My impression is that the USSR's biggest economic problem wasn't military spending but the fact that it had become a petrostate, heavily dependent on oil sales. Which Russia still is. It's an open question whether being a petrostate is more a blessing than a curse. because it makes the economy so vulnerable to commodity price swings. There also seems to be general agreement that the USSR was subsidizing its "satellite states" in the Warsaw Pact pretty heavily. That was a big reason Gorbachev was willing to let them go. In general, military spending as such can be stimulative. You see some descriptions of Biden's economic policy now as "military Keynesianism."
But I remember arguments back in the 1980s that military spending was generally less stimulative than other kinds of government expenditures. though I haven't seen any discussion of that lately. The USSR's GDP was smaller than the US', so it had to spend a higher percentage of its GDP on defense than the US which reduced public investments available for consumer goods and non-petroleum exports.
Also, the fact that Reagan surprisingly was willing to agree on major nuclear-arms-control issues also played an important role, because it reduced the pressure to maintain a military buffer zone with the Warsaw Pact states.
My impression is that the USSR's biggest economic problem wasn't military spending but the fact that it had become a petrostate, heavily dependent on oil sales. Which Russia still is. It's an open question whether being a petrostate is more a blessing than a curse. because it makes the economy so vulnerable to commodity price swings. There also seems to be general agreement that the USSR was subsidizing its "satellite states" in the Warsaw Pact pretty heavily. That was a big reason Gorbachev was willing to let them go. In general, military spending as such can be stimulative. You see some descriptions of Biden's economic policy now as "military Keynesianism."
But I remember arguments back in the 1980s that military spending was generally less stimulative than other kinds of government expenditures. though I haven't seen any discussion of that lately. The USSR's GDP was smaller than the US', so it had to spend a higher percentage of its GDP on defense than the US which reduced public investments available for consumer goods and non-petroleum exports.
Also, the fact that Reagan surprisingly was willing to agree on major nuclear-arms-control issues also played an important role, because it reduced the pressure to maintain a military buffer zone with the Warsaw Pact states.