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Global Security, Glasnost and the Retreat Dividend
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
Extract
THE QUESTION ‘WHO WON THE COLD WAR?’ IS STILL BEING debated. In a way it is certainly right to say that communism is collapsing and that Western capitalism has won the cold war. The Soviet Union (I shall not analyse here the situation in other socialist countries) has in fact recognised the complete failure of its economic system. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) has lost ground during the relatively free elections in various Soviet republics, etc.
Yet we have to take into account that the cold war was largely a war of words, a war of ideas, and in some respects the Soviet Union has done well in the global ideological contest. For a country with a scarcity of food and most elementary consumer goods and with an extensive past record of repression and direct terror it has been extremely successful in establishing its image as a stable and peace-loving partner in the international arena, as a society which is capable of producing more humane, caring, intellectual and trustworthy leaders than most other countries. It is a remarkable achievement and it is even more remarkable that this ideological success has emerged from the ruins of the dull and rigid Brezhnevist ideological machinery.
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References
1 Cf. for example: Pfaff, W., ‘The Revolutions of 1989 Owe Nothing to the West’, International Herald Tribune, 4 05 1990, p. 6 Google Scholar.
2 Cf. also: Laqueur, W., ‘ Glasnost and Its Limits’, Commentary, 07 1988, pp. 13–24 Google Scholar.
3 Gorbachev, M. S., O khode realizatsii reshenii 27 s’ezda KPSS i zadachakh po uglubleniyu perestroiki (On the Implementation of the Decisions of the 27th CPSU Congress and on the Tasks of Deepening Perestroika), Politizdat, Moscow, 1988, p. 88 Google Scholar.
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5 Izvestiya, 16 March 1990, p. 1.
6 Cf. the draft of the new press law, Izvestiya, 5 December 1989, p. 3. A new press law was adopted by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on 12 June 1990 (Izvestiya, 21 June 1990, p.3).
7 Gorbachev, M., ‘Sotsialisticheskaya ideya i revolutsionnaya perestroika’ (‘Socialist Idea and Revolutionary Perestroika’), Pravda, 26 11 1989, pp. 1–2 Google Scholar.
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9 Cf. also: Pork, A., ‘Global Security and the Soviet Nationalities’, The Washington Quarterly, Spring 1990, pp. 37–47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 There is a quite interesting discussion of this possible way of privatization in: ‘A Survey of Perestroika’, The Economist, 28 April 1990, pp. 21–22.