Special for LewRockwell.com
Where did all the time go? Thirty
years ago this week the Berlin Wall fell. Then Soviet chairman Mikhail
Gorbachev freed the Baltic states and allowed divided Germany to reunite.
It was a geopolitical earthquake of historic proportions – and a major miracle
of our times.
The once mighty Soviet Union had become
exhausted by its long military/economic/political struggle to keep up with the
much wealthier United States and its rich allies. Moscow had 40,000
tanks, but its economic infrastructure, crippled by Marxist ideology, was an
empty shell.
A senior KGB general in Moscow told me that, a decade earlier, the
renowned Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov had warned the Politburo that failure
by Soviet industry to account for deprecation to modernize and replace outdated
equipment would provoke a major crisis by 1990. This is exactly what
happened.
By
1990, Soviet industry was broken down, outdated or rusted away. The
Kremlin could no longer maintain the Soviet welfare state with its free
medicine and education, long holidays, vacation spas, early pensions and
unaffordable military spending. Arms alone may have accounted for over
40% of Moscow’s budget.
The
Soviet Empire came crashing down after a revolt by East Germans, followed by
Baltic peoples and central Europeans. Secretary Gorbachev, an idealistic
leader of high ethics, refused to use the Red Army to crush the rebellion.
KGB,
fed up with decrepit Communist misrule, abandoned the Party and moved to take
control. East Germany broke free of Moscow and joyously reunited with
West Germany, altering Europe’s balance of power to the displeasure of Britain
and France, Germany’s historic rivals.
According to the Russians, Moscow made
oral agreements with Washington, London and Paris that, in exchange for
allowing Germany to reunite and then join NATO, the Western powers vowed NOT to
extend the alliance into the former Communist states. They agreed to a
neutral buffer zone across Eastern Europe and the Baltics.
The West
lied. Precisely the opposite occurred. NATO, led by its sponsor,
the US, moved relentlessly east, using its economic and political clout to
dominate Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland (they were delighted), the Baltic
states, Bulgaria, Romania and the wreckage of former Yugoslavia. New NATO
bases in Romania and Bulgaria gave the US-run alliance much greater access to
the Mideast.
The Georgian government, led
by Gorbachev’s foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, a key player in
dismantling Communism, was ousted in a CIA-led ‘color revolution.’
Protests by bankrupt Russia over NATO’s
intrusion into Eastern Europe were scornfully dismissed by the West with ‘well,
you don’t have anything in writing to confirm your claims of a deal.’
True
enough, in the confusion of ‘fin de regime’ Moscow and its Russian diplomats
failed to get signed treaties. `We trusted the Western powers,’
came their pathetic reply. Meanwhile, US intelligence agencies were
looting Moscow of its military technology and bribing the corrupt
government. At times, Russia felt like an occupied nation.
The US poured vast sums of money into
Russia to shore up its pro-US oligarchs and robber barons, corrupting everyone
in their path. A bunch of drunken former Communist Party bigwigs
attempted a clownish coup, only to be blocked by the KGB and military.
Another serious drunk, Boris Yeltsin, was helped into power on a route paved with
US $100 bills by the West. It was Russia’s darkest hour.
KGB finally seized power by
outing Yeltsin and installing one of its brightest officers, Vladimir Putin.
He quickly began rebuilding Russia and cleaning Moscow’s Augean
Stables. Germany achieved another miracle by its successful reunification
with former East Germany.
I
walked through the deserted main building of East Germany’s Stasi secret police
and the abandoned HQ of the quarter million-strong Group of Soviet Forces in
Germany. Files were strewn on the floors; sheets of paper marked ‘Top
Secret’ blew about. It was spooky and miraculous.
I was
reminded of poet Shelley’s great poem Ozymandias:
“My
name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Eric S.
Margolis [send him
mail] is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new
book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the
Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.
Copyright © 2019 Eric Margolis
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/11/eric-margolis/how-we-betrayed-russia/