In a mid-February afternoon in 1984, I was standing on Moscow’s Red Square, in sub-freezing temperature, contemplating the remarkably simple burial site of Soviet leader Yuri Andropov. Still empty, the freshly dug out plot lay at the foot of the Kremlin wall, not far from the Lenin mausoleum. Having replaced Brezhnev less than two years before, Andropov had just died. In the bitter Russian cold, I joined the rest of the world in wondering what the Kremlin would do next.
This was still the first presidential term of Ronald Reagan, America’s chief executive who had thought longer and more deeply about the nature of communism than any of his predecessors in the White House. It was Reagan, in his first presidential press conference in January 1981, who had refused to mince words on the Soviet challenge: Marxist-Leninists operated as if the “the only morality” was what “furthered their cause,” and they would commit “any crime, lie, cheat” to gain their final objective of world communism.
It is hard to compare the impact of political rhetoric from the predigital early 1980s with today’s era of instant social media and constant web-based news and commentary. But no American president had ever spoken so bluntly about the ruthless nature of the communist adversary, and Reagan’s comments caused an uproar. Reagan was heralding a new U.S. approach to Moscow that few, if any, Western leaders of that time, with the possible exception of Margaret Thatcher, would have dared to endorse.
While Reagan acknowledged Moscow’s formidable military power, he also focused on the underlying sickness in Soviet society. Reagan’s competition with Moscow was not just conventional balance of power maneuvering between powerful states. The American president was a pragmatic ideologue, and he was in a contest of ideas. Reagan intuited the internal contradictions of Marxism and appreciated how vulnerable, economically and philosophically, the Soviet Union was becoming.
The early 1980s were years of intense East-West ideological tension in no small measure because of President Reagan’s personal anti-communist convictions. Meanwhile, Cold War hot conflict flared from Central America to southern Africa to Afghanistan. Poland had endured almost three years of General Jaruzelski’s martial law. Across Western Europe, regular demonstrations of hundreds of thousands marched for unilateral disarmament and against nuclear weapons, particularly in the intense autumn of 1983 as NATO countries deployed American Pershing missiles to match Soviet SS-20s.
The irony is that Reagan himself wanted to do away with nuclear weapons and end the crazy Cold War policy of mutually assured destruction—appropriately known as MAD. As William Inboden has extensively documented in his insightful book, The Peacemaker, Reagan was a thoughtful, common-sense conservative, utterly appalled at the expert-accepted insanity of the MAD nuclear doctrine that ruled in both Washington and Moscow.
But the president, trying to pull American foreign policy out of the muddled late 1970s, also understood that the United States had lost the initiative against the Soviets and could regain it only through rearmament and military strength. Like most conservatives shaped by the 1930s, Reagan viewed national weakness in the face of a deadly adversary as a sure path to war. Peace through strength first required arming and later negotiating.
That is why for countless millions of dovish, U.S.-skeptical Western Europeans, in the early 1980s, the cause of the conflict was not the USSR, but that cowboy actor in the White House. The Soviet official media, TASS, piled right on: Reagan was a “liar,” in a “blind fury,” leading a foreign policy comparable to that “pursued by Hitler.”
Still masters of agit-prop, the KGB worked overtime in shaping the anti-U.S. public opinion in Western Europe. Assisting peace and disarmament activists, Soviet operatives poured vast resources into publications, speakers, churches, and massive rallies. Tapping into genuine public worry, the peace and anti-nuclear movement mobilized millions, dominating political dialogue everywhere. Public fear of nuclear conflict was so inflamed that many young Western European activists believed calling for peace also necessitated unilateral disarmament. It was the KGB’s last, finest hour.
The Soviets even offered young people in Western Europeans “goodwill visits” to the USSR, all expenses covered, to check out firsthand the land President Reagan had said was the “focus of evil in the modern world.” It was, in fact, the generosity of the Soviet taxpayer that financed my own personal goodwill visit to Moscow, where I would stroll around Red Square and stumble upon Andropov’s grave that cold afternoon in February 1984.
Studying in West Germany, I had joined many thousands of university students and other young people who boarded Aeroflot direct flights from West Berlin to Moscow on a week-long junket. Looking back today, it was remarkable how much latitude the Soviet handlers gave their young visitors. The ideologues running Soviet propaganda still believed, perhaps in another sign of the USSR’s accelerating decline, the winning attraction of their own socialist-man myths.
They lodged us in Moscow’s Hotel Ukraina and allowed us to move freely around the frozen city. Intourist offerings included the usual Russian museums, the Bolshoi, the GUM department store, and a host of peace meetings that offered fabulous Russian meals and flowing vodka. I remember intense pressure from sidewalk hustlers who bargained to buy my American jeans. The only strict requirement was our attendance at a KGB lecture on U.S. imperialism, which turned out to be about as subtle as a Three Stooges comedy skit.
Although most of the invitees were West German university students, among the hundreds packed into the massive hotel were Europeans of all nationalities, as well as Africans, Asians, South Americans and even a sprinkling of Americans. Of all the varied conversations among the youth, I recall most vividly, forty years later, the East Germans constantly complaining how boring their lives were.
