Merriest Christmas: 1991 and the End of the Soviet Union

(My Fleming.Foundation column)

(Please send to others…)

By John Seiler

Just like that, it was over. On Christmas Day 1991 at 7:32 pm Moscow time, the hammer-and-sickle red flag of the Soviet Union was lowered for the last time over the Kremlin. The tricolor Russian flag was raised. The murderous regime finally was over.

It was the culmination of a series of events over several years, including the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the freedom of the Eastern European “captive nations.” But the Soviet Union lived on, barely surviving on life support, still dangerous because it wielded an immense military force tipped by tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. It also kept pumping out the noxious Marxist ideology almost as much as U.S. universities do today.

But when the flag went down, so did the ideology that had murdered at least 100 million people worldwide, according to “The Black Book of Communism.” Moscow was Marxism Central. It spread the ideology throughout the world with propaganda and the sword. It now had repudiated its central beliefs, and cast itself with the free nations, its future unknown.

Until that point, I had spent my life fighting Soviet communism. I joined the U.S. Army in 1978 and learned Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey. In September 1979, I was posted to Hoechst, West Germany, a suburb of Frankfurt, in the 533 Combat Electronic Warfare Battalion. Our job in a war was to drive our trucks, equipped with special radios, out near the battlefield and listen to what the Red Army was doing. Assuming we weren’t blown up right away because modern military doctrine begins with blinding the enemy so he doesn’t know what you’re doing.

We also were sent to “field stations,” such as the giant one in Augsburg. But we also went on trips on mountains that looked into East Germany, where the massive Soviet forces were located. We would park our trucks and listen for a few days. The Army bought our food at local restaurants. Schnitzel und strudel.

One day, I was listening to a signal from a nuclear missile unit. For some reason it was unencrypted. I wrote down the coordinates of the target and looked it up on a map – paper in those days before small computers. It was on my location.

From then on, I had periodic nightmares of a nuclear bomb heading right for my nose, and woke. I’ve never had any other recurring nightmares or dreams.

The nightmares ended on Christmas Day 1991.

It’s too bad things didn’t turn out better in our relations with Russia. In 1991, President Bush, Secretary of State Jim Baker and others promised President Gorbachev NATO would be advanced “not one inch” eastward. President Clinton quickly broke that promise, bringing almost all the former East Bloc nations into NATO. Now the current kerfuffle with Moscow is over bringing in Ukraine, which will never happen.

The U.S. government under Clinton also sent over Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs to “reform” the newly freed Russian economy away from socialism. He let the infamous Russian “oligarchs” loot the place, causing a decade of misery, with male longevity declining to around 50 years of age.

I could go on about the folly of U.S. policy toward Russia since 1992. A country that wanted to be our friend, and easily could have been made an ally, was kicked with a jackboot when it was down.

I spent the first 36 of my 66 years fighting against Soviet communism. I was the hardest of the hard-core anti-communists. Only to see the fools in my government, few of whom ever saw military service, waste a good part of what was gained.

I think even those fools eventually will realize the problems with Russia can be eased and even solved through diplomacy, if only to use Russia as a counterweight to China. The current idiots so far only have pushed Moscow closer to Beijing. That’s the opposite of the Nixon-Kissinger policy of 50 years ago, which split them so they couldn’t gang up on us.

Russia also, as Solzhenitsyn predicted, amazingly has returned to Russian Orthodoxy. It’s a Christian country again. America still is a Christian country, too, despite 60 years of the government schools inculcating Soviet-style atheism in children, supposedly by being “neutral” on religion. There is no “neutrality” on religion in the schools. You either teach one religion or another, impose atheism – or abolish the government schools altogether (yay!).

Still, the events of 30 years ago remain as a shining day for freedom and peace. Despite the current nuclear sabre rattling, such as by the dunce Sen. Wicker of Mississippi, the nightmare of a bomb landing on my nose has not returned. But my nose is 30 years older.

John Seiler blogs at johnseiler.substack.com