Global Reaction
Michael Johns, writing for The Heritage Foundation's Policy Review magazine, prominently supported Reagan's assertion. In "Seventy Years of Evil: Soviet Crimes from Vladimir Lenin to Gorbachev," Johns cited 208 acts by the Soviet Union that, he argued, demonstrated the Soviet leadership's evil inclinations.
Yuri Maltsev, a high-ranking economist in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev during the 1980s, believed that Reagan was definitely right. He labeled the USSR an "evil empire" in the introduction to the book Requiem for Marx, published in 1993, and in an essay he wrote for the Ludwig von Mises Institute. In his essay, he labeled the Soviet Union an "evil empire," using those exact words. Maltsev had first hand knowledge of the inner workings of the Soviet Union, and concurred with Reagan. Another major figure from the former Soviet Union, Andrey Kozyrev also concurred that the Soviet Union had been an "Evil Empire." Kozyrev was the head of the Soviet Foreign Ministry.
The Soviet Union, for its part, alleged that the United States was an imperialist superpower seeking to dominate the entire world, and that the Soviet Union was fighting against it in the name of humanity. In Moscow, the Soviet press agency TASS said the "evil empire" words demonstrated that the Reagan administration "can think only in terms of confrontation and bellicose, lunatic anti-communism. "
During his second term in office, in May–June 1988, more than five years after using the term "evil empire," Reagan visited the new reformist General Secretary of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow. When asked by a reporter whether he still thought the Soviet Union was an "evil empire," Reagan responded that he no longer did, and that when he used the term it was a "different era"; that is, the period before Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost reforms. Still, Reagan remained a critic of the Soviet regime for its absence of democratic institutions.
Recent historians, such as Yale University's John Lewis Gaddis, have grown more favorable towards the use and influence of the phrase "evil empire" in describing the Soviet Union. In his book The Cold War Gaddis argues that, in their use of the phrase "evil empire," Reagan and his anti-Communist political allies were effective in breaking the détente tradition, thus laying the ground for the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.
Read more about this topic: Evil Empire
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