thousands of American troops from 1965 through 1975, is incomprehensible except in a Cold War context.
In the 1970s as well, many events were driven by the Cold War. U.S.-Soviet wrangling in the Middle East in October 1973, and even more the confrontations over Angola in 1975-1976 and Ethiopia in 1977-1978, were among the consequences. Soviet gains in the Third World in the 1970s, coming on the heels of the American defeat in Vietnam, were depicted by Soviet leaders as a “shift in the correlation of forces” that would increasingly favor Moscow. Many American officials and commentators voiced pessimism about the erosion of U.S. influence and the declining capacity of the United States to contain Soviet power.
In the late 1970s, U.S.-Soviet relations took a sharp turn for the worse. This trend was the product of a number of events, including human rights violations in the Soviet Union, domestic political maneuvering in the United States, tensions over Soviet gains in the Horn of Africa, NATO’s decision in December 1979 to station new nuclear missiles in Western Europe to offset the Soviet Union’s recent deployments of SS-20 missiles, and above all the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979. Acrimonious exchanges between the two sides intensified.
THE ENDGAME
The collapse of the U.S.-Soviet d?tente in the late 1970s left no doubt about the staying power of the Cold War. One of the reasons that Ronald Reagan won the U.S. presidency in 1980 is that he was perceived as a stronger leader at a time of heightened U.S.-Soviet antagonism. Although the renewed tensions of the early 1980s did not spark a crisis as intense as those in the early 1950s and early 1960s, the hostility between the two sides was acute, and the rhetoric became inflammatory enough to spark a brief war scare in 1983.
Even before Reagan was elected, the outbreak of a political and economic crisis in Poland in the summer of 1980, giving rise to the independent trade union known as “Solidarity,” created a potential flashpoint in U.S.-Soviet relations. The relentless demand of Soviet leaders that the Polish authorities crush Solidarity and all other “anti- socialist” elements, demonstrated once again the limits of what could be changed in Eastern Europe. Under continued pressure, the Polish leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, successfully imposed martial law in Poland in December 1981, arresting thousands of Solidarity activists and banning the organization. Jaruzelski’s “internal solution” precluded any test of Moscow’s restraint and helped prevent any further disruption in Soviet-East European relations over the next several years.
Even if the Polish crisis had never arisen, East-West tensions over numerous other matters would have increased sharply in the early 1980s. Recriminations about the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) in Europe, and the rise of antinuclear movements in Western Europe and the United States, dominated East-West relations in the early 1980s. The deployment of NATO’s missiles on schedule in late 1983 and 1984 helped defuse popular opposition in the West to the INF, but the episode highlighted the growing role of public opinion and mass movements in Cold War politics.
Much the same was true about the effect of an-tinuclear sentiment on the Reagan administration’s programs to modernize U.S. strategic nuclear forces and its subsequent plans to pursue the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). These efforts, and the rhetoric that surrounded them, sparked dismay not only among Western antinuclear activists, but also in Moscow. For a brief while, Soviet leaders even worried that the Reagan administration might be considering a surprise nuclear strike. In the United States, however, public pressure and the rise
COLLECTIVE FARM
of a nuclear freeze movement induced the Reagan administration to reconsider its earlier aversion to nuclear arms control. Although political uncertainty in Moscow in the first half of the 1980s made it difficult to resume arms control talks or to diminish bilateral tensions, the Reagan administration was far more intent on pursuing arms control by the mid-1980s than it had been earlier.
This change of heart in Washington, while important, was almost inconsequential compared to the extraordinary developments in Moscow in the latter half of the 1980s. The rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in March 1985 was soon followed by broad political reforms and a gradual reassessment of the basic premises of Soviet foreign policy. Over time, the new thinking in Soviet foreign policy became more radical. The test of Gorbachev’s approach came in 1989, when peaceful transformations in Poland and Hungary brought noncommunist rulers to power. Gorbachev not only tolerated, but actively encouraged this development. The orthodox communist regimes in East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania did their best to stave off the tide of reform, but a series of upheavals in October-December 1989 brought the downfall of the four orthodox regimes.
The remarkable series of events following Gorbachev’s ascendance, culminating in the largely peaceful revolutions of 1989, marked the true end of the Cold War. Soviet military power was still enormous in 1989, and in that sense the Soviet Union was still a superpower alongside the United States. However, Gorbachev and his aides did away with the other condition that was needed to sustain the Cold War: the ideological divide. By reassessing, recasting, and ultimately abandoning the core precepts of Marxism-Leninism, Gorbachev and his aides enabled changes to occur in Europe that eviscerated the Cold War structure. The Soviet leader’s decision to accept and even facilitate the peaceful transformation of Eastern Europe undid Stalin’s pernicious legacy. See also: ARMS CONTROL; CHINA, RELATIONS WITH; CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS; D?TENTE; KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH; KOREAN WAR; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH; UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH Cohen Warren I., and Tucker, Nancy Bernkopf, eds. (1994). Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World: American Foreign Policy, 1963-1968. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cold War International History Project Bulletin (1992-). Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Fursenko, Aleksandr, and Naftali, Timothy. (1997). “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964. New York: Norton. Gaddis, John Lewis. (1972). The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947. New York: Columbia University Press. Gaddis, John Lewis. (1982). Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy. New York: Oxford University Press. Haynes, John Earl Haynes, and Klehr, Harvey. (1999). Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hogan, Michael J. (1998). A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State. New York: Cambridge University Press. Holloway, David. (1994). Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Journal of Cold War Studies (quarterly, 1999-). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Leffler, Melvyn P. (1992). A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Naimark, Norman, and Gibianskii, Leonid, eds. (1997). The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Schmidt, Gust?v, ed. (2001). A History of NATO: The First Fifty Years, 3 vols. New York: Palgrave. Stokes, Gale. (1993). The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. New York: Oxford University Press. Taubman, William C. (2003). Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. New York: Norton. Thornton, Richard C. (2001). The Nixon-Kissinger Years: Reshaping America’s Foreign Policy, rev. ed. St. Paul: Paragon House.
MARK KRAMER
Andrew, Christopher M., and Mitrokhin, Vasili. (1999). The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. New York: Basic Books.
The collective farm (kolkhoz) was introduced in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s by Josef Stalin, who was implementing the controversial process
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Combine harvesters at Urozhai Collective Farm in Bashkortosan. © TASS/SOVFOTO of collectivization. The collective farm, along with the state farm (sovkhoz) and the private subsidiary sector, were the basic organizational arrangements for Soviet agricultural production, and survived, albeit with changes, through the end of the Soviet era.
The concept of a collective or cooperative model for the organization of production did not originate in the Soviet Union. However, during the 1920s there was discussion of and experimentation with varying approaches to cooperative farming differing largely in the nature of membership, the form of organization, and the internal rules governing production and distribution.
