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Catholic Church–Soviet Union relations were marked by long-standing ideological disagreements between the Catholic Church and the Soviet Union. The Holy See attempted to enter in a pragmatic dialogue with Soviet leaders during the papacies of John XXIII and Paul VI. In the 1990s, Pope John Paul II's diplomatic policies were cited as one of the principal factors that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
USA vs USSR Fight! The Cold War: Crash Course World History #39
George HW Bush and the End of the Cold War: Crash Course US History #44
Russia, the Kievan Rus, and the Mongols: Crash Course World History #20
The Cold War: Crash Course US History #37
Christianity from Judaism to Constantine: Crash Course World History #11
Transcription
Hi, I’m John Green,
This is Crash Course World History
and today we’re gonna talk
about the Cold War,
which actually lasted into my lifetime,
which means that I can bore you
with stories from my past
like your grandpa does.
When I was a kid,
they made us practice hiding under our
desks in the event of a nuclear attack,
because, you know,
school desks are super good at repelling
radiation. [formica is magical stuff]
Mr. Green, Mr. Green!
Right, remember in elementary school
there was this special guest who’d defected
from the Soviet Union, and he had--
--Like this crazy Russian accent
and he kept going on and on about how--
Reagan should spit in Gorbachev’s face
instead of signing treaties with him.
And I was like, whoa dude calm down.
You’re in a room full of third graders.
And then for like months afterward
on the playground,
we’d play Reagan:Gorbachev
and spit in each other’s faces.
Those were the days.
Sometimes I forget that you’re me,
Me from the Past. [ahhh… so sweet!]
Yeah, it’s just really nice to
talk to you and feel like you’re lis—
You’re boring. Cue the intro.
[ah ha! there it is.]
[BEST]
[intro music]
[intro music]
[intro music]
[intro music]
[intro music]
[EVER!]
So the Cold War was a rivalry between the
USSR and the USA that played out globally.
We’ve tried to shy away from calling
conflicts ideological or
civilizational here on Crash Course,
but in this case,
the “clash of civilizations”
model really does apply.
Socialism,
at least as Marx constructed it,
wanted to take over the world,
and many Soviets saw themselves in a
conflict with bourgeois capitalism itself.
And the Soviets saw American
rebuilding efforts in Europe and Japan
as the U.S. trying to expand its markets,
which, by the way,
is exactly what we were doing.
So the U.S. feared that the USSR
wanted to destroy democratic
and capitalist institutions.
And the Soviets feared that the US
wanted to use its money and power
to dominate Europe and eventually
destroy the Soviet system.
And both parties were right to be worried.
It’s not paranoia if they really are out
to
get you. [tinfoil hats, always in season]
Now of course we’ve seen a lot of
geopolitical struggles between major
world powers here on Crash Course,
but this time there was
the special added bonus
that war could lead to the
destruction of the human species.
That was new for world history,
and it’s worth remembering: It’s still
new.
Here’s the period of time
we’ve discussed on Crash Course.
And this is how long we’ve had
the technological capability
to exterminate ourselves.
So that’s worrisome.
Immediately after World War II,
the Soviets created a sphere
of influence in eastern Europe,
dominating the countries where
the Red Army had pushed back the Nazis,
which is why Winston Churchill
famously said in 1946
that an “Iron Curtain” had
descended across Europe.
While the dates of the Cold War are
usually given between 1945 and 1990,
a number of historians will tell you that
it actually started during World War II.
Stalin’s distrust of the U.S.
and Britain kept growing
as they refused to invade Europe and
open up a second front against the Nazis.
And some even say that the decision to
drop the first Atomic Bombs on Japan
was motivated in part by a desire
to intimidate the Soviets.
That sort of worked, but only insofar
as it motivated the Soviets to
develop atomic bombs of their own—
they successfully tested
their first one in 1949.
From the beginning,
the U.S had the advantage because
it had more money and power and
could provide Europe protection
what with its army and
one of a kind nuclear arsenal
while Europe rebuilt.
The USSR had to rebuild itself,
and also they had the significant
disadvantage of being controlled
by noted asshat Joseph Stalin.
I will remind you, it’s not cursing
if he’s wearing an ass for a hat.
[way to hang your asshat on a technicality]
Oh, I guess it’s time for the open letter.
