One of the most iconic images of the Cold War era is the imposing citadel of the Kremlin: mysterious, vaguely threatening, its huge walls a perfect metaphor for Soviet implacability, its spires topped with glowing red stars that were for decades so ominous and then suddenly so pathetic. The Soviets didn’t build the Kremlin, they merely appropriated it for their own use, but it does seem like the perfect match, as if the Kremlin simply waited around until the Bolsheviks showed up to the party.

This post at the always-interesting English Russia blog talks about the history of the replacement of the Imperial Russian double-eagle symbol with the red stars and hammer-and-sickle. You would think that this was one of the first things the Bolsheviks would have done upon seizing power, but in fact it wasn’t done until the mid-1930s — a point in Soviet history where Stalin began creating the image of the mighty USSR, no longer a nation in revolutionary struggle, but an emerging power and the center of “the future of the world”.

The red stars still sit atop the two spires of the Kremlin, even though the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist almost 20 years ago. Maybe now that Communism has been more or less displaced with gangster-capitalism, they could replace the stars with the heads of assassinated Russian Mafia dons like these creepy grave markers .

It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

This is a transcript of a speech given by Joseph Stalin at a “campaign meeting” of Moscow-area voters in 1946. In it, he explains exactly why World War II was totally not his fault and just how much pig iron the Soviets will be producing in the future, then very graciously accepts his “nomination” to continue his glorious leadership. (As you can see by the picture above, Uncle Joe made sure the ballot boxes were stuffed to the gills.)

This message paid for by the Republican National Committee

On his blog “Marginal Revolution”, economist Tyler Cowen links to this 2006 speech given by former Soviet Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar about the political and economic collapse of the Soviet Union.

Gaidar says it can all be summed up in three words: oil and grain. The grain problem dated all the way back to the 1950s as the Soviets struggled to increase grain production in the face of a population boom. They failed and went from becoming the largest exporter of grain to one of the largest importers of grain. Meanwhile, over time the Soviet government had come to rely heavily on revenue from selling oil, and even though Soviet oil production had diminished substantially over the years, the high market price of oil in the 1970s kept the overall revenue picture satisfactory.

Gaidar is direct in his analysis:

The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.

The collapse of the oil market was directly responsible for the bankruptcy of the Soviet economy — without oil revenue, the Soviets could not pay for grain imports, could not continue to funnel cash into the war in Afghanistan, and could not bludgeon international lenders into bailing them out. By 1989, Gorbachev had no choice but to start bargaining away political concessions to the West in hopes of attracting money. By 1991, the political state of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was extinct.

Um, I don’t see much mention of The Gipper in that analysis. You remember The Gipper, right? The guy who “won” the Cold War? Yes, the same guy who turned down the ultimate political concession — total nuclear disarmament — when Gorby offered it, hat in hand, in Reykjavik.

Good links — the Gaidar speech is illustrated with some useful graphs and is very accessible even to those of us who aren’t economists.