Self-interest determined USSR in losing the 'Cold War'. The Soviets would have done their arithmetic - lose face for a generation who would become capitalists, nuclear global annihilation leading to millions of survivors rather than the billions of survivors having to fight for the limited uncontaminated food and water, or be unpicked and upstage by an ever increasingly competitive USA. Better Red than dead wasn't an option. Marxists have for almost 2 centuries bragged about the sophistication of inevitable Communism because it was seen as a scientific and uncontested authority, and not an ideal not lost on teenagers. 'Class struggle', however didn't actually include the fact that if, as Einstein feared, the wars after a third world war would be fought with bows and arrows and not the'glorious Red Army' that went on parade in Red Square every year. The Third World War would have rendered Communism not just obsolete but would have set back the conditions for Proletarian revolution and class struggle for millennia. Sorry Marx you would once again be way of the Marx. So. what did Putin do?
Putin might well be a cold war relic, biding his time for conditions to change. Two generations into the middle of the 21st century and they won't know about Stalin, Brezhnev,etc. A warning from history about Communism must therefore include the dangers of nationalistic confrontation and any political criminality and lofty idealism. It's crucial to recognize that idealism isn't part of Communism because it's seen as 'bourgeois' ' devised by the myth-making of Capitalist interests that puts up distractions and obstacles in the path of the' science' of Marxist analysis. Let sociologist's understand the social consequences of the same class hatred that the Soviets used to intimidate the West as well as the fear of feudalism after nuclear war that would threaten other vested interests too.
The ramifications of abandonment of all welfarism in the West after the infrastructure and administration would be smashed permanently for the few survivors, would be catastrophic too. Do we now understand that both Cold War antagonist's couldn't financially support their own and their own ideologies even if a 3rd world war was 'survivable'? The political classes would be left in tact after a 3rd world war but they wouldn't be able to rule because 'deterrent' was no longer available to socially, politically and economically control their own social 'property'. Let us remember that the West rejoiced in having vested interests, but the Soviets were reluctant to admit that they too had 'property'. The idea therefore of Deterent being a socially controlling device for all sides will be developed in a later blog.