Since alternate realities of a sort have lately been in the headlines as we try to imagine an American history with Strom Thurmond as the 34th president, let me toss this question out for consideration: was the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 an unalloyed good from the standpoint of the world, or even from the standpoint of the USA?

Merely raising this question will be taken in certain quarters as prima facie evidence of communist sympathies, and this response will serve for some to exempt the issue from further consideration. For the benefit of this contingent, why not let the first two or three red-baiting posts serve for all the rest, conserving bandwidth?

I'm prepared to stipulate that through most of its brief history the USSR was difficult to love if you happened not to be Russian; difficult enough, indeed, if you were. If Academy Awards were issued annually for Most Egregious Twentieth Century Despot, Stalin would certainly have been a contender at awards time each year once he graduated from supporting player roles, and Lenin's rigor in the prosecution of his political objectives does not inspire admiration in most of us. Khruschev we can treat later; he was an extraordinarily complex and interesting character (I saw him briefly during his 1959 visit as his motorcade passed about two blocks from my house in suburban LA) whose ghost his successors never put to rest. Brezhnev was a gifted hack and his two successors neither lived long enough to place his stamp on a regime...and then came Gorbachev, who recognized that the regime was in trouble, and who set out to save it...

Suppose he had succeeded?

Hard to remember anymore, but in his time he was regarded as a political Houdini, balancing the various political factions in his country (which we on this end saw as Stalinistically monolithic decades after it had ceased being any such thing) as he attempted to shed the rigid Stalinist skin his society was pressing against. He's recognized today as instrumental in the USSR's demise ("an incompetent reformer and a masterful, but unintended revolutionary" as one analysis later put it), but what he hoped to achieve was the transformation of the Soviet Union into an entity that could achieve respectability in the global community.

Think of it: a USSR, probably still somewhat authoritarian (perhaps not terribly different in that respect from Putin's Russia, with which we don't seem to have much problem), largely intact (the Baltics may well have had to go, perhaps with some figleaf of confederation) but more nearly capable of maintaining tight control of the fissile materials within its borders, and shorn of its most messianic imperial pretensions (leave those to the professionals here in the US of A, comrades!). Might this entity, under the educated and cosmopolitan Gorbachev, not have been a more useful international citizen than the rump Russia that the erratic and alcoholic Boris Yeltsin yielded up to us?

Let's imagine, finally, that the survival of the USSR had somehow deprived us of the old regime's withdrawal from Afghanistan, where they were slaughtering Islamic fundamentalists in job lots. Might we assume that, were the Red Russians still fighting the good fight in that unhappy country, Osama bin Laden would have other opponents on his mind, greatly to the benefit of NYC commercial real estate holdings these latter years?

Last thought: Henry Kissinger, also in the news recently, used to be fond of saying that the old USSR *needed* us, and unconsciously knew it: that the country, on some subliminal level, feared its own expansionist proclivities, and relied on the USA to keep these in check. Looking at the regnant Bushamerica today, do you suppose there was another side to that equation?

cordially,

mmoffitt posts:

//I suspect that there are two groups who have suffered more than any other as a consequence of the demise of the USSR: the Russian people and the United States. Yes, the entire country. We are virtually rudderless without the Soviet Union.//

I agree. Speaking as a child of the cold war (b. 1952) I believe that the moral superiority of the USA (such as it was) in the postwar years absolutely relied on the existence of the USSR as a countervailing force: without them there's no one whose sins are dense enough to make our side of the bipolar moral seesaw rise toward the sky.

cordially,

You are perhaps a bit (only a bit) unjust here: the Sov regime in 1962 had had experience in living memory of the devastation of their land; America had to look back to the 1860s--vivid as those memories might be to the Trent Lott set. Khruschev had a visceral sense of the stakes that Kennedy lacked, although a miscalculation forty years ago would have resulted in consequences direr than the outer reaches of either man's memories. I speak as one who remembers the stripped supermarket shevles of 10/62.

cordially,

//Is a political vacuum filled by international criminal gangs and Islamic fundamentalists better than brutal dictatorships and the ever-present danger of nuclear holocaust?//

My point was, that is *not* the choice. Brezhnev's USSR was gone well before Gorbachev's USSR perished. Had Gorbachev succeeded in morphing the national entity he inherited into a civilized member of the international community--and remember that it's not to our moral advantage to regard the mere possession of genocidal-capable quantities of armaments as evidence of evil intent--would it not be preferable from the standpoint of *our* imperial maintenance of the status quo to have a fellow empire with a stake in the bipolar world?

cordially,

//The nuclear holocaust scenario was a given as long as the USA and USSR remained facing each other.//

Not necessarily. Had the USA and USSR the wit and will to arrive at a rapprochment forty years ago we could by now have carved up the so-called Third World (deprived of the opportunity to play one superpower against another) like the Christmas roast, and be feasting on its resources uncontested to this day. Absent that ruinous rivalry a dimestore Stalin like Saddam Hussein would never have been suffered to arise.

cordially,

But of course we need enemies!

And why not choose these from among the many populations who are weak enough for us to exploit but not strong enough (absent a lapse in our vigilance) to present a serious threat?

In other words, if one potential enemy has a zillion nuclear-tipped ICBMs and another can only muster, on a good day, half a dozen Boeing 757s, do you want to go for Door Number One or Door Number Two?

cordially,