But Nato wasn’t the only factor that exerted an impact on the collapse of the Soviet Union, was it?
Nikolai Patrushev:
During the cold war, a whole series of doctrines appeared in the west to justify this anti-Soviet political course. The author of one such doctrine was the American political scientist and statesman of Polish extraction, Zbigniew Brzezinski. He came up with what became known as the strategy of “weak points”, the crux of which lay in identifying the weaknesses of a potential adversary and turning them into serious problems. This strategy served to divert an opponent’s strength away from true confrontation with the US by forcing it to focus its resources on resolving its own mounting problem.
In the 1970s, Brzezinski adapted this to the Soviet Union and under former president Ronald Reagan, he became America’s most important politician in relation to our country. The US national security council was in charge of implementing the strategy, with the president at the helm. The CIA was responsible for identifying and pinpointing our weak points, as well as working out how to transform them into serious problems for the USSR.
It is worth remembering that the then-director of the CIA, William Casey, decided to bring in noted scholars, above all economists, but also specialists from the business world who had personal experience of fighting off competitors. In the course of extensive analytical work, the political, economic, ideological and other weak points of the USSR were defined and studied systematically.
Our country’s main weak point, the CIA found, was its economy. After detailed modelling, the American specialists discovered its weakest link, namely, the chronic dependence of the USSR’s budget on the export of hydrocarbons. They came up with a strategy for bankrupting the Soviet state by pursuing two interrelated goals: slashing the USSR’s income from foreign trade at the same time as increasing its expenditure on resolving externally-provoked problems.
Depressing world oil prices was seen as the main way of cutting the state’s income. This was achieved in the mid-1980s when, as a result of an agreement between the US and a range of oil-producing countries, a surplus of oil flooded onto the market and oil prices fell by a factor of four.
They increased the Soviet Union’s expenditure in a number of ways: moving away from a strategy of confronting the USSR in Afghanistan towards one of entangling it in the Afghan war; inciting acts of hostility to the government in Poland and other Socialist states with the aim of goading Moscow into spending more on stabilising Eastern Europe; stepping up the arms race by, among other things, bluffing over the Strategic Defense Initiative.
It must be said that the Americans achieved their aims. As a result of their actions, the USSR’s expenditure came to greatly exceed its income, provoking a deep economic crisis that spread to the spheres of politics and ideology. The Soviet leadership’s shortsighted attempts to retrieve the situation by accepting financial help from abroad gave Washington additional leverage over Moscow. “Invigorating” measures designed to liberalise the terms of foreign trade were proposed by the west and implemented by the IMF and the World Bank but, in the absence of a smooth transition from the former monopolistic system, they led to the final collapse of the economy.
The strategy of weak points, American experts believe, demonstrated that an economic cold war was far more effective than a hot war and was decisive in bringing about the liquidation of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact.
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