Sarah Paine — Why Russia Lost the Cold War

Sarah Paine opens with the familiar American claim that Ronald Reagan single-handedly defeated the Soviet Union, then tests it against competing explanations. Reagan expanded military spending, deployed missiles in Europe, funded anti-communist forces, increased naval patrols, and pursued the Strategic Defense Initiative. Yet the asymmetry in economic scale mattered: the United States, its NATO allies, and Japan together had an economy many times larger than the Soviet Union's. Paine cites estimates that Soviet defense spending was far higher than Western spending, with post-Cold War estimates reaching at least 40–50% of GNP and some calculations as high as 70% when related infrastructure is included. Soviet officials themselves described the arms race, the Afghanistan war, and fear of SDI as forces that intensified domestic strain. These accounts support the arms-race thesis, but they do not establish that Reagan alone caused the Soviet collapse.

Paine's counterarguments include developments that were not designed as direct attacks on Soviet power. The Helsinki Accords, which Moscow wanted in order to affirm postwar borders, included human-rights commitments insisted on by Western allies. Dissidents in the Eastern Bloc and activists in the West later used those commitments to challenge communist governments against their own promises. Carter's human-rights campaign also resonated with Soviet citizens, according to Gorbachev's translator, while Shevardnadze's questions about what made a country great reflect doubts inside the Soviet leadership. Another explanation emphasizes the Sino-Soviet split: Nixon's opening to China and Mao's outreach to the United States changed the strategic alignment, forcing Moscow to attend to a long, militarized border with China as well as Europe. Paine presents these as interacting pressures that later presidents built upon, rather than as a single decisive act.

A third account shifts attention from presidential decisions to military technology. Deterrence depended on a reliable second-strike capability: an opponent should expect retaliation after a first nuclear attack. Paine argues that U.S. submarine deployments threatened this balance because American submarines could target Soviet submarines in their protected waters, raising Soviet fears that their retaliatory force might be destroyed first. Soviet officials described the U.S. Navy as a central source of American strength and warned that they could not match its reach. This helps explain why submarine warfare and nuclear forces mattered to Soviet leaders, but the lecture frames it as one plausible explanation among several for why Moscow eventually accepted an end to the conflict.