For one of the last times, the Soviet flag flies over the Kremlin at Red Square in Moscow, on Saturday night, December 21, 1991. The flag was replaced by the Russian flag on New Year's. (AP Photo/Gene Berman)
Robert Farley, National Interest: Did Russia Ever Have a Shot at Winning the Cold War?
Could the Soviets have won the Cold War? In retrospect, Soviet defeat seems overdetermined. The USSR suffered from a backwards economy, an unappealing political system, and unfortunate geography. But even into the 1980s, many Cold Warriors in the West worried that Red Victory was imminent.
We can think of Red Victory in two ways; first, if the fundamental rules of the competition between the United States and the USSR had operated differently, and second if Moscow and Washington had made different strategic decisions along the way.
Changing the Rules
The idea of socio-political “rules” that dictate how the world works runs counter to a lot of work in the social sciences. Still, certain social and political experiments initiated at the start of the Cold War ran aground on the shoals of social and human capacity. If we imagine the loosening of some of these “rules” then the Soviet and American experiments might have performed differently.
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WNU Editor: I never believed that the Soviet Union had a chance to win the Cold War .... nor did anyone else that I knew at the time in the Soviet Union. If there was a conventional war .... no invading army would succeed in conquering the Soviet Union .... that was universally believed in the Soviet Union (myself included). But the Cold War evolved into an economic and ideological conflict .... a conflict that President Reagan accelerated .... and one that I knew that the Soviet Union could not hope to win for the simple that at the time I was one of the few Soviet citizens who had the opportunity to really know what the West was all about .... its strengths and its resilience .... and not what the Soviet media was trying to portray. And when the lines of communication between the West and Russia opened up even further under Gorbachev .... when the people in the Soviet Union could finally compare their standard of living to those in the West .... I knew that the ideological battle would be lost. The only surprised that I had from the Cold war was at the end .... when I stood with my father in Red Square and we saw the Soviet flag brought down from the Kremlin, and the Russian flag put in its place. We both knew that the Soviet Union had to change ..... it is that we never thought it would happen so quickly.
