John Galt wrote:


And you need to start being honest. I was an adult during the period.
There was no public discourse about any pending economic dissolution of
the Soviet Union, and since Reagan ran on a platform of increased
military spending because of the demonstrated Soviet imperialism, it
obviously would have been raised during the campaign by Carter and the
Democrat Doves. It was not.

JG

I was a major market radio news director during the period.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone

(this is from your CIA)

"The Failing System

From the mid-1970s to the eve of Gorbachev's assumption of party
leadership in the spring of 1985, the CIA portrayed a Soviet Union
plagued by a deteriorating economy and intensifying societal problems.
CIA products described the growing political tensions resulting from
these failures, the prospect that sooner or later a Soviet leadership
would be forced to confront these issues, and the uncertainty over what
form this confrontation would take.

These products include the unclassified testimony from each of DCI
Admiral Stansfield Turner's annual appearances before the JEC from 1977
through 1980 (Appendix A, references 1-4)--part of the "annual public
reports" cited by the HPSCI Review Committee. Turner's testimony and the
written submissions for these hearings described a "bleak" Soviet
economy for which continued decline through most of the 1980s was
"inevitable." The hearing reports include:

* CIA descriptions of how badly Soviet economic performance lagged
behind that of the West and the prospect that Soviet leaders would be
forced to confront growing conflicts between civilian and military uses
of resources and investment.
* CIA assessments that the Brezhnev leadership recognized the
potential for larger political repercussions from the economic failure;
that the Brezhnev regime (and possibly even an initial successor) was
nonetheless likely to attempt to muddle through rather than confront the
politically difficult choices necessary to deal with the decline; that
muddling through was not a viable option for the longer term; and that
by the mid-1980s the economic picture "might look so dismal" that a
post-Brezhnev leadership might coalesce behind policies that could
include "structural reforms."



Other unclassified CIA publications disseminated in 1977 and 1980
(Appendix A, references 5 and 6) presented the same picture of a
deteriorating economy that ultimately could provoke more radical policies.

From the late 1970s through the early 1980s, CIA produced several
papers addressing the prospects for "serious economic and political
problems" arising from the combined effect of growing consumer
discontent, ethnic divisions, a corrupt and incompetent political
system, and widespread cynicism among a populace for whom the system had
failed to deliver on its promises. (Appendix A, references 7 and 8 and
10-13). One of these papers, for example, described the problems
stemming from "long continued investment priorities favoring heavy
industry and defense, coupled with a rigid and cumbersome system of
economic organization" which "have combined to produce a consumer sector
that not only lags behind both the West and Eastern Europe, but also is
in many ways primitive, grossly unbalanced, and in massive disequilibrium":

* These products portrayed a Soviet leadership caught in a
descending spiral: declining productivity was depressing the economy,
which aggravated the cynicism and alienation of the populace; this in
turn further reduced productivity.
* CIA concluded that this "vicious circle" was potentially more
significant for the 1980s than "anything the regime has had to cope with
in the past three decades," and that the leadership and elites were
fully aware they confronted major problems.
* The analyses repeated the judgment that the Brezhnev regime and
the Andropov/Chernyenko successions were likely to rely on the
traditional Soviet instruments for controlling unrest and imposing
"discipline," but that such approaches would not hold for the longer
term in the face of a Soviet populace that was becoming less pliable and
more demanding."

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-f...oviet.html#ft5