Figure 13.1 Margaret Thatcher
Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC 20540 USA, US News and World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09786.
Margaret Thatcher was keen to learn more about the Soviet leadership, so she invited several top politicians to London in December 1984, but only Mikhail Gorbachev would come. The British prime minister was very impressed by Gorbachev’s willingness to engage in debate. She commented (BBC, 16 December 1984):
I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together. We both believe in our own political systems. I firmly believe in mine. He firmly believes in his. We are never going to change one another. So that is not in doubt, but we have two great interests in common: that we should do everything we can to see that war never starts again, and therefore we go into the disarmament talks determined to make them succeed.
Mrs Thatcher immediately made for Camp David to brief her friend President Reagan on her new acquaintance. She persuaded Reagan that the West could do business with Gorbachev.
Konstantin Chernenko died on 10 March 1985. Gromyko had struck a deal with Gorbachev which was that he would vote for him, and Gromyko was aware, as someone whose career was in government, that he would never head the party. A quick vote was called for because the Americans might use the impasse to their advantage, but two members did not make it to Moscow on time: the Ukrainian and Kazakh First Secretaries. Had they been present, it is possible that Viktor Grishin, the Moscow Party boss, might have been elected leader. Egor Ligachev became the new leader’s no. 2; Nikolai Ryzhkov, an engineer, became prime minister in September 1985; Viktor Chebrikov stayed as KGB chief.
Gromyko expected Georgy Kornienko, an Americanist, to succeed him. This would allow President Gromyko – he became Soviet president in June 1985 – to exert a huge influence on foreign affairs. Gorbachev, on the other hand, did not want a Gromyko clone as foreign minister and instead chose Eduard Shevardnadze, the Georgian First Secretary, who was a charming comrade but with imperfect Russian and even less knowledge of foreign affairs. Anatoly Dobrynin, the suave Soviet ambassador in Washington, was not pleased and commented to George Shultz that an ‘agricultural type’ (i.e. a stupid peasant) had taken over. It was plain that Gorbachev planned to run the show himself. The link between foreign and domestic policy was crucial as better relations with the West would allow less spending on defence. Shevardnadze shared Gorbachev’s concern for change and on Afghanistan they saw eye to eye: it had been a disaster from the very start. The most influential adviser was Aleksandr Yakovlev. Squat – the British ambassador Rodric Braithwaite labelled him a ‘dyspeptic frog’ – a war veteran, he had been an exchange student at Columbia University and had met Gorbachev when, as Soviet ambassador in Ottawa, he had accompanied him round Canada. Yakovlev was no friend of the US but regarded Stalin as a Russian fascist. On the other hand, during his years in Canada, he never developed an understanding of how a market economy worked.
Figure 13.1 Margaret Thatcher
Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC 20540 USA, US News and World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09786.
When Vice President George H. W. Bush attended Chernenko’s funeral, he handed Gorbachev a letter from the president proposing a meeting in the US. Two weeks later, Gorbachev agreed in principle but suggested they meet in Moscow. In June, they agreed their first meeting would take place in Geneva, in November 1985. During the spring and summer Gorbachev and Reagan exchanged letters quite frequently, and this permitted both sides to float proposals to discover if there was any common ground. In October, Gorbachev introduced the concept of ‘reasonable sufficiency’ in assessing the size of the armed forces.
When Donald Regan became chief of staff, in February 1985, he was shocked to discover that Nancy Reagan regularly consulted an astrologer, Joan Quigley, and that, following the failed assassination attempt, her husband had become a devotee. In modern times, the Reagans were almost certainly the only Western leaders to seek guidance which was neither Christian nor scientific. Regan later wrote:
Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House chief of staff [February 1985–February 1987] was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in favourable alignment for the enterprise.
Some church leaders demanded that the Reagans abandon their ‘ungodly’ reliance on Quigley. The Reagans issued a statement that, unlike Caesar’s wife, they believed in predestination. No decisions or policies had been based on horo-scopes as astrology was merely a hobby (The Times, 3 November 2014).
The Geneva summit, on 19 and 20 November 1985, was a watershed in relations. Gorbachev’s attitude to Reagan was that he was more than a conservative: he was a political dinosaur. The US president reciprocated by viewing the Soviet Union as Upper Volta with rockets but potentially a threat to the free world, and he despised communism. His dislike of the Soviet Union and its people was abstract because he had never visited the country, but the few Russians he had encountered – Dobrynin and Gromyko – he liked.
Gorbachev sided with the military in thinking SDI could be countered. He told Shultz beforehand that he believed the aim of the US was to force the Soviet Union into a corner and, anyway, SDI would bankrupt the US. The Soviet Union would engage in a build-up which would pierce the US’s shield, but this was bluff. A party document, in late summer 1989, concluded that the USSR was ‘increasingly out of touch with the latest technologies’.
Gorbachev proposed that the superpowers issue a statement that neither would be the first to launch a nuclear war. Reagan rejected this as it precluded a nuclear response to a conventional Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The compromise reached was to agree to prevent any war between them, whether nuclear or conventional. They also pledged not to seek military superiority. Gorbachev wanted American help to secure a settlement in Afghanistan. Reagan was irritated by Gorbachev’s harping on SDI as offensive and countered by claiming that the early warning system at Krasnoyarsk contravened the ABM treaty. (It did.) Reagan read out a statement proposing a 50 per cent cut in offensive nuclear arms and other weapons reductions. Gorbachev agreed but said he was disappointed they had not made more progress but, overall, they hit it off and one of the reasons for this was a fireside chat.
In May 1986, the new political thinking in foreign policy was formally launched. The main components were:
Gennady Gerasimov, renowned for his suave performance and one liners, such as the Sinatra doctrine ‘we’ll do it our way,’ became the foreign ministry press spokesman.
In the months following the summit, the Soviets launched proposal after proposal to end the arms race. Everything now appeared to be negotiable, and Moscow’s flexibility caught Washington off guard. In January 1986, Gorbachev dramatically proposed the phasing out of nuclear weapons by 2000 and on intermediate range missiles, the Soviet position was almost the same as the American. Moscow was willing to accept limits on ICBMs, and the balance of conventional forces in Europe and Soviet troops, perceived as a threat by NATO, would be redeployed but the Soviet military bridled at cuts in conventional forces. In February 1986, Gorbachev referred to Afghanistan as a ‘bleeding wound’ and signalled that the USSR wanted out in order to improve relations with Washington. Gorbachev, when it came to arms reductions, always encountered opposition from Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, the chief of staff, who confessed he did not believe in the elimination of all nuclear weapons by 2000. The military wanted to keep their SS-20s in place but Gorbachev received strong support from Eduard Shevardnadze and Anatoly Adamishin, deputy minister of foreign affairs. Gorbachev was still not in a position to overrule the military whom he conceded had primacy in security matters.
On 15 April 1986, the Americans bombed Tripoli, after a bomb attack which had killed three people and injured 229 in a West Berlin discothèque on 5 April. Two of the dead and seventy-nine of the injured were US servicemen. It was a clear warning to the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, to cease such acts or face severe reprisals. The CIA began to supply the mujahidin with Stinger missiles which were promptly used to bring down Soviet helicopters. In May, Reagan declared that the US would no longer observe the unratified SALT II agreement.
The shock of the Chernobyl explosion in April 1986 led the Soviet leadership, on 29 May, to drop their demand that SDI should be scrapped. Laboratory testing was now acceptable but external deployment and testing would not be countenanced. This was an opportunity for Washington to make progress in arms negotiations, as they all concluded that SDI had rattled Moscow, and Washington was aware that Gorbachev had provided funding to build a comparable system.
The first direct conflict between the two leaders occurred in August 1986, when the Americans arrested Gennady Zakharov, a Soviet UN employee, when he was on the point of purchasing classified documents, and the KGB responded by arresting Nicholas Daniloff, the Moscow correspondent of US News and World Report. Reagan wrote a personal letter to Gorbachev confirming that Daniloff was not a spy. However, Shultz and the editor of US News and World Report were aware that Daniloff had acquired secret Soviet documents and photographs and had passed them on to the State Department. Shultz was furious when he discovered that the CIA had used Daniloff as a contact with a Soviet source and had discussed him on an open telephone line. He regarded the whole episode as a CIA ploy to stymie his efforts to improve relations with the Soviet Union.
During the three weeks Gorbachev took to respond to a Reagan letter, the US ordered twenty-five Soviet UN employees, whom they deemed to be engaged in intelligence gathering, out of the country. Moscow was warned that if it retaliated, more would go. The Americans also demanded that Yury Orlov, a prominent human rights campaigner, be released and permitted to move to the US, along with his wife (they eventually left). Shultz’s excellent personal relations with Shevardnadze, which included taking the foreign minister on a boating trip down the Potomac, serenading Shevardnadze with the song ‘Georgia on My Mind’. He arranged for three diplomats from the US embassy to sing it in Russian. The comment was: ‘Thank you, George. That shows respect.’ Daniloff was released. Zakharov was expelled, and Reagan then announced the Reykjavik summit, in October 1986, but this was not the end of the affair. After the summit, Moscow ordered out five US diplomats and Washington retaliated by sending fifty-five Soviet diplomats packing.
In the run up to the Reykjavik summit, Gorbachev offered more and more concessions. ICBMs could be eliminated over ten years and US and Soviet tactical nuclear weapons could be removed from Europe. The sticking point, as before, was SDI. Initially, Gorbachev gained the upper hand. Noting that Reagan’s answers were vague, the Soviet leader then posed specific questions. The president then shuffled his cards to find the right answer but some of them fell on the floor. When he had gathered them up, they were out of order. Reagan accepted Gorbachev’s goal of the elimination of nuclear weapons but refused to agree that testing SDI should be restricted to the laboratory. The president could have agreed to laboratory testing without slowing down research, but he was unaware of this. He offered to share SDI technology once the system was in place. SDI, from Reagan’s point of view, was to make nuclear war impossible, but Gorbachev did not accept this and wanted to eliminate all nuclear weapons, which would make SDI irrelevant.
Marshal Akhromeev, at Reykjavik, was unhappy with Gorbachev’s proposed concessions but afterwards proposed to the General Staff Academy that both superpowers move to defensive strategic planning. This implied that the Soviet doctrine of automatic massive retaliation after an American attack would be revised. The new policy would be to engage in defensive operations which might last several weeks and, if that failed, a massive counter-attack would be launched (Service 2015: 227). This was subjected to severe criticism by officers, but it did reveal that Akhromeev was thinking creatively about how to avoid nuclear Armageddon.
Margaret Thatcher’s reaction to President Reagan’s proposal to abandon nuclear deterrence was as ‘if there had been an earthquake beneath my feet’. Another who was in despair was Kenneth Adelman, director of the US arms control and disarmament agency, who failed to dissuade the president. ‘He’d hear the arguments, respond to bits, and then reiterate his goal of a nuclear free world.’ Adelman, in his memoirs, recounted that he once attended a New York soirée at which a celebrated anti-nuclear writer, Jonathan Schell, outlined a utopian proposal for nuclear disarmament. ‘I was dumbfounded’, recalled Adelman, ‘and said that I had heard such notions from only one other person in my life, the President of the United States’ (The Times, 11 November 2014).
The two leaders came tantalisingly close to an official statement, but unofficially they had agreed on more issues than ever before. The Soviets now accepted on-site inspection and human rights as subjects for negotiation. When he returned to Moscow, Gorbachev gave vent to his frustration at a Politburo meeting, using insulting, demeaning language to describe Reagan but, when he had calmed down, he confessed that the two leaders were ‘doomed to cooperate’. Formal failure at Reykjavik resulted in a better INF agreement in 1987, when all missiles were eliminated. Britain and France would have resisted giving up their nuclear deterrent if Reagan’s acceptance of the elimination of all nuclear weapons had remained.
A stroke of luck for Gorbachev was the flight on 28 May 1987 of Mathias Rust, a young West German adventurer. From Finland he flew his small Cessna plane to Moscow, circled the Kremlin and landed in Red Square. Gorbachev was attending a Warsaw Pact meeting in East Berlin and felt humiliated when he heard the news. Hitherto, he had hesitated to do battle with the General Staff and the Ministry of Defence which had resisted arms concessions, but now he had the chance to establish his authority. The minister of defence was sacked and replaced by a general who had spent much of his career on personnel matters. About 150 generals and officers were put on trial or demoted. Gorbachev and Shevardnadze now concluded that no disarmament treaty could be agreed unless the Soviet Union conceded that it had more medium range nuclear missiles in Europe than NATO, and this meant that the Kremlin was now willing to negotiate a separate treaty on intermediate- and short-range nuclear forces. Gorbachev had abandoned his insistence on an agreement on SDI before progress on other weapons systems.
Reagan pursued four objectives in his relations with Gorbachev:
Gradually the Soviet side came to realise that progress on these issues could be of mutual benefit. If progress were made on one issue, it would not be that the Soviets had lost out to the Americans as zero-sum diplomacy came to an end. The breakthrough came in November 1987, when Shultz and Shevardnadze reached agreement on verification.
In December 1987, Gorbachev travelled to Washington, and he and Reagan signed the epoch-making INF agreement. It eliminated a whole class of nuclear weapons, those carried by intermediate range ballistic missiles – over 2,500 in all. It was the first arms agreement signed by the superpowers since 1979. The verification procedures were so intrusive that American officials began to worry that the Soviets might learn too much about US defence. On the last day of his visit, on 10 December, en route to the White House, Gorbachev suddenly instructed his driver to stop, and he got out and started working the crowd. He was enthusiastically received and was exhilarated by the warmth and emotion he encountered. Gorbymania was born. Over lunch, he confided that his reception had made a deep impression on him. Then everyone went out to the South Lawn of the White House to address the public. A shower of rain interrupted them, and President Reagan put up his umbrella for Nancy to shelter under. This struck the Russians as odd as back home it was the task of the wife to look after her husband, not the other way round. The Soviet delegation stayed at the Madison Hotel where the minibar was replete with wines and spirits. They imbibed so heartily that the head of mission had to ask the hotel to replace the alcohol with soft drinks! Outside, they gorged on Big Macs and Cola.
Gorbachev’s wife Raisa was not so impressed by America and on a trip around Washington declined to get out of the car to view the Lincoln Memorial. Her comments were normally negative, and she had the habit, after shaking hands with a row of guests, of opening her handbag and taking out a wet wipe to clean her hands. This became known as the Pontius Pilate syndrome! The relationship between Raisa and Nancy Reagan was frosty as they were always trying to upstage one another.
Shevardnadze and Shultz established quite a close relationship and the latter was well aware that the Georgian did not like jokes about national stereotypes, but this was in sharp contrast to Reagan, who was always telling Irish jokes to break the ice with Gorbachev. Someone should have explained to him that the Irish love to tell jokes which ridicule the national character.
Paddy goes to the doctor in Dublin and complains about bad feet. He is advised to walk a mile a day. Some time later he phones and says: Doc, I’m in Cork, what do I do now? Paddy goes to see the doctor and says his feet are killing him. The doctor advises him to put on a clean pair of socks every day. Later he phones and says: ‘Doc. I took your advice but I can’t get my shoes on now!
Reagan asked US embassy staff in Moscow to collect Russian jokes but Bush put an end to such practice.
Shultz negotiated hard with Gorbachev but usually with tact. However, in April 1988, he informed the Soviet leader the only thing that was stopping America treating the USSR as another Panama was that it had nuclear weapons. The previous December, Gorbachev had told Bush that the Soviet Union was building a supercomputer and giant computers for industry. Bush realised later that this was pure fiction (Service 2015: 255, 257, 275). The Soviet leader had great faith in Soviet electronics, but one of the puzzles about Soviet industry was its weakness in electronics. Brilliant in physics, chemistry and other sciences, the USSR was a laggard in electronics and imported many GDR electronic components for its machines.
Psychologically, the visit came at a vital moment for Gorbachev. At home, he was finding it harder and harder to counter the populist appeal of Boris Yeltsin and opposition to perestroika from the party and the people. As things became more complex domestically, they flourished internationally. Doubters abroad were being silenced while domestically they were becoming more strident. The Washington summit cemented a partnership with the US and the end of the Cold War was in sight. Things began to change also in the Soviet Union and a softer line on human rights was taken and Jews who wished to emigrate were freed from detention and permitted to leave. The Russian Orthodox Church, with the support of the regime, marked the millennium of Christianity in Russia and the Soviet Union and churches were refurbished and reconsecrated.
In February 1988, Gorbachev announced that Soviet forces would be withdrawn from Afghanistan and an agreement on this was signed in April. In May, Soviet troops began to leave Mongolia and it was hinted that they would soon be departing Eastern Europe. Reagan travelled to Moscow for the last summit with Gorbachev, and on 1 June they exchanged the instruments of ratification which implemented the INF treaty. Reagan strolled in Red Square with Gorbachev and when asked by journalists if he still regarded the Soviet Union as the evil empire, answered in the negative. He had changed his mind, as had many Americans, with only about 30 per cent now regarding the Soviet Union as evil and threatening.
At the UN in December 1988, Gorbachev announced that Soviet armed forces would be reduced unilaterally by half a million within two years. Soviet troops, stationed in the GDR, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, would be gradually withdrawn. Astonishingly, he did not expect the US to reciprocate. The remarkable thing about this speech at the New York summit was that neither Gorbachev nor Shevardnadze had consulted the defence ministry before announcing the cuts. In protest, Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, chief of the General Staff, announced his resignation the same day, but another source states that he resigned for health reasons. He had gone along with strategic arms reductions but drew the line at conventional cuts if the US did not reciprocate. It was clear that the Soviet leader was engaged in a high-wire act with his own military. Gorbachev asked Akhromeev to stay as his adviser.
Gorbachev used the UN forum to elucidate his view of universal human values and stressed that freedom of choice was a universal principle. Many wondered if this extended to Eastern Europe. Afterwards he met President Reagan and President-Elect George H. W. Bush on Governors Island. The Armenian earthquake disaster intervened and the Soviet leader had to cut short his visit and cancel a visit to Cuba.
In 2010, Gorbachev, reflecting on the extraordinary relationship with Reagan, commented (The Times, 24 January 2011):
I think it was stroke of luck that history brought two such like-minded people together… I am proud of what we did together because it brought us closer to abolishing nuclear weapons. And it opened the door to a new kind of co-operation in the world… We must pay tribute to Ronald Reagan. He was a great man.
