The Downing Street Years (78 page)

The Cold War itself had never really ended, at least from the Soviet side: there were merely variations of chill. At times, as in Korea and Vietnam, it had been far from cold. But it was always, as I never forgot, a conflict of one system against another. In this sense, the analysis of the communist ideologues was right: ultimately, our two
opposing systems were incompatible — though, because both sides possessed the means of nuclear destruction, we had to make the adjustments and compromises required to live together. What we in the West had to do now was to learn as much as we could about the people and the system which confronted us and then to have as much contact with those living under that system as was compatible with our continued security. In a cold as in a hot war it pays to know the enemy — not least because at some time in the future you may have the opportunity to turn him into a friend.

Such was the thinking which lay behind my decision to arrange a seminar at Chequers on Thursday 8 September 1983 to pick the brains of experts on the Soviet Union. The difficulty of tapping into outside thinking even in our own open democratic system of government shows just why closed totalitarian systems are so sluggish and mediocre. I had been used to wide-ranging seminars from our days in Opposition and had always found them stimulating and educative. But instead of the best minds on the Soviet system I now found myself presented with a list of the best minds in the Foreign Office, which was not quite the same thing. I minuted on the original list of suggested participants:

Back to the drawing board.

In fact, by the time the seminar went ahead I felt that we did have the right people and some first-class papers. The latter covered almost all of the factors we would have to take into account in the years ahead in dealing with the Soviets and their system. We discussed the Soviet economy, its technological inertia and the consequences of that, the impact of religious issues, Soviet military doctrine and expenditure on defence, and the benefits and costs to the Soviet Union of their control over eastern Europe. The one issue which, in retrospect, we underestimated — though it figured briefly — was the nationality question, failure to solve which would ultimately lead to the break-up of the Soviet Union itself. Perhaps for me the most useful paper was one which described and analysed the power structure of the Soviet state, and which put flesh on the bones of what I had already learnt in Opposition from Robert Conquest.

Of course, the purpose of this seminar was not ultimately academic: it was to provide me with the information on which to shape policy towards the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc in the months and years ahead. There were always — right up to the last days of the Soviet Union — two opposite outlooks among the Sovietologists.

At the risk of over-simplification, these were as follows. On the one hand, there were those who played down the differences between the western and Soviet systems and who were generally drawn from political analysis and systems analysis. They were the people who appeared night after night on our television screens analysing the Soviet Union in terms borrowed from liberal democracies. These were the optimists, in search of light at the end of even the longest tunnel, confident that somehow, somewhere, within the Soviet totalitarian system rationality and compromise were about to break out. I remember a remark of Bob Conquest’s that the trouble with systems analysis is that if you analyse the systems of a horse and a tiger, you find them pretty much the same: but it would be a great mistake to treat a tiger like a horse. On the other hand, there were those — mainly the historians — who grasped that totalitarian systems are different in kind, not just degree, from liberal democracies and that approaches relevant to the one are irrelevant to the other. These analysts argued that a totalitarian system generates a different kind of political leader from a democratic one and that the ability of any one individual to change that system is almost negligible.

My own view was much closer to the second than to the first of these analyses, but with one very important difference. I always believed that our western system would ultimately triumph, if we did not throw our advantages away, because it rested on the unique, almost limitless, creativity and vitality of individuals. Even a system like that of the Soviets, which set out to crush the individual, could never totally succeed in doing so, as was shown by the Solzhenitsyns, Sakharovs, Bukovskys, Ratushinskayas and thousands of other dissidents and
refuseniks.
This also implied that at some time the right individual could challenge even the system which he had used to attain power. For this reason, unlike many who otherwise shared my approach to the Soviet Union, I was convinced that we must seek out the most likely person in the rising generation of Soviet leaders and then cultivate and sustain him, while recognizing the clear limits of our power to do so. That is why those who subsequently considered that I was led astray from my original approach to the Soviet Union because I was dazzled by Mr Gorbachev were wrong. I spotted him because I was searching for someone like him. And I was confident
that such a person could exist, even within that totalitarian structure, because I believed that the spirit of the individual could never ultimately be crushed in the Kremlin any more than in the Gulag.

At the time of my Chequers seminar, although as I have explained East-West relations were worsening — and would become worse still when the Soviets pulled out of arms control talks in Geneva in response to the stationing of Cruise and Pershing missiles — it did seem that there would soon be important changes in the Soviet leadership. Mr Andropov, though he was no liberal, did undoubtedly want to revive the Soviet economy, which was in fact in a far worse state than any of us realized at the time. In order to do this he wanted to cut back bureaucracy and improve efficiency. Although he had inherited a top leadership which he could not instantly change, the high average age of the Politburo would present him with the opportunity of filling vacancies with those amenable to his objectives. There were already doubts about Andropov’s health. If he lived for just a few more years, however, it seemed likely that the leadership would pass to a new generation. The two main contenders appeared to be Grigory Romanov and Mikhail Gorbachev. I asked for all the information we had about these two. It was not very much and a good deal was vague and anecdotal. It was soon obvious to me, however, that — attractive as was the idea of seeing a Romanov back in the Kremlin — there would probably be other unpleasant consequences. Romanov as First Secretary of the Communist Party in Leningrad had won a reputation for efficiency but also as a hardline Marxist which, like many of the sort, he combined with an extravagant lifestyle. And I confess that when I read about those priceless crystal glasses from the Hermitage being smashed at the celebration of his daughter’s wedding some of the attraction of the name was lost as well.