[professionally propels toward prop like
a perfectly poised & practiced projectile]
An Open Letter to Joseph Stalin.
But first,
let’s see what’s in
the secret compartment today.
Oh, it’s silly putty.
Silly putty:
the thing that won the Cold War.
[gotta be a Reagan joke in there somewhere]
This is exactly the kind
of useless consumer good
that would never have been
produced in the Soviet Union.
And it is because we had
so much more consumer spending,
on stuff like silly putty,
that we won the Cold War.
Go team!
Dear Joseph Stalin,
You really sucked.
There was a great moment in your life,
at your first wife’s funeral,
when you said,
“I don’t think I shall ever love again.”
And then later,
you had that wife’s whole family killed.
[solid case for NOT putting a ring on it]
Putting aside the fact that you’re
responsible for tens of millions of deaths,
I don’t like you because of the
way that you treated your son, Yakov.
I mean, you were really mean to him
and then he shot himself and he didn’t die
and you said,
“He can’t even shoot straight.”
And then later,
when he was captured during World War II,
you had a chance to exchange
prisoners for him, but you declined.
And then he died in a prison camp.
You were a terrible leader, a terrible
person, and a terrible father.
Best wishes,
John Green
Alright, let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
Europe was the first battleground
of the Cold War, especially Germany,
which was divided into 2 parts
with the former capital, Berlin,
also divided into 2 parts.
and yes, I know the western part was
divided into smaller occupation zones,
but I’m simplifying.
In 1948,
the Soviets tried to cut off West Berlin,
by closing the main road that led into the
city, but the Berlin airlift stopped them.
And then in 1961, the Soviets
tried again and this time they were
much more successful building
a wall around West Berlin,
although it’s worth noting that
the thing was up for less than 30 years.
I mean,
Meatloaf’s career has lasted longer than
the Berlin Wall did.[Oh y-- NOOO!!]
The U.S. response to the Soviets
was a policy called containment;
it basically involved
stopping the spread of communism
by standing up to the Soviets
wherever they seemed to want to expand.
In Europe
this meant spending a lot of money.
First the Marshall Plan spent
$13 billion on re-building western Europe
with grants and credits that Europeans
would spend on American consumer goods
and on construction.
Capitalism’s cheap food and
plentiful stuff, it was hoped,
would stop the spread of communism.
The US also tried to slow the
spread of communism by founding NATO
and with CIA interventions in elections
[looked better on paper]
where communists had a chance, as in Italy.
But despite all the great spy novels
and shaken not stirred martinis,
the Cold War never did heat up in Europe.
Probably the most important
part of the Cold War
that people just don’t remember these days
is the nuclear arms race.
Both sides developed nuclear arsenals,
the Soviets initially with the help
of spies who stole American secrets.
Eventually the nuclear arsenals were so big
that the U.S. and USSR agreed on
a strategy appropriately called MAD,
which stood for
“mutually assured destruction.”
Thanks Thought Bubble.
And yes, nuclear weapons were, and are,
capable of destroying
humanity many times over.
[regardless of Iran's access to Photoshop]
But only once or twice
did we get close to nuclear war:
during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis
and then again in 1983,
when we forgot to give the Russians the
heads up that we were doing some war games,
which made it look like we had launched
a first strike.
OUR BAD!
[closer to ultimate fail than epic fail]
But even though mutually assured
destruction prevented direct conflict,
there was plenty of hot war
in the Cold War.
The Korean War saw lots of fighting
between communists and capitalists,
as did the Vietnam War.
I mean, these days we remember
“the domino effect” as silly paranoia,
but after Korea and especially
China became communist,
Vietnam’s movement toward communism
seemed very much a threat to Japan,
which the U.S. had helped re-make
into a vibrant capitalist ally.
So the US got bogged down
in one of its longest wars
while the Soviets assisted the
North Vietnamese army in the Viet Cong.
But then we paid them back by supporting
the anti-communist mujaheddin
after the Soviets invaded
Afghanistan in 1979.
Of course, as we now know,
nobody conquers Afghanistan
…unless you are the mongols.
[The tune of truly tendering terror
to tons of tearfully troubled tribes]
So after 10 disastrous years,
the Soviets finally abandoned Afghanistan.