The impetus in Soviet-American relations was now lost as President Bush, after assuming office in January 1989, took his time to elaborate his foreign policy priorities. Bush felt that Reagan had been too quick to deal with Moscow and had been too accommodating. This revealed that the new president was having difficulty in comprehending the sea change in Soviet foreign policy. The conservative Bush administration did not want to believe that many of its cherished beliefs about the Soviet Union were dissolving before their eyes. In May 1989, Marlon Fitzwater, the White House spokesman, dismissed Gorbachev as a ‘drugstore cowboy’. But George H. W. Bush changed his mind during his extensive tour of Eastern and Western Europe in July 1989. Everyone pressed on him the need to meet Mikhail Gorbachev as momentous events were taking place. Gorbachev was disappointed that Bush’s first stop was Warsaw, not Moscow. The relationship eventually became very close and Gorbachev remarked, on one occasion, that it was not in the interests of the Soviet Union to diminish the role of the US in the world. On some occasions, he excluded his own interpreter from meetings with Bush, relying entirely on the American interpreter. This behaviour was puzzling, but one explanation would be that Gorbachev’s foreign policy agenda could only be carried out if the US shared it and continued to be the dominant world power. As one of his Soviet communist critics pointed out, this was a strange policy for a Soviet leader to be pursuing.
Figure 13.2 President George H. W. Bush
Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, LC-USZ62-98302.
The turning point in the relationship between James Baker, who had succeeded George Shultz as secretary of state, and Eduard Shevardnadze occurred in September 1989. The latter accepted Baker’s invitation to his ranch at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Before leaving Moscow, Shevardnadze had given vent to his frustration at the tardiness of Washington’s response to Soviet arms proposals. The Soviet foreign minister stayed two weeks and developed as close a relationship with Baker as he had had with Shultz. On arrival he was presented with a ten-gallon Stetson, but enquiries at the Soviet embassy in Washington had failed to elicit information on the size of Shevardnadze’s head. So the Americans worked it out for themselves. The dashing Georgian cut quite a figure in his ten-gallon hat, cowboy boots and three-piece suit.
To underline the economic crisis back home, Shevardnadze had brought along Nikolai Shmelev, a pro-market economist, who had published some devastating analyses of the Soviet economy. The minister was desperate for a partnership with the US, whatever the cost. Without gaining anything in return, he intimated that Moscow was prepared to sign a START treaty. He confirmed that the giant Krasnoyarsk radar station contravened the ABM treaty but had hinted at this during a speech to the UN in 1986. Gorbachev was later to inform Bush that he had decommissioned Krasnoyarsk in order to ‘make things easier for the president’. The facility was not a satellite tracking station, as the Soviets had been maintaining for years, but a sophisticated battle management radar in a potentially anti-ballistic missile system. On his return to Moscow, Shevardnadze made other concessions. He accepted Washington’s demand that it be permitted 880 submarine-launched cruise missiles, but Marshal Akhromeev and others berated him for not having gained reciprocity on this issue.
A Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) document was signed on 17 January 1989, and one of the provisions was that talks would begin on reducing conventional forces in Europe. This resulted in the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, signed in Paris by sixteen NATO states and six Warsaw Pact states on 19 November 1990.
Gorbachev faced another embarrassment when, on 25 April 1989, the British ambassador reported to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that London did not believe that the Soviet Union only possessed 50,000 tonnes of poison gas. The British government had information, from a Soviet defector, that an illegal biological weapons programme was operating. The Soviets did have a germ warfare facility at Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg), but Gorbachev hoped their research could be classified as defensive. The Soviet Union had been caught in breach of its obligations. On 14 May 1990, the British and US ambassadors pressed Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Bessmertnykh to end the Soviet Union’s illegal production of biological weapons. Moscow conceded that the programme had been under way in breach of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention but this was because, it contended, NATO countries had moved production to third countries. The Soviet Union agreed to end the manufacture of biological and chemical weapons, and Soviet and US stockpiles were to be destroyed by 2002 (Service 2015: 372–3, 428–9).
Shevardnadze advised Gorbachev, in November 1989, that it was very important to get Bush’s ‘public commitment for the reform programme’ and warned him that Bush was an ‘indecisive leader’ (Dobrynin 1995: 634). Bush made up his mind about perestroika before he arrived in Malta on 1 December: it was a good idea, and he had a raft of proposals about economic co-operation. The Americans had warned Gorbachev against trying to outsmart Bush at his first meeting by launching a series of new initiatives. Reykjavik obviously still rankled.
The Soviet leader understood that Bush was offering him an economic partnership, although he soon demonstrated that he had a woolly understanding of a market economy. There were informal agreements on Eastern Europe, Germany and the Baltic republics. Eastern Europe did not present a problem because Gorbachev and Shevardnadze had reiterated, on several occasions, that the Soviets would not use military force to prevent the peoples there deciding their own fate. Gorbachev said he hoped the Warsaw Pact would continue. Bush countered by saying that as long as force was not used the US would not seek to embarrass the Soviet Union in the region.
On Germany, Gorbachev counselled caution because no one in the Soviet Union favoured reunification in the short term. On the Baltic republics, he said he was willing to consider any form of association but not separation. Bush made it clear that the use of force there would be disastrous for their relationship, and the US again promised not to make life difficult there for Moscow. He also told Gorbachev that he did not accept Mrs Thatcher’s views on Germany.
She thinks history is unjust. Germany is so rich and Great Britain is struggling. They won the war but lost an empire and their economy. She does the wrong thing. She should try to bind the Germans into the European Community.
(Service 2015: 423)
On arms, it was agreed to work towards the signing of a conventional forces in Europe (CFE) treaty, in 1990. A START treaty might be ready for signing at the next proposed summit, in Washington in mid-1990, but there were also sharp disagreements. Bush was critical of Soviet arms deliveries to Latin America and the behaviour of Moscow’s ally, Cuba. Gorbachev retorted that he had kept his promise not to supply arms to Nicaragua. On Cuba, the Soviet president thought the best solution was for President Bush to meet Fidel Castro face-to-face and offered to arrange a meeting. Bush brushed this aside contemptuously and advised Gorbachev to stop wasting his money on the island. Gorbachev took umbrage at Bush’s assertion that Western values were prevailing. This implied, countered Gorbachev, that the USSR was caving in to Western norms. He preferred the term ‘universal, democratic values’. Eventually, they agreed to say ‘democratic values’. Malta was a watershed in Soviet-American relations. Gorbachev assured Bush that he, as other Soviet citizens, did not consider the US the enemy anymore. Shevardnadze put it graphically. The superpowers had ‘buried the Cold War at the bottom of the Mediterranean’ (Beschloss and Talbott 1993: 165). There was another bonus in 1990, when Shevardnadze transferred the Barents Sea shelf to the US.
Gorbachev came up with the expression ‘Europe is our common home’ (the concept was elastic: it also included the US and Canada) in Paris in February 1986, during his first visit to Western Europe after taking office. He chose France because it was a nuclear power and it would be a feather in his cap if he could interest the French in a nuclear-free world, but President Mitterrand proved quite unresponsive. When Mitterrand visited Moscow, in July 1986, he confided to Gorbachev that he opposed the whole idea of SDI and viewed it as accelerating the arms race instead of slowing it down. After the Reykjavik summit, however, the French repeated their commitment to nuclear deterrence, disappointing Gorbachev.
Figure 13.3
President Ronald Reagan and President Mikhail Gorbachev
Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC 20540 USA, LC-USZ62–117700.
In April 1987 in Prague, the Soviet president floated his pan-European idea but found little response from the leaders of Western Europe who preferred to take their lead from the Americans. When British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher visited Moscow in March 1987, she forcefully reiterated her commitment to nuclear deterrence (‘nuclear weapons have been invented, you cannot de-invent them,’ she said). She also believed the goal of the Soviet Union was to promote communism worldwide. Nevertheless, the two leaders got on extremely well as Mrs Thatcher enjoyed a good argument. As she had the ear of President Reagan, it was important for Gorbachev to attempt to win her over to his way of thinking. She was enthusiastic about something else: perestroika.
A joke circulated after the meeting.
The two leaders are having tea at Gorbachev’s dacha. A dog appears. ‘Come, come, Geoffrey Howe, come and say hello to the nice lady,’ the Soviet leader says. ‘Why do you call him Geoffrey Howe?,’ enquires Mrs Thatcher. ‘Oh, that’s because he always does what I say!’
Shevardnadze cracked another joke about Mrs Thatcher:
She goes up to Heaven and God welcomes her. ‘How are you? How are things down there, my daughter?’ ‘First of all, I’m not your daughter and, secondly, you are sitting in my seat!’
Gorbachev told a story about a man who decided to change jobs and chose work in a toy factory. After all the pieces had been assembled, he found he had a machine gun. This was a subtle way of pointing out to the US president that in the Soviet Union appearance is not always reality.
Mrs Thatcher was famous for her dress sense, from her colourful power suits to the formidable handbags and pristine strings of pearls. On one occasion, visiting the Kremlin in winter, in felt boots, her Special Branch bodyguard was observed by KGB security to have bulging pockets which they assumed was ‘impressive weaponry’. The bodyguard waited until Mrs Thatcher had moved into the warm and then pulled out a pair of high heels for her to change into.
Although President Mitterrand regarded Reagan’s belief in SDI as bordering on the mystical, he maintained a hard line on France’s nuclear deterrent: it was non-negotiable, and the French Parliament even voted to upgrade their armed forces. In Moscow in April 1987, Mrs Thatcher also confirmed her belief in nuclear deterrent. In December 1987, Gorbachev dropped in on Mrs Thatcher en route to the Washington summit to sign the INF treaty. Geoffrey Howe, the British foreign secretary, was very impressed by their work rate and compared them to two star Stakhanovites (exemplary Soviet shock workers). Gorbachev’s first extended official visit to Britain, in April 1989, found Mrs Thatcher passionately interested in the development of perestroika. When Gorbachev commented that many in the West were having doubts about it, she brushed this aside and assured him that all in the West were enthusiastic about it. (This was pure fiction!)
After visiting France and Britain, the two Western European nuclear states, it was time for the Soviet leader to visit West Germany in June 1989. The Germans had been feeling left out of Gorbachev’s diplomacy. When Chancellor Kohl saw Gorbachev at Chernenko’s funeral, the new Soviet leader enquired where the Federal Republic was drifting. He used the verb driftovat, to drift, which is not to be found in any Russian dictionary. Kohl was probably the first Western leader to be treated to such neologisms – Gorbachev loved to pepper his remarks with newly mastered English expressions. Kohl found the Soviet president’s communicative skills brilliant and attempted to pay him a compliment. Unfortunately, he likened him to Joseph Goebbels, the silver-tongued Nazi propaganda chief, which soured relations for a while. This led Helmut Schmidt, the ex-chancellor, to offer this comment about the monoglot Rhinelander: ‘I think there are still two or three fields in which he still needs a lot of education: international affairs, arms control and military strategy, and economics and finance.’ In July in Paris, Gorbachev told the French the post-war era was over, and at the Sorbonne, he underlined that pure intellect without morality constituted a terrible danger. He was in Helsinki in October and then he went to Italy. The reception he received in Milan was the most emotional of his career and was feted everywhere as if he had arrived from Mars. On 1 December, he was the first Soviet leader to enter the Vatican and informed the Polish Pope John Paul II that democracy was not enough: morality was also essential. The pope spoke Russian with him for a while and assured him that he would not do anything to undermine perestroika. When Gorbachev thanked him in Polish, the pope corrected his Polish and was then invited to visit the Soviet Union.
You know, I changed things in Stavropol krai and that pleased me a lot. I thought I knew how to do it, so when I arrived in Moscow I thought I’d do the same but on a bigger stage. Then I realised, as regards appointments and personnel, you cannot even move one single person because the system (sistema) is so tightly knit and interdependent. I was really in despair.
—Gorbachev
The oblast Party leader was a king; the republican Party leader was a tsar; and the general secretary was practically God’s equal.
—Gorbachev
The main priority for Gorbachev was raising living standards. One of the reasons for the ousting of Khrushchev in 1964 had been food shortages. The share of the budget accorded agriculture increased from 16 per cent to 18 per cent and then to 25 per cent in 1985, and food was heavily subsidised. Andropov cancelled increases in bread and other food products at the last moment, in January 1983, because he feared social unrest. Billions of dollars were spent annually on importing grain and other foodstuffs.
Andropov lamented this and told the Central Committee on 22 November 1982 that the country had become accustomed to such purchases.
It became an automatic sort of procedure: we start to buy grain abroad every year; and we got butter from somewhere else, milk from somewhere else again. Of course, you will understand that they haven’t given us all this because they thought we had beautiful eyes. Money is demanded. I don’t want to scare anyone but I will say over recent years we’ve wasted billions of gold roubles on such an expensive thing.
What solution did Andropov offer? None. This analysis was so bleak it was not published. Unfortunately, the world prices of gold and diamonds began to fall as did Soviet oil output. Nonetheless, by the mid-1980s, the South African company De Beers was paying the Soviet Union about a billion dollars a year for high-quality diamonds. On the other hand, Soviet propaganda hammered any businessman who traded with South Africa under apartheid!
On 18 January 1983, Nikolai Ryzhkov, CC secretary for the economy, was scathing about the fulfilment of national plans to fellow CC secretaries:
Of course, it’s said that the plan had been fulfilled but that won’t be the truth because it is the corrected plan that has been fulfilled whereas the plan envisaged by the national economic plan has not been fulfilled. This is how we get a situation here where we ourselves create disinformation.
(Service 2015: 55–6, 58)
The concept of a socialist market economy surfaced in 1984. There was talk of promoting co-operatives and individual labour activity. Gorbachev took part in many discussion groups, but his contributions were marked by a lack of clarity and understanding of economics. This was his Achilles’s heel and like Mao, he could not comprehend the dismal science.
Everyone agreed that economic reform was necessary and even Marshal Ogarkov had reached that conclusion, but the problem was how to implement it. The gulf between labour productivity in the Soviet Union and the US had been narrowing until 1973 but afterwards it began to widen. This was due to the information revolution in the US (computers, etc.) which the USSR was slow to emulate. The Soviet economy began to slow down in the mid-1970s. Growth between 1981 and 1985 was zero, according to Abel Aganbegyan, one of Gorbachev’s leading economic advisers, but he only reached this conclusion in 1989.
The first reform was uskorenie (acceleration), the brain child of Abel Aganbegyan. Only about 15 per cent of the capital stock was up to world standards. A mere 5 per cent of exports went to capitalist countries so retooling industry became the goal. However, the investment required cut investment to consumer goods industries. The results were meagre. The next move was to combat alcoholism. This noble goal had two main drawbacks: one was the hole in the budget which would result as booze was the main source of revenue for the state, and the other was that the male population liked its vodka. My own experience revealed that one cannot separate a Russian from the bottle. Psychologically it turned males against Gorbachev and his reforms, but the female population applauded but that had little impact in such a male-dominated society.
The name given to the new economic policy was perestroika or restructuring. The goal was to rethink, reorganise and restructure the way things were done, and it was to apply to all aspects of activity. Because the economy was not taking off, Gorbachev concluded that party and government officials were holding it back. They were preventing the creative potential of workers bearing fruit. So glasnost was launched and it permitted ordinary people to criticise their bosses. This would kick-start progress, but this was a complete misreading of the reasons for the failure of perestroika to produce quick results. The main reason was that enterprises did not regard perestroika as beneficial.
The explosion at reactor number four of the Chernobyl atomic power station at 1.26 a.m. on Saturday, 26 April 1986, exposed the limits of glasnost. Gorbachev was told at 5 a.m. and a special commission of top scientists were sent to the site but forwarded no information for two days. (The first nuclear power plant to register the explosion was the facility at Forsmark, in Sweden. At first, the personnel thought that the source was their own plant, so high was the reading!) All 47,000 inhabitants were evacuated from Pripyat, 3 km from the plant, on the afternoon of 27 April, but by then they had been exposed to radiation for forty hours. A short item appeared on the evening of 28 April on Soviet television but it gave no indication of the seriousness of the catastrophe, and the May Day parades in Kiev and other cities went ahead – all within the zone of contamination. On 2 May, everyone was evacuated from the village of Chernobyl, 7 km from the plant.
Another explosion in reactor number two was possible as radioactive magma was seeping through the cracked concrete floor. If it came into contact with the water table underneath, an explosion at least ten times as powerful as Hiroshima would occur. On 13 May, thousands of miners were ordered to dig a tunnel in the sand under the reactor in order to pour in concrete to prevent seepage. Finally, on 14 May, Gorbachev appeared on television to tell his fellow citizens what had happened, but his delivery was hesitant. The fact that it had taken him eighteen days to decide to inform the public angered many. Untold thousands of people had been unnecessarily exposed to radiation due to the refusal of the Gorbachev team to act immediately. Chernobyl demonstrated to some citizens that Gorbachev was a bumbling leader who was unlikely to lead the country forward. Politburo minutes even revealed that plans to cover up the nuclear accident had been discussed. This tactic had worked when an explosion at the Mayak nuclear facility in the Urals in 1957 caused a nuclear catastrophe almost as serious as Chernobyl.
Thousands of troops were drafted in to ‘liquidate’ the problem of Chernobyl. In September, radioactive graphite had to be removed by hand from the roof of the reactor, but a man could only work forty-five seconds due to the radiation. By November, the reactor had been sealed in a huge concrete and steel sarcophagus. Chernobyl had cost seventeen billion roubles but also thousands of lives. The heroes were the firefighters and soldiers who gave their lives to save their country and Europe from an unimaginable nuclear catastrophe.
Chernobyl dashed hopes about socio-economic acceleration. It was a water-shed, and the culture of secrecy and lack of personal responsibility had to be tackled. Gorbachev made clear that politicians and scientists at lower levels had been incompetent and mendacious. Glasnost expanded rapidly, and Gorbachev used terms such as ‘socialist pluralism’ and the ‘pluralism of opinion’. It was beginning to take on aspects of the Prague Spring.
Chernobyl added urgency to the need to reach agreement on nuclear weapons. Gorbachev, in a conversation with George H. W. Bush on 10 December 1987, mentioned that if nuclear power stations in France or elsewhere were destroyed, it could lead to nuclear war. The idea that one could do something after the beginning of a nuclear conflict was nonsense. If foreign ministers could not reach agreement in arms control negotiations, they should be fired (Service 2015: 189).
