Before The age of the Donald by Dave Jaffe - Part Nine

      Before the Age of the Donald - Part Nine


     In 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.  A communist revolution overthrew the ruler of the country. Yet then the new communist rulers started killing each other. And the vast number of people living in the countryside rose in rebellion against their new rulers based in Afghanistan's capital city of Kabul.
     "The tribesmen living in Afghanistan outside Kabul," a friend of mine said who visited Afghanistan in the late 1970's, "are really tough people. The Soviets are in for a hell of a fight."
Soon the whole of Afghanistan was a war zone. The U.S. president Jimmy Carter and his foreign policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski saw an opportunity to hurt the Soviet Union. They started to funnel arms and guns into the hands of the rebellious tribesmen.
   Yet the Soviet invasion had restarted the Cold War. In the 1980 U.S. presidential election, the long time anti-communist Republican Ronald Reagan beat Carter. Reagan loathed the Soviet Union which he dubbed 'The Evil Empire'. "Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev," Reagan said when he visited the famous wall in West Berlin. Here East German police had shot dead hundreds of East German citizens when they tried to jump the wall and get into West Berlin.
      Reagan also presided over a massive U.S. arms military buildup. This placed great pressure on the Soviet Union. Yet  Mikhail Gorbachev now headed up the Soviet Union and to everyone's surprise he started to dismantle the repressive apparatus of the U.S.S.R. By the late 1980's it seemed that the Soviet Union was transitioning into a real democracy.
  Nearly all censorship was scrapped. People spoke out in the media about all the many flaws and faults they were living under. And soon the Eastern European satellites were in revolt. Communist ruled countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland and East Germany threw off their communist dictators and Gorbachev let it happen.
      "They're doing it their way," a Soviet spokesperson said, echoing Frank Sinatra's famous hit song called 'My Way'. Genuine elections were held in some republics in the U.S.S.R. and Boris Yeltsin took over as head of the republic of Russia in a fair contest. He unleashed a torrent of criticism at Mikhail Gorbachev who didn't respond with violence.
       Only in Romania was there real violence. Over 5,000 people died when Romania's dictator Nicolae Ceceascu sent his troops to crush protestors. The crowd then got hold of the dictator and  killed him and his wife. Democracy seemed to be flourishing in Russia and Eastern Europe.
     Yet this moment of reform didn't last too long. An ugly nationalism started to surface in some of the republics. The food distribution system started to fall apart. And hard line communists  were outraged at Gorbachev's liberalism. In 1991 a group of these people launched a coup and tried to restore the old days of top down rule. Boris Yeltsin stood up to their army and the coup failed. Then Yeltsin proclaimed the end of the U.S.S.R.
   The Soviet Union now splintered into 15 separate republics with the republic of Russia as the biggest one of them. All these republics became separate countries. The U.S.S.R. and communism were now history. "Socialism is finished," conservatives all over the world said as they rejoiced in the demise of the Soviet Union. And for now they were right.
      A few years before this, the Soviet Union withdrew its army from Afghanistan after killing 600,000 people. The Afghani tribes people had helped defeat the Soviet Union and bring it to an end. 1991 was truly an amazing year in the history of the 20th century.