The Myth of the Strong Leader

Transformational Political Leadership

By a transformational political leader, I mean one who plays a decisive role in introducing systemic change, whether of the political or economic system of his or her country or (more rarely) of the international system. The word ‘transformational’ generally has a positive connotation. It suggests profound change, but a fundamental reconstruction of the system into one that is qualitatively better than what has gone before. Largely for that reason, I distinguish it from revolutionary leadership. Some revolutions against oppressive rulers produce regimes that are an improvement in certain respects, and worse in others, than their predecessors. They are generally characterized, however, by the use of force to overthrow the pre-existing regime and by the subsequent use of coercive power to impose and sustain their rule over the whole population. However egalitarian and democratic their revolutionary rhetoric may be, they also have a strong tendency to create not only authoritarian regimes but also a cult of the strong individual leader within the post-revolutionary system. Leaders who play a decisive role in transforming the political or economic system of their country, without resort either to violent seizure of power or to the physical coercion of their opponents, are different from such revolutionaries. They are likely to do more lasting good and certainly less harm. It is rare, of course, for all of the aspirations of transformational leaders to be fully realized. And the systemic change they introduce may only partially survive the rule of their successors. However, the gulf between the utopian rhetoric of revolutionaries and the subsequent authoritarian reality is generally much wider.

Although the list is not intended to be exclusive, and though mention will be made of other leaders who have made significant contributions to promoting transformative change, the major focus of the chapter will be on five leaders from different countries – General Charles de Gaulle, Adolfo Suárez, Mikhail Gorbachev, Deng Xiaoping and Nelson Mandela. Only France was a democracy at the time when transformational change took place, but de Gaulle was responsible for a profound switch from one kind of democratic political system to another. Within a democracy such transformative change is likely to occur only when the existing system is in severe crisis. Change in Britain has been sufficiently gradual that there was no place for a transformational leader in the twentieth century (or in the twenty-first thus far). In the United States, the last president with a strong claim to be regarded as a transformational leader was Abraham Lincoln, and it is no accident that nineteenth-century America was in deep internal crisis at the time.

CHARLES DE GAULLE

Usually leaders who think of themselves as being above politics, and who regard politicians with disdain, are bad for democracy. It is an outlook to which some military men have been particularly prone. General Charles de Gaulle, too, believed that he had a higher understanding and conception of France than mere politicians, and he was disparaging of political parties. Yet, in spite of fears to the contrary, he strengthened French democracy, rather than undermining it, and played the decisive role in replacing an ailing democratic political system with a more robust one.

De Gaulle had an indomitable belief in France’s grandeur. Very early in his memoirs he writes of his feeling that ‘France is not really herself unless in the front rank’ and that ‘France cannot be France without greatness.’1 An army general who was a junior minister of defence at the time France surrendered to Nazi Germany in 1940, he saw Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist government as a stain on his country’s honour. Departing for London, he immediately took upon himself the role of commander of the Free French. He came to be accepted as such by the allied leaders, especially by Churchill, although the relationship between these two exceptional and strong-willed men was, to say the least, prickly. De Gaulle attributed this, in large part, to the greater distrust of him felt by Roosevelt and to Churchill’s believing that, under wartime conditions, he had to keep in step with the American president. The British prime minister, de Gaulle wrote, ‘did not mean to adopt towards Free France an attitude that would be in conflict with the White House’. And, since ‘Roosevelt showed himself distrustful towards General de Gaulle, Churchill would be reserved’.2

In spite of stubbornness on both sides, with de Gaulle in much the weaker position but determined not to show it, there was also mutual respect. Churchill’s first encounter with de Gaulle was in France at a meeting with leading figures in the French government just three days before German troops occupied Paris on 14 June 1940. The British prime minister flew in secret to a small airstrip near Orleans. Marshal Pétain, Churchill noted, ‘had quite made up his mind that peace must be made’, for ‘France was being systematically destroyed’, and Pétain believed it to be his duty to save Paris and the rest of the country from that fate.³ De Gaulle made clear how different was his conception. He was in favour of carrying on guerrilla warfare against the German occupying troops.* Already aged forty-nine, de Gaulle appeared youthful to Churchill who had become prime minister one month earlier at the age of sixty-five. Churchill wrote of him: ‘He was young and energetic and had made a very favourable impression on me.’ Churchill himself saw de Gaulle as the potential leader of the French struggle for liberation.4 In London, de Gaulle had to work hard to gain recognition from the French Resistance that he was their leader in exile. His radio broadcasts to France during the war helped to consolidate that leadership and it was symbolically confirmed when, with the liberation of France in August 1944, he led the march of Free French troops into Paris.