There was no coherent pattern to the economic reforms which were introduced. One instance was the law on co-operatives and individual labour activity, in 1986. It was followed by legislation which criminalised money grubbing, unearned income (letting a room in one’s flat, for example) and living above one’s means. Often legislation would afford enterprises greater autonomy in production and distribution of goods, but the second part of the same legislation restricted these concessions. Ministries were downgraded but they had arranged intersectoral transfers, financed research and development, trained personnel and lobbied the centre on behalf of their enterprises.
The most radical reform so far was the law on the state enterprise of July 1987. It promoted self-financing and self-management. Workers could elect the director and other personnel, including foremen. If they disagreed with management, they could dismiss it and elect new management. Government and party officials could no longer give orders to enterprises. Of all the economic reforms this was the most disruptive. Self-financing did not make a lot of sense without a comprehensive price reform. As a consequence, perestroika began to run out of steam by the end of 1987.
The conference, in June 1988, was a great leap forward towards democratisation. The USSR Congress of People’s Deputies (CPD), extinct since Lenin’s day, was resurrected. Fifteen hundred deputies were to be directly elected in multi-candidate elections and 750 nominated by social organisations, such as the party and Komsomol. The CPD would elect from its members a Supreme Soviet of 400 members. They would be full-time law makers. This move transformed the role of the chair of the USSR Supreme Soviet, which hitherto had been a more or less decorative post. The present holder was Andrei Gromyko but Gorbachev, wanting the post for himself, pushed Gromyko into retirement. A Belarusian, Gromyko spoke beautiful Russian and had a keen sense of humour but never displayed this in public. He followed the Russian tradition that if someone smiled all the time, he was regarded as an idiot. One has to remember that he had a hard taskmaster, Josef Stalin, who believed that a Soviet diplomat should be feared and not loved. ‘Grim Grom’ (foreign minister from 1957 to 1985) will go down in history as Mr Nyet (Mr No). He would have achieved much more had he been more flexible but, after all, Russians do not bargain but negotiate. He was to rue the fact that he had helped make Gorbachev party leader.
The conference highlighted the fact that the party had split into various factions. Those who wanted to proceed slowly were probably in the majority, and one of the critics was the writer Yury Bondarev. He did not like what had happened over the previous three years and likened perestroika to a plane which took off and had no idea where it was going to land.
Yeltsin was also quite a performer. He proposed that those members of the Politburo who had been there under Brezhnev resign because they were responsible for the mess the country was in. He attacked the party nomenklatura’s privileges: their special polyclinics, special shops and the like. There ‘can be no special communists in the Party’, he thundered, and the little people loved it. He called for multi-candidate elections to all party posts and then he turned cheeky. Would the delegates rehabilitate him by removing the charges made against him at the October 1987 plenum? He would prefer it now rather than fifty years after he was dead. He was showered with abuse.
He also proposed the privatisation of public property. But who could buy this property? Party bureaucrats, enterprise managers, those who had done well from the shadow capitalist economy, the black market rich, the KGB – these groups stood to do very nicely from the rise of Yeltsin. Boris presented himself as the champion of the Russian Federation as it did not have its own Communist Party, Academy of Sciences and so on and this amounted to discrimination. Russian nationalists flocked to his colours.
An even more radical reform was the decision to remove the party from the industrial economy (agriculture remained a party responsibility until the collapse of the Soviet Union). Party secretaries had been the glue which kept the planned economy together. Party First Secretaries, almost always engineers – except in oil regions where they were geologists – were recruited from successful enterprise managers. He had four main functions:
Who was to take on these responsibilities? The local Soviet, but it had no department of industry and therefore had no expertise in such matters. So a vacuum began appearing at the local level. Enterprises gradually paid less attention to the centre and began forming trusts and associations, and this had an important side effect in non-Russian republics: the growth of nationalism.
A popular ditty made the rounds:
Sausage prices twice as high
Where’s the vodka for us to buy?
All we do is sit at home
Watching Gorby drone and drone
Another caustic comment was: ‘How do you translate perestroika into English?’ ‘Easy. Science fiction.’ A cartoon depicts an enterprise director dictating a telegram to Moscow. ‘Have successfully implemented perestroika. Await further instructions.’
The Soviet Union became more and more dependent on international markets for grain and food imports. The first large grain imports were in 1963, and in 1984, they had risen to forty-six million tonnes, costing $25 billion in 2000 prices, and in 1985 they were 45.6 million tonnes, costing $22.5 billion. Gold was also sold to raise the money to pay for these huge imports. The grain was for human, cattle and poultry consumption. Cattle were raised in huge complexes (following the US example) but Soviet farmers could not supply enough feed grain and the same applied to poultry production. The Soviet Union began to run up a hard currency debt in 1974, and it rose inexorably afterwards. By 1985, Soviet debt was $22.5 billion but, if Eastern Europe is added, it became $115.7 billion. (According to Gaidar [2007] in 1988, Soviet debt had risen to $41.5 billion and all socialist countries to $205.7 billion.)
A law on cooperatives was passed in May 1988 but most of them were set up in state enterprises. They mushroomed and by mid-1989, the number of workers in cooperatives had risen to 4.9 million. Wages in cooperatives were at least double those in state enterprises and in early 1991, six million were working in cooperatives. They often raised the ire of the general public as enterprise goods were simply sold at a handsome profit. They were also used as a cover for drinking, as tea cups were distributed but then filled with vodka. Cooperatives were useful channels for laundering currency acquired through bribery and corruption.
Legislation in July–August 1988 permitted the Komsomol to engage in foreign economic activity. In other words, the Komsomol elite could set up scientific and technical centres and undertake research for domestic and foreign firms. Legislation in November 1989 permitted an enterprise to purchase, wholly or partially, property it was renting. This, in effect, privatised property and allowed management to acquire valuable assets at low prices.
In 1985, the six military members of the Politburo retired and, among the new talent promoted was Deputy Prime Minister Li Peng, who had studied hydraulic engineering in the Soviet Union. Hainan Island, off the south east coast, became an SEZ to produce, among other things, rice and sugar cane. Guangdong province became, in effect, an SEZ; other coastal cities followed and Shanghai itself could attract foreign investment. Two Chinese economies emerged: the SEZs based on foreign capital and expertise and becoming enormously prosperous, and the rest of the economy where living standards lagged far behind. Zhao Ziyang, the prime minister, became enamoured of the scientific technical revolution and after a visit to the US became even more excited by the potential of technology to change the world.
Huge state projects, such as the Shengli oil refinery, were launched but local officials expected a cut to turn a blind eye to irregularities. It was in their interests to promote business in their region and tax evasion became the norm. Deng said on American TV: ‘To get rich is glorious. To get rich is not a sin.’ (He is also credited with another aphorism: ‘It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.’ What he actually said was: ‘It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or yellow.’)
Because unemployment was not permitted to exist under socialism, surplus labour, mostly young people, was sent to the countryside from the 1950s onwards. This ended with Mao’s death and they then returned to the cities. There were over twenty million of them, and they accounted for about 10 per cent of the urban population. Few of them could find work and they began blocking railway lines, surrounding government buildings and the like. In November 1979, the government was forced to legalise individual economic activity and a person could now become an entrepreneur. Pressure from below – fear of mass protests – had again won the day. Two years later, the party and government declared that private entrepreneurship was a ‘necessary complement’ to the socialist economy. This opened the floodgates to capitalism in cities and towns. During the 1980s, the authorities discriminated against TVEs and individual activity, and it was only in 1992, when capitalism was officially recognised as part and parcel of socialism, that discrimination ended.
Students wanted more democracy, which Deng was determined to deny them. In January 1987, Hu Yaobang resigned as secretary general of the party. He had favoured dialogue and some movement towards democracy but he refused to stand and fight for his convictions. Zhao Ziyang took over the top party post, and a battle developed between hardliners and reformers over who should become prime minister. Eventually Li Peng got the nod. A conservative, dour comrade, he was an uninspiring choice.
In April 1989, Hu Yaobang suffered a heart attack at a Politburo meeting and died a week later. Hu was extremely popular with intellectuals and students, and he was revered as that rara avis, an honest communist. During student demonstrations in 1986, he had sided with the students. A list of political demands was handed to the country’s parliament, and they included calls for freedom and democracy. At another demonstration there were shouts of ‘Down with the Communist Party!’ Deng declined to visit Hu in hospital and he became a target for the demonstrators.
Student protests were normal but this time it was different, as the public joined them, and the leaders were stunned by the number of Beijingers who joined the protests. The railways allowed masses of students to travel free to Beijing. Deng became exasperated at the extent of the protests which spanned 130 cities.
On some days, there were about a million protesters on Tiananmen Square. A policeman, told by an old lady not to touch the students because they were ‘our’ children, told her: ‘If it weren’t for this uniform I would join them.’ Li Peng, the prime minister, told Deng that the protesters wanted to overthrow the regime. One of the golden oldies, the Party Elders, called the students ‘bastards’.
In the midst of this crisis, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev arrived. This was not his first attempt to improve relations with the Middle Kingdom. When Li Peng was in Moscow for Chernenko’s funeral, he had rejected the olive branch extended by the new Soviet leader and stressed that China would never accept subordinate status to the Soviet Union but did not rule out an improvement in relations. He returned in June 1985 to sign an agreement on scientific and technical cooperation. When he visited again in December 1985, Gorbachev stressed they had a common interest in opposing SDI. He wondered why China supported America’s policy in Afghanistan and assured Li that Moscow had no interest in causing trouble for China in Vietnam. Li made it clear to him that China would not accept the ‘little brother’ status and there would be no normalisation of relations until the USSR changed its policies in Afghanistan and Cambodia. Moreover, he was sharply critical of Moscow endorsing Vietnam’s military presence in Cambodia. On a more positive note, a visit by Deputy Prime Minister Yao Yilin in December 1985 saw negotiations on arms control and the signing of a bilateral trade and economic co-operation.
Gorbachev’s visit had been prepared by Shevardnadze who had visited Beijing and Shanghai in February 1989. In the Chinese capital, Shevardnadze proposed the normalisation of relations and therefore a visit from Gorbachev would be welcome. He met Deng in Shanghai who advocated better relations and assured Deng that there were no Soviet troops in Afghanistan in false uniforms. Deng made clear there could be no peace in Cambodia until all Vietnamese troops had been withdrawn. Shevardnadze even hinted the Soviets might stop providing aid to Hanoi. What made Deng angry were the machinations of the Vietnamese to set up an Indochinese Federation, dominated by Vietnam. He even brought up the territories lost to Imperial Russia during the nineteenth century: ‘There will come a time when China will perhaps restore them to itself.’ Stung by this, Shevardnadze even asked the Politburo on 16 February to consider returning some territory around Vladivostok (it had been taken as recently as 1860).
The depth of Chinese feeling about the unequal relationship with Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union was brought home to me in an interview, in August 1988, with a member of the Central Committee of the CPC who had studied in the Soviet Union. He delivered the first two sentences in Russian and then reverted to Mandarin. He proceeded to launch a violent tirade against the Russians for the way they had demeaned, insulted and taken advantage of the Chinese, beginning with the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, the first treaty signed by the two countries. He went through all the subsequent treaties, ending with the one which Stalin had imposed on the People’s Republic in 1950. I was warned never to trust Russians (not Soviets) as they were cheats, thieves, dishonourable and disreputable people.
To put it mildly, Gorbachev was not impressed by China’s reforms and on 29 September 1986 informed his aides:
The Chinese have developed agriculture on a private basis. They have achieved stunning success but there should not be euphoria as if China had resolved everything. But what next? They don’t have fertilizers, technology or intensive methods. We have all of these but we have to unite these with personal interest. This is our problem. This is where we can insure a burst forward. Ilich (Lenin) tormented himself about how to unite the personal interest with socialism, and this is what we have to think and think about.
Gorbachev failed to appreciate that socialist agriculture had failed in China and that was the reason why private or capitalist agriculture had re-emerged.
He told Anatoly Chernyaev, in August 1988:
I don’t understand all the fuss about China… Yes, there is everything on the shelves in the shops but nobody is buying. It is a capitalist market. And the law of that market operates in such a fashion that prices are inflated to the point that everything lies around on shelves and when the goods go stale they sell them off cheaply.
(Service 2015: 380–5)
What an extraordinary analysis! If anyone needs evidence that Gorbachev did not understand economics, this is it. I spent two months in China in the summer of 1988, mostly in Beijing, and can testify that goods moved off the shelves. There were two currencies: the hard and soft yuan, and one could buy choice goods with the former. There was a Friendship Store for foreigners but only hard currency was accepted. It is true the quality of the goods was not very high and this extended to the construction industry. I stayed with a middle-class family in a new flat and one can only say the quality of workmanship was very low. On the other hand, one had to be at a bakery at 6 a.m. to get the bread one wanted in Liaoyang, in central China. It did a roaring trade in wedding, birthday and other cakes which were as delicious as anything one could buy in London. I asked what the secret was: all the flour was imported.
Students were enthusiastic about Gorbachev’s reforms and many wanted their own Gorbachev. Some were fasting in Tiananmen Square in the hope he would intercede on their behalf and they and their supporters cursed Deng. The Soviet leader was keen to repair relations with the Middle Kingdom, and some of Deng’s speeches were published in Russian and favourably reviewed in Pravda.
On 16 May, Gorbachev arrived in Beijing and was met by Deng – the welcoming ceremony had to be held at Beijing airport because Tiananmen Square was full of students – who had warned him there was to be no hugging and kissing. He then proceeded to give him a lecture on Russian imperialism: 1.5 million km2 had been stolen from China, no one would forget this, and there was no point in speeding up the normalisation of relations between the two Communist parties. When he met Li Peng, the prime minister showed no interest in more trade but concentrated on issues which divided the two countries. He regretted the depredations Japan had wrought in China during their occupation from 1937 to 1945 but said that pragmatism dictated economic relations as Japan was an advanced industrial country. It was high time that the Soviet Union and China agreed on their frontier. Gorbachev responded by saying he would like to demilitarise the frontier. He then met Zhao Ziyang, party general secretary; the discussion was very open, and it was clear that the Chinese Party boss wanted to go down the same route as the Soviet Union. But Deng did not, and hence Gorbachev was an unwelcome guest. However, he was able to make a speech in the Great Hall, on Tiananmen Square, in which he highlighted the fact that 436 short- and medium-range nuclear weapons would be destroyed in the Soviet East. He proposed that the Soviet railway network could form a new Silk Road by transporting Chinese goods to Europe, and he ridiculed Western commentators who saw Soviet and Chinese reforms as leading to the restoration of capitalism. Gorbachev asked China to provide desperately needed consumer goods and would be paid in raw materials, and he also requested a loan which was agreed.
Shevardnadze held talks with Jiang Zemin, Shanghai Party boss and Politburo Standing Committee member, who informed him China was willing to act as intermediaries to resolve the conflicts in South East Asia. Gorbachev was taken around a modern factory in Shanghai but was not impressed. It became clear that Deng and Li had little interest in expanding trade with the Soviet Union now that capitalist countries were investing in China. Gorbachev’s inability to recognise that China was modernising rapidly was reflected in his comment to James Baker, in late May 1989, when he informed the American that China’s scientific and technical capacity would soon hit the buffers (Service 2015: 387–8). Gorbachev held to the Western capitalist view that successful modernisation had to be accompanied by democratisation. What he had not realised was that China was undergoing economic democratisation but not political and that was the secret of its success.
Annoyed at Zhao’s comments to the Soviet leader, Deng called a meeting on the morning of 17 May. He informed the leadership that the students’ goal was to set up a ‘bourgeois republic on the Western model’. Multi-party elections would cause chaos like the ‘all-out civil war’ the country had experienced during the Cultural Revolution. ‘You don’t need guns and cannons to have a civil war; fists and clubs will do just fine’ (New York Times, 6 January 2001). National stability came before democracy, and the party thought that if it retreated any further it was finished. Deng informed them that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would be brought in to restore order and martial law. Zhao Ziyang disagreed and asked Deng to rescind the martial law decision whereupon Deng reminded him that the minority submits to the majority. Rumours spread about the imminent declaration of martial law and over a million appeared on the streets. They supported the hunger strikers and called for Deng to go. Zhao and Li Peng went out to meet the students but Zhao conceded tearfully they had come too late. Deng was furious at Zhao’s tears and words, and martial law was declared on 20 May.
Troops began moving into the city, but about two million Beijingers set up road blocks with buses and lorries and prevented them reaching their destinations; some units went over to the demonstrators. The troops retreated to their bases, and it looked as if China was sliding into anarchy.
On the night of 3–4 June, troops moved forward, encountering the usual road blocks. This time they opened fire and killed many ordinary citizens in the western parts of the city. In the bloodletting that night, most deaths occurred outside Tiananmen Square. The crowd’s anger was vented on the soldiers and some of them were lynched. The Goddess of Democracy, a huge statute erected by the students, which had stood facing Mao in Tiananmen Square, was flattened by tanks. This symbolised the squashing of hopes for democracy for decades to come. Demonstrators in sixty-three cities across China protested against the slaughter of the demonstrators in Beijing.
Figure 13.5 Deng Xiaoping
Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC 20540 USA, US News and World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09796.
The official death toll was put at 200 but the most realistic was 775. Anatoly Lukyanov informed the Soviet Politburo, at its meeting on 4 October 1989, that the real number of casualties was 3,000. Gorbachev commented: ‘We must be realists. Like us, they have to defend themselves. Three thousand – so what?’ Deng Xiaoping’s comment was as chilling: ‘You call this a slaughter? This is a petty matter compared to what China saw not so many years ago.’ It is difficult not to conclude that Deng was also taking revenge for the humiliation which he and his family had suffered during the Cultural Revolution.
The crackdown was a disaster for the demonstrators but even more for Deng as foreign investors could not get out of China fast enough. President Bush announced a cessation of weapons sales to Beijing, worth $600 million, as did the European Union, and the World Bank said it would end lending to the Middle Kingdom.
Jiang Zemin took over as party leader and reverted to pre-reform language. The entrepreneurs, who had benefited from reform, had sided with the students so they had to be closed down. Private companies were not to be permitted to compete with SOEs. Farmers were encouraged to go back into communes. Party secretaries reappeared in factories and farms and claimed precedence. Red had taken over from expert and profit was a dirty word again.
Deng took a back seat but was still acknowledged as the paramount leader. The period after Tiananmen Square was characterised by a fierce struggle between the conservatives and those who wanted to continue with market reforms. The execution of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife in December 1989 underlined the importance of military support as Ceauşescu had fallen after the army deserted him. The PLA cleansed its ranks of those regarded as unreliable with some being court-martialled, and the military budget was cranked up 15 per cent.
