FOLLOW-UP: THE FAILURE OF KHRUSHCHEV’S MORAL STRATEGY

In the comments section of Richards Brief post, Dan of tdaxp asked, in reference to my crticism of the assertion by Dr. Chet Richards that Afghanistan represented a ” proximate cause” of the Soviet Union’s collapse, that I explain further my contention that:

“Thirdly, Dr. Richards vastly overestimates the role of Afghanistan in provoking the Soviet collapse. While the war in Afghanistan certainly did not help matters for the Soviets, the cost of battling mujahedin was fractional compared to the vast sums the Soviets were spending as a percentage of GDP on military and state security services. Morally, the regime had crippled itself in the mod-1960’s when Brezhnev-Kosygin-Suslov reversed Khrushchev’s attempts to morally reconnect the regime with the Russian people and imposed a creeping ” neo-Stalinist” orthodoxy that became more sterile as the Politburo grew grayer. Afghanistan was a product of the Soviet leadership’s total moral isolation and the regime’s economic implosion, not the cause.”

In 4GW theory, a school of thought that draws deeply from the ideas of the late Colonel John Boyd, moral conflict is a more important (i.e. decisive) domain in which to orient strategy than the physical or mental. As DNI puts it on their website:

“The focus (Schwerpunkt) of the non-state player’s operations is to collapse the state morally, that is, to rob it of its will to continue the fight. What is new is that one of the states in question may be a distant superpower and the non-state participant a transnational, ideological group”

Now for some background in Soviet history to provide the context that explains why I think Dr. Richards has Afghanistan ” backwards” as a cause when it is really an effect of a preexisting moral collapse of Soviet power.

Nikita Sergeievitch Khrushchev is generally misunderstood by the Western public and not a few scholars. Most people recall Khrushchev as a dangerous buffoon who banged his shoe at the UN and blinked during the Cuban Missile Crisis that he recklessly provoked. This is, in my view, a serious misreading of a very ruthless Soviet politician; one who rose under Josef Stalin and succeeded him as ruler of the Soviet Union while supposedly better men like Kosior and Voznesensky went to unmarked graves.

Khrushchev came to power after Stalin had throroughly terrorized Soviet society for nearly thirty years, slaughtering some 20 to 61 million citizens along the way, the final figure depending on what kind of yardstick of moral responsibility one cares to use. After orchestrating the 1954 coup against Beria, Khrushchev was always more than simply primus inter pares but he never enjoyed Stalin’s undisputed power, instead checking his Presidium rivals through his dominance of the Central Committee of the CPSU and his support in the early years from the marshals of the Red Army. To understand Soviet foreign policy in the Khrushchev era one must realize that he was also manuvering against internal rivals – first Beria and Malenkvov, then Molotov and Kaganovich and finally Suslov, Kosygin and Brezhnev.

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