Early 1981: USSR Study Concludes Soviets are Losing Cold War

The Soviet Union’s intelligence directorate, the KGB, releases a classified study that concludes the USSR is losing the Cold War it has been waging for decades with the United States. In Soviet terminology, the “correlation of world forces” between the US and the USSR is turning in favor of the United States. This assessment is strikingly different from one conducted in 1971, when the USSR was seen as equivalent to the US in power and global influence, and the so-called “Brezhnev Doctrine” is seen as a counterpart to the US’s “Monroe Doctrine” in Latin America and the “Carter Doctrine” in the Persian Gulf, giving the USSR hegemony over much of Asia and Eastern Europe. Marxist doctrine presumed that the “correlation of forces” is scientifically based, and will lead inevitably to the triumph of communism over other competing political and social systems. But the last 10 years have not gone according to plan. The USSR is caught up in its own Vietnam-like quagmire in Afghanistan. Soviet gains in Indochina, Angola, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua are being countered by the US’s own expansionism, particularly in the Persian Gulf. Cuba, the Soviet foothold in the Western Hemisphere, is foundering economically and draining Soviet resources at an alarming rate. The Soviet-backed regimes in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua are battling against potent US-backed insurgencies. The US is backing human rights activists in Poland and the USSR itself. And the US populace is largely supportive of the Carter- and Reagan-led arms buildup (see Late 1979-1980 and Early 1981 and After). [Fischer, 3/19/2007]