The increasing chaos in the Soviet Union was another warning of the consequences of not keeping a tight rein on political reform, and Jiang Zemin even called Gorbachev another Trotsky. He had studied in the Soviet Union and was as near to a technocrat as the party had. He surprised Richard Nixon on a private visit in 1989 by reciting the Gettysburg Address in English and was well-versed in Western classical music. He realised that the only course for China was to improve relations with developed countries as only they could provide the technology the country needed. This would permit the Middle Kingdom to become deeply embedded in the world economy and play a role in key international institutions. In foreign affairs, he was well served by the astute Qian Qichen, and in economic policy by Zhu Rongji, who later became prime minister.
Deng met military leaders and won them over so the PLA would now protect his reforms. In January 1992 he set off, accompanied by his daughter, on a southern tour which he disguised as a family holiday. He made for the Shenzhen, one of the SEZs, and was given a hero’s welcome, and also went to Zhuhai and Shanghai. Deng said that without economic progress, the events of 3–4 June would have resulted in civil war. China had to move forward boldly and assimilate all the fruits of civilisation, including those of advanced capitalist countries.
In 1992, the constitution was amended to stipulate that the head of the party and the prime minister could only serve two five-year terms in office as no one wanted another Mao. At the 14th Party Congress, in October 1992, Deng underlined the fact that the party could not be challenged and that China would not adopt a real multi-party system. There are eight other political parties, but they are dubbed ‘flower pot parties’ as they perform merely a decorative function.
The battle between those who wanted to retain a centrally planned economy and those who favoured moving to a market economy lasted from 1978 to 1992, when the country moved to a market economy with Chinese characteristics.
An important factor was that the US opened its doors to Chinese goods, and China had an advantage over the Soviet Union in that overseas Chinese began to invest and added their know-how. Taiwan also joined in. Suzhou, near Shanghai, is a modern city and was built in collaboration with Singapore. Deng’s attitude to foreign affairs was succinct: ‘Bide our time and conceal our capabilities.’ Hence Chinese foreign policy consisted of not interfering in the domestic politics of any country. China, instead, concentrated on trade as a way of expanding its influence. For instance, China signed 1,395 bilateral treaties between 1973 and 1982. Almost all of them were commercial, and the Middle Kingdom did not enter into any military alliances. Instead, it concentrated on building up the strength of the armed forces, and almost all the modern hardware came from the Soviet Union. The Chinese tactic was to order, say fifteen MiG fighters, but only take delivery of one. Then they copied it – reverse engineering – and cancelled the order for the other fourteen. They also did this with trade in civilian goods. A German company delivered a state-of-the-art printing press, and when the representative visited again he was shown a replica of his press. SEZs naturally involved technology transfer as did joint ventures with foreign firms. Thousands of Chinese students went to the US and Europe to study. The main subjects were science, engineering and computing. At Imperial College, University of London, the only arts subject Chinese study is the Russian language.
Only two communist regimes in Europe were endogenous: Yugoslavia and Albania. All the others – in Poland, the GDR, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria – were exogenous. Without the Red Army, the communists would not have acquired and retained power. Czechoslovakia was in between. It was an endogenous revolution in February 1948 but an exogenous force – the Soviet Army – kept it in power.
Had it not been for Big Brother in Moscow, the communist regimes would have been swept away. Experience was to show that once communism collapsed in other states, Yugoslavia and Albania would go the same way.
So what would the new comrade in Moscow do? Having visited Czechoslovakia after the suppression of the Prague Spring, Gorbachev was well aware of the depth of hatred felt by most Czechs and Slovaks towards the Soviet Union. One of his university fiends, Zdenék Mlynář, was able to report to him on the temperature of relations. Gorbachev took it for granted that Eastern Europe, once it had chosen communism, would remain communist. The debate was about the type of communism which could evolve.
Eastern Europe was secure behind the shields of the Soviet Army. The US and its NATO allies did not contemplate starting the Third World War over Bratislava or Sofia, and the Warsaw Pact had troops everywhere except in Romania and Bulgaria.
Gorbachev, in March 1985, told Eastern European leaders that the Soviet Army would no longer be used to resolve political conflicts on their patches. What were they to make of this? They were used to communist speak: the boss said one thing and meant another. All this talk of communist states being equal and responsible for their own affairs was probably eyewash. Anyway, it was important that the population of Eastern Europe continued to believe that if they stepped out of line, Ivan would come marching in. Then at the June 1988 Party Conference, Gorbachev reiterated this view: ‘to reject freedom of choice is to oppose the objective movement of history itself. That is why the policy of force in all its forms has historically outlived itself.’ At the United Nations in December 1988, he talked about the universal right of choice and claimed there were no exceptions.
Erich Honecker did not like what he saw in the Soviet Union. He was known as Erich ‘Don’t Tell Me Any Bad News’ Honecker. Erich informed Gorby there was no need for perestroika in the GDR and it should be dropped in the Soviet Union. Alarmed at the contagious effect of information about the political and economic changes in the Soviet Union, the GDR leader took the unprecedented step of banning Sputnik which was a popular Soviet magazine. The Soviet ambassador responded by distributing it from the embassy!
Gorbachev was aware of the fragility of the Eastern European economies. On 23 October 1986, Nikolai Ryzhkov presented a bleak report to the Politburo. Poland was knee deep in debt and Hungary was looking into the abyss. No economist there thought the solution was integration with the Soviet economy – they were all looking westwards for salvation. Another analyst concluded that Warsaw Pact countries would collapse in 1989–90. Gorbachev waxed eloquent about the desire of the region to undertake perestroika, but this was a myth. In January 1989, Gorbachev even wondered what would happen if Hungary applied for membership of the European Economic Community (the European Union after 1993). He conceded that the Soviet Union could not provide any more aid, but Eastern Europe needed new technology, and inevitably it would look westwards. The Soviet military was also feeling the pinch, and its budget did not increase in 1989, the first time this had happened since the 1920s (Service 2015: 316, 367). So by 1989, the Soviet Union had accepted that the region could decide its own future.
There were two main reasons why Gorbachev did not want to intervene militarily in Eastern Europe. The first was that if he did, it would provide a precedent for the use of military force in the Soviet Union. Because most of the political establishment, the KGB and the military wanted force to be used at home, it would be impossible to resist. The other reason was economic. Military intervention in Eastern Europe would be followed by Western economic sanctions, and vital imports of grain, foodstuffs, fodder and technology would be embargoed. In 1989, the Soviet Union depended more on the Western world than vice versa, and so sanctions would weaken the Soviet economy. Under such a scenario it is difficult to imagine Gorbachev surviving.
Had Eastern Europeans known that Gorbachev would remain in office and that the Soviet military would not intervene, they would have blown the communists away before 1989. They were delighted by perestroika and the reforms it brought in. Taking the party out of the industrial economy, having multi-candidate elections to parliament, the laws on cooperatives and individual farming and the setting up of new banks were all Eastern European aspirations. They all wanted their own Gorby.
The rise of Solidarity in 1980–1 held out hopes for radical reform in Poland, but the fact that the Polish military remained loyal to the Polish United Workers’ Party meant that the movement was suppressed and driven underground. Wojciech Jaruzelski knew that if the military remained loyal, he was secure in office. That was his first priority, and his second priority was to effect gradual change. In April 1984, Gromyko delivered a dismal report on Poland and concluded that the country was looking to the West for economic salvation. He criticised Jaruzelski for promoting the emergence of a kulak class in the countryside; Ustinov thought that the Polish military was too passive and, anyway, they were all sons of Solidarity. One solution was to give Jaruzelski a stiff talking-to!
Hungary was an obvious role model for Poland and the Hungarians had their New Economic Mechanism, but there was nothing similar in Poland. Reform economists worked with the Hungarian government, but this was not the case in Poland as all reformist economic thinking took place outside the party. In 1988, price rises afforded Solidarity activists the opportunity to lead strikes, and after a strike by coal miners – the elite of the working class – the government managed to lose a vote of confidence in the unreformed Polish Parliament or Sejm. Mieczysław Rakowski, a more open-minded communist, became prime minister.
Round table discussions with social organisations, headed by Lech Wałęsa and Solidarity, got under way in February 1989 and they proved a model for other communist states. It provided a forum whereby communist governments gradually surrendered more and more of their power.
In April 1989, Solidarity was again legal. The Roman Catholic Church was afforded full legal rights, although this had not hindered it in the past, and its new Primate, Cardinal Glemp, was a conservative. There were to be parliamentary elections, and 35 per cent of the seats could be freely contested. Wałęsa flew to Rome and thanked those at the Gemelli Clinic who had cared for the pope after the assassination attempt of May 1981. ‘It’s hard to imagine Solidarity would have survived without him,’ he told them. The pope received him as a head of state.
On 4 June, Solidarity won all but one of the 100 seats in the upper house and just over a third of seats in the Sejm. President Jaruzelski made General Czesław Kiszczak – who had a reputation for suppressing dissent and was dubbed the ‘thinking man’s thug’ – prime minister in August 1989.
President George H. W. Bush dropped by in July 1989, but the crowds in Warsaw were nothing like those that had welcomed President Nixon in 1972. Jaruzelski told Bush he was reluctant to run for president as Solidarity would oppose him, but Bush pressed him to run because a dangerous political vacuum would ensue if he stepped down. Bush thought Jaruzelski ‘very special, particularly complex and yet clearheaded’. Bush found Wałęsa’s aspirations ‘unrealistic’, especially the idea that Americans would buy up Polish farms. However, they did agree that German reunification was coming and because of this Poland wanted Bonn to agree on the country’s western frontier.
Some Poles regarded this humiliation of the PUWP as the collapse of communism. The fact that the party accepted its defeat and did not attempt to use the military to defend its power signalled that it was dying a slow death.
The new prime minister was Tadeusz Mazowiecki, from Solidarity. Jacek Kuron, one of the Solidarity leaders, on seeing a government car draw up outside his apartment, assumed that he was going to be arrested once again, but he discovered that he was the new minister of labour and the limousine and chauffeur were part of the perks! Rakowski had made a last-ditch attempt to prevent Mazowiecki becoming prime minister, but Gorbachev phoned him and told him to concede. There was someone else who was trying to turn the tide back: President Ceauşescu of Romania. He wrote to the Warsaw Pact leaders and advocated military intervention in Poland – it was ironic that a Romanian should resurrect the Brezhnev doctrine. Rakowski also received the message and leaked it to the press. Gorbachev rebuked Ceauşescu and Vladimir Kryuchkov, the KGB chief, dropped in and wished the new Polish government well.
By the end of 1989, the communist system had been dismantled. The clause in the constitution which afforded primacy to the PUWP was removed, and the country changed its name from the People’s Republic of Poland to the Republic of Poland. Leszek Balcerowicz became minister of finance and began moving to a capitalist economy but he was less radical than some other pro-market economists.
As a consultant in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, I had the task of finding economic advisers to help with foreign investment. As an academic I had access to economists in the Academy of Sciences (except in East Berlin). In Budapest, I asked who I should consult in Warsaw and was told: ‘Leszek Balcerowicz’. ‘And in Prague?’ ‘Vaclav Klaus’. ‘In Moscow?’ ‘Egor Gaidar’. It transpired that they had all been collaborating in drafting proposals for the transition from a planned to a market economy.
When Jaruzelski resigned as president, in December 1990, Lech Wałęsa took over as president of Poland. In October 1991, the first fully democratic elections in Poland since 1945 saw the Solidarity coalition parties sweep the board.
János Kádár, put in power by Moscow in 1956, surprised many sceptics by becoming the most moderate communist ruler in the region. In the beginning he was known as a quisling and the ‘iron fist in a velvet glove’ but later he became the ‘reformer’. His lugubrious appearance and lack of personal vanity made him appear a transitional figure, but it masked the fact that he was the master of the possible. That is, he knew the outer limits of Soviet tolerance and the population did as well. Hungary had the most reformed economy and intellectual life in the communist region. The searing experience of 1956 conditioned the country to accept the fact that it was a vassal state of the Soviet Union. Marxism-Leninism, if taken seriously, could get you into trouble and so ideology played a minor role in national life. So relaxed were the Americans about Kádár that they returned the symbol of Hungarian nationhood, the Crown of St Stephen, in 1978, from its repository in Fort Knox. Even Mrs Margaret Thatcher was pleasantly impressed by the modest Kádár.
In 1981, 5.5 million Hungarians travelled abroad including almost half a million to capitalist countries. This meant that about half the population left the country and the vast majority went back. Two million Western foreigners visited Hungary which revealed that there were no disaffected political groups. Pope John Paul II wanted the Roman Catholic Church to take a more aggressive stance against the regime, but Catholics politely declined as they had ‘goulash communism’ and it tasted fine.
In June 1989 in Budapest, US Secretary of State James Baker was told that when perestroika began in the Soviet Union, Hungary was implementing measures more radical than those envisaged in Moscow. When the first private restaurant opened in Moscow in 1986, Hungary had about 35,000 private businesses. The state fixed a thousand prices, but the market fixed another million and cooperatives and private plots flourished. Hungary was the only country in Eastern Europe which was self-sufficient in food. Until 1983, the Soviet Union had to subsidise Hungary, but when the money ran out in Moscow, Kádár switched to the West and obtained large loans. By 1987, Western debts had risen to $18 billion, and domestic prices and inflation were getting out of hand.
When Kádár died, in July 1989, hundreds of thousands lined the streets to bid him passage to a better world. Nowadays, he is regarded as one of the greatest Hungarians of the twentieth century, but that list, to be truthful, is not very long!
Kádár was ill-suited to the challenges of the Gorbachev era with its plethora of political and economic reforms, and foreign policy was also offering opportunities which he could not respond to. He was removed from power in May 1988 and replaced by Károly Grósz who had been prime minister and was a careful, uncharismatic apparatchik in the Kádár mould. The radicals in the leadership were Imre Poszgay and Rezsö Nyers, the leading economic reformer. They created the beginnings of a stock market, reduced business taxes and permitted full foreign ownership of Hungarian companies. Later in the year Forum and the Alliance of Free Democrats emerged as a result of dialogue with the HSWP.
Poszgay set the pace of change although there was no popular pressure to do so. In January 1989, he announced that the events of 1956 should be viewed as a ‘popular uprising’. This was sensational as the standard communist view was that 1956 was a ‘counter-revolution’. The Politburo set up committees to review the previous three decades.
Another Poszgay sensation was that the HSWP should prepare for life in a multi-party system, and legislation was passed which permitted this in February 1989. The same month the HSWP abandoned its claim to a monopoly of political power. In April, Moscow agreed to withdraw Soviet troops from Hungary by June 1991, but on Gorbachev’s insistence, this was kept secret.
In May, the party accepted that the government should be responsible to parliament and not to it. Round table discussions between the HSWP and the democratic opposition led to further dramatic changes. Imre Nagy and four others, executed in the wake of the 1956 Revolution, were reburied with state honours. Symbolically, all the other victims were also reburied.
In October, most members of the HSWP split off and formed the Hungarian Socialist Party and adopted social democracy as their guiding principle. Some old parties were resurrected such as the Smallholders’ Party and the Social Democrats. In late October, parliament decreed parliamentary elections and the direct election of a president. On 23 October 1989, the anniversary of the outbreak of the 1956 Revolution, the People’s Republic of Hungary became the Republic of Hungary and the communist era was over. The transition of power from communism to post-communism in Hungary was the most peaceful in the Soviet bloc.
The GDR was the Soviet Union’s stepchild. Egon Bahr concluded that Walter Ulbricht was a ‘politically talented snake’ and Edward Ochab, the Polish leader in 1956, thought that he was a ‘good communist’ but ‘his brains were a bit defective’ (Toranska 1987: 70). (Was Ochab implying that only someone with a defective brain could be a good communist?)
The hard winter of 1969–70 scuttled him. Potatoes were in short supply and Egypt sent some, and electricity spluttered on and off. Ulbricht was pushed aside in 1971, and Erich Honecker became Moscow’s comrade in East Berlin. Willi Stoph, the prime minister, read a litany of complaints about the ‘old goat’s’ mismanagement of the GDR: botched automation of production, motorways through cities with no traffic and so on. Ulbricht died in 1973 but no flags flew at half-mast and the old GDR died with him.
Honecker turned out to be just as troublesome and irked Brezhnev by claiming that the GDR was farther along the road to communism than the Soviet Union; this was hard for the Soviets to swallow as the GDR was economically dependent on Moscow. Gorbachev found Honecker very trying as Erich talked in mechanical phrases and could not be drawn into a real discussion. Everything was fine in the GDR, and Gorbachev should give up perestroika and glasnost at home. The two had crossed swords before when Chernenko had summoned the SED leader to Moscow in the summer of 1984 to account for his relations with Chancellor Helmut Kohl. The whole Politburo was of the mind that Honecker was becoming dependent on West German loans and this had to stop. As Chernenko was too ill to receive Honecker, Gorbachev stepped in and savaged the GDR leader. Ustinov informed the Politburo that the behaviour of the other Eastern European leaders was just as suspect.
President Ronald Reagan set the cat among the pigeons on 12 June 1987. Standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate, he had a message for the Soviet leader. ‘If you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: come here to this Gate. Mr Gorbachev, Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall’. Actually it was not Gorbachev’s wall to pull down, but that was beside the point. Honecker, in response, vented his fury on television and thought it would last another 100 years.
Figure 13.6 President Ronald Reagan
Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC 20540 USA, LC-USZ62–13040.
Erich was the type of comrade who thought if one had three square meals a day and a bed at night, what else did one need? His wife Margot was the minister of education and a hard-line communist. After the collapse of communism, the Honeckers lived in Santiago, Chile, as there was a special bond between them and Chilean communists. After General Augusto Pinochet’s coup in 1973, communists sought to escape and with borders closed, some communists were smuggled aboard GDR ships in jute sacks with the cargo of fruit and canned fruit.
GDR planners did not wish to draw any positive lessons from the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) in the Federal Republic. An East German told me, in the late 1970s, that the Wirtschaftswunder in West Germany was nothing. ‘Just look at the Wirtschaftswunder in the GDR!’ This was an example of the level of debate one enjoyed (if that is the word) with East German officials.
I had many discussions with East Germans in the 1960s and 1970s. The best place was on a train passing through Poland or in Poland! On one occasion, in Warsaw, an East German official concluded our discussion by saying that he wished he could speak Polish as well as I spoke German! Had he realised I was British the conversation would have lapsed into Parteichinesisch (Party Chinese or communist-speak). However, one could have interesting conversations with some East German academics at conferences. In 1986, I asked one what he could do to improve the situation in the GDR, and he informed me he had no intention of doing anything until Honecker departed the scene. In other words, the price of being a critic was too high. This attitude paralysed the country and led to people living two lives: the official and the private.
