Tag: Gorbachev

Lessons from Soviet history: Could it happen here?

On By gyonas1 Comment

What if Trump had succeeded in overthrowing the election?

Former President Donald Trump apparently was totally dedicated to being declared the winner of the 2020 election, and he might have been successful if he had been able to persuade a number of members of our elected and appointed government organizations to go along with his plan. It is conceivable that the result would have been a rejection of the election results and the emergence of an unworkable form of government leading to political, social and economic chaos. The extreme forces on the liberal and conservative sides of the social and political spectrum might have launched a power struggle that could also involve military forces to enforce some sort of an interim government approach. It seems rather hard to believe that a world economic and military power with the ability to launch a nuclear war could totally lose control of its fundamental decision making and management abilities, but this would not have been the first time this has happened, and it would be useful to consider a little history lesson.

Some describe the Jan. 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol as an attempt to overthrow the government.

On Aug. 20, 1991, the Soviet government was preparing to sign a treaty that would have changed the relationship between the central government and the republics of the Soviet Union. The force behind this agreement was Mikhail Gorbachev, the man in charge, who along with a group of loyal followers wanted to change just about everything.  He was in the process of creating a new form of government that he had been working on since 1985, and his goal was an entirely new economic and military approach.

The 1991 Soviet coup d’état attempt, also known as the August Coup, was a failed attempt by hardliners of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party to forcibly seize control of the country from Mikhail Gorbachev, who was Soviet President and General Secretary of the Communist Party at the time.

Gorbachev envisioned a non-militaristic, non-autocratic, and globalistic liberal form of government driven by an entrepreneurial spirit like most of the rest of the world. He was convinced that the old Communist approach was doomed to failure. At the same time, he harbored the concept that he could preserve Communism in some form, but he was not too clear on that. He knew that the constant drain of funds to support all of the poor and gradually getting more poor republics would lead to inevitable failure of the government, and he was prepared to turn the dependent client states loose to fend for themselves. He had tried all sorts of approaches to turning around his country and one of his schemes was to end rampant alcoholism without considering that it was a major source of income to run the government, and this decision just added to the increasing economic woes.

The Soviet leader also was convinced that the military industrial complex was a major cause of economic disaster and he did everything he could do to derail attempts to spend increasing funds on defense in general and space weapons in particular. His goal was not only conventional disarmament, but also the elimination of all nuclear weapons. Strangely enough, there was at least one other person in the world that agreed with the nuclear part of his plan, and that was President Reagan, but that is a different story, so back to the overthrow.

A group of eight high-level Soviet officials put together a plan to take over the government and put a stop to any treaty that would lead to the end of the Soviet Union. They waited until it was almost too late and they did not really think through how exactly they would manage to run their new government. Nevertheless, with only two days to go, five of them showed up at Gorbachev’s vacation home in Crimea. Their plan was to convince him to sign an emergency declaration that put would put them in charge of the government.

One of the most important participants in this coup was Oleg Baklanov, the head of the military industrial complex and a man dedicated to restoring the global space leadership that they had demonstrated beginning with Sputknik in 1957. He believed that the Soviets had managed to let the Americans take over with the latest move being Reagan’s SDI that he believed could easily be handled if he were allowed to get on with running the show.  He was convinced that he knew how to win this latest form of technical competition and his approach was to develop and deploy their own death star, called Polyus, which would control space. The only issue was that Polyus had crashed into the Pacific after its launch in 1987, but only because of a minor software glitch, and Baklanov was not ready to give up on his engineer’s technology approach to problem-solving.

Baklanov had a running battle with Gorbachev and tried to persuade Gorbachev that he really had a better idea based on the superior scientific and engineering capabilities of the military R&D branches of the government. After many attempts to get his way, he concluded that Gorbachev cared little and barely understood the miracles of Soviet technology and was driven by his own political philosophy. Baklanov thought at least half of the military technical advantages were already devoted to the non-military needs and were best managed by stepping up military spending rather than somehow turning over the economy to a free and non-governmental form of big business.

When the coup plotters confronted Gorbachev, Baklanov later claimed in his oral history that Gorbachev “was dressed in a sweater although it was hot outside … to emphasize that he really was sick … became rather emotional and I saw a dull man thinking in a dull way about himself, rather than the matter at hand … and said he would sign the treaty even if they cut off my legs.”

The plotters left without any agreement and headed back to Moscow to “make arrangements” including getting Boris Yeltsin to go along with their plan, but that was not to be.  When Gorbachev returned to Moscow few days later still wearing that same sweater, he found that the coup plotters had ordered tanks and military to take over and enforce their coup.  Yeltsin then called on the public to strike and protest the coup. Yeltsin climbed on a tank, and with a megaphone and demanded the coup be defeated, and when the military refused to fire on the crowds, the coup was essentially over in three days and the plotters were arrested. Some spent time in prison but were released after an amnesty was declared in 1994. Gorbachev’s chief military adviser who had signed up with the coup committed suicide when it failed. An active coup plotter, Boris Pugo, along with his wife also took their own lives.

