Sarah Paine

The Soviet economy was literally exhausted from this monstrous arms race, militarism, enemies with half the world.

That's his take.

And Gorbachev told the Central Committee, he said, look, we're encircled not by invisible armies, but by superior economies.

And he often told people living this way any longer is impossible.

So you can make a powerful argument.

It's the Soviet economy that lost the Cold War.

This gentleman, Alexis de Tocqueville, is very famous for writing a book about the last days of the French monarchy before the French Revolution overturned it.

He also wrote something about democracy in America, both excellent books.

But this one's come from the one about France, which Tocqueville observes, "...the most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform."

Russians, of all political persuasions, they agree on at least one thing, and that is that Gorbachev's role in how the Cold War turned out was pivotal, that he played a very essential part.

And Gorbachev made his decisions based on certain false assumptions.

One of them was the irreversible direction of history.

Gorbachev thought of history going always forward towards communism, never backwards to communism.

capitalism.

Of course, Eastern Europe took a U-turn, went straight back to capitalism.

And here is Leonid Shibashin, who is a senior person in the KGB, their intelligence office.

He said, the thought never occurred to the government that it's possible to withdraw from socialism.

And if you think about

both communist theory and how imperialism works in practice, usually the mother country is more developed than whatever all the colonies are, right?

Well, the Soviet Union was an inverted empire.