Some of those mujahedeen later became
members of the Taliban,
though, so it’s difficult
to say that anyone won that war.
But it wasn’t just Asia:
In Nicaragua, the US supported rebels
to overthrow the leftist government;
in El Salvador,
the US bolstered authoritarian regimes that
were threatened by left-wing guerrillas.
The United States ended up supporting
a lot of awful governments,
like the one in Guatemala, which held onto
power through the use of death squads.
[like i said, looked better on paper]
Frankly, all our attempts to
stabilize governments in Latin America
led to some very unstable Latin American
governments, and quite a lot of violence.
And then there were the
luke-warm conflicts,
like The Suez Crisis where British
and French paratroopers were sent in
to try to stop Egypt from
nationalizing the Suez canal.
Or all the American covert operations
to keep various countries from
“falling” to communism.
These included the famous
CIA-engineered coup to overthrow
Iran’s democratically elected
prime minister Mohammed Mossadeq
after his government attempted
to nationalize Iran’s oil industry.
And the CIA helping Chile’s
General Augusto Pinochet overthrow
democratically elected Marxist
president Salvador Allende in 1973.
And lest we think the Americans
were the only bad guys in this,
the Soviets used force to crush
popular uprisings in Hungary in 1956
and in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
So, you may have noticed
that our discussion of the Cold War
has branched out from Europe to
include Asia, and the Middle East,
and Latin America.
And in fact,
almost every part of the globe
was involved in some way with the
planet being divided into three “worlds.”
The first world was the U.S.,
Western Europe and any place that
embraced capitalism and a more or
less democratic form of government.
The Second World was the
Soviet Union and its satellites,
mostly the Warsaw Pact nations,
China and Cuba.
The Third World was everyone else and
we don’t use this term anymore
because it lumps together a
hugely diverse range of countries.
We’ll talk more about the specific
economic and development challenges
faced by the so-called
“Third World countries,”
but the big one in terms of the Cold War,
was that neither the U.S. nor the Soviets
wanted any of these
countries to remain neutral.
Every nation was supposed to pick sides,
either capitalist or communist,
and while it seems like an easy choice now,
in the 50s and 60s,
it wasn’t nearly so clear.
I mean, for a little while, it seemed
like the Soviets might come out ahead,
at least in the Third World.
For a while, capitalism,
and especially the United States,
seemed to lose some of its luster.
The US propped up dictatorships,
had a poor civil rights record,
we sucked at women’s gymnastics.
Plus, the Soviets were the first to put
a satellite, a man, and a dog into space.
Plus, Marxists just seemed cooler,
which is why you never see
Milton Friedman t-shirts...
until now available at DFTBA.com.
I like that, Stan,
but I’m more of a centrist.
Can I get a Keynes shirt?
Yes. That, now that’s hot.
But Soviet socialism did not finally prove
to be a viable alternative
to industrial capitalism.
Over time,
state-run economies just generally
don’t fare as well as private enterprise,
and people like living in
a world where they can have more stuff.
More importantly,
Soviet policies were just bad:
collectivized agriculture stymied
production and led to famine;
suppression of dissent and
traditional cultures made people angry;
and no one likes suffering
the humiliation of driving a Yugo.
But why the Cold War ended when it did
is one of the most interesting
questions of the 20th century.
It probably wasn’t Ronald Reagan
bankrupting the Soviets,
despite what some politicians believe.
The USSR had more satellite states
that it needed to spend more to prop up
than the U.S. had to invest in its Allies.
And the Soviet system could never
keep up with economic growth in the West.
But,
probably the individual most responsible
for the end of the Cold War was
Mikhail Baryshnikov.
[Um...]
No? Mikhail Gorbachev?
Well, that’s boring.
[and far less lycra-clad]
I always thought the Soviets
danced their way to freedom.
No? It was Glasnost and Perestroika?
[not the cultural resonance of White Nights?]
Alright.
but Gorbachev’s Perestroika and Glosnost
opened up the Soviet political and economic
systems with contested local elections,
less restricted civil society groups,
less censorship,
more autonomy for the Soviet Republics,
more non-state-run businesses
and more autonomy for state-run farms.
Glasnost or “openness”
led to more information from the west
and less censorship led to a flood of
criticism as people realized how much
poorer the second world was than the first.
And one by one, often quite suddenly,
former communist states collapsed.