Gorbachev agreed with Yeltsin to abolish the Communist party, and in December the hammer and sickle flag was lowered, but then what? What was the outcome of a new freedom with lots of influence from the West? It is reported that without the law and order of the old government, the mafia that had been created when Gorbachev got rid of vodka took over and a new approach to big business emerged with oligarchs in charge.

Russian President Vladimer Putin poses for photos riding on horseback while shirtless.

Violent uprisings were not uncommon, and the government went into a multiyear economic and social collapse. Then Putin, with his KGB backing, rode shirtless on his horse to the rescue in 1999 by restoring law and order and increasing autocratic control. Putin believed that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” His attempt to regain control of the Soviet republics has resulted in today’s rapidly evolving war in the Ukraine, and a renewal of the conflict between the West and Russia with consequences yet to be determined.

So what did I conclude from all of this history story? Certainly we are not Russia, and we have resilient institutions that work well under stress.  Not surprisingly, I believe an orderly transition of power that reflects the will of the governed is a rather good idea. When the rule of law and reasonable people make the transition decisions in a cooperative manner, it is better than a disorderly overthrow of the government. Had it happened here, we might have seen the lessons of Soviet history revisited on our own shores.

Reagan and Gorabchev leaving Reykjavik

1986 and 2020, Part Two

On By gyonas5 Comments

The new actor on the Soviet scene in 1986 was Mikhail Gorbachev. After the deaths of three Soviet leaders since 1982, Gorbachev became the new head of the Soviet Union in 1985. He immediately found that he was faced with managing total economic collapse and political chaos in competition with the most powerful Soviet force, their own military industrial complex. He seemed to be an idealist committed to open communication and restructuring and faced a never-ending collection of problems. He pressed on nevertheless with enthusiasm, optimism and charm.

One of Gorbachev’s first initiatives was to wage war against alcohol, which he believed was one of the reasons for the failure of the Soviet economy, but he only managed to cut off a major source of government income from the Soviet vodka monopoly. The alcohol kept coming, however, and the illegal vodka income then went instead to their own version of the Mafia. Soviet historian Vladimir Zubock described these events writing, “The Soviet socialist empire, perhaps the strangest empire in modern history committed suicide.”

Well, maybe Soviet suicide is a bit of an overstatement, but there really were enough serious troubles facing Gorbachev to cause at least a feeling of overwhelming depression. In April, the Chernobyl reactor disaster, the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, causing more than 300,000 people to be resettled, threw Gorbachev into a desperate lack of trust in Soviet technology. And there is more to this sad story. In September, the pride of the limited Soviet fleet of luxury cruise ships collided with a freighter in clear weather and hundreds of wealthy Soviet citizens died leading to a nation overcome by “pessimism and foreboding.”

Some people believe the superstition that bad things come in threes. The third blow struck in 1986 and it may have been the worst. The event was the sinking of a Soviet nuclear submarine, but that was not the first time that such a disaster happened. In 1968, the K129 nuclear missile carrying submarine sank to a depth of 5000 meters in the Pacific 2700 kilometers from Hawaii. After the Soviets failed to locate it, a U.S. ship found it, and an enormous, technically fantastic and very secret CIA program called Azorian tried to lift it, but it broke apart on the way up and it was never revealed publicly what we recovered. When remembering the history, it is easy to confuse 1968 with 1986 and K129 with K219, but let’s try to get it straight.

In October 1986, the K219, one of their ballistic missile submarine with 34 nuclear warheads, sank within 1000 kilometers of Bermuda, but this time there was no problem finding it since a trailing U.S. submarine was watching the disaster. At first, the Soviets blamed the disaster on a collision with our submarine Augusta, and I can imagine that Gorbachev, who was actively engaged in negotiating with Reagan to put a stop to any more high-tech competition with the U.S., was stunned when he got the message that the sub was on fire. I imagine he felt a sense of desperation and had given up on competing with the United States. In a bit of additional mystery, a Soviet deep water research probe found later that the sub was “sitting upright on the ocean floor with empty missile tubes dangling open.”

Gorbachev was in no mood to compete and was even prepared to give up all of the Soviet nuclear weapons. His only condition for mutual abolition of nukes was our agreement to “10 years of research in the laboratories within the treaty” and he made it clear ‘it’s laboratory or goodbye.” I think he did not want the Soviet “death star” to be launched and he knew he could not put a stop to his own aerospace industry enthusiasts creating a new weapons race unless we first agreed to keep our program out of space. So my argument not accepted by the real experts, is that he was more worried about the SDIsky than the SDI.

Maybe he thought he could turn around the course of economic and technological history in 10 years, but Reagan would not go along, even though he hated nukes. The problem was that he believed we were ready and able to deploy defenses, which of course was false. In my opinion, the Soviet Union was on the way out even without our “help” because of its moral decay and mismanaged economic and political institutions. A nuclear agreement might have helped us deal with the global spread of nuclear weapons and maybe even contributed to an economic turnaround for the failing Soviets. Instead, the world still has more than enough nukes to go around, including North Korea. In addition, there is the growing capability of Iranian program, even without their “top nuclear scientist.” Well, some things don’t change and space-based lasers are still far off in the future.

