After the collapse of the Soviet Union, at an oil conference in Houston in November 1991, the speech of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, known as the "Iron Lady", directly exposed how the West disintegrated the Soviet Union. At that time, Margaret Thatcher had just stepped down as British Prime Minister, and invited Thatcher to the conference in the name of her former career in chemistry, but in her speech, Thatcher did not talk about chemistry, but nakedly, as a victor in the process of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the West. Summarizing Thatcher's speech, there were three very important stages in the collapse of the Soviet Union in the West.
The first stage is the pulling stage. After World War II, the Soviet Union established a red regime, which the Western countries were very reluctant to see, and they regarded the Soviet Union's red regime as a thorn in their eye. At this stage, the Western countries first wanted to slowly change the Soviet Union through cooperative infiltration, and then achieve the goal of disintegrating the Soviet Union.
But in the 1950s, this approach simply did not work, and it was not until Khrushchev came to power that the Western countries began to see hope, because Khrushchev opposed his predecessors and was most likely a good collaborator. The signing of the 1955 Treaty with Austria was initiated by the Soviet Union, which solved an important problem left over from World War II; then the Soviet Union announced the end of the war with Germany and began to establish diplomatic relations with Germany.
When Khrushchev visited the United States in 1959, the United States at this time also took the opportunity to send the Soviet Union a favor and recognize the Soviet Union's status as a great power. But it wasn't long before the West began to discover that although Khrushchev opposed his predecessors, the main purpose of his political activities was to build his own prestige, and his policy was still in the Soviet way.
At this time, the West realized that the Soviet Union still had to be suppressed, and quickly took action. The United States began to deploy new missiles in NATO countries, but the Soviet Union did not want to show weakness, built the Berlin Wall in Berlin, Germany, and also provoked the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the War between the United States and the Soviet Union was on the verge of breaking out, and finally the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from Cuba to avoid war.
The second stage is an arms race. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union was furious and aggressive, while the Western countries ostensibly took a defensive position, but in fact they were on the defensive. That is what Margaret Thatcher said in her speech to take the economic threat. Through analysis, Western countries believe that in the Soviet Union at that time, the economic development indicators were very high, which was mainly due to the policy of the planned economy and the material and spiritual stimulus measures adopted by the Soviet Union.
Therefore, the Western countries decided to create some civil unrest in the Soviet Union and weaken the economic strength of the Soviet Union. At that time, the Soviet Union always adhered to the principle of equal armaments with NATO, so the Western countries intended to induce the Soviet Union to increase its armament investment by deliberately inflating the number of weapons it possessed, and the increase in armament investment would directly lead to the Soviet Union reducing its investment in consumer goods of other residents, which would cause public dissatisfaction and make the Soviet Union chaotic.
But the outcome of the arms race is very "dramatic", which can be said to be far beyond the expectations of Western countries. In the arms race stage, the Soviet Economy, far from being dragged down, went hand in hand with the military economy and had the tendency to catch up with and surpass the United States. Historical records show that as of 1975, the Soviet Union's industrial production value was only 20% different from that of the United States.
The total number of strategic missiles is as high as 2402, even the United States can only look back; conventional military forces are also very powerful, the number of U.S. troops at that time was 2.1 million people, more than 10,000 tanks, while the number of Soviet troops was as high as 4.4 million, the number of tanks was as high as 50,000; in 1979, the Soviet Union's strategic nuclear forces invested three times that of the United States, shocking the world. During the arms race stage, the development momentum of the Soviet Union was very strong, and the slow economic development of the United States, coupled with the heavy losses in the Vietnam War, wasted a lot of manpower and material resources, and the United States had to shrink its troops stationed in Asia.
The third stage is the internal disintegration phase. The dramatic outcome of the arms race left the West looking elsewhere. Although the Western countries found that the Soviet Constitution gave any member state the right to break away from the Soviet Union at any time, this trick was not easy, and it was not easy to disintegrate the Soviet union.
As Margaret Thatcher said in her speech, although it is difficult, this provision of the Soviet Constitution does leave room for the Western countries to collapse the Soviet Union. According to historical records, Western countries have always wanted to cultivate opposition within the Soviet Union through various means. The Western countries actually looked at Yeltsin, so Gorbachev was not optimistic about him when he came to power, and it was not until the "new thinking" was introduced that the Western countries began to attach importance to Gorbachev and saw the dawn of the internal collapse of the Soviet Union. But in the end, the Western countries still supported Yeltsin to come to power, and the purpose of the Western countries to drag down the Soviet Union was achieved.