The secret police, the Stasi, were very active. There were more Stasi officers per head of the GDR population than Gestapo per head of the population in Germany before 1945. As I had had regular conversations with Stasi officers in London, there was a Stasi file on me in East Berlin, but I decided not to read it because I knew from friends that I would encounter some nasty revelations. The Stasi had informers everywhere in Britain and abroad, but it did not do them much good. I was careful to make the point in my conversations with Stasi officers that the planned economy was a failure and only market-linked reforms could revive the GDR economy. One officer did not bother to hide the fact that he was Stasi, and he came to my office in the University of London on a regular basis. He greeted me with ‘Good morning’ then switched to German. He wanted to know my opinion about the Thatcher government, foreign policy and a host of other questions. Finally, he stood up and said in English: ‘Thank you. See you again.’
My wife’s family had relatives in East Berlin and East Germany. I visited a cousin regularly who was a professor of Greek mythology at the Humboldt University in East Berlin and he was a mine of information. A convinced communist and member of the SED, he waxed eloquently about life and said that many students arrived at university giving the impression they were schizophrenics. They knew what they had to say but did not believe it. His job was to explain that the ideology reflected real life, but in the 1980s he changed. He related that he usually went into the university library on Saturday mornings to do research. He was hauled in by the Stasi who told him that they had been studying him closely but could not work out what he was doing. He informed them that he was engaged in research, but they simply refused to believe that anyone would work on Saturday mornings without being paid! Eventually they had to let him go because they had nothing on him.
The only area of life where there was anything akin to dissent was in the churches. The Lutheran Church in Germany traditionally supports the state. Protestants concentrated on opposing the arms race and the stationing of NATO missiles in Europe, and they were also unhappy about the militarisation of East German society. Someone had a brainwave and came up with a brilliant biblical slogan: Swords into Ploughshares. ‘They shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. And never again shall they learn war.’ Young East Germans sewed an embroidered badge on their jeans, and it depicted a man bending a sword with a hammer. The original was a statue in New York which was a gift from the Soviet Union, and it became a symbol of passive resistance laced with the delicious irony that the original had been a present from Big Brother.
There was a lot of dialogue with foreign churches. One of those who engaged in debate was Paul Oestreicher, an Anglican priest who told me that he and his interlocutors chose venues where they thought the Stasi could not overhear them. They were amazed to learn after 1990 that the Stasi had recorded every word of their conversations. It also transpired that some of the Protestant pastors were Stasi officers and others were Stasi agents.
No one in the GDR thought that communism could be overthrown, and what they desired was the reform of the existing system. Gorbachev kept on saying that each country had the right to decide its own future. He repeated this twice in July 1989 – at the summit of the Warsaw Pact in Bucharest and at the Council of Europe meeting in Strasbourg – that the Brezhnev Doctrine was dead.
Honecker knew that the old days of subsidised oil and cheap loans had gone and the fact that Moscow had caved in to the Poles in 1980–1 revealed that it was in no position militarily or economically to help out the Eastern Europeans. Erich ruefully conceded that the GDR would have to look after itself, but the problem was that the country did not have the raw material or resource base to sustain a modern economy.
Erich is at his wits’ end. In desperation he calls in the country’s bishops. ‘Look, I’m no believer but I need advice. The Party does not listen to me anymore; the economy has gone to the dogs and Gorbachev is worse than useless. What can I do to turn things round?’ ‘Well, our Lord when facing a problem performed a miracle.’ ‘Could I perform a miracle?’ ‘Well… ’ ‘Jesus walked on water. Could I do that?’ ‘Well… ’ ‘Let’s try.’ The next day Honecker appears at one of the Berlin lakes and then proceeds to walk across the water. ‘Look,’ says a Berliner to his neighbour, ‘he can’t swim!’
At first Gorbachev was reluctant to attend the fortieth anniversary celebrations of the founding of the GDR on 7 October 1989. He had to go because it would have been a devastating blow to the SED had he boycotted the event, but talking to Honecker was like talking to a brick wall. In private, Gorbachev called him an ‘arsehole’. During the celebrations the crowds greeted Gorbachev enthusiastically, and ‘We want our own Gorby’ was one chant. Another chant was ‘Wir sind das Volk’ (‘we are the people’). In other words, power rested with the people. Gorbachev later told his listeners: ‘History punishes those who are left behind.’
On Monday evenings, for months, a weekly prayer meeting had been transforming itself into a peaceful demonstration in the Lutheran Frauenkirche, in Leipzig. On 9 October, there were 70,000 massed outside the church after prayers had finished, and they refused to disperse. As the police could not cope with such a crowd, heavily armed soldiers and tanks were brought out to meet them. Would there be bloodshed? The GDR leadership had welcomed the massacre on Tiananmen Square in June. One of those who helped ensure that there was no violence was Kurt Masur, chief conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and the demonstrators were permitted to march on. Another was Vyacheslav Kochemasov, the Soviet ambassador in East Berlin, who ordered Soviet troops to stay in barracks without consulting Moscow. He asked for confirmation the following day and it was granted. Masur and Kochemasov were the heroes of the hour. The communists had lost their nerve, and those who wanted to bring down the communist regime knew that the GDR was living on borrowed time.
A coup removed Erich Honecker from power on 18 October, but his successor was the lugubrious, uninspiring Egon Krenz, a member of the Sorb Slav minority in the GDR. On 24 October, Krenz called for a candid report on the state of the GDR economy, but it made dismal reading as labour productivity in the GDR was at least 40 per cent below that of the Federal Republic. The GDR was facing financial collapse.
To make matters worse for East Berlin, Gennady Gerasimov, the witty Soviet foreign ministry spokesman, delivered his famous Sinatra quip on Good Morning America on 25 October. ‘We now have the Sinatra Doctrine. He has a song: “I Did It My Way.” So every country decides on its own which road to take.’
So could Krenz make a difference? When he talked to Gorbachev on the phone, on 1 November, the latter made clear he was quite aware of the mess the GDR economy was in and it was all Honecker’s fault. Krenz said that if the country did not receive help, living standards would drop 30 per cent and such an event would be politically unacceptable, but the Soviet Union could provide little aid.
Krenz then wanted to know what space Gorbachev had allocated the GDR and the Federal Republic in his ‘common European home’. He pathetically pointed out that the GDR was the child of the Soviet Union and that ‘paternity for the child has to be accepted’. Gorbachev explained to Krenz that the Soviet Union was developing closer relations with the Federal Republic so East Berlin should ask Bonn for money. According to Krenz, Gorbachev assured him that the Yalta and Potsdam agreements would not be revised, and he believed that Gorbachev thought the GDR would continue as a state. He still thinks the Soviet leader deceived him.
At 6.53 p.m. on 9 November, East German TV carried a press conference chaired by Günter Schabowski, a Politburo member and a former editor of the party newspaper, Neues Deutschland. Surely he would know how to respond to journalists. The press conference was a shambles as Schabowski tried to articulate the new policy on travel. GDR citizens were to be allowed to visit West Berlin but had to obtain a visa in order to do so. ‘When are these regulations going into effect?,’ asked a Western journalist. Schabowski shuffled his papers and responded: ‘As far as I know, this takes place immediately, without delay.’ The Associated Press, at 7 p.m., carried the sensational news: ‘According to information supplied by SED Politburo member Günter Schabowski, the GDR is opening its borders.’ Hundreds of thousands of East Berliners converged on the border crossings and demanded to be permitted to pass through.
Eventually, at 11.30 p.m., Lt Colonel Harald Jäger ordered forty-six armed guards to open the barrier and stand aside, and the other border crossings followed suit. The GDR was trampled to death in the stampede to get to West Berlin.
Speaking twenty-five years later, Jäger commented:
My world was collapsing and I felt abandoned by my Party and military commanders. I was on the one hand hugely disappointed but also relieved that it had ended peacefully. There could have been a different outcome… When I saw Schabowski on TV, I thought, ‘What a load of crap! He should have known that East Germans would head for the exits when they heard that. But they didn’t inform us at all. We were kept in the dark.’
Jäger made a series of desperate phone calls to his superiors asking what to do. One told him to let those with the necessary documents through and send the rest home. When he called again and said he had to do something, he was told to let a few through in the hope it would calm the situation, but he could see the crowd was getting restive. ‘There were fears they could get their hands on our weapons.’ His border guards were urging him to do something, but they didn’t know what it should be. ‘I was only a lieutenant colonel and didn’t have the authority. But when no one from above would give any orders, I was practically forced to take action.’ At 11.30 p.m. he let everyone through, including future German chancellor Angela Merkel. ‘It wasn’t me who opened the Wall. It was the East German citizens who gathered that evening. The only thing I can be credited with is that it happened without any blood being spilt’ (The Times, 7 November 2014).
I was in Berlin on that historic day attending a conference on Forty Years of Divided Germany in the Reichstag which backed on to the Wall at the Brandenburg Gate. On the morning of 10 November, young GDR conscripts were perched on the Wall and they were delighted but their officers looked as if their world had collapsed, which it had. The mood was euphoric, and about 3.5 million GDR citizens poured into West Berlin which had a population of about a million. Each received 100 marks (about £35) to spend. The ill, the halt, the lame and the crippled came, carried along by their families. One enterprising fellow crossed and recrossed seven times before he was rumbled, and the most sought after products were bananas and pornography. A group of Japanese tourists asked me for a piece of the Wall, but a West Berlin police officer told me not to touch the Wall. ‘It is the property of the German Democratic Republic’, he stated. As soon as he had gone, I used a pick to knock a hole in the Wall. On the other side were two young Vopos, or police, swinging their Kalashnikovs. They looked at me and I looked at them. The day before they would have trained their guns on me. That day they just looked and continued on their way.
Chancellor Helmut Kohl launched a ten-point plan for German reunification without consulting anyone abroad; this caused great annoyance in Moscow, Paris, London and Washington and everyone hoped Gorbachev would veto the plan. When Hans Modrow, the GDR prime minister, visited Moscow on 30 January 1990, he informed Gorbachev that a majority of GDR citizens no longer supported the concept of two German states, and so it was impossible to preserve the republic.
The Alliance for Germany, backed by Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union, won the elections in April 1990. I was in Leipzig during an election rally addressed by Kohl. What anthem should be sung beforehand? Eventually, it was decided the pre-1933 anthem would be appropriate, and music and words were handed out as no one knew either.
The West German Social Democratic Party (SPD) opposed a united Germany, favouring a democratic GDR as did most churchmen in the East. Willy Brandt, a pre-1933 social democrat, was strongly in favour of unification. It is striking that the older generation wanted Germany to be one but the younger generation of socialists preferred two Germanies.
When James Baker met Gorbachev in February 1990, he was at pains to stress that the US was not seeking any advantage from these developments. The Soviet leader then saw Kohl and said that it was up to the Germans to decide things for themselves. Gorbachev hoped for a neutral, united Germany but Kohl, now full of self-confidence, rejected this and proposed that a united Germany join NATO. In March, the Alliance for Germany, backed by Kohl’s own party, the CDU, won the East German elections and, in April, the new government proposed that unification be achieved according to the federal constitution. The GDR would simply be integrated into West Germany and thereby disappear. In May, the GDR signed the state treaty with the Federal Republic on economic, monetary and social unity, and the Deutsche Mark (DM) became the common currency on 1 July. Kohl committed a grave error in agreeing that East German marks would be converted into DM at a rate of one to one, and this made almost all East German goods uncompetitive in West Germany.
The reunification of Germany, on 3 October 1990, resulted from the coming together of three factors: the Gorbachev revolution in the Soviet Union; the collapse of the GDR economy which led to large numbers of its citizens making for West Germany; and George H. W. Bush’s determination to make German unity one of the crowning achievements of his presidency. The Soviet leader simply conceded everything the man in the White House wanted. On the important point of whether a united Germany would become a member of NATO, pressure from Bush and Baker led eventually to Gorbachev giving in, orally, to the consternation of his officials. In his memoirs, Gorbachev claims that the decision to allow Germans to decide their own security arrangements – it was a foregone conclusion that they would vote for NATO – originated with him and not Bush. The White House sees it the other way round. One of the reasons for the acceptance of Germany in NATO was Kohl’s close personal relationship with the Soviet leader.
One striking example of this took place at Arkhyz, in the north Caucasus, in July 1990. Here, in formal and informal meetings, the two leaders agreed many of the details of reunification. Without consulting Shevardnadze, who had done all the spadework on Soviet-German relations, Gorbachev abandoned all claims as an occupying power and any restriction on German sovereignty, including a united Germany joining NATO. He agreed to the withdrawal of Soviet forces, with the German promising to build accommodation in the Soviet Union for the returning personnel and the Germans also paid for the troops to leave. Had Gorbachev not been so desperate for German financial aid, he could have struck a much more advantageous bargain. German reunification, and the Soviet terms for it, were not discussed in the Politburo. Shevardnadze was unhappy as he was aware that the ire of the military and the conservatives would descend on him for ‘losing’ the GDR.
The Soviet garrison of about 350,000 soldiers was to be withdrawn. Bonn paid a handsome sum to build accommodation for the returning soldiers, but it was never built as the money was embezzled by various officials. There was never any risk of the East German population attacking Soviet soldiers as relations between the two were not hostile, as I observed on numerous occasions. Only officers were allowed to visit towns when off-duty and ordinary soldiers were locked in their barracks where discipline was harsh.
A determined opponent of unification was Margaret Thatcher. In September 1989, in Moscow, she told Gorbachev that the ‘reunification of Germany is not in the interests of Britain and Western Europe… We don’t want a united Germany.’ It would lead to post-war European borders being changed. ‘We cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security’ (The Times, 11 September 2009). She was also against the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and Chernyaev records that she asked for the following remarks not to be minuted as she was resolutely opposed to the unification of Germany and wanted to tell Gorbachev things that she could not say in public (Service 2015: 408).
France’s President Mitterrand was also horrified at the prospect of a united Germany in the near term and wanted it to happen over a ten-year period. François Mauriac quipped that he loved Germany so much he preferred two of them. The Italian prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, went one better. ‘We love the Germans so much that the more Germanies there are the better’. The French could not understand why Gorbachev had not vetoed the whole idea. Jacques Attali, an adviser, even said he would go and live on Mars if this happened, but he later moved to London as head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
The GDR needed Western currency. Alexander Schalck-Golodhowski, a Stasi colonel, acted as the GDR fixer. One estimate is that he earned the GDR DM25 billion (£8 billion) between 1964 and 1989. He procured consumer goods for the leadership – including soft porn – negotiated loans and business deals, and sold arms to Third World countries (when the Ethiopian dictator Mengistu needed weapons and bread, ‘it was my phone that would ring,’ he said). Schalck-Golodhowski also sold political prisoners and their relatives to West Germany (33,755 political prisoners and 250,000 of their relatives were sold for a sum of DM3.5 billion), and works of art were removed from their East German owners and sold to West German dealers. The art ranged from antique furniture to Picasso, and the owners had to hand it over or face a huge tax bill. Toxic West German nuclear waste was imported and disposed of. There were investments in Spanish holiday resorts and luxury Austrian hotels and secret accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, and some bankers in West Berlin and Zürich were more than willing to do business with Schalck-Golodhowski. One of his biggest coups was, in 1983, to obtain a DM1 billion (£300 million) credit from Franz Josef Strauss, the top Bavarian politician, who was anti-communist on paper. A Bavarian sausage magnate was keen to gain access to cheap GDR pork and this facilitated the deal. One West German contact commented: ‘He gave the impression that the whole of the GDR was up for sale’ (The Times, 1 July 2015).
Czechs and Slovaks learnt a hard lesson in 1968: ‘Don’t bait the Russian bear.’ Sullenly, they gradually accepted their lot, but a small group of active dissidents came together in 1977 to form what was known as Charter 77. The Chartists were a disparate bunch as they included expelled communists, academics, the religious and idealists, the most famous of whom was playwright Václav Havel. They were very serious people and studied classical Greek philosophy, Shakespeare and European literature; they kept burning the torch of independent thought as they were preparing for post-communist Czechoslovakia. The Char-tists invited Western academics to come and address their seminars. They were smuggled in and were inevitably discovered, and that meant no more visas and prison terms for the Chartists. Havel was used to going to prison but stressed that he and the others needed to maintain moral superiority over the regime and had to cultivate their ‘own garden’. The ranks of the Chartists provided many of the top state officials after the collapse of communism.
Gustáv Husák, a Slovak, was a sea of contradictions. He spent the years 1954 to 1960 in jail, but he, not Dubček, was the first to call for democratisation in 1968. After the August 1968 invasion, he was initially opposed to the Soviets but was accepted by Moscow as Dubček’s successor.
Gorbachev’s perestroika lit a fuse under communism in the region, but reform-minded communists were as rare as hen’s teeth and new ideas came from outside the party. Gustav Husák resigned as party boss in December 1987 but carried on as president. He was succeeded by the uninspiring Miloš Jakeš who had welcomed the Soviet invasion of 1968. The Roman Catholic Church, even though it was a minority faith in the Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia), was the dominant religion in Slovakia, and it began to demand greater religious freedom. In 1989, Prague stopped jamming Radio Free Europe and everyone could then listen to Václav Havel.
The fall of the Berlin Wall was the death knell of communism in Czechoslovakia. If the previously submissive East Germans could topple a communist regime, why not the Czechs and Slovaks? The crisis in the GDR was fuelled by economic decline but this was not the case in Czechoslovakia. A student demonstration in Prague, on 17 November 1989, was brutally dispersed and a student was ‘shot dead’. He was filmed walking away after his ‘death’ had been recorded. In other words, the whole episode had been a put-up job by the secret police to discredit the old leadership and introduce a new team acceptable to the West.
On 18 November, the Civic Forum, headed by Havel and consisting of actors and students, came into being. Its membership became much wider than Charter 77 and included such figures as Alexander Dubček who was the hero of the hour. On 24 November, the party sacked Jakeš and replaced him with a nonentity. Havel and Prime Minister Adamec then struck a deal: the government would agree to free speech, free elections and foreign travel if Havel would join a coalition government.
