to have that argument now, only saying that your perspective ex post is different from the perspective ex ante.
Find me something that Reagan said before the Wall came down that suggests he had a plan to bankrupt the USSR by outspending them. At the time, his administration was furiously selling the idea that we had to hike military spending to keep up with new Soviet weapons systems. Remember a glossy booklet put out by the Pentagon in the mid-/late-80s called (I think) "The Threat"? It was full of pictures of all the things the USSR was building that we needed to match.
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Like all of pressures we put on the USSR, no one of them was sufficient to bring them down. It was a hollistic approach. Aphganistan was part of it. So was Grenada, which was the first time in history where a country that had turned communist was turned away from communism. Funding (even prior to Iran-Contra) the contras was further pressure. Working with the Pope and the AFL-CIO in Poland was still more. Deploying the Pershings in Western Europe was more. Etc.
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The containment strategy articulated by George Kennan and others from the late 1940s contemplated pushing back on the Soviet Union, although there was always debate about how much to do this. In 1950 or so, Paul Nitze won a bureaucratic battle in favor of "the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce," or something like that. While I concur that Reagan did this, I don't see how this was different in major part from what his predecessors did.
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I'm not sure this is accurate, but I'd be willing to be educated. What did Nixon/Carter do in order to embolden?
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Helsinki happened during the Ford Administration, as I recall, and both Ford and Carter did things to encourage dissent in Soviet Bloc countries. Reagan continued this.
