“My name is Drago. I’m a fighter from the Soviet Union. I fight all my life and I never lose. soon I fight Rocky Balboa, and the world will see his defeat. Soon, the whole world will know my name.” – Rocky IV
Result of Soviet experiment to mix Lenin with a cat.
It was an autumn night. I was driving back to college after a weekend visit home. My car sped uphill as fast as it could – my foot pushed the gas pedal until it was flush with the floor and all 1800cc’s of General Motors® engine that I owned was working at peak capacity. The steep grade kept my car from going much over 70 mph, but that was breaking the law all the same. Thankfully, there was no place for a cop to hide, and if one did by chance catch my speed on the radar, he’d be more likely to congratulate me on being able to go that fast up the hill than give me a ticket.
The trees slid by, growing straight up even though the slope they grew on was steeply slanted. I looked up at the starry sky through the driver’s side window. The stars were everywhere. The cold, dry mountain air and utter lack of light pollution and haze made the night sky here confusing – how can you see a constellation when the sky is so filled with stars that no pattern can be found? The mountain pass also took me into a radio dead zone – not a single channel, AM or FM was available.
On a Sunday night, there was no other traffic. My headlights were the only lights within twenty miles – not even a lonely mountain cabin. And that’s when I noticed the glow from the north. A deep red glow, one like I’d never seen before spanned the entire northern horizon.
“Did they finally blow it all up?” I quickly hit the radio button to scan stations. The orange LED numbers sped endlessly by without finding a channel to fix on. I switched to AM. Again, spinning numbers, repeating back at the beginning. No signals. I pulled over at a wide spot in the road meant for truckers to put chains on when the pass was snow packed and icy. I got out and closed the door behind me.
The night was still, the only sound the pinging of contracting metal as the engine cooled. And the only light, outside of the stars, was that red glow from the north. I knew a major military installation was on the other side of that hill, maybe 75 miles to the north. One that would certainly be on the list for missiles coming over the pole if the Russians decided that it was time to play. Was this what a nuclear glow looked like?
For the next fifteen minutes I drove on, the radio searching in vain for a station. As quickly as I left the pass, the radio hit and grabbed a station. Nothing strange, nothing unusual – “the hits keep coming!” I breathed a sigh of relief and settled on the rock station. AC/DC©. Thunderstruck. That would work. The lights of the next town appeared as I followed the road. The next morning I read in the paper – “Northern Lights Visible Over Half the United States.”
Maybe one day communism will work . . . though rain dances have a better record.
Looking back, there is a tendency to think the Cold War was a farce, a fake war that the United States was destined to win since we were fighting against a bunch of fat vodka-swilling goofs in fur hats. That wasn’t what we felt at the time, as it seemed that the Soviets went from victory to victory, and communism kept spreading. We knew that we were caught up in a clash between economic systems, one that could change from taking turns feeding rifles and grenades to various flavors of rebels in countries that no one really cared about to full mobilization and launch of nuclear weapons faster than the Dominos® thirty minute delivery guarantee.
In addition to being a clash of ideology, the Cold War was also a clash of economic systems. Freedom was given a chance, not because of its efficiency and all of the awesome blue jeans, but because the war planners thought it would produce more. Even as free markets “wasted” money on consumer pursuits, they also gave people incentives to create more. The economy of the United States was an open book, and it was mainly flourishing, having survived both double digit interest rates and Barry Manilow.
The Soviet Union, however, didn’t share information with the world on its economy, except good news about Soviet technical triumphs. From the outside, the Soviet Union looked strong – exceptional world athletes at the Olympics, technical triumphs like the first satellite and the first man in orbit made the Soviets seem a technical machine that would destroy the West. There was the idea that the Soviets were ahead of us, technically, even though the first pocket calculator they produced was based on a Texas Instruments® calculator that they bought, gutted, and presented as their own.
Their fighter jets were, however, real. And very good. If their missiles weren’t accurate, they had thousands of them.
But what we didn’t see from the West was, despite the technical achievements and strong military, the Soviet Union was rotting inside. What caused the rot? You could argue corruption, you could argue a lot of things, but when it comes down to the true root cause, it’s simple. The Soviet system did not encourage individuals to greatness. It relied on central planning – the equivalent of having Congress describe what the economy should make, down to the smallest details. The Soviet Union collapsed. Slowly. Unlike the economies of the West, it couldn’t grow fast enough to fund a response to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), more commonly known as Star Wars.
And that was it. SDI was one more thing than the Soviets could cope with. The Soviet system collapsed like systems do – first at the edges in Eastern Europe, then finally at the core in Moscow. This slow collapse played out over more than a decade, and only really started with the Berlin wall coming down.
The biggest part of the Soviet Union ending was the most likely threat of the world ending all at once. With that ending, the West was cut adrift – it ceased to have an opponent in any real fashion. Without its opponent, in Solzhenitsyn’s speech to Harvard® (LINK), what the West really lost became evident. There’s a lot to this speech, more than one post or even two or three. I’ll probably revisit it again in time.
“. . . in early democracies, as in the American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice.”
In our struggle with and defeat of our Soviet enemy we’ve lost two things. We’ve lost who we are as a people. A generation ago it was clear to every American that your mere presence in America didn’t make you an American – much more was required. Now our division multiplies and it becomes apparent how “satisfaction of instincts or whims” has shattered us.
We’ve also lost any sense of purpose, a national goal worth achieving. It’s not that there’s not a lot to be done – there are plenty of goals left that are worthy of humanity to accomplish: interplanetary flight, immortality, understanding physics. But right now we can’t agree on anything.
In the end, if we can’t solve this, we’ll fragment. Thankfully, that will give us a whole new batch of enemies . . . .
