It was 20 years ago this summer that the final disintegration of the Soviet Union rapidly unfolded. In June 1991, Boris Yeltsin was freely elected president of the Russian Republic, with Mikhail Gorbachev clinging to power atop the precarious USSR. In August, Communist hardliners attempted a dramatic coup against Gorbachev, prompting a stunning succession of declarations of independence by Soviet republics, with seven of them breaking away in August alone, and four more following through mid-December.
The writing was on the wall — not the Berlin Wall, which had collapsed two years earlier, but the graveyard of history, which would soon register the USSR as deceased. It was December 25, 1991, the day the West celebrates Christmas — a celebration the Communists had tried to ban — that Gorbachev announced his resignation, turning out the lights on an Evil Empire that had produced countless tens of millions of corpses.
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Historians debate the credit that goes to various players for that collapse, from Gorbachev to Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Lech Walesa, and Vaclav Havel, to name a few. These are the people who get books written about them. But there were many behind-the-scenes players who performed critical roles that have never seen the light of a historian’s word processor. Here I’d like to note one such player: Herb Meyer. Specifically, I’d like to highlight a fascinating memo Meyer wrote eight years before the Soviet collapse.
From 1981 to 1985, Meyer was special assistant to the director of central intelligence, Bill Casey, and vice chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. In the fall of 1983, he crafted a classified memo titled, “Why Is the World So Dangerous?” Addressed to Casey and the deputy director, John McMahon, it had a larger (though limited) audience within the intelligence community and the Reagan administration, including President Reagan himself. Later, it would earn Meyer the prestigious National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal. Even so, the memo has eluded historians, which is a shame. It ought to rank among the most remarkable documents of the Cold War.
Meyer began his eight-page memo of November 30, 1983, by describing a “new stage” that had opened in the struggle between the free world and the Soviet Union. It was a “direction favorable” to the United States. He listed positive changes in America that suddenly had the USSR “downbeat.” Not only was the U.S. economy “recovering,” but Meyer foresaw a “boom” ahead, “with the only argument” having to do with its “breadth and duration.”
Meyer listed seven signs of America’s surge before providing even more symptoms of Soviet decline — a decline that was unrecognized by most pundits and academic Sovietologists. His insights into what he saw as an imminent Soviet collapse were prescient. After 66 years of Communist rule, the USSR had “failed utterly to become a country,” with “not one major nationality group that is content with the present, Russian-controlled arrangement.” It was “hard to imagine how the world’s last empire can survive into the twenty-first century except under highly favorable conditions of economics and demographics — conditions that do not, and will not, exist.”
“The Soviet economy,” Meyer insisted, “is heading toward calamity.”
Meyer nailed not only the Soviet Union’s economy but also its “demographic nightmare.” Here, he was way ahead of the curve, reporting compelling information on Russian birthrates, which were in free-fall. He recorded an astounding figure: Russian women, “according to recent, highly credible research,” “average six abortions.”
As for the Soviet Bloc, Meyer didn’t miss that either. “The East European satellites are becoming more and more difficult to control,” he wrote, emphasizing that it wasn’t merely Poland that was in revolt. “[O]ther satellites may be closer to their own political boiling points than we realize.”
“In sum,” concluded Meyer, “time is not on the Soviet Union’s side.”
I joined the Army staff in 1981 and worked on industrial mobilization and economic anlysis projects for four years on active duty and some years as a consultant afterward. These duties included regular meetings with Central and Defense Intelligence Agency representatives. The CIA types were maddening. The DIA types less so.
Even though there were decades of history about Soviet decline, the CIA analysts remained adamant to the bitter end that the Soviets were getting stronger. Using open sources, it was easy to refute their supposed expertise. Even with the same sources as they, it was clear that their interpretations were almost always wrong.
One amusing story is that the CIA folks were convinced that the Russkies were building a factory to make tanks somewhere east of the Urals. When I pointed out that a multi-national trade delegation had toured the plant and reported that the largest hoist/crane capacity was only 5 tons, they refused to be convinced that this was just a small truck building facility. And, why locate a tank plant over there when the real threat was from Western Europe? The plant never did open BTW, because none of those foreigners wanted to buy those lousy machines anyway.
I read George Kennan's memo many times, and I disagreed with his post WWII strategy of containment. I think benign neglect would have worked much better and more quickly. If we hadn't given them all those grain shipments, people would have been more restless. If we didn't have diplomatic relations, there would have been fewer spies, like the Rosenbergs, to steal our secrets.