De Gaulle’s great physical height was accompanied by an equally high conception of himself as a man of destiny. He was not only convinced that he had a momentous role to play, but also saw himself as a performer. During the Second World War, he once said, he had become aware that ‘there existed in people’s spirits someone named de Gaulle’, and ‘I knew that I should have to take account of that man . . . I became almost his prisoner.’ Therefore: ‘Before every speech or decision I questioned myself: is this the way in which the people expect de Gaulle to act? There were many things I should like to have done, but that I did not do because they would not have been what they expected of General de Gaulle.’⁵

Such an elevated sense of duty and destiny did not fit comfortably with the messiness and compromises of everyday peacetime politics. De Gaulle, however, by the end of the war had established himself as a leader with an appeal to French democrats from different parts of the political spectrum. With his impeccable wartime record and anti-Nazi credentials, he was a natural choice to head the French provisional government in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Eschewing at each stage of his career any attempt to rule by force, de Gaulle chose a democratic path. In 1946 that meant resigning from the premiership and retiring to his home in the village of Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, from where, nevertheless, he hoped that before long he would be called back to Paris to lead the nation. It was to be another twelve years before the call came.

De Gaulle’s main complaint against the constitution of the Fourth Republic that had been created just after the war was that it did not provide a powerful executive. In particular, it lacked the strong presidency which he craved. Most French democrats were extremely wary of a powerful executive. Having lived under authoritarian rule during the war and having seen the havoc wreaked by totalitarian and authoritarian governments elsewhere in Europe over the previous two decades, they tended, too readily, to associate a strong executive with despotism. In reality, there can be no democracy without an authoritative – as distinct from authoritarian – executive.

De Gaulle set out his critique of the Fourth Republic constitution in 1946. Not all of it was well founded – in particular, his disparagement of political parties. There were too many of them in France at that time, and they were too divided internally, but competing parties are an indispensable component of a democracy. In his prediction of instability, as a result of an executive insufficiently powerful vis-à-vis parliament, de Gaulle was more prescient. During the thirteen years of the Fourth Republic (1945–1958) there were as many as twenty-five governments and fifteen premiers, during a time when Britain had just four prime ministers. Governmental crises were frequent, and in the last year of the Fourth Republic’s existence, France was ruled by caretaker governments for one day out of every four.6 Yet, it is possible to exaggerate the failures of those thirteen years. The French Communists were supported by about a quarter of the electorate, but the country remained democratic. Relations with Germany – a country whose forces had invaded France twice in the first half of the twentieth century – had been repaired, and France had become a founder member of the European Economic Community. French industrial production expanded faster than did that of the United States and Britain in the 1950s, and France had an impressive social security system. Living standards had risen quite rapidly.⁷ So the Fourth Republic was not without its achievements.

Yet the system and the country were, by 1958, in crisis. Governments were falling with increasing frequency. They struggled to come to terms with loss of empire, and, in particular, they found themselves incapable of resolving the Algerian problem. On the French right, in the army and, still more, among the French settler population in Algeria, there was a determination that Algeria would remain French (as it had been since 1830), whatever might happen to other former colonies. The army had entered the Algerian war in a ‘never again’ mood, believing that this was the last place ‘where they could feel useful and respected’ and that loss of Algeria would be disastrous for both them and their homeland.8 Already in 1956, France had 400,000 troops in Algeria, many of them conscripts, combating the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), the radical Arab nationalist movement for Algerian independence. Tensions over this colonial war poisoned French politics. Even Socialist governments maintained the attempt to keep Algeria French, while critics of the war – and of the use of torture in its prosecution – were treated vindictively.⁹ Successive French governments were caught between the incompatible demands of Algerians for independence and of the large white settler population insistent that Algeria was an integral part of France. Added to this was the highly questionable loyalty of the army, should any government in Paris make too many concessions to the FLN. Indeed, a French government which was even suspected of being willing to grant independence for Algeria risked being overthrown in a military coup.

