Dr. Yuri Yarim-Agaev modeled the Soviet economy and found a hidden tax rate above 90 percent, which told him the Soviet Union could not sustain its military buildup. The KGB had expelled him in 1980; later he was in the room when Ronald Reagan asked whether the bear was sick or wounded. In the second half of a two-part conversation in the Surviving Communism series, Jenny Beth Martin asks him what Reagan was like, why Zohran Mamdani's housing plan is the Soviet question in new clothes, what finishing the job in Iran really means, why Putin's conservatism is Stalin's and not Reagan's, and what Americans should be on guard about now.
Guest: Dr. Yuri Yarim-Agaev, physicist, Soviet dissident and member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, expelled from the Soviet Union in 1980, founder of the Center for Democracy in the USSR, who briefed President Ronald Reagan before Reykjavik and before his trip to Moscow and worked as a scientist at MIT and Stanford.
Today's topics:
• Reagan's question: sick bear or wounded bear? Three men briefed him on the weakness of the Soviet economy, the answer was sick, and Reagan was the only president, he says, who understood that ideology is the heart of a totalitarian system.
• The Soviet economy in one number: a hidden tax of more than 90 percent, with the rest handed back by loyalty to the party.
• Zohran Mamdani's New York housing plan: take as much as possible and redistribute it by their rules. The key question is who controls it, and that is never decided democratically or by merit. The middle class, the nucleus of any city, gets pushed out.
• COVID and rule by expertise: one truth, one set of experts, the dissenting scientists silent. Gavin Newsom's restaurant party is the simplest lesson in who the rules are for.
• Political opponent versus national enemy: do not call the whole Democratic Party communist. Communists are enemies of the country, and in the 1970s Scoop Jackson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and the AFL-CIO's George Meany were America's fiercest anticommunists.
• Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries will not speak against the socialists in their party, both agree: not because they are communists, but because they are afraid.
• How he got out: after Natan Sharansky and Yuri Orlov were arrested and Andrei Sakharov was exiled, Western scientists boycotted Soviet science. The Soviets, far behind in computers and electronics, expelled him in 1980 rather than jail him. He went to MIT, then Stanford.
• Ronald Reagan in the room: he listened, he asked precise questions, and he was deliberate about ending the regime. Evil empire, ash heap of history.
• Iran: if you went the military route, the only way is to finish. Stop in the middle and you do not win, you lose. The country is damaged; the regime has consolidated and the opposition is weaker. The Soviet Union was in ruins in 1945, and its regime was never stronger.
• One bloc: Russia, China, and Iran fight the United States together, with Ukraine and Gaza as proxy fronts. The weakest link is Russia, the road to Tehran runs through Kyiv, and if Russia loses, China does not go after Taiwan.
• Putin's Russia: the same KGB, still sponsoring terrorism, still working to discredit American elections, and, he says, no longer honoring the old rule against operating on American soil.
• Conservatism is relative: Reagan and Truman were American conservatives; Stalin and Brezhnev were communist conservatives. Embrace Putin and you keep Stalin's company. Family values do not separate free countries from totalitarian ones; human rights, political liberty, and the rule of law do.
• The danger from the left is always greater than the danger from the right, and liberals who refuse to fight the radical left are the ones who summon the authoritarian right.
• His life's lesson: human rights are the best thing humankind invented, the foundation of the United States, and the strongest weapon against totalitarianism. 2026 marks 250 years of the Declaration of Independence and 50 years of the Moscow Helsinki Group.
• Part two of a two-part conversation in the Surviving Communism series. Share it, then vote for liberty, for our constitutional republic, and against communism.
The Jenny Beth Show airs live Monday through Friday at 1:00 PM ET. Hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party movement and Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action. Subscribe for daily analysis of politics, policy, and the fight for constitutionally limited government. teapartypatriots.org
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