In Europe

however, drew exactly the opposite conclusion: this level of defence spending was a clear indication that Moscow was still aiming for world domination. As late as October 1988, three months after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and announced his moderate revolution of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction), CIA Soviet specialist Robert Gates warned: ‘The dictatorship of the Communist Party remains unchallenged and unassailable … A long period of rivalry with the Soviet Union still lies before us.’
    At that point, the military and nuclear spending of the Soviet Union was no less than five times higher than officially admitted, around thirty per cent of GNP. At the same time, almost no modernisation was taking place: while the digital revolution of the 1980s was in full swing in the West, the communist world had almost no computers. The heavy industry set up by Stalin continued to belch forth vast quantities of chemicals, steel, tanks, trucks and aircraft, while the country's production of common consumer goods lagged far behind. A considerable share of Russia's agricultural production came from the kitchen gardens of farmers and workers: half the country's food was being grown on three per cent of its arable soil.
    In 1989, the spending deficit of the joint Eastern European states was four times what it had been in 1975. The Soviet Union was governed by the elderly: the average age of the members of the Politburo was seventy.
    At first these problems were camouflaged by successes in foreign policy (new Soviet-oriented regimes in Vietnam and Angola) and an economic crisis in the West. In addition, the ailing Soviet economy was propped up for years by the billions it received in revenues from oil exports. But after 1979 oil prices began to drop and the Soviet Union entered into a hopeless war in Afghanistan. Almost all of the Russians I spoke to remembered a given moment, usually around 1983, when they realised that something was very wrong indeed with the Soviet economy: there were inexplicable problems with the electricity supply; butter suddenly becameunavailable; queues for bread appeared one week and were still there the next, and one month later no one knew any better. The birth rate decreased drastically, as did the general health of the population: in 1988, the number of healthy conscripts was down twenty-five per cent from what it had been in the 1970s. Child mortality had risen by a third. Alcohol consumption was around twice the European average.
    To make things worse, a new arms race began, this time at technologically advanced levels. In the late 1970s the Soviets had deployed seventy SS-20 missiles, medium-range nuclear weapons that suddenly posed a threat for all of Western Europe. NATO responded in 1979 with what was referred to as the ‘double decision’: if the Soviet Union was unwilling to dismantle its SS-20s, NATO would deploy nuclear weapons – the Pershing II and the cruise missile – all over Western Europe. The short distances involved meant that only minimal warnings would be given of an attack. In Western Europe, the fear of a nuclear war, and above all of an accidental nuclear war, was greater than it had been since the 1950s. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets. In the end, the INF (Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces) Agreement between Gorbachev and Reagan in December 1987 put an end to this potentially fatal competition. Two months later, under the watchful eye of the Americans, the first SS-20s were dismantled in Kazakhstan.
    As the British historian Richard Vinen has observed, the Soviet Empire as a superpower was weaker and poorer than many of its colonies. Satellite countries such as Poland and Hungary still had a strong tradition of small private companies capable of working with relative efficiency.
    The DDR was seen as the showpiece of the Eastern Bloc. In reality, however, that country lived largely from the loans, at an estimated total of three billion Deutschmarks, that had been flowing eastward since 1973 as part of Willy Brandt's
Ostverträge
. With those loans, Chancellor Brandt and his successors were able to ‘purchase’ all kinds of concessions from the DDR regime: the relaxation of travel restrictions, the release of political prisoners, the reunification of families. These were, in effect, the first breaches in the wall.
    In 1983 the DDR's debts had risen so far that the federal government of the West was forced to cough up