In Germany,
the Berlin Wall came down in 1989
[pulled down with the Gipper's own hands]
and East and West Germany
were reunited in 1990.
In Poland,
the Gdansk dockworker’s union Solidarity
turned into a mass political movement
and won 99 of the 100 seats it was
allowed to contest in the 1989 election.
Hungary held multiparty elections in 1990.
The same year, mass demonstrations
led to elections in Czechoslovakia.
In 1993, that country split up
into Slovakia and the Czech Republic,
the happiest and most mutually
beneficial divorce since Cher left Sonny.
Of course sometimes the transition away
from communism was violent and painful.
In Romania, for instance,
the communist dictator Ceaucescu
held onto power until he was tried and put
before a firing squad at the end of 1989.
And it took until 1996 for a non-communist
government to take power there.
And in Yugoslavia, well, not so great.
And in Russia,
it’s a little bit Putin-ey.
Ah! Putin.
But just twenty years later,
it’s hard to believe that the world
was once dominated by two super powers held
in check mutually assured destruction.
[sure didn't work for Harry & Voldemort]
What’s really amazing to me,
though, is that until the late 1980s,
it felt like the Cold War
was gonna go on forever.
Time seems to slow as it approaches us,
& living in the post-Cold War nuclear age,
we should remember that the past
feels distant even when it’s near,
and that the future seems assured—
even though it isn’t.
Thanks for watching.
I’ll see you next week.
[don't ask. you try & corral the talent
when they're a NYT best-selling author]
Crash Course is produced and directed
by Stan Muller.
Our script supervisor
is Meredith Danko.
Our associate producer
is Danica Johnson.
The show is written by my
high school history teacher
Raoul Meyer and myself.
And our graphics team is Thought Bubble.
[where time may be cold, but not too war-y]
Last week’s phrase of the week was
"Justin Bieber"
[Johnny Bookwriter is a full-on Belieber]
Thanks for that suggestion.
[he said, sincerely]
If you’d like to suggest
future phrases of the week,
you can do so in comments
where you can also ask questions
about today’s video that will
be answered by our team of historians.
[or fought out amongst yourselves with
varying degrees of merit and clarity]
Thanks for watching Crash Course
and as we say in my hometown,
don’t forget Folly and Desperation
Are Ofttimes Hard to Tell Apart.”
[Did you know John is a triple threat?]
Ow.
The end of World War I brought about the revolutionary development, which Benedict XV had foreseen in his first encyclical. With the Russian Revolution, the Holy See was faced with a new, so far unknown, situation. An ideology and government which rejected not only the Catholic Church but also religion as a whole. "Some hope developed among the United Orthodox in Ukraine and Armenia, but many of the representatives there disappeared or were jailed in the following years. Several Orthodox bishops from Omsk and Simbirsk wrote an open letter to Pope Benedict XV, as the Father of all Christianity, describing the murder of priests, the destruction of their churches and other persecutions in their areas."[1]
Pius XI
Worried by the persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union, Pius XI mandated Berlin Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli to work secretly on diplomatic arrangements between the Vatican and the Soviet Union. Pacelli negotiated food shipments and met with Soviet representatives, including Foreign Minister Georgi Chicherin, who rejected any kind of religious education and the ordination of priests and bishops but offered agreements without the points vital to the Vatican.[2] Despite Vatican pessimism and a lack of visible progress, Pacelli continued the secret negotiations until Pius XI ordered them to be discontinued in 1927 because they generated no results and were dangerous to the Church if they were made public.
The "harsh persecution short of total annihilation of the clergy, monks, and nuns and other people associated with the Church"[3] continued well into the 1930s. In addition to executing and exiling many clerics, monks and laymen, the confiscation of Church implements "for victims of famine" and the closing of churches were common.[4] However, according to an official report based on the 1936 census , some 55 percent of Soviet citizens identified themselves openly as religious, and others possibly concealed their belief.[4]
Pius XI described the lack of reaction to the persecution of Christians in such countries as the Soviet Union, Mexico, Germany and Spain as a "conspiracy of silence". In 1937, he issued the encyclical Divini Redemptoris, which condemned communism and the Soviet regime." He named a French Jesuit to go to the Soviet Union and secretly consecrate secret Roman Catholic bishops. That was a failure since most of them ended up in gulags or were otherwise killed by the communist regime.
