The Soviet Union appears in these episodes chiefly as a historical reference point for arguments about American foreign policy and about the meaning of socialism, rather than as a subject examined on its own terms. Guests invoke its collapse, its rivalry with the United States, and its economic model, but the excerpts supply no account of its founding, its institutions, or its internal history.
The military-industrial complex and the post-Soviet turn
Ivan Eland traces the persistence of defense spending to the period after the Korean War, when, he says, the defense industry did not go away as it usually did but stayed on in peacetime. He describes defense as a political industry: large contractors do most of their work for the government and choose subcontractors on the basis of which states they are in, so that the most important briefing slide is the one showing where the subcontractors are. Members of Congress, seeing a subcontractor in their state or district, vote for programs they may not want. Eland calls this a military-industrial and congressional and even media complex The Return of Big Spending Republicans? (2017).
Within that account, the Soviet Union marks a turning point. Eland says that after World War II the United States squared off against the Soviet Union but was using that as a rationale for policing the world, and that after the Soviet Union fell in 1991 it got much worse — the United States intervened a lot more because there was no counterweight and overtly policed the world. He adds that the country can no longer afford this because of a huge national debt, and that the United States pays 75% of NATO defense spending while the alliance has 28 members The Return of Big Spending Republicans? (2017).
Korea and the Cold War division
John Glaser dates the creation of North Korea to the end of World War II, when the United States and the Soviet Union divvied up occupation zones following the collapse of the Japanese imperial presence on the Korean Peninsula: the Soviet Union had the north, the United States the south. Bob Zadek interrupts to stress that the peninsula had been one country, not two, and that the division was artificial — the Koreans, he says, did not have very much to say about it. Glaser agrees that it bears some resemblance to imperial chessboards and says the victors drew an arbitrary line on the peninsula, the 38th parallel Non-Aggression in a Nuclear Era (2018).
Glaser then describes the 1950 attempt by the communist regime in the north, backed by both China and the Soviet Union, to forcibly reunite the peninsula. He notes that between 1948 and 1950 several top generals and national security advisors in the Truman administration had said the United States should withdraw from South Korea, but that when the war broke out the administration decided American credibility was at stake, a conviction intensified by the Cold War and the developing containment policy against the Soviet Union. The United States and its allies intervened, obtaining UN Security Council approval in part because the Soviet Union was at the time boycotting the Security Council; the Truman administration never got permission from Congress, and Glaser says the involvement was never authorized by Congress as the Constitution demands. China and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union were on the north’s side Non-Aggression in a Nuclear Era (2018).
Latin America and the language of liberation
Clifton Ross places the Soviet Union inside a broader account of empire and national liberation in Latin America. He argues that the United States, itself an ex-colony of the United Kingdom, began looking south with the idea of building its own empire in the Western Hemisphere, a project he associates with the Monroe Doctrine in the 19th century. As the Cold War progressed, he says, the United States saw communist guerrilla movements everywhere — and they actually existed. Starting in 1960, he states, the Soviet Union really did take on an approach of funneling arms through Cuba to guerrilla insurgencies all over the continent Utopia Unmasked (2019).
In Ross’s telling, the liberation on offer was national liberation from colonial governments allied with the United States in a Cold War context, just as the Soviet Union had its colonies in the Eastern Bloc, and the model for what these movements wanted to liberate into was a socialist revolution. He says most of these movements were almost all backed by the Soviet Union, and that the solidarity movement in the United States and around the world was largely inspired by Leninist ideas, whether it knew it or not. Bob Zadek proposes that the countermeasure to perceived American imperialism in Latin America was simply Russia, and that this pushed the region away from market economies and property rights; Ross calls that pretty accurate Utopia Unmasked (2019).