Of Mr Gorbachev what little we knew seemed modestly encouraging. He was clearly the best educated member of the Politburo, not that anybody would have described this group of elderly soldiers and bureaucrats as intellectuals. He had acquired a reputation for being open-minded; but of course this might be just a matter of style. He had risen steadily through the Party under Khrushchev, Brezhnev and now Andropov, of whom he was clearly a special proté gé; but that might well be a sign of conformity rather than talent. Nevertheless, I heard favourable reports of him from Pierre Trudeau in Canada later that month. I began to take special notice when his name was mentioned in reports on the Soviet Union.

For the moment, however, relations with the Soviets were so bad that direct contact with them was almost impossible. It seemed to me that it was through eastern Europe that we would have to work. The Deputy Prime Minister of Hungary, Mr Marjai, had come to see me in March, before the general election, and had renewed an invitation from his Government for me to visit Hungary. I had been fascinated by what he told me about the Hungarian ‘economic experiment’. At one point Mr Marjai, having noted the importance of profits and incentives, declared that it was not for the government to hand out money because the government did not have money. I commented that these remarks could have been made in one of my own speeches.

Hungary was the choice for my first visit as Prime Minister to a Warsaw Pact country for several reasons. The Hungarians had gone furthest along the path of economic reform, although they were anxious to describe it as anything but capitalism. A certain amount of liberalization had occurred, though outright dissent was punished. The strategy of Já nos Ká dá r, officially First Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party but in fact unchallenged leader, was summed up in the telling if hardly original slogan, ‘he who is not against us is with us.’ He used economic links with the West to provide his people with a tolerable standard of living while constantly asserting Hungary’s loyalty to the Warsaw Pact, socialism and the Soviet Union: a necessary consideration, given that some 60,000 Soviet troops had been ‘temporarily’ stationed in Hungary since 1948. By this time Mr Kâdâr seemed to be regarded with some respect, perhaps even affection, by many Hungarians because he was credited with avoiding a repetition of the events of 1956, while allowing a gradual process of reform to continue. Although he himself had been tortured by his comrades, his own past included the incidents of villainy which marked the careers of all that generation of old communist leaders: he had been responsible for the torture and trial of Cardinal Mindszenty, the execution of his friend, Foreign minister Rajk, and the betrayal of the Revolution of 1956. However, he denied to me personally that he had had any responsibility for the execution of Imre Nagy, the reformist communist leader; indeed he said he had obtained an undertaking from the Soviets that Nagy would be allowed to live. In any case, the fact that Kâdâr had been in power for so long meant that he had come to know the Soviets and their thinking better than any other eastern European
leader. In particular, he knew Mr Andropov, who had been the Soviet Ambassador in Budapest at the time of the 1956 uprising, and, we believed, remained close to him. I hoped that he would report back to the Soviet leader what I had to say.

I stepped off the plane at 10 o’clock on the night of Thursday 2 February 1984 to be met by the Hungarian Prime Minister, Mr Lâ zâ r, and then walked across the thick snow to inspect a floodlit Guard of Honour. My first official engagement the next morning was a private discussion with Mr Lâ zâ r, a self-effacing functionary who gave every sign of loyalty to the communist system. But what he had to say showed the roots of that loyalty. He warned me that the worst possible thing I could do on my visit was to cast doubt on Hungary’s remaining part of the socialist bloc. The Hungarians had been concerned at what Vice-President George Bush had said to this effect in Vienna after making a successful visit to the country. I realized that formal adherence to the Soviet system was the price of the limited reforms they had been able to make. I immediately said that I understood and I was careful then and later to keep my word.

Later that morning I saw Mr Kâ dâ r. He had only four more years left in power. But he was still vigorous and very much in charge. He was a square-faced, large-boned, healthy complexioned man with an air of easy authority and an apparently reasonable frame of mind in discussion. He did not rely, as so many other communist leaders did, on serried ranks of advisers and we were accompanied only by interpreters.

The main message I tried to get across was that the West and President Reagan personally were genuinely seeking disarmament. What we wanted was to preserve our own security, but at a lower level of weaponry, particularly nuclear weaponry. I told Mr Kâdâr that I knew from President Reagan, who was a close friend, just how personally hurt he had been by an earlier response to an attempt to get a better understanding with the Soviet Union. I recalled the tone in which President Reagan had spoken, when the two of us were walking in the garden of the United States Embassy in Paris, about a personal letter he had written in his own hand to President Brezhnev telling him of America’s desire for peace. He awaited the reply eagerly. It took a long time to come. And when it did, it consisted of just the standard, official typed letter, short and dismissive. Since then, I added, President Reagan had indeed been increasing the military strength of the United States but he wanted relations between NATO and the Warsaw Pact improved.

I went on to try to gain a clearer picture from Mr Kâdâr of the
situation in the USSR. He told me about the personalities of the Soviet leaders he had known: as he put it ‘the Russians are individuals too’. Khrushchev was impulsive. Mr Kádár had told him that he was like an old Bolshevik — instead of saying ‘Good Morning’, he tended to punch you in the stomach. Brezhnev he described as very emotional. Andropov was different again. He described him as very tough and calculating, but someone who was capable of listening. He confirmed that Andropov was ill, but said that he was mentally intact and never stopped working. He also told me that his condition was improving but that the Hungarians were crossing their fingers for him. He added that the Soviet leadership was becoming stronger and younger people were entering it, that they wanted peace and were prepared to have talks about it. Of course, this picture of life in the Kremlin could hardly be taken at face value, given Mr Ká dá r’s long association with Mr Andropov. And given that Andropov died six days later, what he told me about the latter’s health was either wildly optimistic or a diplomatic lie. But his insights were interesting nonetheless.