The Fall of Communism 1195ity, for example, in Azerbaijan between Muslim Azerbaijanis and Christian
Armenians.
Second, in 1989, a forceful democratic opposition emerged, led in Russia
by the Nobel Prize—winning Russian physicist Andrey Sakharov (1921—
1989), who had helped develop the hydrogen bomb. Gorbachevs encour
agement of participation in public life increased the ranks of Soviet citizens
demanding reform. For many people, brutal tales of the Gulag became
increasingly compelling, having been brought to light by works of the Rus
sian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), first in his novel A Day in
the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1962) and then in The Gulag Archipelago
(1973). Moreover, the campaign for human rights, led by Sakharov, discred
ited the regime, even if the Gulag itself no longer existed. The Helsinki
Accords, signed by the Soviet Union as well as by the Western powers in
1975, encouraged dissidents. Increasingly, the Russian opposition reached
a large audience through the circulation of handwritten, typed, or clandes
tinely printed manuscripts, as well as through the medium of Western radio
broadcasts.
Third, the aggravation of the economic crisis beginning in 1988 increased
the number of Soviet citizens convinced that a Communist government sim
ply could not bring about a meaningful improvement in the quality of their
lives. At the same time, television broadcasts from Finland day after day
showed the advantages of a free-market economy. Gorbachev vacillated
between free-market policies and traditional Communist state controls. The
result was a further weakening of the economy, replete with shortages and
undermined by enormous military spending.
Gorbachev determined that the Soviet Union could not afford to continue
the arms race with the United States. He therefore moved to improve rela
tions with the U.S. government. In the early 1980s, Soviet-U.S. relations
had continued to sour dangerously. Following the U.S. ban on the export of
oil and gas to the Soviet Union after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in
1979, the U.S. government had tried to prevent the Soviet Union from con
structing a long pipeline that would bring Siberian natural gas to Central
Europe by threatening sanctions against any state or company that assisted
the endeavor. Then U.S. President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) backed a
plan to construct a space-based missile-defense shield, dubbed “Star Wars”
(Strategic Defense Initiative), provoking an outcry by the Soviet Union and
by some U.S. allies as well. In 1983, a Russian fighter shot down a South
Korean passenger plane that had entered Soviet air space, killing 169 peo
ple, including Americans. The Soviet Union boycotted the 1984 Olympics,
which were held in Los Angeles, as the United States had done four years
earlier in Moscow.
Gorbachev now resumed arms-limitation negotiations with the United
States, but he refused to sign an agreement because Reagan would not
include the “Star Wars” experiments in the negotiations. Highly successful
visits to Washington, D.C., and New York in 1987 gave the Soviet leader