Let's see... Abridged version follows!
The fall of the Eastern Bloc and the Warzaw pact and Soviet empire had exactly ZERO to do with Ronald Reagan, but I guess American's don't have much knowledge about the history of the Soviet Empire and it's internal turmoils, so let's se if we can set some of this straight.
The first thing we in the West have to understand, is that information and ideas moved around extremely slowly due to an incredible amount of snitches and police informants encouraged by the state to spy on everyone, your family and children even, and report any anti-Soviet "propaganda". The result of course, was a very closed society were it could take years for an idea to move between the various countries and muster enough traction to become a problem for the leadership. However, the Eastern Bloc was ripe with underground organizations, but what in the West would have taken a week to organize, took years.
So, let's look at the events that eventually lead up to the fall of the Soviet Empire. It took decades and needed many nails in the coffin before completed.
The first nail in the Soviet coffin came in 1956 in Hungary, see
the 1956 revolution shortly after followed by the
Poznan protests in Poland. 1956 was not a good year for the Soviet Empire, a short time after Khrushchev's "secret speech" of February 1956 were he denounced Stalin.
The idea brought forth during these two separate events slowly permeated the Eastern Bloc and in East Germany and specially in the divided Berlin, people migrated to the west in throves and the result is one that US is repeating today on it's Mexican border, they built the
Berlin Wall. This wall is probably one the biggest and most important reasons why the Soviet Empire fell.
The next major nail in the coffin came in 1968, a year that will for every one who lived through it, remain the year the world almost ended. It was a year with great turmoil in Europe, examplified by
The Prague Spring and the brave work by
Alexander Dubcek and the violent suppression by the Soviets. The morning the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, August 21st, my uncle was serving in the Norwegian military as an officer in the border patrol on the Soviet-Norwegian border, not far from
Kirkenes and they woke up to a view never seen before or later. On the Soviet side of the border, Soviet
T-64 tanks lined up with their turrets pointing toward Norway. I'm sad to say that quite a few Norwegian officers failed that day and ran. The border commander however was an old war tested veteran and all he did, was to pick up the direct line to his Soviet counter part and luckily, my uncle was present when the call was made (he was an army captain and serving directly under the border commander) and later have relied the event many times. When the Soviet border commander came on the line, the old Colonel said "I don't give a shit where you park your tanks, just don't point the gun at us!" and slammed the phone down. 10-15 minutes later, the turrets turned around and pointed inward toward the Soviet Union. It was a day that resulted in court martial for several Norwegian officers who left their duty.
In the 70's the Soviet Union went into a stagnation under
Leonid Brezhnev. This was a very quiet time, on the surface, but underneath, it boiled, it brewed and people suffered. Many of the Eastern Bloc countries went through a very oppressive and dire period in the 70's and it laid the solid foundation for the fall of the Soviet Empire.
Then the man who tipped the scale entered the scene in the late 70's and what an unassuming man he was, a burly figure with a huge handle bar mustache, a mere electrician, but he could electrify the masses in way no others have been able to behind the curtain and he did it in a ship yard on the coast of the Baltic sea, in the city of Gdansk, Poland and this unassuming man later received the Nobel Peace Prize for the part he played in bringing down the Soviet Empire, his name you ask?
Lech Walesa, did you really not know? The organization he and others built, the first independent union in the Eastern Bloc,
Solidarity, became a symbol of hope.
The rot from inside was prominent and when the people started to understand that they and not the state was in control, there was no turning back. Add to the problems for the Soviets, the financial burden of the war in Afghanistan combined with an internal decay in every area, combined with uncertainty after the death of Brezhnev and the quick succession of several General Secretaries ending up with another unassuming man taking the reigns, a man with vision for the future of the Soviet Union and the future he saw was not a communistic future but a more social democratic future and he understood that change was needed (sounds familiar?), make room for
Mikhail Gorbachev and he immediately after taking offices, introduced four new concepts to the Soviets,
Glasnost (openness),
Perestroika (restructuring),
Demokratizatsiya (democratization) and
Uskoreniye (acceleration). The four cornerstones of his new politics became the foundation the fall of the Soviet empire finally rested upon.
Ronald Reagan just happened to be US president when Gorbi entered the stage and the rest is history as they say. I spent my birthday in 1989 in Berlin, chipping away at the Wall. It was my most emotional birthday ever.