Snake Featherston
Banned
True.
Reforms that had been evident since the rise of Andropov as he'd carefully built his constituency long before his official rise.
So this awareness arose spontaneously? That's curious, given that as late as 1981, the advance of Communism was still marching onward.
Only in public rhetoric. Behind the scenes while Brezhnev trundled off to his death the Soviet leadership was divided into a reactionary and a reformist faction, the latter under Andropov rising in one of the most rapid transitions in Soviet history because it spent the entire latter time preparing for this. Reagan mythology wants to make correlation causation, this is not so.
Your visceral (but not wholly unfounded) loathing of a two-term American president has, in my view, clouded your judgement on this issue, but I don't think we will bridge this impasse because of it. We both agree that Reagan is overrated and made some bad calls, but seem to differ on his ultimate effect and contribution to changing the fundamental order in the world.
Yes, you say he had one, I say that he had none at all outside the United States. Name five things he really did succeed at, as collapsing the USSR was not in fact one of them.