The KGB had only conducted light vetting in selecting their visiting throng of foreign invitees. Some, like me, were committed anti-communists just curious about our enemies, but most of the Western Europeans were not so much pro-Soviet as they were U.S.-skeptical and hostile to Reagan’s policies. Frigidly cold Moscow winters do not spontaneously produce a Woodstock. For most, it was a time of defeatism, not idealism.
It was the good-natured, anti-communist Reagan who had the better handle on optimism in the otherwise cynical early 1980s. Citizen Reagan had first encountered the real nature of Marxism-Leninism when, as president of the Screen Actors Guild in the 1940s, he fought communist organizers in Hollywood. Communists knew the incalculable value of infiltrating and winning over America’s entertainment industry, and Reagan stood up to them, even carrying a pistol and waving off death threats.
As a politician, Reagan emerged in the 1960s, rejecting both the counterculture and Washington experts. The term “Deep State” was still two generations in the future, but Reagan did not hold back his outspoken criticism when he believed, which was often, that the federal government was taking the country down the wrong path.
In response to the upstart Reagan, the dominant media class and official Washington unleashed considerable rhetorical firepower, much of it now in undigitized archives that requires old-fashioned research to pull up. Younger conservatives in the United States, molded in the ongoing raucous era of Donald Trump, are often unaware of Reagan’s own brave record of rebellion and boat-rocking.
In the early 1980s, when Reagan was in the White House, his opponents in the U.S. and Europe were firmly opposed to his policies, and they hit back without mercy and with ruthless denunciations. Soviet TASS commentators did not have to invent anti-Reagan invective, they could just copy the abundant pejoratives put out in the Western press: “trigger-happy cowboy,” a “nitwit,” and “shallow, superficial, and frightening.”
Reagan’s long march to rejuvenate anti-communism in U.S. foreign affairs first gained momentum in the 1970s as he led the challenge to East-West détente. President Richard Nixon had been disgraced by Watergate, but he succeeded in establishing détente as foreign policy orthodoxy in official Washington. Finely orchestrated by Henry Kissinger, détente was based on finding accommodation with Moscow and implicitly acknowledging the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine: Soviet gains in the world were permanent.
There were, of course, other U.S. politicians, even Democrats such as Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who criticized the Nixon-Ford détente with Moscow. But no other national leader matched Reagan in his determination and vision in charting a new national-security strategy. No other senior politician invested so much in ending détente and remaking American military strength. Reagan knew that his was the most viable path to the promised land of no MAD and a changed USSR.
President Reagan’s greatest resource was not just his matchless use of the bully pulpit, but his willingness to endure the fierce personal criticism that counterattacked everything he said and did. Perhaps the high-water mark in the first term was Reagan’s 1982 speech to the British Parliament, where the president, in remarks he largely wrote himself, not only philosophically hammered the Soviet empire, but forecast its coming doom:
What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term—the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.
It is impossible to imagine any other anti-détente policymakers of that era, including Zbigniew Brzezinski or even the Iron Lady herself, staking their reputations with such a pronouncement. In taking that rhetoric to a skeptical Europe, in which Russian troops still stood on the Elbe, Reagan proved his unmatched mettle and deep wisdom.
Yet it was Reagan’s 1983 “Evil Empire” speech that truly put Reagan in a class alone:
I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written. I believe this because the source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual. And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow men.
The firestorm of reaction showed how unhinged—and historically wrong—his Western critics could be. Henry Steele Commager, the renowned liberal academic and historian, reflexively said that Reagan’s “evil empire” address was the “worst presidential speech in American history, and I’ve read them all.”
Commager only studied presidents; Ronald Reagan knew how to be a great one. Reagan’s anti-communist rhetoric reached millions in the Soviet eastern bloc and even disillusioned people within the USSR. As events would dramatically play out, it was President Reagan who had the far deeper insights on the movement of historical forces than Commager.
Against almost all the experts in his own administration, Reagan announced his bold Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. His allies criticized him, and his political opponents went ballistic. The New York Times proved again how wrong it can be:
By pressing ahead with a “Star Wars” missile defense, Mr. Reagan is forcing the arms race into outer space. Yet most scientists think it cannot possibly be practical till far into the 21st century. Committing to more than modest research is incredibly wasteful, as if President Wilson had vowed in 1919 to put a man in space.
How far off The New York Times was in understanding the impact of SDI on the Kremlin would only become apparent as researchers dug into the Soviet archives. In The Peacemaker, Inboden documents that the Soviet leadership was convinced that American technology would succeed in deploying SDI and remaking the strategic balance of power.
The Reagan administration would leave a mixed record in accomplishing many conservative goals, particularly on the domestic front, where the president would ultimately lose his battle against the constantly growing Washington Leviathan and federal debt. On the national-security stage, however, America’s 40th president won an historic victory for both the world and the international conservative cause in helping, without a hot war, to bury Soviet Marxism-Leninism.
Reagan’s personal steadfastness and bravery in the early 1980s made that achievement possible, in an incredible accomplishment that conservatives everywhere should celebrate each February when the cold winds blow.
