1 00:00:03,490 --> 00:00:04,300 Hi.

In this presentation, I want to focus on new thinking that's going on in the East Bloc, especially the Soviet Union, in the late 1980s. All through this course, we've talked about how new thinking happens, that it just doesn't come out of the blue. That first, there's a situation people understand. And you try to understand, what they noticed about the situation. You look at what problems or opportunities did they see in that situation. Then, what kind of solutions did they think they had. And you see what solutions they chose. And then how that created a new situation. So to explain the new thinking in the Soviet Union, which has momentous consequences, you start by noticing that they think they're in a period of crisis. In other words, they see a situation. They see problems. By the way, your later hindsight understanding of what the situation was, in your opinion, or what problems they should have seen, is interesting but you can't let that blur your ability to see the problem as they saw it, through their eyes. And also, it's really important to think about what their alternatives were in their minds. They're not going to make a move to do something unless they believe they've got a viable option. So, what is the problem as Soviet leaders might have perceived it in the middle of the 1980s? From their point of view, they look at their leadership, and they see an aging old guard. Brezhnev dies. Andropov dies. Chernenko dies. Men in their 70s, even in their 80s, this is the image of the Soviet leadership to many of the Soviet people. The impassive leaders, standing on the reviewing stand. They also notice the political international trends. After the big crisis of 1983 as you go into 84, 85, there's a definite sense in the Soviet Union that the political and

international momentum seems to be running a bit against them, that they feel more and more isolated by the way things are going. But that's not all, they've got this war grinding on in Afghanistan, killing Soviet soldiers every month, draining Soviet attention, Soviet prestige. As they look at their economic situation, they also see problems. Imagine: Youre in the Soviet leadership, it's 1985, 1986, you're looking at how the economies of the world are doing. Now you saw this chart before. I showed it to you, in 1976, to give you a sense of the way Chinese leaders might have seen the world. Now I've run it forward to 1986. Now again, the Soviet leaders did not have this chart. But I think this chart gives you some sense of the way the world looked to people in the mid-1980s, when they tried to figure out which economies were most dynamic. And what you'd notice here, look at the green line for the Soviet Union, it's flattening out. Look at the contrast, even with a country like South Korea, between the situation in 1966 in the Soviet Union and now look, 20 years later. You might even notice that China is beginning to slowly pick up. You look around the Soviet Union and they see the aging consequences of a devotion to heavy industry, to the mining and exploitation of raw materials. This map is just one way of graphically depicting that layout. An interesting thing about this map is it uses the color orange to point out areas of severe environmental damage, around these areas where a lot of mineral exploitation has occurred. And you can see how extensive these are, including this area around Chernobyl, where a Soviet nuclear reactor, in 1986, suffered a catastrophic meltdown. At the end of the 1970s, though, the Soviet economy had good news. All that oil they were producing was

selling on the world markets for a terrific price. The Soviets were bringing in all sorts of hard currency. They could use that to get terrific loans from the West to buy lots of consumer goods and other things. But from the point of view of a Soviet leader in, say 1986, take a look at what's happened to their income from oil sales. Here's 1986 right here. You can see what's happened to the oil price. That drop means that their income from oil sales is less than half of what it was only a few years earlier. If that's your principal source of hard Currency, and then you need that hard currency to service those loans you took out in the banner days, loans that are also helping you subsidize some of the economies dependent on you in Eastern Europe, you have a severe debt problem, severe problems in maintaining the standard of living your citizens had started getting accustomed to having. And then of course, the Soviets are looking over their shoulders at China. Again, imagine the year, it's 85, 86, here's some of the way the world was perceiving China in 1985, 1986. For instance, this cover of Time Magazine captures the popular mood from September 1985. [LAUGH] By the way, you can see this, on the wall screen over here on the left, in traditional Chinese style, carrying the posters of Karl Marx with the citizens working in rice paddies. And, now look. [LAUGH]. Riding bicycles. Blue jeans. Cameras. Tennis shoes. Time Magazine, in fact, named Deng Xiaoping its Man of the Year for 1985. And here you see a collage of images that captures what he seems to represent in the eye of the world right then. If you're a Soviet leader, how are you processing this?