It was not a new uprising of indigenous Algerians but of the French settlers which brought developments to crisis point in May 1958. It was they who sacked government offices in Algiers. Partly from qualified sympathy with the French settlers, but mainly in order to control the situation, the commanding officer of the troops in Algiers, General Jacques Massu, set up a ‘committee of public safety’. On 15 May he ended a speech with the words, ‘Vive de Gaulle!’ Increasingly, the army, the settlers and many members of the political class in Paris began to think of de Gaulle as the one person who could get them out of the impasse. The assumption within the army and among the settlers was that he would be the most formidable defender of Algérie Française. On the same day as Massu’s speech, de Gaulle issued a brief statement in which he spoke about the degredation of the state, the alienation of the people, turmoil in the army, and of France being on a road to disaster thanks to the ‘regime of parties’. He announced his willingness ‘to assume the powers of the Republic’.¹⁰ Four factors facilitated his return – his status as war hero who had returned to France in 1944 and restored the integrity of the French state on a democratic and republican basis; the memory of his dramatic and voluntary withdrawal from French public life in 1946; the publication in the recent past of his several volumes of war memoirs, which not only heightened people’s consciousness that de Gaulle was still waiting in the wings but also made a great impact with their evocative language and emotional appeal;11 and, above all, the fact that by 1958 the authority of the French state had reached a low ebb and appeared to be at risk of a coup d’état.¹²

Before the end of May the National Assembly had voted to ask de Gaulle to form a government. He then moved quickly towards getting the kind of political system he had long favoured – one in which there would be a dual executive of president and prime minister, but with the president very much the senior partner. The detailed new Constitution was drafted by de Gaulle’s loyal follower, Michel Debré, who was to become the first prime minister of the Fifth French Republic after de Gaulle had become its president. The constitution contained most of what de Gaulle had wanted, though it was Debré, who shared his views, who was left to negotiate it.¹³ Eighty-five per cent of the electorate came out to vote in a referendum on the constitution, held on 28 September 1958, and of that large turnout 80 per cent voted ‘yes’. This was, essentially, a ‘yes’ to the person of de Gaulle.¹⁴ The new constitution made it much harder for the legislature to make and unmake governments and the presidency was substantially strengthened, even though the prime minister retained significant policy-making powers. The president was particularly responsible for foreign and defence policy, and de Gaulle made full use of his powers, devoting especial attention to Europe, to colonial and French Community questions and, above all, to Algeria, which, until 1962, was the most pressing issue on the political agenda.¹⁵ De Gaulle would also intervene in other areas when he so wished, but he did not try to exercise detailed control over day-to-day policy. In particular, economic policy and financial matters were largely left to his successive prime ministers and finance ministers.¹⁶

In order to avoid the recurrence of a multiplicity of political parties, the voting system was radically changed, with various forms of proportional representation rejected. The system adopted was a two-round electoral process in which there was a run-off election a week after the first round, in which only the leading candidates (usually just two of them) were left in the contest. This made for majorities in the National Assembly capable of sustaining a government, although deputies remained as free as ever to criticize the executive. The new electoral system worked well for the freshly created Gaullist party, the Union for a New Republic (UNR) and much less well for the Communist Party. De Gaulle did not allow the new party to use his name, but his apparent distance from it was no more than a careful contrivance.17 He was aware that without the support of a major party he would over time lose ground. The one other major constitutional change desired by de Gaulle, but for which he was content to wait, was direct election of the president by the electorate rather than the legislature. This he obtained by referendum in 1962, as well as agreement on a seven-year term of office. This clearly enhanced the independent authority of the presidency not only for de Gaulle but for future incumbents, although the term was reduced to five years in 2002.¹⁸

Most importantly, the institutions created at de Gaulle’s behest have stood the test of time. This form of dual executive – or semi-presidentialism – has been much copied by other countries, not least in former Communist states, but has rarely produced as satisfactory a combination of effective governance and democratic accountability as it has in France. There has been stable government during the five and a half decades of the Fifth Republic and its institutions have gained widespread acceptance within the country. That endorsement extends to the Socialist and Communist parties, although many of the former and all of the latter were opposed to the new political system at the time of its introduction. After he had become French President in the 1980s, François Mitterrand remarked that ‘the institutions were not made with me in mind, but they suit me very well’.¹⁹

