The truth about Reagan
From Alexander Nekrassov Sir: In many of the tributes to the former US President Ronald Reagan it was stressed that he had won the Cold War with the Soviet Union by forcing the Kremlin to accept that it would never be able to win the arms race with the US. It was also claimed that Reagan's 'star wars' programme forced the Soviet leadership to back down and eventually concede defeat that in turn resulted in the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union.
The truth of the matter is that the Soviet leaders never accepted that the star wars programme would work. Soviet experts were always adamant that a space-based anti-missile system could prevent only a limited nuclear strike but would never be able to deter an all-out nuclear attack.
The Soviet communist system had started to disintegrate long before President Reaan and Mikhail 'the Reformer' Gorbachev came to power. The erosion of communism began in the 1960s and gathered pace after that. The pressure for change was growing rapidly within the country, inspired in part by the stance of the West, and to a much greater degree by the incompetence of the Soviet leadership and its disastrous economic policies and ideological gimmicks.
At the beginning of the 1980s communism as an ideology and an economic system was technically dead in the Soviet Union.
Ronald Reagan may have been a great president, but his contribution to the fall of communism in the Soviet Union has been greatly exaggerated.
Alexander Nekrassov
Former adviser to the President of Russia, London NW5
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