The coup de grâce to the communist regime was administered in Moscow. A Warsaw Pact meeting declared that the invasion of 1968 had been misguided and illegal and because all those in official positions owed their roles to the invasion, they were forced to resign. The prime minister stepped down on 7 December and Husák as president on 9 December, and leading Chartists joined the government. The most dramatic promotion was that of Jiři Dienstbier who was working as a stoker. When the foreman phoned his wife demanding to know why he had not turned up for work, she informed him: ‘Jiři will not be coming in today. He has just become the Foreign Minister of our country’. On 28 December, Dubček was made speaker of parliament and the following day, parliament elected Václav Havel president of the Republic of Czechoslovakia.
The country had passed from being an orthodox communist state to a democracy within a span of just over a month. The catalyst was the brutal suppression of the student demonstration on 17 November. Havel coined the expression ‘velvet revolution’ to describe the peaceful collapse of communism, but none of this would have been possible without the revolution in the Soviet Union. The fall of the Berlin Wall was another powerful stimulus. I did an interview on BBC television about the situation in Czechoslovakia after the fall of the Wall. I said that communism in Czechoslovakia was doomed and could not survive, but the presenter looked at me in amazement and clearly did not believe his ears. He and others had got used to the idea that communism was impregnable.
A young Bulgarian lady, looking as if she had just stepped out of a Parisian salon, came to see me in the University of London in early 1988. She informed me that Bulgaria wished to move away from the Soviet Union and towards Europe and Sofia wanted democracy and a capitalist economy. I did not believe a word she said, but my scepticism turned out to be ill-founded. Things were changing in Bulgaria which was regarded as the most supine pro-Soviet regime in the region; cynics described Bulgaria as the ‘sixteenth republic of the Soviet Union’. A Bulgarian joke was: ‘How would you describe Bulgarian-Soviet relations? Simple. They are like a cow which grazes in Bulgaria but is milked in the Soviet Union.’
Todor Zhivkov, nicknamed Uncle Tosho, based his power on tight security and between 1985 and 1989, 105 people were shot for trying to cross the border without a visa. Loans and technological aid from the Soviet Union kept the country going and the Soviets even built a nuclear power plant. There were no Soviet troops in Bulgaria but Moscow did not rank Bulgaria very highly, and it was easier for a Soviet citizen to visit there than Poland or Hungary. The main problem concerned the Turkish minority. Nine hundred thousand ethnic Turks were obliged to adopt Bulgarian names between December 1984 and March 1985, and perhaps a hundred Turks died violently. The Turkish language and books in Turkish were banned as was circumcision, and Zhivkov suggested that those who did not agree could leave for Turkey. Over 300,000 crossed the border before Ankara closed it.
There was nothing comparable in Bulgaria to Charter 77 or Solidarity. Hence change would have to come from within. A Club for the Support of Perestroika, headed by Zhelyu Zhelev, was formed in November 1988 and a free trade union appeared in February 1989. The creeping coup against Zhivkov began in the summer of 1989, and one of the leaders was Petur Mladenov, the foreign minister, and the minister of defence came on board. Things speeded up at a meeting of the Warsaw Pact in Bucharest in July. Gorbachev took the unprecedented step of walking down the hall to speak to Mladenov, but protocol demanded that he ask Zhivkov’s permission first before moving on to the foreign minister. Mladenov informed the Soviet leader that Zhivkov would be removed in November, and Gorbachev simply commented that it was an internal Bulgarian affair. On 10 November 1989, Todor Zhivkov, First Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party since March 1954, was voted out of office but he would get a pension and a villa. The fall of the Berlin Wall ensured that the coup was bloodless and unchallenged. Mladenov succeeded Zhivkov as president a week later but the Bulgarian opposition had played no part in Zhivkov’s removal. On 14 November, sixteen different organisations formed the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF), headed by Zhelev, and almost all of them were party members.
Mladenov headed off a revolution by promising free elections but was forced to resign in July 1990 after a video was shown in which he had advocated the use of tanks against demonstrations in December 1989. In June 1990, Zhelev won a seat in the Grand National Assembly to draft a new constitution, and, in August, the assembly elected him president of Bulgaria by a two-thirds majority.
Nicolae Ceauşescu had some grand nicknames such as ‘The Genius of the Carpathians’ and ‘The Titan of Titans’, but locals also called him ‘Our Dracula’. Gorbachev referred to him as the ‘Romanian Führer’ intent on building ‘dynastic socialism’. The secret police, the Securitate, were, by quite a distance, the most brutal in Eastern Europe, and at least a thousand dissidents were murdered. An estimated 617,000 were imprisoned, and 120,000 are thought to have died behind bars during his twenty-five-year reign. He took nepotism to an elevated level and about sixty family members were in top positions in the state. Elena, the dictator’s wife, sat on every important committee in the country. In a bid to beautify Bucharest, whole districts were flattened in order to build huge, soulless blocks, and peasants were forcibly moved to ‘agrotowns’.
He managed to convince the Soviets to withdraw their troops from Romania in 1958. The invasion of Czechoslovakia was perceived as a threat to Romania and was condemned, as was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. When the Soviet Union and its allies boycotted the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 1984, Romania sent a full complement and won many medals.
Ceauşescu’s independent line in foreign affairs won him many accolades and invitations to the West, and Romania was the first communist country visited by President Richard Nixon. Romania became a member of the International Monetary Fund and received large loans; Queen Elizabeth II made him a knight of the realm but the honour was revoked on 24 December 1989. On a state visit to France in 1980, Ceauşescu’s entourage pocketed many antique clocks and other artefacts. George H. W. Bush called him a ‘good communist’. He did have one secure source of hard currency as Chancellor Kohl paid him DM25,000 (about £8,000) for each of the 5,000 ethnic Germans who were allowed to move to West Germany.
Romania was hit hard by the economic crisis of late 1970s, and Ceauşescu decided to pay back all international debt as quickly as possible. This led to blackouts, food shortages and a rapid increase in poverty, but vast building projects in Bucharest, in a Postmodernist style, were still going ahead. One of the results was the House of the People, the largest building in Europe and the second largest in the world. It is now called the Parliament of the People and is Bucharest’s main tourist attraction.
Where did the revolution begin? It began in a town with a considerable Hungarian minority, Timişoara; the pastor of the local Calvinist church, László Tökés, was their spokesman. The position of the Hungarian minority in Romania was always a sensitive issue. When the Romanian authorities began a campaign to evict him, Budapest took up his case. The eviction order was dated 7 December, and on 15 December, Tökés asked his congregation to assemble outside the church. A huge crowd gathered that day, and the same occurred the following day. The crowd then began to loot stores and attack the party headquarters but the Securitate dispersed them. On 17 December, protesters clashed with police and shouted: ‘freedom, democracy and free elections’. Fighting ensued and protestors took control of the centre of the town. The police responded, killing over sixty civilians and arresting over 700. Ceauşescu ordered the military to shoot demonstrators and blamed Washington, Moscow and Budapest for the trouble. On 18 December, Ceauşescu departed for Tehran to sign a deal involving the exchange of Iranian oil and gas for Romanian arms. Leaving the country was a fatal mistake because rumours spread that he had fled taking with him gold worth billions of dollars.
On 19 December, the dead were brought to Bucharest, cremated and the ashes thrown to the wind. It was all secretive but fuelled the rumour mill and almost seventy dead grew into thousands. On 20 December, clashes occurred again in Timişoara and the prime minister arrived to negotiate. Ceauşescu was back on 20 December and dispatched 20,000 club-wielding workers by train to impose proletarian order, but most of them refused to leave their carriages when they arrived. Communists contacted Gorbachev but he insisted it had to be resolved by Romanians.
Just after midday on 21 December, Ceauşescu decided to address a huge rally in front of the Central Committee building and it was carried live by TV. There was a commotion and Ceauşescu looked alarmed. What caused the incident? A taxi driver, Adrian Donea, had heckled the dictator. Ceauşescu promised higher wages and pensions and some applauded but the meeting gradually descended into chaos. Donea later remarked: ‘We could see he was scared. At that moment we realised our power.’ Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu deemed it wise to remain in the building that afternoon. Barricades appeared in the city and the police opened fire. Forty-nine bodies were counted on 21 December.
On 22 December, the rioters were out again. News filtered through that the minister of defence had committed suicide. He could be blamed for collaborating with foreign enemies as he had prevented the dictator’s order to massacre the population being carried out. The army went over to the revolution and, in so doing, sealed the fate of the Ceauşescus. Soldiers handed out Kalashnikovs to civilians, and one skirmish led to another and almost total confusion reigned. A helicopter took off from the Central Committee building with the leaders on board and a new leader, Ion Iliescu, appeared on television. He had once been seen as Ceauşescu’s successor but, like almost everyone else, had fallen out with him. At about 5 p.m., Iliescu had formed his revolutionary government from members of the National Salvation Front (NSF). Almost a thousand civilians were to die in the next few days as communism entered its death throes. Loyalists would not concede defeat and so the blood flowed.
The helicopter landed in the suburbs. Elena packed and threw in two loaves just in case they needed food; the helicopter took off again and headed north west. Apparently, a Boeing 707 was always ready there to fly them into exile and Libya appeared the most likely destination. The helicopter touched down and a car was commandeered, but it soon ran out of petrol and police took them to an army barracks on the evening of 22 December.
On the evening of 24 December, the National Salvation Front leaders decided to put the Ceauşescus on trial. A major reason for this was that the NSF leaders were all former party and government officials and wanted no embarrassing revelations about their past conduct to become public. The next day a revolutionary tribunal and a firing squad of three paratroopers arrived by helicopter. Elena was defiant. Nicolae refused to recognise the court; after a couple of hours the couple were sentenced to death, but the proceedings were a mockery of justice. Elena asked to die with her husband. As the firing squad took aim, they held hands. Nicolae shouted: ‘Long live free, independent and socialist Romania! Death to the traitors! History will avenge us!’ ‘There were tears in his eyes,, remembered one of the firing squad. Nicolae puffed out his chest and began singing the Internationale. ‘Arise, wretched of the earth! Arise prisoners of hunger!’ He never got to the fourth verse. The soldiers had been told to fire 30 rounds into them – from the hip at a distance of about a metre. One soldier fired seven rounds at Elena and then his gun jammed. He changed the magazine and fired another 30 rounds, mainly to the head, and she flew backwards and her blood splattered his uniform but she did not die easily and moved in spasms. Nicolae died immediately from the bullets of the other paratroopers. ‘His body jumped a metre in the air from the force of the bullets’, remembered another soldier (The Times, 19 December 2009).
The Romanian revolution was a palace coup as one group replaced another. Power never rested with the people, but it was not a KGB plot or one planned by the generals and party apparatchiks who took over. The upsurge of popular anger which toppled the dictator could not have been pre-arranged. Nevertheless, without Gorbachev and the fall of the Berlin Wall, popular fury would not have brought about the Romanian revolution. Iliescu was as brutal as Ceauşescu, and in 1990, confronted by student protesters, he deployed the same tactics as the dead leader. He sent in workers with clubs to disperse them.
Albania remained the most Stalinist of the Eastern European communist dictatorship until the late 1980s. Tirana left the Soviet orbit in 1961 and moved into the Chinese orbit, but it did not copy Deng Xiaoping’s pro-market reforms in and after 1978. With Mao gone, it looked inward and relied on ‘muscular socialism’ to keep it afloat. Albania did not even join the Helsinki process in 1975. Enver Hoxha died in 1985 from Parkinson’s disease and was succeeded by Ramiz Alia. There was an attempt at economic reform in late 1989, but this opened the floodgates as protestors demanded even more change. As in the GDR, the young and ambitious wanted to leave, and the obvious destinations were Greece and Italy. A popular way of getting to Italy was to commandeer a boat and set sail. Albania was the poorest country in Europe and only counted about three million citizens. The state collapsed and chaos reigned. Albanians have a great facility for foreign languages. An aide to the president came to the University of London, in 1991, and articulated policy in excellent English. I asked him a question in Italian and he replied fluently; this indicated there was a small educated elite.
On 12 December 1991, the Democratic Party of Albania (DPA) was founded by former communists and others. Elections were held in March 1991, and the Socialist Party of Albania (the communists under a new guise) won two-thirds of the vote and the DPA 30 per cent. The ex-communists proved quite incapable of effecting a transition to a market economy and were removed from office the following year. The DPA took over, but the collapse of communism and law and order led to waves of crime and corruption. A major factor in fomenting a violent civil war was the credulity of Albanians in believing they could become rich quickly. A massive Ponzi scheme attracted almost half the population and defrauded them of about $1.5 billion. Its collapse in 1997 precipitated the fighting, but the country became a parliamentary republic in 1998.
The Yugoslavs pioneered worker self-management, and Milovan Djilas views it as a form of Marx’s free association of producers. The factories would run themselves, but they had to pay a tax for military and other state needs; this would presage the ‘withering away of the state’. The system was based on workers’ councils, where delegates of workers as workers and workers as consumers would run the economy. Self-management (workers’ councils) was extended outside the factory right up to the federal and republican levels, and this led to republics acquiring a high level of independence. Cities were run by self-managed communes. From the mid-1960s, a consumer economy with large amounts of Western capital and a largely free press got under way. The self-managed economy recorded some of the highest growth rates in the world, and this appeared to prove that worker-self management and decentralisation could produce a modern, industrial state. In 1965, further decentralisation was decreed. Enterprises were to be autonomous and to compete with one another. Foreign direct investment was promoted, and a foreign company could buy up to 49 per cent of a Yugoslav enterprise. This was called market socialism but the problem was that the north, Slovenia and Croatia, part of the Habsburg Empire until 1918, had a head start on the poor southern republics. Income differentials widened from 4:1 to 8:1. There was a tendency to seek foreign loans instead of generating capital inside the country. In the south, workers’ council placed great emphasis on toilets and canteen and working conditions, whereas in the north it was about prices and enterprise development, and there was also a tendency for each republic to try to become an industrialised mini-state – all funded on foreign capital.
The oil price shocks of the 1970s resulted in Yugoslavia not being able to service its foreign debts. The IMF structural adjustment programmes required a reduction in social spending in order to balance the state budget, but hyper-inflation and mass unemployment followed and this fuelled angry nationalism. As one commentator said, ‘it is ironic that it was the West and not the East which dealt the final blow to worker self-management’ and mass strikes and violence spread like wildfire (Hatherley 2015: 399–402).
No charismatic leader appeared after Tito’s death in 1980. What was to bind the federation together? Communism had no appeal and the party had fragmented. Into this vacuum stepped Slobodan Milošević who became leader of the Serbian League of Communists in 1987 and played the most potent card he had: nationalism. His goal was the creation of Greater Serbia, and this involved expanding Serbia’s frontiers.
Slovenia decided it was better off as an independent republic, and Slovene communists withdrew from the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in early 1990. It was an easy decision to take as there was huge inequality in Yugoslavia. Per capita income in Slovenia was about $14,000, which ranked it above Portugal in the First World. By contrast, in Kosovo per capita income was under $2,000. Needless to say Slovenes resented their taxes being diverted to the backward south. Croatia came second in the wealth league in Yugoslavia followed by Serbia.
Slovenia made an almost seamless transition to democracy but it was different in other republics. Milošević was elected president of Serbia in December 1989 in a fair election. The communists and some socialist allies merged and formed the Socialist Party of Serbia in July 1990. Civil war broke out in 1991 and eventually NATO bombed Yugoslavia in 1999. Milošević was indicted for war crimes; his trial began in The Hague in 2001 and he died there in 2006.
In Slovenia and Croatia, elections in April and May 1990 saw non-communist parties successful. The new leader of Croatia was Franjo Tudjman, a former communist whom Tito had jailed for nationalism. Tudjman’s authoritarian style was reminiscent of Milošević. Serbs in the enclave of Krajina were ‘ethnically cleansed’, and crimes were committed. When Tudjman died in 1999, Croatia could then begin moving to democracy. All six Yugoslavia republics – Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Macedonia – had held competitive elections by the end of 1991. The federal president resigned as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had passed away. So too had the Communist Party, but it lived on under the guise of socialism in Serbia. Serbia and Montenegro called themselves the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia between 1992 and 2003 when Montenegro (Italian for Crna Gora or Black Mountain) declared independence on 3 June 2006.
The war with China in February–March 1979 made abundantly clear that Vietnam would not accept domination by any power, communist or not. Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented reforms after 1978 gradually transformed the relationship, and Vietnam and China have now reached agreement to integrate economically northern Vietnam and the adjoining southern Chinese provinces. A factor in this decision was that Vietnam began introducing capitalist economic reforms in 1986. In early 1989, Vietnam asked the Soviet Union for a loan of $400 million, but Moscow declined as its hard currency reserves were dwindling. The Vietnamese leadership took drastic action and abolished rationing, liberalised prices, cut food subsidies to zero, reduced the budget deficit significantly, devalued the currency by 450 per cent and disbanded collective farms. This did not have a negative impact on gross domestic product (GDP). In 1990, 71 per cent of the labour force was still employed in agriculture, and Vietnam reaped the same benefits as China when peasants became artisans and entrepreneurs (Hayton 2010: passim).
The Paracel and Spratly Islands continue to be a bone of contention between Vietnam and China. Perceiving South Vietnam to be losing the struggle with the Viet Cong, China seized the Paracel islands from Vietnam, and the new communist government was presented with a fait accompli. The two sides eventually fought a brief naval battle in the South China Sea, in 1988, over the ownership of the Paracel and Spratly islands. China won.
Gorbachev told a joke in America about a man who got fed up with queuing for vodka.
‘I’m going to shoot Gorbachev,’ he announced. After a while he returned. ‘Well, did you shoot him?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘The queue was longer than the vodka queue!’
In January 1989, Gorbachev announced a plan to reduce military spending by 14 per cent and arms manufacture by 19 per cent. He told the CPD on 30 May 1989:
The state continues to live beyond its means. Budget expenditure in the five year plan is growing faster than revenue. The result is a growing budget deficit… the main culprit for this state of affairs is the Ministry of Finance.
What an extraordinary claim. The Ministry of Finance implemented Politburo decisions – even when they knew them to be ill-judged.
In November 1989, Gorbachev penned an article in Pravda. He made it clear he had changed his mind about a lot of things:
Whereas, at first, we thought it was basically a question of correcting individual deformations in our social organism, of perfecting the system which had been developed, we are now saying that we must radically remodel our entire social system, from the economic foundation to the superstructure… reform of property relations, the economic mechanism and the political system.
In other words, he admitted that all his previous reforms had been misconceived and this was the key reason why perestroika had not transformed the country as planned. Attempting to graft market reforms onto a faltering planned economy could only end in failure.