Pius XII's pontificate faced extraordinary problems. In the 1930s, the public protests and condemnations of his predecessors had not deterred Soviet authorities from persecuting all Christian churches as hostile to Marxism–Leninism. The persecution of the Catholic Church was a part of an overall attempt to eradicate religion in the Soviet Union. In 1940, after Germany had occupied western of Poland, the Soviet Union annexed eastern of Poland, along with the Baltic countries, including the predominantly-Catholic Lithuania.
Two months after his election on May 12, 1939, in Singolari Animi, a papal letter to the Sacred Congregation of the Oriental Church, Pius XII reported again the persecutions of the Catholic faith in the Soviet Union. Three weeks later, while he was honouring the memory of Saint Vladimir on the 950th anniversary of his baptism, he welcomed Ruthenian priests and bishops and members of the Russian colony in Rome, prayed for those who suffer in their country and awaited with their tears the hour of the coming of the Lord.
Persecution began at once, as large parts of Poland and the Baltic States were incorporated into the Soviet Union. Almost immediately, the United Catholic Churches of Armenia, Ukraine and Ruthenia were attacked. While most Oriental Christians belong to an Orthodox Church, some, such as the Armenian Catholic Church, Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church, are united with Rome, which allowed them to keep their own Oriental liturgy and Church laws.
After World War II, the Russian Orthodox Church was given some freedom by the government of Joseph Stalin but not the Orthodox Oriental Churches, united with Rome. Leaders of the Orthodox Oriental Churches faced intense pressure to break with Rome and to unite with Moscow. Pope Pius addressed specifically the Ruthenian Catholic Church in Ukraine. The encyclical Orientales omnes Ecclesias is a summary of the relations between the Eastern churches and Rome until the persecutions in 1945.[5]
Some Ruthenians, resisting Polonisation, felt deserted by the Vatican and returned to the Russian Orthodox Church during Pius XI's pontificate.
Dialogue: 1958 to 1978
John XXIII
The brief papacy of John XXIII had attempts to reconcile with the Russian Orthodox Church in the hope of reducing tensions with the Soviet Union and contributing to peace in the world. The Second Vatican Council did not condemn Communism or even mention it in what some have called a secret agreement between the Holy See and the Soviet Union. In Pacem in terris, John XXIII also sought to prevent nuclear war and tried to improve relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. He began a policy of dialogue with Soviet leaders to seek conditions in which Eastern Catholics could find relief from persecution.[6]
John Paul II has long been credited with being instrumental in bringing down communism in Catholic Eastern Europe by being the spiritual inspiration behind its downfall and a catalyst for peaceful revolution in Poland. In February 2004, the Pope was even nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize to honor his life's work in opposing communism and in helping to reshape the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, there has been much debate among historians on the realistic significance of John Paul II's opposition to communism in the Soviet regime's eventual fall. While most scholars agree that his intervention was influential in ending the Polish Communist Party's rule, there is much disagreement in his role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Historians differ also on their opinions on the significance of the influence of John Paul II, as opposed to that of other economic and political factors. Thus, it is necessary to investigate the relative importance of John Paul II's role in the collapse of Eastern European communism by analyzing the historical events from his election to the papacy in 1978 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
On October 16, 1978, Karol Wojtyla was elected to the papacy. As the first-ever Polish pope and the first non-Italian to be elected to the papacy in over four centuries, his election came as somewhat of a surprise to many Catholic scholars worldwide. Wojtyla chose to take the name John Paul II, after his predecessor, John Paul I, who was pope for barely a month before his death on September 29, 1978. Religious and political leaders alike wondered what it would mean for a citizen of a communist country to become pope. Poles, on the other hand, rejoiced at the news.[7]
Having lived under both the Nazi and the Soviet regimes, the new pope was unwavering in his opposition to both fascism and communism. While the Vatican had always officially opposed communism because of its atheism, Pope John Paul II lost no time in making his theological opposition into an active policy of confrontation. In his first encyclical, he pinpointed religious freedom as the paramount human right and argued that it was the duty of the Church to protect that right. Simultaneously, he rejected the general Cold War diplomacy of appeasement by removing or demoting Church leaders who had enacted the policy of Ostpolitik, or quiet negotiation with communist leaders.[8] Pope John Paul II spoke out publicly against communism.