But maybe there are lessons to be learned from the events of 2020 and we won’t have to make the Soviet mistakes. The world has seen plenty of surprising and horrible recent catastrophes, but there is reason. I had hoped that our new United States president would not be faced with the same sort of economic, political and social mess that confronted Gorbachev only 34 years ago. Maybe, I thought, we can solve some of our own economic and public health problems, and figure out a way to just “learn to get along” both within our borders and with our adversaries in other countries. That is, before Jan. 6, 2021, in the words of FDR, “a day which will live in infamy” that has exposed our own socio-political frailty.

My view was even becoming optimistic after the presidential election, until I realized that many of the governance problems that Gorbachev faced, are looming in our own future. Possibly we cannot avoid the seemingly inevitable repeat of wide spread self-destructive decision making of nations under stress. It seems that a nation cannot easily avoid reacting poorly to its history of traumatic events, but I hope we have learned our lessons.

Oh, one more thing about history. And that is what happened a few months before Beckurts was murdered. He and I had a very nice meeting to talk about German involvement in the SDI. My goal was to get him to agree to a contract that would support our program. Over lunch in an elegant German restaurant, he explained to me in no uncertain terms that his company did not support the SDI and had no intention of participating.

Voltaire

Are you smoking something?

On By gyonas7 Comments

One of the readers of my latest couple of blog posts asked me if I was smoking funny cigarettes. I don’t think he appreciated my satire. I really did not know I was in the satire business, until one of the readers of my book, “Death Rays and Delusions,” commented that I was trying to be another Voltaire. Being an engineer, I thought that was an automobile model, (perhaps a Chevy), so I looked it up and found Voltaire was a 16th century philosopher who poked fun at political leaders using a style characterized by wild exaggeration, irony and subtle humor. In my recent blog posts, I poked fun at the obviously silly idea of a new branch of the military, the space force. I knew enough about the subject that I figured the Air Force already had the job well in hand so I opined that one financial benefit would be the use of the surplus uniforms left over from the Star Trek TV series. My other post dealt with the concept that we could dominate space control through investing in new and revolutionary technologies.

In my book, I described the outrageous notions that we could defend ourselves against the threat of nuclear tipped ballistic missiles if we only had to deploy hundreds of giant space-based lasers, or thousands of tiny missiles, or maybe just a few orbiting nuclear weapons to create beams of x rays. When I was the chief scientist of the SDI program, I enjoyed the satirical humor in the “Bloom County “cartoons where I was described as a plump penguin who argued, “Why fer crying out loud…. research physicists need Porches too.”

Maybe the message of my book was lost in the satire, but my point was that decisions were being driven by the tech sales forces of the military industrial complex. They were extremely successful in extracting large sums for unlikely programs, that turned out to be the heart of an elaborate mind game with the Soviets.

The policy decision makers on both sides had no clue about the reality of the technology, but they were mostly motivated by their own philosophical, strategic and economic concepts. Gorbachev hated nukes, the arms race and the impending financial collapse of the Soviet empire. Reagan hated nukes, believed the Soviet Union was on the edge of financial extinction and was willing to make a deal that even shared our technology with the Soviets.

As it turns out, scientists and engineers were involved, but were only along for the ride. Many of them believed that their next miracle would give us the winning move.

It smells of higher politics

On By gyonas1 Comment

The Soviet military fascination with death ray weapons dates back to the 1920s with the publication of the science fiction novel, “Garin’s Death Ray.” The Alexi Tolstoi Garin Death Raystory about the genius inventor Garin described a weapon with pinpoint, but still incredibly destructive, capability. This prophetic novel not only predated by decades the invention of the laser, but it also quoted Garin’s detractors as claiming, “This invention smells of higher politics.”

Two of the three Nobel Prize winners in 1961 for the invention of the laser were Russians and they were instrumental in launching an enormous laser weapon program. Eventually the program struggled with many failures and was only revived in response to Reagan’s Star Wars program in 1984. This effort became a crash program to launch the Soviet Union’s laser Death Star.

On May 15, 1985, the Soviet Union for the first time tested the world’s biggest space Polyuslaunch vehicle Energia. The payload for the launch was the 80 ton Polyus experiment dedicated to the development of a space control laser weapon. Polyus was a giant risk that was characteristic of the Soviet experimental technology philosophy of try it, learn from failures, fix it and try again. The huge gamble had been in the works as a multiyear high power laser program that was already underway but became a crash program in response to Reagan’s SDI initiative.  Instead of trying to compete with their own space-based missile defense program, they decided that laser-based space control would be the most logical path to defeat the SDI. Gorbachev knew that even a minimally successful deployment and test would lead to a space weapon race with the United States. He knew that his failing economy and inferior computer and electronics technology would certainly just accelerate the Soviet path to failure. Fortunately Polyus failed to orbit because of a software problem, and a real star war was avoided.