Ivan hears that the local departmental store is going to sell sausages. He arrives home and finds his wife in bed with his best friend. He says to her: ‘You can’t do that. You need to get some sleep because you have to get up early tomorrow morning to queue for sausages.’
In January 1991, the Russian Supreme Soviet legalised private property in land, capital and the means of production. Private enterprises could be established and hire as many workers as they liked. The Russian Federation began acquiring all-Union enterprises and property on its territory, and oil, gas and mining were gradually taken over. The goal was to suck the lifeblood out of the Soviet Union and re-establish the Russian Federation as the dominant republic, and attempts were undertaken to take over party property. The ‘war of laws’ proceeded apace as each republic sought to widen its autonomy and restrict Moscow’s power; the result was that the Soviet economy gradually disintegrated.
One of the reasons for Gorbachev’s lack of faith in private agriculture was his visit to Canada in 1983. He concluded that Canadian farmers relied on subsidies to survive and this turned him against capitalist agriculture. Between 1986 and 2010, annual subsidies to Canadian farmers ranged from US$6 billion to US$8 billion, and one of the reasons for this was that Conservative governments rely on rural votes. In OECD countries, subsidies averaged 19 per cent of gross farm income and in Japan, South Korea, Norway and Switzerland it was as high as 50 per cent. On a visit to a Soviet agricultural research institute, I was asked to explain how milk prices were arrived at in Britain. I said there was a state guaranteed price and a market price and if the market price was lower than the former, farmers received a subsidy to make up the difference. The problem with milk production was that it was too high and the government wished to reduce it. As the Soviet Union was a shortage economy, I am not sure they believed me.
Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on 1 August 1990 in an attempt to recoup some of the losses suffered during the war with Iran. It was incorporated in Iraq, and this posed a severe test for the evolving Soviet-American relationship. Gorbachev faced a dilemma: Iraq was an ally and there were thousands of Soviet troops in the country. James Baker and Eduard Shevardnadze met at Vnukovo 2 airport, in Moscow, and agreed on a statement condemning the Iraqi aggression – the precursor of joint votes in the UN. On 9 September, Gorbachev and Bush met in Helsinki and talked most of the day. The Soviet leader wanted assurances on two points: that military pressure would be used against Saddam Hussein, without it escalating into war; and that US forces would leave Kuwait after it had been liberated. Gorbachev again brought up the subject of US financial aid for the Soviet Union and was thus obliquely hinting that Kuwait and credits were linked. A rift developed between Gorbachev and Shevardnadze when the former chose Evgeny Primakov to be his envoy to Saddam. Primakov spoke Arabic and was a specialist on the Middle East, and he put together a peace deal which involved two islands and an oil field in return for Saddam’s withdrawal from Kuwait. James Baker regarded Primakov’s proposals as more ‘capitulation than compromise’.
Shevardnadze felt slighted and passed on his suspicions of Primakov to Baker. He informed Primakov, in Gorbachev’s presence, that his proposals would be disastrous for the Middle East and Soviet foreign policy. Primakov lost his temper and denigrated the foreign minister’s knowledge of the Middle East. ‘How dare you, a graduate of a correspondence course from a teachers’ college in Kutaisi, lecture me on the Middle East, the region I’ve studied since my student days!’ (Primakov 2004: 51). It was not the first time Shevardnadze had felt aggrieved at Gorbachev’s behaviour. He had offered to resign, in December 1989, after coming in for fierce criticism in the USSR Supreme Soviet and not being permitted to defend himself. Gorbachev appealed for him to come back, and he withdrew his resignation. The military was very unhappy about the decision to side with the Americans against Saddam Hussein and even went so far as to send a very critical letter to Gorbachev.
On 23 October 1990, Anatoly Chernyaev and Evgeny Primakov forwarded a memorandum to Gorbachev:
It would be expedient to share the data we have on Iraq’s military preparations with the US government, in strictest confidence. The data includes information about Iraq’s preparedness to use chemical and bacteriological weapons in case it is militarily attacked.
Gorbachev disagreed. The following month, Margaret Thatcher brought up the subject and said that Britain was aware that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons but she did not believe that Iraq had nuclear weapons. Gorbachev replied: ‘We have no information to suggest that Iraq has nuclear or biological weapons. It does have chemical weapons’ (The Spectator, 26 March 2011). In fact, Gorbachev was well aware that Iraq would use biological weapons under certain circumstances.
Several months after Saddam’s attack on Kuwait, the American public was shying away from military intervention. Then a 15-year-old girl spoke at the United Nations and catalogued the brutality of Saddam’s troops. Delegates were in tears as she related horror stories and one stood out. She said she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers plundering Kuwait’s hospitals: ‘They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the infants to die on the cold floor.’ Public opinion changed immediately, and the US went to war but it turned out later that the girl was the royal daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington and had never been to the hospital and the incubator story was pure fiction. Why were Americans duped? The story played on their emotions as many, if not most, decisions are based on emotion.
Israel ‘considered’ using atomic weapons in response to the Scud missile attacks launched by Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. Right-wing ministers, including Yuval Ne’eman (he was working on Israel’s nuclear programme), Rafael Eitan and Rehavam Ze’evi, urged Yitzhak Shamir’s government to respond forcefully. They meant a nuclear response. Shamir rejected Israeli military action out of hand.
In 1979, the KGB in Damascus provided the Syrian Communist Party with $275,000 and $329,000 the following year. Far greater sums flowed into the party’s coffers through Soviet commercial contracts with companies controlled by it, and the party was also secretly supplied with arms.
In June 1982, during the unsuccessful Israeli attack on Lebanon to destroy the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), Israel and Syria fought one of the largest air battles of the twentieth century over the Biqa valley. The Israelis destroyed all of Syria’s SAM-6 missile sites, shot down twenty-three Syrian MiGs without losing a single plane, and when new SAM sites were built, the Israelis took them out as well. When President Hafez al Assad visited Moscow for Brezhnev’s funeral in November 1982, Andropov agreed to supply advanced weapons systems, some of them operated by Soviet personnel. Andrei Gromyko and Marshal Ustinov opposed this decision (Andrew and Mitrokhin 2005: 209–13).
In 1984, there were over 9,000 Soviet service personnel in Syria, mostly anti-aircraft combat units. While fighting in Syria and Lebanon in the early 1980s, dozens of Soviet officers, including three generals, were killed and hundreds wounded (Militera.lib.ru 2000).
Gorbachev developed a remarkable rapport with President Hafez al Assad of Syria. Despite ill-treating communists, the Syrian dictator was viewed positively because of his resolutely anti-Western policies. In a conversation with al Assad, in April 1987, Gorbachev floated the idea of Soviet support for Arab unification and made clear that Moscow would back al Assad as the leader of the Arab world. When al Assad came to the Soviet Union for medical treatment in 1988, Gorbachev visited him in hospital, and he was to get the best care as ‘our friend, brother and comrade’. Al Assad was informed that his friends in the Soviet leadership: ‘are always ready to help you in any circumstances. You can be sure that we shall never let any harm come to friendly Syria. We shall always think together, act together and constantly keep in touch’ (The Spectator, 26 March 2011). Al Assad’s comment after the demise of the Soviet Union was plaintive: ‘We regret the Soviet collapse more than the Russians.’
Elections to the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies led to the formation of Democratic Russia, and this grouping dominated Moscow and St Petersburg. Eighty-six per cent of the deputies were communists but this meant little as the party had split into many factions. Many deputies were heads of enterprises and the military and KGB were well represented, but workers and peasants only accounted for 6 per cent.
May Day demonstrations revealed the level of frustration and anger as thousands of people marched behind banners proclaiming: ‘The Politburo should retire’; ‘Down with the CPSU’; ‘Down with Marxism-Leninism’; and ‘Pension off Gorbachev.’ The Russian tricolour, banned since 1917, made an appearance. Gorbachev did his best to prevent Yeltsin becoming speaker of the Russian Parliament in May 1990 but his comrade, Aleksandr Vlasov, a former head of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, was a poor speaker and hence no match for Yeltsin.
The declaration of the sovereignty of the Russian Federation, passed by parliament on 12 June 1990, was a devastating blow for the Union and Gorbachev. Russian law was now to take precedence over Soviet law, and Russia would now only acknowledge Soviet legislation that was deemed beneficial.
Russia was not the first republic to declare itself sovereign. Estonia, Lithuania and Georgia had declared themselves sovereign in March; Latvia in May; Uzbeki-stan and Moldova joined Russia in June; and Ukraine and Belarus in July. Republics were now claiming precedence over Moscow.
There was no mechanism for resolving these disputes and aspirations. The 1977 Soviet constitution permitted republics to leave the Union, but how was this to be done? The constitution was silent about this, and autonomous republics (mainly inhabited by non-Russians) wanted to become full republics. How?
What was Moscow to do about the Baltics? According to Vladimir Kryuchkov, Gorbachev had agreed to use force against ‘extremists in Latvia and Lithuania’. Another source states that a document had been drafted to introduce presidential rule but Gorbachev never signed it. The party in Lithuania was clamouring for Moscow to ‘restore order’. On 10 January 1991, Gorbachev forwarded an ultimatum to the Lithuanian Parliament to implement fully the Soviet constitution there. In other words, reject the demand for independence. The same day, he instructed the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the head of the KGB to prepare to use force in Vilnius, and an Alpha special unit was sent to Vilnius. On 11 January, Alpha and other security forces together with local worker volunteers from the committee of national salvation occupied the House of the Press. During the night of 12–13 January, army and KGB units advanced to seize the television centre in Vilnius, and in the resulting conflict fourteen people died. Citizens began building barricades around parliament.
Gorbachev had only given verbal orders to attack, but afterwards he refused to confirm this. Two days before the attack he had assured President Bush that force would not be used unless Soviet power was attacked.
Gorbachev’s lack of openness offended the military as they had carried out an order and were now being accused of acting without authority. The conclusion they reached was that, in future, they would not use force unless they had a written order from the president. This was to prove crucial during the attempted coup in August 1991 when they were ordered to attack the White House which they would only do after receiving a written order; none ever came, so there was no military assault on the White House.
These events provoked a furious response throughout the Soviet Union. Donetsk miners demanded the resignation of Gorbachev and a democratic and economic transformation of the country, and Yeltsin called on Russian troops not to obey orders to suppress dissent in the republics.
The Vilnius tragedy revealed that the Soviet government was willing to use force to keep the Union intact, and force might now be deployed to resolve the political crisis in Russia. The most important lesson drawn by Yeltsin and his supporters was the need to establish a Russian army to defend Russia. After returning from Tallinn, Estonia, on 14 January, Yeltsin stated that the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan had decided to form a quadripartite pact. They were not willing to wait for the signing of a Union Treaty. Yeltsin had travelled by car to St Petersburg and then flew to Moscow. A friendly KGB officer had advised him not to fly from Tallinn to Moscow.
On 23 February 1991, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved at a meeting in Bucharest of foreign, and defence ministers from the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Romania, and Comecon met the same fate on 27 June 1991. These were the last rites of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe.
How was Gorbachev to keep the Union together? He began planning a referendum, to be held on 17 March 1991, to find out. Voters were asked if they ‘deemed it necessary to retain the USSR as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics?’ The leaders of the republics of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Moldova and Georgia declared they did not wish to sign a new Union Treaty. Yeltsin seized the opportunity to add another question. Were voters in favour of a directly elected president of the Russian Federation? Over 70 per cent voted for the Union, and Yeltsin got his yes vote.
The election of the president of Russia took place on 12 June 1991 with Democratic Russia and a host of other parties supporting Boris Yeltsin. A vice president, following the American precedent, would also be needed. Who would be Yeltsin’s running mate? In the end Boris chose Colonel Aleksandr Rutskoi, an Afghan veteran, believing he would bring in the military vote and some communists. The winner needed to obtain a majority of registered voters, not a majority of those who voted. Yeltsin obtained 57.3 per cent and was sworn in as president in the Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin on 10 July. A new national anthem (without words, as no one could agree on them) was based on the music of Glinka. For the first time since 1917, the Patriarch of All Russia blessed the incoming ruler. Russia had been resurrected.
Gorbachev pressed the US ambassador for credits every time they met. A credit line of $1.5 billion was arranged in June, and the Soviet leader pointed out that the Gulf War had cost $100 billion and the money had been immediately found. Was it not worth raising the same to save perestroika? After all, the latter was ten or a hundred times more important than the Gulf War. The rich man’s club was the Group of Seven (G7). Could the Soviet Union possibly join? In order to get an invitation, Gorbachev needed a financial plan.
The ideal person to draw up such a plan was Grigory Yavlinsky, so he went off to Harvard to work with Graham Allison. Yavlinsky called the joint effort the ‘window of opportunity’ and Allison described it as the ‘great design’. Gorbachev pulled out all the stops and invited Mrs Thatcher to his Moscow dacha. She was completely won over and instructed the US ambassador to send a message to the president: he was to lead the Western initiative to save Gorbachev. When the ambassador pointed out that this would be difficult because the Soviet Union had still to adopt market reforms, she brushed aside his remarks and told him to think like a statesman, not as a diplomat, trying to avoid doing anything.
On 17 June, Kryuchkov spoke at a secret meeting of the USSR Supreme Soviet. He laid out the case for Gorbachev’s removal and demanded that extraordinary measures be taken to cope with the gathering crisis, but the deputies did not side with him.
Negotiations on a new Union Treaty concluded on 17 June at Novo-Ogarevo, a splendid residence just outside Moscow and the draft was then forwarded to the Union republics. There was a closed session of the USSR Supreme Soviet on the same day where Gorbachev was subjected to withering criticism. Marshal Dmitry Yazov reported on the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Germany, Hungary and Poland. Gorbachev had cut the armed forces by half a million, including 100,000 officers, and many of them had no pensions because they had not served long enough. Boris Pugo, the minister of internal affairs, said that criminality and inter-ethnic conflicts were getting out of control. Since August 1990, the militia had confiscated about 50,000 firearms and tonnes of explosives. Kryuchkov wondered why Gorbachev was so popular in the West. Valentin Pavlov, the prime minister, asked for and was granted extra powers which placed him on a par with the president. Furious, Gorbachev turned up the next day, attacked Pavlov and demanded a vote of confidence which he got. Pavlov boasted about how much money he was making on the currency black market and, presumably, he was using the Ministry of Finance as a piggy bank. Gorbachev confronted him: ‘Comrade Pavlov, you are a thief.’ He countered, ‘Yes, I am but I am a socialist thief!’
Gorbachev’s bid for G7 money was doomed from the start. A programme was drawn up by the government but was not deemed viable. At the G7 meeting in London from 15 to 17 July, everyone listened politely to the Soviet leader. There was little reaction when he invited business leaders to invest in the Soviet Union. He asked for and was granted membership of the IMF.
On 23 July, republican and Soviet leaders assembled at Novo-Ogarevo, but Gorbachev sensed danger. Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbeki-stan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan were to sign the Union Treaty on 20 August. Significantly, no parliament, not even the Soviet, was to be a party to ratification. Gorbachev knew that it would have been voted down.
The last Party Central Committee plenum took place on 25–26 July. A new party programme and preparations for the next Party Congress were on the agenda. Delegates insulted Gorbachev and the level of noise precluded rational debate. The draft programme was a remarkable document because it was a social democratic programme, not a communist one. It was to be debated at the Congress, which was to take place in November–December 1991.
Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Nursultan Nazarbaev convened, in Novo-Ogarevo, on 29 July, and decided to sack Vice President Yanaev, Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB, Boris Pugo, minister of the interior, and the head of the State Radio and Television Committee. The president of the new Union would be Gorbachev and the new prime minister would be Nazarbaev. Because the KGB bugged Novo-Ogarevo, Kryuchkov and the others learnt that they were to go. Parliament could not dismiss Gorbachev as he had been elected for five years, unless he had become mentally and physically incapable of performing his presidential functions. An attempt to introduce a state of emergency failed in March 1991, and in April the Security Council began drafting a state of emergency decree. Gorbachev, after all, had mentioned on several occasions the need for ‘emergency measures’. On 3 August, the day before he left for his Foros holiday home in Crimea, he said that the situation was ‘exceptional’. It was necessary to take ‘emergency measures’. Then Gorbachev added: ‘People will understand this.’
George H. W. Bush arrived in Moscow in late July 1991 for his first Moscow summit as president. It was to be the fourth and last Gorbachev-Bush meeting. Ironically, it was the most rewarding for both leaders, on a purely personal basis. The START treaty was ready for signature, after ten years of hard negotiations; the CFE treaty was with the Senate for ratification; a bill was before Congress conferring on the Soviet Union most favoured nation status; and there was a tentative agreement on a Middle East peace conference, but the realities of the domestic situation impinged on the meeting. A note was passed to Bush, informing him that six Lithuanian customs officials had been killed during the night. Gorbachev was embarrassed as this was the first he had heard of the incident. It appeared that it had been staged by the minister of internal affairs to disrupt the summit, and it also revealed that Bush was better informed about Soviet domestic events than the Soviet president. It was clear that Gorbachev was not in full control of the police.
The growing influence of the republics was marked by Gorbachev’s invitation to Boris Yeltsin and Nursultan Nazarbaev, the leader of Kazakhstan, to join him in a working lunch and to participate in some of the sessions. Yeltsin replied that he preferred to meet Bush face-to-face, president to president, in his office. He kept Bush waiting ten minutes and the encounter overran. At the official dinner, Yeltsin tried to upstage Gorbachev. When First Lady Barbara Bush entered, he attempted to escort her to the top table, as if he were the host.
In planning his itinerary, Bush had been advised by American diplomats to visit Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. Initially, the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs raised no objections, but then it changed its mind and advised Bush against travelling to Kiev, given the tense situation there. Instead, he could spend some time with Gorbachev in Stavropol krai. Evidently, the Soviet leader was piqued by Bush’s wish to visit Ukraine at a time when the Ukrainians were proving difficult during negotiations for a new Union treaty. It could boost the nationalist cause there. In Kiev, Bush was to meet the constitutional head of the republic, Leonid Kravchuk; all toasts were to be in Ukrainian and English, and no Russian was to be used. Bush countered by saying that he would cancel the visit but due to the advanced level of preparation, it would be embarrassing. On an open line, the US ambassador spelled out the negative consequences for Moscow as it would be blamed for the change of plan. Gorbachev changed his mind and agreed that the visit should go ahead. It underlined the changed nature of Soviet politics as it would be the first visit by a US president to a Soviet republic without the Soviet leader at his side. So, on 1 August 1991, President Bush and his entourage made for Kiev. Gennady Yanaev, the Soviet vice president, went along as well, at Gorbachev’s request, and some thought he was there to keep an eye on Bush.