General de Gaulle’s achievements did not lie only in far-reaching institutional change. Making masterly use of ambiguity as a political device, he resolved the Algerian issue. When de Gaulle told the settlers in 1958 ‘I have understood you’, they took that to mean that he was committed to keeping Algeria French, yet what he had said was both ambiguous and non-committal. De Gaulle was not strongly for or against Algerian union with France, but he aimed, above all, to end the war and the festering sore which the Algerian problem had become. He skilfully ‘exploited the divisions of his opponents, the loyalty of his own supporters (Michel Debré, the prime minister, was notably lukewarm about Algerian independence) and the war-weariness of a frustrated French population’.²⁰ De Gaulle’s position, and along with it French public opinion, ever more obviously shifted further away from that of the French settlers and their military backers. In 1959 de Gaulle reminded the army that they were not an autonomous body: ‘You are the army of France. You only exist by her, because of her, and for her. You are at her service, and that is your raison d’être.’21 Both the army and the settlers realized that, even if they had played a crucial role in bringing de Gaulle to power in May 1958, his standing with the French public had in the meantime become so enhanced that a new insurrection would have a slimmer chance of success. Nevertheless, there was an army revolt in Algeria in 1961, and de Gaulle, with superb aplomb, got most of the French people on his side, and the insurrection fizzled out. As Vincent Wright noted, de Gaulle’s television appeal to the nation ‘was as moving and as resolute as it was effective, a rare combination of high drama and deep sincerity’.²² By 1962 Algeria had become an independent state. De Gaulle also oversaw the granting of independence to twelve other French overseas territories.

In many respects deeply conservative, de Gaulle was also, argues Sudhir Hazareesingh (the author of an illuminating book on the Gaullian mythology and legacy), ‘moving in the direction of history’. The big questions on which his judgement was vindicated by posterity were the need to continue the war after 1940 and to unify the Resistance; his assessment of the weaknesses of the electoral and party systems in the Fourth Republic; his determination to create the new institutions which have worked well in the Fifth Republic; and his acceptance of the need for decolonization.²³ Not only did de Gaulle change the political system, Hazareesingh argues, but he also made an important contribution to changing the political culture of France, reconciling ‘the Right with the Republic and the Left with the nation’. At the same time he gave new meaning to older values – ‘heroism, sense of duty, the feeling of belonging, defiance of fate, and contempt for materialism’.²⁴ The heroism is worth underlining. Especially in the period up to the end of the Algerian war, there were repeated attempts to assassinate de Gaulle. He was constantly being warned by security advisers to reduce his contact with crowds. In any gathering he towered above those around him and appeared to present all too vulnerable a target. Yet de Gaulle rejected with disdain the warnings of danger and admonitions not to take unnecessary risks.²⁵

On foreign policy, de Gaulle recognized Communist China and was critical of the American war in Vietnam, believing (on the basis of French experience) that it would end in failure.26 He played an important part in maintaining the good relations with West Germany already established by Fourth Republic politicians. He withdrew France from the integrated command system of NATO and, although resolutely anti-Communist, established better relations with the Soviet Union, having asserted his independence from American foreign policy. An animus against both the Americans and the British was easily discernible, and he twice vetoed Britain’s application to join the European Community (accepted only during the presidency of his successor, Georges Pompidou). The deeply divided and ambivalent attitudes of the British to joining European institutions were such that de Gaulle received many letters from the UK telling him to carry on the good work of keeping Britain out of the Common Market.²⁷ De Gaulle could be a difficult partner for American and British governments, but there is no doubt that France’s international prestige was enhanced during the years of his presidency.

One of the more questionable elements of the constitution of the Fifth Republic was the introduction of the referendum, since referendums on particular issues tend to become plebiscites on the government or person initiating them. They are also open to abuse. In principle, the president could not initiate a referendum; it was the government and parliament which had the right to do so. They were also not to be held on a reform which was in conflict with the constitution. Yet both of those provisions were to be breached by de Gaulle and by later presidents. Referendums were also a double-edged sword. To the extent that they amounted to a vote of confidence in the president and his judgement, they helped de Gaulle in January 1961 and April 1962 on Algeria-related questions and in October 1962 when there was a referendum on what was clearly a constitutional issue – direct election of the president.²⁸ However, social unrest, including violent clashes between police and demonstrators on the streets of Paris in 1968, saw de Gaulle lose some of his earlier authority. This was reflected when he lost a referendum in April 1969 on issues of regionalism and the reorganization of the upper house of the legislature, the Senate.²⁹ Reacting as if this were, indeed, a withdrawal of confidence in him by the French public (although the referendum was lost quite narrowly), de Gaulle immediately resigned and retired for the last time to Colombey. He died eighteen months later, aged eighty.

In the years since then he has come to be widely regarded, both in his homeland and abroad, as the greatest Frenchman of the twentieth century.

ADOLFO SUÁREZ

Six years before his death in 1975, the Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco, decided that, after he had gone, monarchy would be restored in the person of Juan Carlos. This duly occurred, and one year after his accession to the throne, the king appointed Adolfo Suárez as prime minister to replace Franco’s last appointee in that office, Admiral Carerro Blanco. There were many in the military who had no intention of giving up the privileged place which the Franco dictatorship had accorded them, but the king, even though he was Franco’s choice as head of state, selected Suárez to lead the government in the expectation that he would take Spain on a democratic path. Suárez, who was to be prime minister from 1976 until his resignation in 1981, appeared to many observers as an unlikely agent of radical change. He had been a high-level bureaucrat in the Franco regime, rising to be head of radio and television in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet, he was to exceed the expectations of democrats by playing a decisive role in the transition.

Suárez’s achievement must be put in context. He was in part responding to a strong feeling within Spanish society that change was necessary, although the levers of coercive power were in the hands of those opposed to a dramatic break with the previous regime. On the one side, there were powerful pressures from interests served by a continuation of authoritarian rule. On the other side, there were the demands for radical change coming from the anti-Francoist Left, both Socialists and Communists. It was Suárez’s consensus-building style that was to be decisively important in reconciling, to a remarkable degree, apparently irreconcilable differences. He did not achieve widespread popularity. In that respect he was far outshone by the Socialist leader, Felipe González.30 It was, though, a working relationship with the Communist leader, Santiago Carrillo, to which Suárez gave priority. Carrillo was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who had recently earned some international renown as the head of one of the two major ‘Eurocommunist’ parties (the Italian Communist Party, led by Enrico Berlinguer, being the other).31 Yet Suárez’s decision to seek the legalization of the Communist Party in 1977 was unquestionably the most dangerous moment for the emerging democracy. It could easily have led to a military coup d’état to put a stop to the democratizing process. That threat was constant throughout Suárez’s years in power, and it was a major achievement on his part that he staved off a major coup attempt until as late as 1981.

If a Francoist bureaucrat may be regarded as a surprising agent of democratic change, the same would be no less true of a Communist leader. Yet, at an early stage of the transition, Carrillo (who died as recently as September 2012 at the age of ninety-seven), turned out to be one of Suárez’s most important partners in the negotiation of a new political order. Once the democratic breakthrough had taken place, the Socialists gained far more support than the Communists, but at the time of Franco’s death, the Communist Party, although still illegal, had significant backing within Spanish society. While the legalization of that party infuriated many in the high command of the military, its continued suppression could have had serious repercussions. A direct clash between the Communist Party and the new government would have given the military the excuse to put a brake on the democratization process.

Thus, the long-exiled Communist leader had a pivotal role to play. Following his return to Spain, Carrillo was imprisoned in December 1976, but Suárez had conversations with him as early as February 1977. The Communist leader was responsive to the prime minister’s overtures. Carrillo agreed to recognize the monarchy, the flag and the unity of the Spanish state, thus somewhat assuaging conservative fears.³² To persuade the Communists to accept a constitutional monarchy was a major achievement on Suárez’s part. It took far longer for the Socialists to agree to this, for the basic division since the civil war had been between Francoists and Republicans, with the unacceptability of a monarchy taken for granted on the left. However, Suárez saw it as fundamentally important to bring the Communists within the system, and his negotiations with Carrillo achieved this. The senior officer corps did little to disguise their anger at the acceptance of the Communist Party as a legitimate participant in Spanish political life, yet they were persuaded to swallow this bitter pill. Suárez boldly and publicly proclaimed his belief that the Spanish people were mature enough ‘to assimilate their own pluralism’, that to continue making the Communist Party illegal would mean repression, and that he did not think the population should feel ‘obliged to see our jails full of people for ideological reasons’.33

Even more remarkable than encompassing the Communist Party within the new order was Suárez’s success in persuading the corporatist parliament that had been appointed (not elected) under the Franco regime, the Cortes, to agree to its own abolition. If Suárez had simply announced that he was closing it down, the security forces would surely have arrested him. Instead, he set about building a coalition for change. In a major speech to the Cortes, he made a forceful case that if they wanted to avoid conflict and subversion in Spain, they should begin to recognize the ‘pluralism of our society’ and that meant opening up the opportunity of legality for groups and political parties. As he put it: ‘The aims of parties are specific and not the least of them is to assume power. So, if the road is not opened by the legality which is being proposed by the state itself, there will be an apparent peace, below which will germinate subversion.’ He played on his audience’s desire to avoid ‘subversion’ and said he was sure that they would understand that there ‘cannot be, and will not be, a constitutional vacuum, and still less a vacuum of legality’.³⁴ The night before the Cortes voted on the Law on Political Reform in November 1976, just five months after Suárez had been appointed prime minister, many observers remained uncertain of the outcome. The vote, however, was 425 in favour and only fifty-nine against. Suárez had displayed skilful leadership not only by recognizing and responding to demands from within the broader society but by winning support for consensual solutions even from within the ranks of the old elite. To consolidate the new foundations, he put the Law on Political Reform to a national referendum, obtaining an impressive 94 per cent approval for the law.

