No greater nonsense will accompany Ronald Reagan to his grave than the idea
that he brought down the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War.
Among the many causes of Soviet collapse two words stand out, and they aren't
Ronald Reagan.
They are rock and radiation.
The GOP military's 1980s attempt to "spend the Soviets into oblivion"
certainly feathered the nests of the defense contractors who contributed to Reagan's
campaigns here, and who still fatten George W. Bush. Lockheed-Martin,
Halliburton and an unholy host of GOP insiders have scored billions in profits from
Iran-Contra to Star Wars to Desert Storm to Iraq.
But these were not the people who brought down the Kremlin. If anything,
they prolonged Soviet rule with the unifying threat of apocalyptic attack.
No, it was rock & roll that wrecked the USSR. From the late 1960s on, the
steady beat of the Beatles and Motown, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, shattered
Stalinism at its stodgy core.
Precisely the things most hated by the Reagan's rightist culture warriors
here eroded and helped dissolve the old-time Soviet culture there. Beamed in by
radio, smuggled in on records and tapes, the "youth music" was unstoppable.
When Mikhail Gorbachev announced Perestroika, it was at least in partial
response to the irresistible subversion of the western counterculture. Rock and
roll was doing to the remnants of Stalin's Russia what it had already done to
Eisenhower's America.
The final blow came not from Ronald Reagan's beloved nuclear weapons, but
from the Soviets' own Three Mile Island.
After Chernobyl Unit Four exploded on April 26, 1986, Swedish radiation
monitors detected huge clouds of radiation pouring out of the Ukraine. Gorbachev
lied about it. Critical days passed before his "open" regime acknowledged the
catastrophe.
As apocalyptic radiation poured over their land and into their bodies,
millions of Soviet citizens were infuriated to learn from sources outside their
country how horrific the disaster really was---and that their lives were in
genuine danger. Cancer, birth defects, stillbirths and more soared out of control.
Gorbachev's credibility was forever shattered.
Soon a staggering 800,000 draftees---"liquidators"--- were forced into deadly
manual clean-up at the reactor site. The horrific maelstrom of resulting disease fed a fierce
organization parallel to the US's Vietnam Vets Against the War that remains an
uncompromising political force throughout the former Soviet Union.
With the fury aimed at Gorbachev came devastating economic fallout. Untold
billions went to evacuate and quarantine the Chernobyl region. The costs are
still escalating. The danger of a renewed melt-down still boils beneath the
surface.
The epidemic of radiation-related diseases has also taken a huge
psychological toll, with countless evacuees and victims---many of them children---still in
pitiable condition.
Himself a pusher of atomic power since his "Death Valley Days" working for
General Electric, Reagan never mentioned the devastating impacts of Chernobyl.
He also never thanked the Beatles.
But a cultural revolution and a nuclear malfunction cracked the Kremlin's
core. Reagan's beloved Star Wars made his GOP buddies even richer. But it was
rock and radiation that finally did in the Soviets.
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HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is available at
www.harveywasserman.com. His is co-author (with Bob Fitrakis) of GEORGE W. BUSH VERSUS THE SUPERPOWER OF PEACE (
www.freepress.org)