In Kiev, Bush was careful to stress that he was on Ukrainian soil. Nixon, in 1972, had spoken of Soviet soil and Kiev as the mother of all Russian cities. He declined to meet representatives of the opposition alone but met them with Kravchuk and other officials. His speech to parliament attacked naked nationalism (Plokhy 2014: 64):
Freedom is not the same as independence. Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.
Ukrainian Americans were furious, and it was dubbed the ‘chicken Kiev’ speech, a derogatory sobriquet. For them, it revealed that Bush was Gorbachev’s man and Ukrainian nationalists were of the same opinion.
At Babii Yar, on the outskirts of Kiev, in September 1941, German Sonderkommandos had shot 34,000 Kievan Jews in two days. Bush’s speech there was emotional and well received by nationalists and others. Kravchuk, as an eight-year-old boy, had witnessed the mass execution of Jews by German troops. Two members of the group looked out of place: Yanaev and the Soviet ambassador to Washington. The former did not understand Ukrainian and knew little English. An American official commented that Ukrainians treated him as if he were the chairman of the All-Union Leprosy Association!
In order to succeed, a coup has to have the support of the KGB and military. The brain behind the attempted coup was Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB. On 20 July, the KGB leaders convened a meeting with KGB republican chiefs, and they discussed measures to be taken if executive organs ‘were paralysed’.
Gorbachev was warned about the impending coup. Gavriil Popov gave the US ambassador, Jack Matlock, the names of the plotters and the information was passed on to Boris Yeltsin, then in the US, and to Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, the minister of foreign affairs. In a telephone conversation with Gorbachev, President Bush warned him about an impending coup but he unwisely gave Gavriil Popov as his source. The next time that Gorbachev encountered Popov, he wagged his finger at him and asked, ‘Why are you telling Americans fairy tales?’
On 6 August, Kryuchkov instructed two KGB officers to undertake a feasibility study on the introduction of a state of emergency but the conclusions were not very positive. On 14 August, Kryuchkov stated that Gorbachev was mentally confused and was unable to work, but this was a total fabrication. The following day, documents introducing a state of emergency were ready. All parties and social organisations – except the CPSU – were to be closed down and party rule reintroduced. These proposals were to be presented to Gorbachev in the interests of saving the motherland (Kryuchkov 1996: Vol. 1 passim). Gorbachev was informed by the KGB that the state was becoming ungovernable.
At 8 a.m. on 18 August, Minister of Defence Yazov ordered troops to be ready to move into Moscow and KGB troops were to be dispatched to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Seventy politicians were to be arrested including the leaders of the Russian government and Eduard Shevardnadze, who had resigned in dramatic fashion as minister of foreign affairs on 20 December 1990.
Reformers have run for cover. A dictatorship is coming – I declare this with a full sense of responsibility. Nobody knows what kind of dictatorship it will be, who will come to power, what kind of dictator or what kind of order will be installed.
(Pravda, 21 December 1990)
Kryuchkov phoned Gorbachev four times to reassure him that everything was normal. Gorbachev also talked to Vice President Gennady Yanaev, Oleg Shenin, the party secretary responsible for party organisations, and Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov. They were all among the plotters. At 4.50 p.m. Foros security alerted Gorbachev to the fact that some visitors wished to see him, but this was strange as he has no appointments scheduled. General Yury Plekhanov, head of the KGB’s ninth directorate responsible for the security of the leadership, was accompanied by Oleg Shenin, Oleg Baklanov, deputy chair of the Defence Council, General Valentin Varennikov, commander in chief of ground forces, and Valery Boldin, his chief of staff; it dawned on Gorbachev that the KGB, military and party had betrayed him.
The most aggressive stance was adopted by General Varennikov, who had commanded the troops in Vilnius in January. In response, Gorbachev told Varennikov exactly where he could go in the most obscene Russian he could muster. Gorbachev was advised that a state of emergency was needed immediately but he declined to sign the documents placed before him. Instead, he said it would be better to attain the stated objectives by ‘democratic means’. Baklanov said Russian President Boris Yeltsin would be arrested on his return from Almaty, Kazakhstan, and Vice President Gennady Yanaev would assume the president’s functions. ‘Relax,’ said Baklanov. ‘We’ll carry out the “dirty work” and then you can return’ (Gorbachev 1996: 631–2; O’Clery 2011: 197–212). Two hundred thousand pairs of handcuffs had been ordered from a factory in Pskov. Finally, Gorbachev shook hands with each as they left, and his final words were ‘Damn you all, go ahead!’ Vladimir Medvedev, his chief of personal security, then reported that all communications had been cut. Gorbachev, Raisa, his daughter, son-in-law and two granddaughters were now under house arrest.
The composition of the State Committee for the State of Emergency revealed how incompetent Gorbachev was in choosing his team. Anatoly Lukyanov, the speaker of the USSR Parliament, had been a friend since university days; Yazov had been chosen as minister of defence because he was a ‘dolt’ (his own description); Gennady Yanaev was a non-entity whose staff did his paperwork for him while he devoted himself to his twin passions: drink and women. Asked if he enjoyed good health, he quipped: ‘My wife has no complaints’; Valery Boldin, his chief of staff, had been with him since 1978.
On 19 August, Yanaev became president but was in no fit state to carry out his duties as he had spent much of the night drinking with Valentin Pavlov, notorious for liking a tipple. Yazov told military officers that an attack on Soviet power was imminent. At 6 a.m., funereal music by Chopin alerted the public that something terrible had happened. A state of emergency had been introduced, and the motherland was in mortal danger, as Gorbachev’s reforms had led the country into a cul-de-sac. Soviet institutions had been undermined by an unscrupulous minority bent on dictatorial power, and a tidal wave of sex and violence threatened to drown the motherland. Socialism, communism and the party were not mentioned.
One of the greatest mistakes perpetrated by the plotters was their failure to arrest Boris Yeltsin. The order was given and then cancelled. Why? Yeltsin was permitted to make his way to the White House, the Russian seat of government. Kryuchkov tried to convince him to join the Extraordinary Committee, but Boris sensed that his moment of destiny had arrived. As an instinctive politician, he seized the opportunity to lead the opposition to the attempted coup and was clever enough not to rally everyone behind the flag of Russia but to call for the reinstatement of Gorbachev as Soviet president. Yeltsin, the showman that he was, mounted a tank outside the White House and roared defiance at the self-appointed State Committee. Giving in would return the Soviet Union to the era of the Cold War and cut the country off from the outside world. Amazingly, communications from the White House had not been cut and Yeltsin was able to talk to world leaders, including President Bush.
Astonishingly, CNN continued broadcasting inside the Soviet Union, and this meant that republican leaders had another source of information. It often conflicted with the version being put out by the party in Moscow.
Most foreign leaders assumed that the coup had succeeded. President Mitterrand thought it was a fait accompli, but Margaret Thatcher did not. She had to break the news to Leonid Zamyatin, the Soviet ambassador in London. He later recalled:
She called me at eight in the morning and said very angrily: ‘Mister Ambassador, do you know what is happening in Russia?’ ‘I am sorry, madam, I don’t.’ ‘Well, then turn on your TV set and see for yourself. I need permission for a flight of an English aircraft to Russia. You are flying with me. I will take a doctor along. Gorbachev must be sick. Maybe dying. I must be in Russia.’
(Service 2015: 491)
Thousands of Muscovites surrounded the White House and built barricades, but they would have been routed had the military attacked. The reason they did not was that Yazov had demanded a written order from the Extraordinary Committee, which never arrived.
Three young men were killed accidentally by tanks during the attempted coup. The troops returned to barracks on 21 August, and the same day a Russian parliamentary delegation, accompanied by two Gorbachev allies, Evgeny Primakov and Vadim Bakatin, flew to see Gorbachev at Foros. Kryuchkov suggested to Yeltsin that they should jointly go to see the Soviet president, but Boris suspected it was a plot to assassinate him. When Raisa heard that the plotters were on their way to see her husband, she feared the worst and had a ‘massive fit… micro stroke… had a haemorrhage in both eyes. Her eyesight declined dramatically.’ The Committee leaders arrived at 4 p.m., but Gorbachev would not speak to them. The Russian delegation arrived at 8 p.m. The president was already a free man and had been telephoning President Bush and republican leaders. About midnight, the plane with the Russian delegation and the Gorbachev family took off. Kryuchkov was with them to ensure that the KGB did not shoot down the aircraft. The plotters were in another plane.
Gorbachev arrived at Vnukovo airport about 2 a.m. and he headed straight for the microphones, but Evgeny Primakov cut in and stated that the president was too tired to comment. Primakov was speaking for Russia, and the Soviet president would have to play second fiddle to Russia from now on. At midday in the Kremlin, Gorbachev convened a meeting of his supporters and new appointments were announced. Then the Soviet president made for the White House and made the speech which effectively ended his political career. He talked about reforming the party, but he had not grasped that the party had betrayed him and could not be reformed. He talked about a new future, but the response was a torrent of abuse. Exasperated, he told journalists: ‘You will never know the complete truth.’
On 24 August, he bitterly commented, ‘I came from Foros to a different country and I, likewise, am a different person.’ Boris Yeltsin was ready with the knife, and the president was forced to rescind the appointments he had made the day before. He was invited to the White House by the president of Russia to meet the Russian Supreme Soviet or Parliament. The Russian president humiliated the Soviet president at every turn as he stood above him and pointed the finger down at him. He forced Gorbachev to read the minutes of the government meeting of 19 August when all but two of the ministers had supported the coup. ‘And you appointed that government,’ Boris said gloatingly. ‘Now on a lighter note, shall we sign the decree banning the Russian Communist Party?’ All Gorbachev could splutter was: ‘I haven’t read the decree.’ Yeltsin also signed a decree seizing the assets of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on Russian territory.
On 25 August, Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary of the CPSU and its Central Committee was dissolved. The Communist Party, which had so triumphantly seized power on 7 November 1917, had expired in a whimper. The Bolshevik era was over.
Others died as well. Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, the top brain in the military, hanged himself in his office at the second attempt and there were several notes: one to pay an outstanding mess bill – roubles included. When they came for Boris Pugo, the minister of internal affairs, they were shocked by what they found. His wife lay dying with a bullet in her brain; he was dead with a bullet in his head and her aged father, in the final stages of dementia, was wandering around the apartment. Pugo’s note read: ‘Forgive me. It was all a mistake.’ Others jumped out of windows to their deaths.
On 30 August, Gorbachev asked Shevardnadze to come to the Kremlin and the ensuing conversation was explosive. The latter accused Gorbachev of betraying his life’s cause, betraying his allies and surrounding himself with mediocrities and flatterers. ‘You became a person who – whether it was deliberately or involuntarily doesn’t matter – provoked the coup. And I have every ground for supposing that you took part in the plot.’ When he declined to become minister of foreign affairs again, Gorbachev asked why. Shevardnadze replied, ‘I don’t trust you’ (Service 2015: 492).
The fifth and final session of the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies was convened on 2 September in the Kremlin. As Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova and Georgia had declared independence, they were not represented. Deputies agreed to dissolve the Congress and draft a new Union Treaty to establish a Union of Sovereign States. Gorbachev proposed a federation in which the centre would be responsible for defence and foreign policy. Yeltsin disagreed and stated that the president of the new Union would play a ceremonial role, ‘similar to that of the Queen of England’. There was also talk of a confederation, and it might have kept twelve republics together (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were beyond the pale), but Gorbachev would have none of it. The model was obviously Switzerland, and Gorbachev was aware that the Swiss president enjoyed only a ceremonial role.
Plokhy (2014) calls the USSR the Soviet Empire, and he vividly brings out the seething resentment of many nationalities at Moscow rule. The Russo-Ukrainian treaty, signed in November 1990 by Yeltsin and President Leonid Kravchuk, guaranteed the existing boundaries, but all that changed after the failed coup. On 24 August, Yeltsin recognised the independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania within their existing frontiers, and on the same day, Ukraine declared independence. Whereas the declaration of sovereignty had given precedence to republican laws over Soviet Union laws, independence meant that Union laws could be ignored completely. Contrary to the policy adopted towards the Baltic States, Russia did not recognise Ukraine’s independence, or that of Georgia, which had proclaimed independence in April 1991.
When the Ukrainian declaration of independence was read out in the Soviet Parliament, Gorbachev, red-faced, stormed out of the chamber. Dmitry Likhachev, the doyen of academia, warned that the collapse of the Soviet Union would lead to border wars. The Russian Federation, hitherto leading the charge to drain the Union of its powers, was now faced with the problem of how to save the Union. Yeltsin told his press secretary, Pavel Voshchanov, to draft a statement saying that ‘if any republic breaks off Union relations with Russia, then Russia has the right to raise the question of territorial claims’ (Plokhy 2014: 176). When the statement was published, Voshchanov was asked which republics could face claims and he answered, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. He later expanded this to mean territories which had previously been part of Russia: Crimea and Donetsk oblast in Ukraine, Abkhazia in Georgia, and northern oblasts of Kazakhstan. Critics were quick to point out that Donetsk oblast (Donbas) had never been part of the Russian Federation. After 1917, it was included in the Republic of Ukraine and later incorporated in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Abkhazia, likewise, had never been part of Russian territory. It had either been independent or an autonomous Republic of Georgia. In 1917, northern Kazakhstan became part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the early 1920s, the autonomous Republic of Kazakhstan was proclaimed and declared to be part of the RSFSR. Kazakhstan became a Soviet Socialist Republic in 1936.
Gorbachev weighed in by stating that ‘there cannot be any territorial claims within the Union, but their emergence cannot be ruled out when republics leave the Union’ (Plokhy 2014: 177). The president’s message was clear: stay in the Union or face dismemberment.
The Ukrainians hit back immediately and labelled the Moscow democrats imperialists in disguise. Yeltsin sent his emissaries to Kiev and they had to defend the indefensible, but it turned out that the territorial claims were merely a tactic to postpone Ukrainian independence. ‘Do you think we need those territories?,’ a member of Yeltsin’s inner circle asked. ‘We need Nazarbaev [president of Kazakhstan] and Kravchuk [president of Ukraine] to know their place’ (Plokhy 2014: 179). Their place, of course, was in the Union and under Russia’s control. The Russian delegation failed to find common ground with Kravchuk and the Ukrainian democrats, and it was plain to see that they were aiming for a ‘civilised divorce’. On hearing the outcome of the failed talks, Nursultan Nazarbaev sent a message to Yeltsin asking for the Russian delegation to come to Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan. At a joint press conference with Nazarbaev, Russian Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi stated there were no territorial problems between Russia and Kazakhstan.
This disastrous démarche ended any trust that existed between Kiev and the new masters in Moscow. Gorbachev and Yeltsin wanted the same thing: Moscow rule. Kravchuk did not bother to turn up at the Novo-Ogarevo discussions about a successor state to the USSR. A more skilful politician than Gorbachev might have saved something from the flames, but he did try to play the ethnic card by warning that eleven million ethnic Russians in Ukraine would be difficult to swallow. How right he was. He also encouraged the autonomous republics within the Russian Federation to seek recognition as republics.
The parlous state of the Soviet economy after the attempted coup was graphically illustrated by Gavriil Popov, the mayor of Moscow, in a conversation with James Baker, the US secretary of state. Popov said there was no longer a central government and that republics and large cities, such as Moscow, were on their own. The food situation was so serious Moscow could not survive the winter. He asked for eggs, powdered milk and mashed potato mix. ‘Some of this material is stored by your army, which throws it out after three years. But a three year shelf life is good enough for us.’ What a humiliating position for a superpower to be in.
After meeting Russian democrats, Baker concluded that they were incapable of ruling the country without outside help. He wrote to President Bush proposing a new Marshall Plan to prevent a ‘world which is more threatening and dangerous, and I have little doubt if they [democrats] are unable to deliver the goods, they will be supplanted by an authoritarian leader of the xenophobic right wing’ (Plokhy 2014: 205). The timing was unfortunate because of the poor state of the US economy; it was in no position to fund a new Marshall Plan but President Bush strained every sinew to keep the Union afloat. The reason was the fear that the four nuclear republics – Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan – could fall apart and nuclear weapons end up in the wrong hands. The continuation of the Union was in the US interest, but Bush failed to understand the power of nationalism once glasnost had uncorked the bottle of protest.
On 1 December 1991, Ukraine held a referendum on independence. In March, three-quarters of the electorate had voted for a ‘renewed federation’ and now 90 per cent favoured independence, but the Soviet Union could not survive without Ukraine. When Yeltsin arrived in Belavezha forest near Minsk on 8 December 1991, his first move was to offer Kravchuk the Gorbachev-approved plan for a reformed Soviet Union, but the Ukrainian president did not even consider the proposal. Gorbachev and Kravchuk agreed that a viable Union had to include Russia and Ukraine. Russia would not enter such a Union on its own as it would become responsible for weak Central Asian Muslim states. It should be pointed out that Ukraine vastly overestimated its economic potential as it thought it was the richest republic, which it was not. The Russian Federation was the richest. Had Kravchuk had a more realistic understanding of the Ukrainian economy he might have acted differently. Plokhy maintains that it was Ukraine and not Russia which determined the fate of the Soviet Union, with Kravchuk signing its death certificate.
So the heads of state of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus dissolved the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and set up the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Yeltsin then phoned President George H. W. Bush with the news, and it was left to Stanislau Shushkevich, the Belarusian leader, to inform Gorbachev. The latter had every right to feel insulted as he had been duped. A Russian put it graphically: ‘After Foros, Yeltsin had Gorbachev by the balls.’ The CIS would not have a president, and Gorbachev and Yeltsin shared the Kremlin as if they were dual monarchs. That came to an end on 25 December 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev appeared on television to announce his resignation as president of the USSR. There had been an agreement between the two presidents that the Soviet Union would expire on 31 December 1991, but the red flag was taken down and replaced by the Russian tricolour on Christmas Day. The two were to meet to sign the documents which would transfer the nuclear briefcase to the Russian president, but in a fit of pique, Boris refused to go. He was so incensed by Gorbachev declining to say he was resigning – he stated he was laying down his responsibilities – that he ordered the TV to be turned off. Eventually, officials had to go from one president to the other to get the requisite signatures. There was no ceremony ending the existence of the Soviet Union, and it expired without a whimper.