Georgia after the collapse
Ben Powell uses the former Soviet republic of Georgia as a case study in free-market reform. He says Georgia made essentially no reforms when the Soviet Union collapsed, and made essentially none for over a dozen years after the fall. Then, he says, a politician named Saakashvili came to power and brought in Kakha Bendukidze as his finance minister, whom Powell describes as rabidly free market. Powell credits Bendukidze with firing government bureaus entirely, privatizing everything and putting it online so the highest bidder gets the property with no corrupt deals like in the rest of the Soviet Union, eliminating taxes, lowering rates, establishing a flat tax, limiting government debt, and firing the entire traffic police force in a day — after which, the joke goes, crime went down because they were the most criminal in the country Socialism… Still Not Cool (2019).
Powell reports that Georgia went from being unranked in the economic freedom index, meaning the bottom of the barrel over 150, to the top 10 freest economies in the world. He notes Georgia is still relatively poor, about $8,000 per capita income, but growing rapidly since the Rose Revolution, in a tough part of the world with a hostile neighbor, Russia, to the north. Bob Zadek observes that one thinks of the former Soviet Union as monolithic, but that Georgia and Estonia are interesting pockets of free-market capitalism among the now separate countries that used to be part of it. Powell also notes that during Soviet times Georgia was the main producer of wine in the Soviet Union, because the central planners understood that warm Georgia would do wine better than Siberia, but mass-produced swill on fertile lands that nobody liked; since becoming economically free, the vineyards have gone fallow and wine-making has returned to the hills Socialism… Still Not Cool (2019).
Socialism after the Soviet collapse
John Judis describes his own trajectory as an orthodox Marxist socialist in the 1960s and ’70s — workers owning and controlling the means of production, no capitalist class, markets disappearing, central planning — and says the vision was sort of the Soviet Union plus democracy. He says he became disabused of those views during the ’70s, and that when the Soviet Union itself collapsed, that was the end. He then describes rethinking socialism in the 1990s, influenced by the historian Marty Sklar, arriving at the idea that socialism was not a stage of history coming after capitalism and brought about by revolution, but something developing within capitalism as capitalism itself developed within feudalism Is Socialism Still a Dirty Word? (2021).
Judis connects this to Bernie Sanders, whose view of socialism he says was not the orthodox Marxist Soviet Union traditional view but something close to an advanced social democracy, with stronger unions, workers on corporate boards, and industries that do not act in the national interest strongly regulated and if necessary nationalized, while markets remain a very important part of how any economy has to work. He notes that Sanders’s popularity was concentrated among the young, a generation that did not grow up during the Cold War as he did, and that among people over 45 socialism is still primarily seen as the Soviet Union or Cuba or Venezuela — an identification he says was visible in Southern Florida in the 2020 election Is Socialism Still a Dirty Word? (2021).
Across episodes
The excerpts do not show a developing argument about the Soviet Union itself; they show the same reference point used for different purposes across five episodes. Ivan Eland (2017) treats the Soviet collapse as the moment American interventionism accelerated for lack of a counterweight; John Glaser (2018) treats the Soviet Union as one of two victors drawing an arbitrary line across Korea and as the backer of the northern regime; Clifton Ross (2019) treats it as the patron of Latin American insurgencies and the Eastern Bloc analogue to American empire; Ben Powell (2019) treats the post-Soviet space as a laboratory for free-market reform; and John Judis (2021) treats the collapse as the death of orthodox Marxism and the starting point for a softer democratic socialism. No guest responds directly to another’s characterization.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts contain no account of the Soviet Union’s founding, its internal institutions, its economy apart from central planning and Georgian wine, or the date and manner of its dissolution beyond Eland’s reference to 1991 and Judis’s and Powell’s references to the collapse. They do not describe Soviet policy in Europe, the Eastern Bloc’s governance, or the nuclear arsenal that Bob Zadek mentions in passing when introducing the North Korea discussion. No excerpt states the outcome of the Korean War, the terms of any armistice, or what became of the 38th parallel. The sources also do not say what became of the Soviet Union’s constituent republics beyond Georgia and a passing mention of Estonia.