Suárez succeeded also in forming a moderate conservative alliance called the Union of the Democratic Centre, which emerged in 1977 as the most successful party in what was Spain’s first general election since 1936. One effect of democratization was to give hope, and new opportunities, to separatist movements in the Basque country and Catalonia. It was, therefore, of real significance for the consolidation of Spanish statehood in its democratic form that these first competitive elections were national, rather than regional. Nationalist and regional parties tend to perform better in regional elections in their own territory than they do when the same citizens are voting for a government of the entire country. In the Spanish case, they have polled between 15 and 25 per cent higher in regional elections than in those at state-wide level.35 Thus, the parties which benefited most from holding, in the first instance, free elections for the country-wide legislature were those whose appeal was to the whole of Spain. These were, most notably, Suárez’s centre-right coalition and the Socialist Party, led by González. In the earliest post-Franco years, it was important for the development of democracy that moderate, non-nationalist parties emerged as the strongest.

Nationalist and separatist movements continue to be a serious issue in Spanish politics in the second decade of the twenty-first century, but they no longer present such a threat to democratic government.³⁶ Had they appeared to risk break-up of the state in the immediate post-Franco years, this would, in all likelihood, have provoked a return to authoritarian rule. The military would have formed the backbone of a regime whose coercive crushing of separatism (although that would have been only a short-term solution) would have been accompanied by suppression of the fledgling Spanish democracy.* Suárez, in contrast, took early steps to reassure moderate opinion in Catalonia and the Basque country, with particular success in Catalonia. The Basque National Party and representatives of Catalan nationalism took part in negotiations in 1977, and the 1978 Spanish Constitution offered significant devolution of power to both regions, with Catalan and Basque becoming official languages in both territories, alongside Castilian (standard Spanish).

The first Suárez government was beset by severe economic and social problems in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis. The newly elected prime minster initially considered introducing an economic stabilization plan by executive decision. After reflection, however, he decided that it would be more legitimate and more effective if he could get agreement on a consensual ‘pact’ in support of policies that measured up to the scale of the problems. The ‘Moncloa Pact’ (the name is that of the prime minister’s residence) is widely considered to be one of the most effective agreements in the history of democratic transitions. Faced by the threat of widespread worker unrest, Suárez understood that he must engage in give-and-take negotiations with the Communist and Socialist opposition if the government were to get union leaders to understand and tolerate painful wage control policies and anti-strike agreements for the first year of the democratic experiment. He invited the leaders of every party with seats in the new parliament which had been generated by free elections in June 1977, Communists included, to a series of private meetings in Moncloa.

Only after these extensive negotiations and resultant agreements did Suárez bring the Moncloa Pact to both houses of parliament. With the parties having already made their difficult concessions, there was only one vote against acceptance of the pact in the Lower House and only three votes against (and two abstentions) in the Upper House. The Pact which the unions and the major political parties had signed up to included, in return for moderating wage demands to lower inflation and public debt, a range of political and social reforms from guarantees for freedom of expression to the legalization of contraception. The agreement prepared the way for a fuller democratization of Spanish society.37 The fruits of Suárez’s inclusive political style were seen also when Spain applied in 1977 for membership of the European Community (as the European Union was then known). This had the support of all the parliamentary parties. In Spain, as in other countries moving away from authoritarian rule, EU membership helped to solidify democratic rule (notwithstanding tensions caused in more recent years by the international economic crisis and the problems of the common currency).

Recognizing the need for a new constitution which would underpin the emerging democratic order, Suárez was aware of the dangers of imposing it by a simple majority. In a parliamentary speech in April 1978, he said that ‘the Constitution, as an expression of national concord, must be obtained by consensus, for which it is necessary to take into account the diverse political forces now present’.³⁸ Although the Communists had already conceded that the monarch would be head of state, the Socialists took more persuading and, until late in the day of drawing up the constitution, were insisting that the Spanish state should become, and be defined as, a Republic. However, they eventually agreed to the idea of a constitutional monarchy in return for abolition of the death penalty and reduction of the voting age to eighteen.39 In large measure as a result of Suárez’s leadership, Spain made a negotiated transition to democracy. The draft constitution received close to unanimous assent in the parliament and was endorsed by almost 90 per cent of the population, the Basque region being the one major exception.⁴⁰