It would have been nice to read Herb Meyer's memo back in those days when I thought I was a voice in the wilderness.
In my sophomore History class at the University of South Carolina my professor told us the USSR would disintegrate. That was 1973. I guess he read Kennan
There was an article in The Atlantic in 1986, I believe, by the Georgetown University demographer Murray Feschbach (sp?) that also painted the deteriorating situation facing the USSR--he too cited the abortion statistics, although, as I recall by then the number had risen to 8 per child bearing woman. I spoke with the professor and was so struck by the soundness of his data and methodology that I came away convinced of the USSR's collapse. I wonder if the professor and Meyer knew each other and shared data and insights.
Handy is conflating two lines of analysis. Yes, Soviet economic decline was obvious, and CIA reported it (this is a matter of record). But, as Meyer himself notes, defense spending was increasing, and the Soviets were deploying new and upgraded weapons systems, i.e. "getting stronger." Meyer's conclusion that something had "to give" reflected CIA's analysis, which again is a matter of record.
Science fiction author Robert Heinlein did a tour of the USSR with his wife in 1960, two articles he wrote about it are in the collection "Expanded Universe", and in one he tells how his wife came to the conclusion that the Russians had a declining population.
The internal problems of the Soviet Union (including high abortion rates) were well known to anybody interested and not blinded by ideology (see for example the books by Viktor Suvorov) by the early 1980's, and the course towards collapse clear and obvious. I got a lot of abuse from left-wing students at university at the time for pointing it out to them.
Apart from anything else, it was a matter of simple maths. The combined population of NATO was something like twice that of the Warsaw Pact, and the combined GDP more than five times greater, and the growth rate higher. For the WP to keep military spending anything like on a par with NATO was an incredible strain, and one that could only get worse until either the Soviet leadership gave up (politically impossible) or the Soviet economy collapsed. Anybody could have worked this out, and it says something about the West's political elites that so few actually did.
Just want to take this opportunity to endorse Prof. Kengor's book "Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism".
Excellent read and all the ammunition you'll ever need to counter nitwits who insist Gorby deserves the credit or don't know it was Reagan who approved Stinger missiles in Afghanistan over the objections of many of his advisers.
I remember reading comments by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to the same effect shortly before Reagan was elected. It makes one wonder if the solutions to our present problems are also in the hands of a handful of people with a different way of seeing things.
The whole memo (linked above by Nick D) is well worth reading.
This got me thinking - who or what is the next superpower enemy of the US, and how will that struggle proceed? Or could the US fall as quickly as the USSR? The world never stays static. Empires rise and fall, sometimes very suddenly. I see 3 possibilities for a future superpower enemy - China, a third Caliphate, and a Europe transformed into an empire by the need for fiscal union during the debt crisis.
The population decline in Russia has slowed down. In fact there was a slight gain in 2009. Projections for 2050 are more like 125-145M rather than the 100M mentioned in the article.
In the early 80s, I was part of a small, wide-ranging Navy 'zero-based review' of the Soviet Navy in particular, expanding to include the Soviet Union in general (the Air Force was working on a similar project). As I worked through it, it became apparent to me that one of the key reasons we were engaged in the project was to overcome the inertia & kingdom-building (along with the attendant turf protection)that had developed in Naval Intelligence as well as other intelligence services with which we dealt.
One of our prize sources of that time was Murray Feshbach (qv 'jimnuzzo' above), who did phenomenal work in uncovering data about the Soviets, despite their careful attempts to conceal it. His conclusions were so valuable that even visitors from the Soviet embassy would seek him out to find information about their own nation that had been suppressed. Feshbach (& we) were primarily fighting the entrenched, mostly Ivy-league bureaucrats in the Establishment, with the worst examples being the CIA & State Department.
We too had the abortion data (probably from Feshbach) along with other pieces of the puzzle, but our small group was not tasked to develop a prognostication about the fate of the Soviet empire. We were able to enjoy some small (& some not-so-small, unintended) victories, & not without some cost, but it is galling to me to this day that our main adversaries were our own people.
So, yes, the information was there (as one can glean from the comments), but it is to Mr Meyer's great credit that he was not only able to arrive at a well-formulated conclusion, but that he overcame the deliberate obstacles & persevere despite the condescension & retrograde attacks of the Anointed.
