Can we tell the start of a Fourth Turning by noticing the frequency and intensity of nation-level unforced errors? A look at the Soviet Union during the 1980s, when in retrospect the nation was clearly falling apart, and the unforced errors during that decade that might have been good indicators of what was happening.

 

 

https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/the-notorious-flight-of-mathias-rust-7101888/

“At about this time, Soviet investigators would later tell Rust, radar controllers realized something was terribly wrong, but it was too late for them to act.”

 

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration released a publication called “Soviet Military Power” which was frankly intended to make the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics look more powerful than it was. In 1989, someone FINALLY put out a response to it, called Soviet Military Power, Annotated” which pointed out that it was frankly a propaganda document. Unfortunately, the annotations were also frankly propaganda. At one point it alludes to Rust’s flight as having a lot of lucky coincidences that just happened to embarrass the Soviet Union on Border Guard day. It implies, that is, that Mathias Rust’s flight sure looked like an intentional propaganda stunt that must have had direct help from someone who wanted to embarrass the USSR> Anyway, if it was the case that this was anything else, I’m rather confident that Rust would have been “disappeared” a while ago.

 

 

Googling us intelligence tracking Mathias Rust leads to a “Secrets of Signals Intelligence During the Cold War” - nothing there, really, that I used here, but it was interesting reading.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Berlin_Wall

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Solidarity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Round_Table_Agreement

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severomorsk_Disaster

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/07/11/world/soviet-naval-blast-called-crippling.html

 

Listing them here for additional clarity and impact.

 

• 1979 - Afghanistan
• 1980 - Solidarity
• 1983 - KAL 007
• 1985 - Chernenko dies
• 1986 - Chernobyl
• 1987 - Mathias Rust
• 1989 - Berlin Wall Falls
• 1991 - August Coup

 

HBO’s miniseries on Chernobyl influenced my views of the Chernobyl disaster by making the causes clear enough to be enthralling cinema. It’s a good intro to the disaster, although parts of it are fictionalized.

I could not find the cosmonaut cartoon, but saw it at work every day in 1985-1987. There was another cartoon I remember but also couldn’t find about Solidarity: Polish &  Soviet leaders discuss the labor union, and assume that it was engineered by reactionary forces in the West. It then shows a small group of people reading from The Communist Manifest: Workers of the world, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

That sixth Star Trek film is The Undiscovered Country, released in December 1991, only a few weeks before the official dissolution of the Soviet Union.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102975/