In elections in 1979, Suárez’s Union of the Democratic Centre had a narrow lead over the Socialist Party, but did not have an overall majority. Throughout his time in office, Suárez never achieved popular acclaim. He was too closely associated with the Franco regime to be admired by the democratic left, and far too liberal and conciliatory to anti-Francoist opinion for the taste of the most conservative forces (including many in the senior officer corps). Terrorist attacks by the Basque extremist organization, ETA, were by the beginning of the 1980s threatening the stability of the political system. In each successive year since the mid-1970s there had been more deaths, including those among the armed forces, which fuelled military discontent with the emergent democracy. Suárez was very conscious of an erosion of his own political authority and believed that if he attempted to hold on to power for a full parliamentary term, this would endanger democratization. More concerned with the fate of Spanish democracy than with prolonging his time in office, he resigned from the premiership in late January 1981.

Just a few weeks later, on 23 February, when the Cortes was in session to confirm the choice of his successor as premier, a military contingent, led by Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero, interrupted the parliamentary session, fired several rounds, and ordered all the deputies to be silent. Almost all of them crouched on the floor. Suárez was in the small group who did not. Along with Santiago Carrillo, Felipe González and another leading member of the Socialist Party, he was separated from the other deputies and destined for imprisonment if the coup had been successfully implemented. The role played by King Juan Carlos was pivotal in making certain this did not happen. Tanks had gone on to the streets in other cities at the same time as the military incursion into the country’s parliament. The king telephoned the main commanders and ordered them to get their tanks and men back to their barracks.

The next day, wearing his uniform of Captain General, the highest military rank, Juan Carlos appeared on television and announced that he would not tolerate this attempt to interrupt the democratic process. Although there was a substantial majority of Spanish public opinion opposed to the coup, the king’s stance was hugely important in ensuring its collapse. The military were much more responsive to commands from the king as head of state than they were to politicians or to public opinion. The coup failed and a number of the officers involved in it were arrested and subsequently imprisoned. The revived monarchy had not been a particularly popular institution. Such legitimacy as it was accorded was – and remains – fragile and highly dependent on the behaviour of the occupant of the throne. Juan Carlos, by appointing Suárez in the first place, by accepting that Spain should become a democracy and that his role would be that of a constitutional monarch, and, above all, by his stance at the time of the February 1981 coup, earned respect. As Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan observed, Juan Carlos ‘legitimated the monarchy more than the monarchy legitimated the king’.41

Of all those who had accepted the Franco regime, and prospered under it, it was, however, Suárez who played the most decisive part in the speedy transformation of the Spanish political system from authoritarianism to democracy. The fact that he came from the heart of the old establishment meant that he was able to carry enough of that body of opinion with him, even as he legalized hitherto banned political parties and wasted no time in holding genuinely democratic elections. He was by no stretch of the imagination a charismatic leader. (Felipe González came closest to that description among Spain’s post-Franco politicians.) Nor was he a ‘strong’ leader in the sense of one who dominated all those around him. He sought consensus and his style was collegial. He made concessions and compromises, but in pursuit of a goal he steadfastly pursued – that of democracy. In this he was astonishingly successful.

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV

Mikhail Gorbachev was a leader who was responsible for still more dramatic change than what occurred under Suárez. For one thing, he came to power in a country that was, in military terms at least, a ‘superpower’ and which had for decades ensured that Communist rule prevailed not only in the multinational Soviet state but also throughout most of Central and Eastern Europe. Systemic change in the Soviet Union would, accordingly, have much wider repercussions than fundamental change in Spain.* Yet, there are important parallels between the cases of Suárez and Gorbachev. Both had risen through the ranks of the old regime, and most Soviet dissidents, as well as foreign leaders, assumed that any reforms that Gorbachev might undertake would be within fairly narrow limits. It was taken for granted that Gorbachev would not do anything that would risk the monopoly of power of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or undermine its internal hierarchical power structure. Equally, it was assumed, he would never risk undermining Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. There could be no question of ‘losing’ any of the countries which the leaders of the Soviet party-state – not to speak of its military-industrial complex – regarded as their country’s legitimate geopolitical gains from victory in the Second World War.

