[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 23 (Monday, March 7, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: March 7, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                              THE COLD WAR

                                 ______


                        HON. GERALD B.H. SOLOMON

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                         Monday, March 7, 1994

  Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, I would like to call the House's attention 
to an article by Arnold Beichman in the March 1 issue of the Washington 
Times.
  Mr. Beichman calls attention to the massive intellectual fraud being 
perpetrated in academia and the news media regarding the cold war. The 
dogmatic extremists who dominate these two debased institutions are 
engaged in a concerted campaign to rewrite the history of the cold war.
  The campaign basically takes three tacks. The first is to deny that 
the Soviets were a real enemy. Another, while conceding the awful 
nature of Soviet communism, holds that Western policies, and especially 
those of Ronald Reagan, had nothing to do with the demise of the Soviet 
empire. And finally there is the notion, evinced by people like George 
Kennan, that we too, lost the cold war because we exhausted ourselves 
with too much defense spending.
  Of course, the Kennan theory is easily dismissed. It is indeed 
laughable to anyone who has ever stepped foot in a Communist country. 
To counter the first two notions will require vigilance, however. The 
truth must be told, over and over again, about the evils of communism 
and the policies that helped contain and ultimately defeat this evil 
force.
  Fortunately, Mr. Beichman has added truth to the debate by quoting 
some rather knowledgeable sources: Russian dissidents and reformers. It 
turns out, Mr. Speaker, that Alexandr Solzhenitsyn--and who understood 
the cold war better than him--gives Ronald Reagan direct credit for the 
end of the cold war. And then we have Russian reformers, like foreign 
minister Andrei Kozyrev and former Moscow police chief Arkady Murashev, 
both of whom fully concur with Ronald Reagan's apt description of the 
Soviet Union as an evil empire.
  It turns out, Mr. Speaker, that Ronald Reagan, the actor from Eureka 
College, understood the fundamental nature of communism better than 
most American Ph.D's put together.
  It is important to point all of this out, Mr. Speaker. For the 
Clinton administration is now deeply entrenched in a foreign policy of 
appeasement, the precise opposite of Ronald Reagan's successful 
approach. This is dangerous, and must be countered at every turn.
  I insert the Beichman article for the Record.

               [From the Washington Times, Mar. 1, 1994]

                      An Exile's Cold War Verdict

       ``The Cold War was essentially won by Ronald Reagan when he 
     embarked on the `star wars' program and the Soviet Union 
     understood that it could not take this next step.''
       Guess who said it? A Republican admirer of the former 
     president? No. An ultra-right wing columnist? No. George 
     Bush? James A. Baker? Most assuredly, no. The man who uttered 
     this formidable finding is Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The text 
     is to be found in a profile by David Remnick of the great 
     Russian writer published in the Feb. 14 issue of the New 
     Yorker.
       After residing in exile for 20 years, 18 of them in the 
     United States, the world-renowned author who made the phrase 
     ``Gulag Archipelago'' synonymous with the former Soviet Union 
     is returning to Russia in May. Should anything happen to 
     Russian President Boris Yeltsin, let us pray that Mr. 
     Solzhenitsyn, even though he is 75 years of age, will 
     consider running for that post against the inevitable 
     candidacy of the barbarous Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
       The significance of Mr. Solzhenitsyn's characterization of 
     Mr. Reagan as the architect of victory in the Cold War is 
     that since the fall of the Berlin War almost five years ago--
     Nov. 9, 1989--there has been a campaign of denigration among 
     U.S. academicians in history and political science of the 
     Reagan presidency. A school of mendacious historians has 
     arisen who either claim that ``nobody'' won the Cold War or 
     else that the United States ``lost'' it.
       Among Russian spokesman, there is no question as to who won 
     the Cold war and why. Arkady Murashev, onetime Moscow police 
     chief and a leader of Democratic Russia, was quoted in New 
     York Review as saying about Mr. Reagan: ``He called us the 
     `Evil Empire'. So why did you in the West laugh at him? It's 
     true.'' Andrei Kozyrev, Russia's foreign minister, was quoted 
     in the Los Angeles Times as saying ``the Soviet Union had 
     really been an evil empire.'' He compared the ``mass crimes'' 
     under the Soviet dictatorship to the revelations about the 
     Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials. Sergei Khrushchev, son of 
     Nikita S. Khrushchev, on the ``Larry King Show'' said with a 
     rueful smile, ``Sure, you win [sic] the Cold War.'' And now 
     comes the verdict of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
       Will such a verdict still the voices of the social science 
     faculties of American universities peopled by Marxist 
     fantasists, like Wade Huntley, assistant professor of 
     politics at Whitman College, Walla Walla, Wash.? He recently 
     published an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 
     the title of which tells all--``The United States Was the 
     Loser in the Cold War.''
       Professor Fritz Stern, a distinguished Columbia historian, 
     in a New York Times Op-Ed article derided claims that America 
     won the Cold War:
       ``Without the thousands of dissidents in the Soviet Union 
     and those in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia who risked 
     their lives to overthrow an ever-lying tyranny, we could not 
     have prevailed and there would be no freedom in Eastern 
     Europe. . . . [T]he final collapse of Soviet tyranny, unlike 
     that of Nazism, was brought about by indigenous forces.''
       Professor Stern seemingly ignores 45 years of postwar 
     history. It was American leadership--Harry Truman's--which 
     organized the Berlin airlift in 1948 when Britain's Labor 
     government was urging compromise with Josef Stalin, which 
     pressed the United Nations to resist the communist invasion 
     of South Korea, which initiated the Marshall Plan. It was 
     American leadership--Dwight Eisenhower's--which strengthened 
     NATO, which prodded hesitant allies in Western Europe to 
     resist communism. And under President Reagan's leadership, 
     America faced up to the peril of an imperialist Soviet Union 
     by instituting an arms program, including SDI, which, as 
     Russian commentators have now conceded, brought the former 
     U.S.S.R. to its knees. Without the tough-minded ``Reagan 
     Doctrine,'' final collapse of Soviet tyranny might have been 
     a long time coming.
       For anyone not blinded by ideology, Ronald Reagan's role as 
     architect of the bloodless victory over the former Soviet 
     Union was luminously clear. Mr. Solzhenitsyn's verdict only 
     confirmed what any student of contemporary history knew. So 
     the question before us is what will the history books say in 
     years to come about who won the Cold War and how it was done? 
     Will the words of a Solzhenitsyn be included in the histories 
     our children will be reading?

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