CIA Assessments of the Soviet Union

In the aftermath of the political breakup of the Soviet Union, charges that CIA was oblivious to the deteriorating economy and corroding societal conditions that set the stage for the breakup have taken on the aura of conventional wisdom. The New York Times, for example, asserted in an editorial on 22 October 1995 that The CIA considered the Soviet Union an economic power when it was actually an economic wreck. An article in The Wall Street Journal on 27 July 1995 by Adam Wooldridge stated that the CIA--in the face of readily available evidence to the contrary-- continued to endorse the myth that the communists had transformed an agricultural backwater the USSR into a mighty industrial power capable of ever higher levels of economic development. Neither of these assertions is accompanied by any examples in which CIA expressed the judgments it is accused of making. Wooldridges article was a review of a book-The Tyranny of Numbers by Nicholas Eberstadt-which includes similar, albeit less strident, criticisms of the CIA. The Foreword to Eberstadts book was written by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who has been perhaps the most prominent and influential critic of CIAs performance on the Soviet Union.