Historian Paul Kengor on Ronald Reagan and the collapse of the USSR - Part II

Grove City College political scientist Paul Kengor writes about the history of the twentieth century and, in particular, the Cold War period.  One of his recent books examines the effect that Ronald Reagan had on the collapse of the Soviet Union.

After a book signing at the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, Kengor spoke with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about The Crusader:  Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.

What the Soviets called Reagan

The title of the book, "The Crusader," emerged from research Kengor did in the Soviet archives.

As Kengor was reading the Soviet documents, he explained, such as Pravda, Izvestia, and transcripts of a TV program called Studio 9 (“the Moscow version of 60 Minutes”), and memoirs of Soviet officials like Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, he discovered “they called Reagan ‘the crusader.’”

The Soviets, he said, “understood better than American liberal academics that Reagan, beginning in the 1950s, had signed up for groups like General Lucius Clay’s Crusade for Freedom [and] Dr. Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communist Crusade.”

Reagan himself, Kengor noted, “had been using that word.  He didn’t mean it in a religious sense, although Reagan was religiously inspired to undermine this viciously atheistic empire.  (As Gorbachev said, the Soviets pursued a war on religion.)  But Reagan meant the word crusade in the sense of crusade for freedom, a crusade to undermine” the USSR.

'Crosshairs of the crusader'

The now-declassified documents that Kengor used in his research were not kept hidden from the Soviets during the 1980s.

“They were classified at the time,” he explained, “but there was some leaking.  I think it might have been intentional leaks, to get out some of the NSDDs” into the Soviets’ conversation.

According to interviews released a few years ago, NSDD 75, which was written by Harvard Sovietologist Richard Pipes while he served on the staff of the National Security Council in the White House, was intentionally but only partially leaked.

“When the Soviets heard that that was out, they were apoplectic.  They wanted to find out, what’s in that document?  They badly wanted to know what was in that document because the Soviets knew that Reagan had drawn crosshairs on their empire.  They were in the crosshairs of the crusader,” Kengor said.

The Soviets, he continued, “were hungry to find out what specifically the Reagan administration was doing and they knew that Reagan was coming at them from multiple angles,” something that became clear to Kengor through interviews with former Soviet officials.

Critique of scholarship

Beyond the history analyzed in his book, Kengor said, he wanted to express a criticism about scholarship.

“I would tell young people, in particular,” he said, that “if you run into a liberal professor who denies that Reagan had anything to do with the Soviet Union [collapse], that professor needs to know that the Soviets disagree with him, that the Poles disagree with him, that the people behind the former Iron Curtain disagree with him.”

That professor, he pointed out, “needs to know he is in a very tiny minority and doesn’t have evidence for his assertions.”

Kengor offered the theory that “maybe that’s why they avoid the primary source documents.  They’re afraid that it will dispel a lot of their sacred cows about how Reagan allegedly had nothing to do with” the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

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