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Abstract: "The fall of the [Soviet] empire," former Czech president Vaclav Havel wrote, "is an event on the same scale of historical importance as the fall of the Roman Empire." It is true that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev repudiated the Brezhnev Doctrine--that the Soviet Union will use force if necessary to ensure that a socialist state remains socialist--and in so doing undercut the Communist leaders and regimes of Eastern and Central Europe in the critical year of 1989. But why did Gorbachev abandon the Brezhnev Doctrine? One Western leader above all others forced the Soviets to give up the Brezhnev Doctrine and abandon the arms race, brought down the Berlin Wall, and ended the Cold War at the bargaining table and not on the battlefield: President Ronald Reagan.

Soviet Communism, the dark tyranny that controlled nearly 40 nations and was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 100 million victims during the 20th century, suddenly collapsed 20 years ago without a shot being fired.

In just two years--from 1989 to 1901--the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union disintegrated, and Marxism- Leninism was dumped unceremoniously on the ash heap of history. There was dancing in the street and champagne toasts on top of the Brandenburg Gate. And then most of the world got on with living without asking:

A decade ago, I edited a collection of essays by some of the world's leading authorities on Communism who suggested that a wide range of forces-- political, economic, strategic, and religious--along with the leadership of principled statesmen and brave dissidents brought about the collapse of Soviet Communism.

In my essay, I suggested that when Communist leaders in Eastern and Central Europe admitted they no longer believed in Communism, they dissolved the glue of ideology that had maintained their faade of power and authority.

I pointed out that the Communists failed, literally, to deliver the goods to the people. They promised bread but produced food shortages and rationing-- except for Party members and the nomenklatura. They promised the people land but delivered them into collectives. They promised peace but sent young men off to die in foreign wars in distant lands.

In this information age, I wrote, the Communists could not stop the mass media from sustaining and spreading the desire for freedom among the captive peoples. Far from being an impregnable fortress, Eastern and Central Europe was a Potemkin village easily penetrated by electronic messages of democracy and capitalism from the West.

Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser to President Carter, argued that Marxism-Leninism was an alien doctrine imposed by an imperial power culturally repugnant to the dominated peoples of Eastern and Central Europe. Disaffection was strongest in the cluster of states with the deepest cultural ties with Western Europe--East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary.

Harvard Professor of History Richard Pipes said there were incidental causes of the Soviet Union's dissolution like the invasion of Afghanistan, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and the vacillating personality of Mikhail Gorbachev. And there were more profound levels of causation like economic stagnation, the aspiration of national identities, and intellectual dissent. But the decisive catalyst, Pipes said, was the very nature of Communism, which was at one and the same time utopian and coercive.

The political philosopher Michael Novak discussed the long-term effect of atheism--a sine qua non of Communism--on the morale of people and their economic performance. Communism, he said, set out to destroy the "human capital" on which a free economy and a polity are based and in so doing sowed the seeds of its own destruction.

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Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism