Black Monday


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.
 
Reforms that had been evident since the rise of Andropov as he'd carefully built his constituency long before his official rise.



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.



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.
Now you're arguing in cirles. I think we're done here.
 
Now you're arguing in cirles. I think we're done here.

We've been arguing in circles the whole time. Not least because I have noted repeatedly my rationale for things like Reagan not collapsing the USSR (most notably that he'd not been President for two years when it fell) and this has made no impression whatsoever.
 
We've been arguing in circles the whole time. Not least because I have noted repeatedly my rationale for things like Reagan not collapsing the USSR (most notably that he'd not been President for two years when it fell) and this has made no impression whatsoever.

If you concede that the root causes of the collapse of the USSR did not appear overnight, then Reagan being out of office when the dissolution happened has nothing to do with anything, again.
 
If you concede that the root causes of the collapse of the USSR did not appear overnight, then Reagan being out of office when the dissolution happened has nothing to do with anything, again.

Given that the USSR's collapse had causes that preceded him by virtue of the intrigue beginning during the 1970s, Reagan must have been a reality-warper or a time-traveler to have any influence on the Stagnation that propelled the Andropov faction to power.
 
Given that the USSR's collapse had causes that preceded him by virtue of the intrigue beginning during the 1970s, Reagan must have been a reality-warper or a time-traveler to have any influence on the Stagnation that propelled the Andropov faction to power.

Soviet power was at its height in the late 1970's. Maybe I'm missing something?:confused:
 
Soviet power was at its height in the late 1970's. Maybe I'm missing something?:confused:

Yes, Soviet power was at its height in a military sense. However the economic Standstill was already a generic part of Soviet rhetoric and jokes in the 1970s. So Reagan was not the cause of a crisis when he couldn't even get the GOP nod for the Republican nomination at the time.
 
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