Victory over Communism in Context (1981)

2006

About Reagan's role in the end of the Cold War

Humanities Research, 2010

What is called here the 'Solidarity Decade' covers the developments between September 1980, the beginning of the mass, organised, peaceful and negotiated dismantling of communist domination in the Soviet Bloc, and September 1989, the formation of the first non-communist government in Eastern Europe, and the beginning of the 'contagious' systemic transformation that initiated the domino-like fall of communist regimes in the region and the gradual transition to what Holmes 1 labelled 'post-communism'.

1995

Three decades after Gorbachev's 1986 Glasnost campaign, the sudden death of the Soviet Union still continues to keep diplomatic historians busy with its momentous implications. The mutually excluding political realms of the Cold War forged a conservative American historical discourse, which perceived the Soviet Union as an evil empire. Existing biases against Moscow continued after the Soviet collapse and were conjured up in a new scholarly genre that might properly be termed as "the Reagan Victory School". The adherents of this school suggest that President Reagan's resolve and unsophisticated yet faithfully pragmatic foreign policy designs -the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in particular -became the major factor behind the Soviet Union's demise and America's "triumph" after the Cold War. Looking at several influential monographs on the subject, this paper seeks to demonstrate the well nuanced yet often mono-causal notions vocalized by American scholars of Cold War triumphalism.

An overview of the myriad circumstances that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the de facto victory of democracy over communism in the geopolitical arena.

end of communism

EAST [international edition], No. 12 (December 1956)

sarai.net

Contemporary European History