Reply #5: The problem is that many think simplisticly.

[Igel]

"One must make it as simple as possible for the students."
"Yes, but one must not make it simpler than possible."

Reagan helped; he forced military production to increase, he made the USSR's overseas adventures harder to sustain and more expensive, he helped make Afghanistan a hell-hole, and he forced a fair amount of openness. The USSR would have collapsed, whatever the CIA maintained, but he pushed it. He didn't make it fall. He helped.

Just as Carter helped bring it down. And Nixon (we'll skip Ford). And the Helsinki Committee. And even Russian dissident writers.

Now, Gaidar was pro-Gorbachev. And he's written a lot about Soviet and Russian economic history. It's good that he's written his book (kniga.com doesn't have it, and Panorama of Russia has it out of stock, but I'll find a copy).

A student recently asked me about Izvestiya and Pravda when we were going over glasnost' in class (a literature class, no less). I had said that the papers no longer beamed with joy at the production figures for tractors and grain, and had started to report airplane crashes and suicide rates. "But didn't people know that things weren't all that great?" one student asked. "Look, you have 10 million farms and they're feeling triumphant at producing 50k tractors, and overjoyed when a farm with 5000 acres gets its first tractor. Do the math. Russians did."