What do you make of this? And then you might also ask yourself, what is the real path to the security of the Soviet Union? Should we continue to invest principally in our military establishment as the path to security or should we have some other conceptions? So question, do they have some other conceptions? Are they seeing any alternative? Answer is yes, they are. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev becomes the new leader of the Soviet Union. He truly represents a model product of the Soviet communist system. Born in the Caucasus, his family had experienced some of the terrors of Stalinism. But he's risen through the ranks, the best Party schools, all the good experience in government. The other leaders would look at him as a youthful, dynamic person, thoroughly imbued with all the training the Soviet socialist system can provide to its young leaders. Gorbachev looks around and analyzes the communist movement as of the 1980s. He's quite taken with some of the ideas of the Eurocommunist parties in places like Spain, and especially in Italy. Taken with the way they're trying to bring back ideas of democratic socialism in the redefinition of communism. He adopts, after he comes in, the goal of perestroika: renewal for the Soviet Union. He wants to reduce foreign requirements. In other words, let's ease up on confrontations with the West so that I can cut back on the amount of resources I have to devote to my military establishment and can put more into my domestic economy. He also believes in glasnost: a new openness, a more open dialogue about the problems of the country, the past of the country, and options for the future. Why, you might ask, did the Soviet leadership choose someone like this to lead the country in 1985? Well, a couple points.

One, it was a very close call in 1985. There was no inevitability about the selection of Gorbachev from among the field. His principal rival, the party boss of Leningrad, might've been selected and the Soviet Union might've followed a very different path. But Gorbachev was the man they picked. After the previous three leaders, that image of youthful dynamism and his reputed successes with Soviet agriculture seemed to make him look like the best guy. But a really important explanation for why Gorbachev adopts this agenda and has support for a while, is that he's embodying multiple agendas of people within the communist elite. On the one hand, he does embody the agenda of people who really do want to liberalize the definition of communism. People like this man, Alexander Yakolev, a long time Communist Party official that had spent a lot of time serving in foreign countries. He'd thought a lot about how to renew the Soviet system. Take, for example, this memorandum that Yakolev wrote secretly to Gorbachev at the end of 1985. You can see on the priority of political development. He believes the Soviet Union really needs to change its political system in order to keep up with what modern times demand. You can see here he's arguing to invigorate the legislative side of the Soviet government. Because right now, of course, the legislature is really a nominal legislature that's crushed by the executive power. He's talking here about votes of confidence, a decisive strengthening of accountability on the part of the executive branch. He wants policy discussions to be real discussions, not just dry reports. Elections, he writes, should be not just a selection but a choice and, importantly, a choice among the best. Notice how he keeps finding quotes from Lenin that make these arguments seem like they're in tune with

the original communist inspiration. And notice here his argument on the Payoff: colossal increase in real responsibility for the masses, accountability, and mainly, a genuine engagement of the masses in the management of the affairs of the region, oblast, republic, and country. Transformation of local governments into genuine organs of power. And again, he renews the argument that for this you need glasnost, you need openness. Again, he finds a quote from Lenin, to affirm that value, thorough and timely information an unavoidable condition of the further democratization of public life. These are pretty radical views to be expressing secretly at the top of the communist government. But Yakovlev and that kind of agenda is only one of the tributaries to new thinking. Another really powerful tributary actually comes from people in the mainstream Soviet national security establishment. People like this man, Marshal Sergey Akhromeyev. Akhromeyev is an innovative, vigorous military thinker. He believes the Soviet military is going to have trouble keeping up with the American military unless it can adopt scientific and technical revolutions, innovate rapidly, show real agility. He thinks new thinking, and renewal, is also critical to the renewal of the Soviet military to keep it strong. So you see the converging agenda that Gorbachev pulls into his coalition for new thinking -not only more liberal-minded people like Yakovlev, but also people who believe that somehow the Soviet system needs to be rebooted in order to make it stronger in very traditional terms. It's that combination that gives Gorbachev vital domestic political momentum to carry forward his ideas about

new thinking in the late 1980s and open up a world of new possibilities. We'll explore what happened in that world next time. [BLANK_AUDIO]