Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "What REALLY Brought Down the USSR? - Forgotten History" video.
-
1
-
This video is in part poorly researched.
It is more than a bit rich to credit the collapse of the USSR to Reagan. The SDI was a minor factor. The collapse was almost entirely of the Soviets own making. The Soviet's oil revenue was seriously down, and corruption throughout the Brezhnev era was rampant - the Moscow Loop as Russians called it. Gorbachev proved unable to fix it and in the end gave up.
The collapse was due to things such as the AGAT. After decades following the policy, set in place by Stalin, of copying as best they could all sorts of American technology, they saw that America was producing personal computers (8-bit CP/M at that time) cheap enough to deploy to all schools and small businesses. The Russians realised that this could put them way behind in productivity and education, having until then implemented a very good education system. So they began a project to produce their own PC - a functional clone of the Apple II called the AGAT. It cost an immense sum to develop and cost several times per unit what an Apple II cost. Then, as large scale production of the AGAT, began, Apple launched the radically far better Macintosh. Kind of like struggling to produce a Model T Ford only to realise everybody else has the latest Toyota. Completely demoralising.
It was things like this: As their foreign minister Shevardnadze put it in a TV interview, the USSR had accumulated a sizable fraction of their population that had been in the West, as diplomats, scientists on international conferences, engineers doing post-grad courses in western universities (Shumovsky Programme), touring performing arts, etc etc - all spreading the word that life in the West really is better. Thus much of the population, from the top down, lost faith in communism. They had been fed for decades stories that the USSR would catch up and pass the USA, but eventually all knew it was just never going to happen.
1