Sarah Paine – Why Russia Lost the Cold War
12/19/20251 hr 55 min
This is the final episode of the Sarah Paine lecture series, and it’s probably my favorite one. Sarah gives a “tour of the arguments” on what ultimately led to the Soviet Union’s collapse, diving into the role of the US, the Sino-Soviet border conflict, the oil bust, ethnic rebellions and even the Roman Catholic Church. As she points out, this is all particularly interesting as we find ourselves potentially at the beginning of another Cold War.
As we wrap up this lecture series, I want to take a moment to thank Sarah for doing this with me. It has been such a pleasure.
If you want more of her scholarship, I highly recommend checking out the books she’s written. You can find them here.
Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) – Did Reagan single-handedly win the Cold War?
(00:15:53) – Eastern Bloc uprisings & oil crisis
(00:30:37) – Gorbachev’s mistakes
(00:37:33) – German unification and NATO expansion
(00:48:31) – The Gulf War and the Cold War endgame
(00:56:10) – How central planning survived so long
(01:14:46) – Sarah’s life in the USSR in 1988
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSarah Paine· Guest0:00
(applause) Thank you for coming. It is, it's a treat to be with you and sharing all this stuff. Um, since we seem to be in a second Cold War, maybe it's a good time to revisit the last one, to see why it turned out the way it did and why the participants in it thought it turned out the way it did. So, I'm gonna pose the question: Why Russia lost the Cold War. And people have loads of different answers to that question, so this is gonna be a tour of the counterarguments. I'm gonna start with an answer that many Americans have, very simple one that's like, "Ronald Reagan single-handedly defeated the Soviet Union." So that's one possible answer. But then I'm gonna give you all kinds of counterarguments to that, and some of them are gonna be other external explanations of what others did to the Soviet Union, others are internal th- uh, ones of what the Soviet Union, the cards it didn't play particularly well, and then I've got some umbrella explanations. So that's my plan for this evening. The story that Ronald Reagan did it, well, here's a picture at the Reagan Ranch after the Cold War's over. You see the Gorbachevs and you see the Reagans, and they seem to be having a grand old time, which suggests there's something maybe off with that explanation. But anyway, the way, uh, the Ronald Reagan did at school is, Ronald Wegan, uh, did a massive military buildup, and that s- ... some would argue it bankrupted the Soviet Union. He was a man of words