Despite warnings from Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, not to interfere in Poland, the new pope visited his homeland within the first year of his papacy. On June 2, 1979, John Paul II made his first papal visit to Poland, and three million people came to the capital to greet him.[9] The pope held Mass publicly in the Victory Square, Warsaw, which was usually reserved for state-sponsored events. In the Lenin Shipyard, John Paul II held Mass in memory of the Polish workers who had been killed in a 1970 strike and carried a large wooden cross which some took to symbolize the burden of communism on the Polish people.[10] The historian John Lewis Gaddis identified the 1979 papal visit as the "trigger that led to communism's collapse worldwide" because of its profound effect on the morale of the Polish people.[11]
The trade Union Solidarity emerged in Poland in 1980 under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa. The emergence of the Catholic anticommunist movement has been causally linked by many historians, to Pope John Paul II's first papal visit to Poland in 1979. Indeed, John Paul II publicly defended the strikers and ordered the Polish Church to aid them in a message to Stefan Wyszyński, the archbishop of Warsaw and Gniezno.[12] Most previous Polish revolutionary movements had been secular in nature,
but Solidarity centred on the religious symbols of the cross, the rosary, and the Madonna.[13]
In January 1981, Walesa visited Rome, met with the pope for the first time and received his official recognition and support.[14]
On May 13, 1981 in St. Peter's Square, Pope John Paul II was shot four times, hitting him in the abdomen and his left hand, by would-be-assassin Mehmet Ali Agca. Many scholars have claimed that the assassination attempt was part of a conspiracy by the Soviet Union, but that theory has never been proved. If true, the assassination attempt would reveal Soviet fears of the Pope's influence in the Eastern Bloc and his assistance in the Polish Solidarity movement. However, the pope survived.[15]
Initially, the Polish communists resisted the Solidarity rebels and imprisoned many of the movement's leaders between 1981 and 1983, but over the course of the 1980s, the movement gained more power and thus more legitimacy. Consequently, in 1989, round-table talks were held between the leaders of Solidarity, the Soviet Communists and the Catholic Church. In 1990, Walesa was elected president of Poland and began large-scale market reforms. By 1992, Soviet troops had begun to leave Poland.[16] That trend was paralleled by demonstrations and revolts in several other Soviet-controlled states.
There has been much speculation by historians about the relationship between Pope John Paul II and US President Ronald Reagan.[17] Both leaders kept up a regular letter correspondence and met in Rome in June 1982 and in June 1987. That interaction has caused many historians to believe that both leaders' co-operation strengthened the anticommunist cause.[18] However, other historians, like George Weigel, have argued that both men were able to make their own individual political achievements. According to that view, the United States, under the leadership of Reagan, presented an economic challenge to the Soviet Union, which was entirely independent of Vatican influence.[19] Therefore, Reagan's role in the collapse of the Soviet economy may have been more influential than that of Pope John Paul II.
On December 1, 1989, the pope met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It was the first time that a Catholic pope had met with a Soviet leader. Both leaders agreed to establish diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the Soviet Union. Gorbachev also pledged to allow greater religious freedom within the Soviet Union. Many saw the meeting as a symbolic end to the philosophical conflict between the Soviet Union and the Vatican.[20] It certainly showed a growing willingness on both sides to co-operate.
Even though the pope was primarily a religious leader, his leadership also had significant political consequences.[21] John Paul II clearly used his Polish identity and connections to bring about the collapse of the nation's communist regime.[22] While the intervention of Pope John Paul II was undoubtedly an essential factor in the ending of communism in Poland, how significant the pope's leadership was in the rest of Eastern Europe and within the Soviet Union itself is less clear.[11] The efforts of anti-communist leaders, such as Pope John Paul II and US President Ronald Reagan did not make the fall of the Soviet Union inevitable. However, both leaders hastened the end of the Cold War and the fall of communism, particularly in Eastern Europe.[23]
^Dennis J. Dunn, "The Vatican's Ostpolitik: Past and Present." Journal of International Affairs (1982) 36#2 : 247-255. online
^Constantine Pleshakov, There Is No Freedom Without Bread! 1989 and the Civil War That Brought Down Communism, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 82–85.