[3] Additionally, Walter Laqueur notes that "Various articles that appeared in professional journals such as Problems of Communism and Survey dealt with the decay and the possible downfall of the Soviet regime.
Former Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner in 1991 wrote in the US Journal Foreign Affairs, "We should not gloss over the enormity of this failure to forecast the magnitude of the Soviet crisis .
Yet I never heard a suggestion from the CIA, or the intelligence arms of the departments of Defense or State, that numerous Soviets recognized a growing, systemic economic problem.
And what use can the director in 1989 derive from knowledge of the prices of 1949?One of the founders of the USSR, later expelled by Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky devoted much of his time in exile to the question of the Soviet Union's future.
Notwithstanding that the Soviet bureaucracy has gone far toward preparing a bourgeois restoration, the new regime would have to introduce in the matter of forms of property and methods of industry not a reform, but a social revolution.
If at the present time, notwithstanding the too obvious inconveniences of such an operation, it has considered it possible to introduce ranks and decorations, it must inevitably in future stages seek supports for itself in property relations.
"[18] Kennan later regretted the manner in which his theory was received and implemented, but it nevertheless became a core element of American strategy, which consisted of building a series of military alliances around the USSR.
They are far bigger and more pliant in the vast structure of a mighty empire than could ever have been conceived by Marx in his hovel... Human society will grow in many forms not comprehended by a party machine.
"[21] As an academic at Columbia University, Brzezinski wrote numerous books and articles that "took seriously the option of collapse", including Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics (1969) and Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era (1970).
Six of them, by Brzezinski himself, Robert Conquest, Merle Fainsod, Eugene Lyons, Giorgio Galli, and Isaac Don Levine, considered "collapse as a serious possibility although not immediately.
[24]In 1989, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet power throughout Eastern Europe, Brzezinski published The Grand Failure: The Birth and Decay of Communism in the Twentieth Century.
"[25] Ferenc Farkas de Kisbarnak, an exiled Hungarian general and leader of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), predicted the dissolution of the Soviet Union due to nationalist pressures.
At the conference, Farkas gave a speech entitled "The War Against Bolshevism and the Military Factors Represented by the Subjugated Nations" where he predicted the disintegration of the USSR along ethnic lines which would eventually leave European Russia isolated.
[32]In a posthumously published 1964 book entitled Cold Friday, Communist defector Whittaker Chambers predicted an eventual Soviet collapse beginning with a "satellite revolution" in Eastern Europe.
[42][43] Bernard Levin drew attention in 1992 to his prophetic article originally published in The Times in September 1977, in which an uncannily accurate prediction of the appearance of new faces in the Politburo was made, resulting in radical but peaceful political change.
In her 1978 book L'Empire éclaté, historian (and later member of the Académie française and the European Parliament) Hélène Carrère d'Encausse predicted that the Soviet Union's political legitimacy would be fatally strained by diverging fertility between its culturally Russian/Eastern European parts (dominant in government and industry but with plummeting birth rates) and its culturally Asian and/or Muslim parts (with growing birth rates but little representation in the established "gerontocracy").
In a talk on the Soviet threat that I heard him give in the 1980s at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, he reminded the audience of Machiavelli's observation in The Prince that 'all armed prophets have conquered and all unarmed ones failed.'
In 1980, the political scientist Robert M. Cutler published an article "Soviet Dissent under Khrushchev"[53] that concluded that the following events were likely: (1) that in the generational turnover of elites after Brezhnev died (which began when he died in 1982), the Soviet regime would seek to increase public participation (which began in 1985 via glasnost, after two more top gerontocrats had died); (2) that the Communist Party's rule would be challenged in Central Asia (which occurred in the 1986 rioting in Kazakhstan before the Baltic republics erupted); and (3) that Party leaders at the local level would go their own way if the Party did not give them a reason to remain loyal to the Moscow center (which occurred in all republics in the late 1980s, but most dramatically when the new RCP and the RSFSR sapped some of the power of the CPSU and the USSR in 1990–1991).
Milton Friedman and his wife Rose mentioned briefly in their book Free to Choose (1980) that "the collapse of communism and its replacement by a market system, seems unlikely, though as incurable optimists we do not rule it out completely."
He claimed this collapse was part of a long-term deception strategy designed to lull the West into a false sense of security, abolish all containment policies, and in time finally economically cripple and diplomatically isolate the United States.
In 1981, Andrew Greeley gave these predictions:[58]Before 1990 In 1985 German economist Werner Obst published a book entitled Der Rote Stern verglüht.
[60] The Reagan administration used a perceived strength of the Soviet Union to justify a significant expansion of military spending according to David Arbel and Ran Edelist.
On March 3, 1983, President Reagan told the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida: "I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last—last pages even now are being written.
And that's why we must continue our efforts to strengthen NATO even as we move forward with our Zero-Option initiative in the negotiations on intermediate-range forces and our proposal for a one-third reduction in strategic ballistic missile warheads.
[citation needed] On 7 January 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, supreme leader of Iran, sent a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Soviet Union.
"[69]Seymour Martin Lipset and György Bence write: Given these judgments of the Soviet future made by political leaders and journalists, the question is why were they right and so many of our Sovietological colleagues wrong.
Reagan and Levin came from rightist backgrounds, and Moynihan, much like the leaders of the AFL–CIO, from a leftist anti-Stalinist social-democratic milieu, environments that disposed participants to believe the worst.
Most of the Sovietologists, on the other hand, were left-liberal in their politics, an orientation that undermined their capacity to accept the view that economic statism, planning, socialist incentives, would not work.
Brzezinski's 1969 collection, Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics demonstrates this point, of "the fourteen contributors...Two-thirds (four out of six) of those who foresaw a serious possibility of breakdown were, like Levin and Moynihan, nonacademics.
In the desire to emulate the successes of the natural scientists, whose judgments are "value free," politology (sic) and sociology have been progressively dehumanized, constructing model and relying on statistics (many of them falsified) and, in the process, losing contact with the subject of their inquiries—the messy, contradictory, unpredictable homo sapiens.