Reagan's Cold War Victory a Myth

Aside from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, some CIA analysts, and Reagan himself, few saw what was really happening in the early 1980s. Most startlingly, the Soviets’ chief of the general staff, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, saw the writing on the wall more clearly than anyone, and saw it long before anyone could claim that Reagan’s military buildup had brought the Soviets to their knees. Here’s what he told me in a mostly off-the-record conversation in March 1983 at a huge conference table in the Soviet Defense Ministry’s conference room ringed by triumphal Soviet divisional flags: “The Cold War is over, and you have won.”