Reply #65: The Soviet Union collapsed under its own bureaucratic weight [View All]

[LTR]

If any one person deserves credit for pushing the end along, it was Gorbachev.

Reagan didn't do shit. He was in the right place at the right time. In fact, the Cold War was at its peak in the early 80s (with incidents such as the Korean jet liner tragedy in '83), and things really got scary at times. The SU was pretty jittery at times because their leaders kept dropping like flies, ther were a few international incidents, Afghanistan was a pure boondoggle that was bankrupting them and Reagan was involved in a little sabre-rattling.

Diplomatically, Reagan got nothing done with Communist hard-liners like Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko. Gorbachev was a reformer, and was much more reasonable to work with. That made the job much easier.