Gorbachev is a pre-eminent example of a political leader who individually made a profound difference, even though there were many good reasons why change should be embarked upon in the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1980s.⁴² There had been a long-term decline in the rate of economic growth. The military-industrial complex flourished, but at the expense of the rest of the economy. Living standards, while much higher than in Stalin’s time, remained well below those enjoyed in neighbouring Scandinavian countries and in Western Europe. Even one of the successes of the Communist period, the rise in educational standards – including a strong higher education sector containing many well-qualified specialists in research institutes and universities – harboured the seeds of change and provided a potential constituency supportive of radical reform.

Yet the Soviet system was one in which there was a sophisticated array of rewards for political conformism and a hierarchy of sanctions and punishments for nonconformity and dissent. For Soviet power-holders, in particular, the risks of radical reform appeared to far outweigh the potential benefits. If their highest priority was to keep intact both the Communist system and the Soviet Union, they could plausibly argue by 1992 – by which time neither the one nor the other existed – that their caution had been fully justified. While at some stage in the future, the Soviet Union would have reached a crisis point, it remained stable in the mid-1980s, its underlying problems notwithstanding.* Even during the thirteen dreary months when Konstantin Chernenko was general secretary of the Communist Party – and, therefore, the country’s leader – there was no public unrest, only private grumbling. While the limitations of the Soviet command economy (despite its successes in military technology and space research and development) were among the stimuli to change, the Soviet Union was not in crisis in 1985. It was radical reform which produced crisis, rather than crisis that dictated reform. The idea that the Soviet economy was in such a parlous condition that it forced reform on Gorbachev is a misleading explanation of the profound change which occurred. If the economic imperative was so overwhelmingly strong, it does not explain why Gorbachev before long – certainly by the beginning of 1987 – was giving priority to political over economic reform. It is arguable that political reform was required to overcome entrenched bureaucratic opposition to the introduction of a market. However, Gorbachev pursued liberalizing and democratizing change for its own sake, and was later to admit: ‘In the heat of political battles we lost sight of the economy, and people never forgave us for the shortages of everyday items and the lines for essential goods.’⁴³

No less wide of the mark is the notion that the hardline rhetoric and increased arms expenditure of the Reagan administration left the Soviet leadership with no option but to concede defeat in the Cold War.† From the end of the war to the 1960s the United States had enjoyed military superiority over the Soviet Union, but that did not produce a more conciliatory Soviet foreign policy. On the contrary, these were years of Soviet-backed Communist expansion – and of the crushing of both the Hungarian revolution and the Prague Spring. It was from the early 1970s that the Soviet Union acquired a rough military parity with the USA, each side having enough nuclear weapons, and the means of their delivery, to wipe the other off the face of the earth. Although the possible technological spin-offs from investment in Reagan’s favoured Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) caused some Soviet concern, it was talked up by leading members of the Soviet military-industrial complex mainly as a device to avoid the cuts in defence expenditure which Gorbachev was pursuing.44 Reagan himself later conceded that ‘SDI might take decades to develop’ and that it would not be ‘an impenetrable shield’, for ‘no defense could ever be expected to be one hundred per cent effective’.⁴⁵ The SDI aspiration was unveiled by Reagan to the world in March 1983 when Andropov was Soviet leader. Yet, under both Andropov’s and Chernenko’s leadership, the Soviet response to stepped-up military spending in the United States was to follow suit. It was Gorbachev who changed Soviet foreign and defence policy, not Reagan or SDI.

Gorbachev took a more critical view of the condition of Soviet society in the mid-1980s than did any of his colleagues in the leadership. He was also more concerned than they were about the possibility of catastrophic nuclear war occurring through miscalculation, accident or technical malfunction. However, in March 1985, when Chernenko died, Gorbachev was the only reformer in the Politburo and the only one of them seriously intent on ending the Cold War. The other members of the Politburo formed the selectorate who nominated one of their number to the Central Committee to be general secretary, effectively thus choosing the next leader of the Soviet Union. How did Gorbachev become that person within twenty-four hours of Chernenko’s death? Given the composition and conservatism of the Soviet top leadership team, he was obviously not chosen because he was a reformer. He had not shared his more radical reformist ideas with his Politburo colleagues, and several of them were later to complain that they had no inkling that he would pursue the policies he did.46 He was also the youngest member of the Politburo, intellectually its most agile and physically its most robust, at a time when three aged top leaders had died within a period of less than three years. Annual state funerals had become an embarrassment to the Soviet state. Moreover, Gorbachev was already number two within the leadership. (Yuriy Andropov, in particular, had been impressed by his intelligence and energy and had extended his responsibilities during his fifteen months as Soviet leader.) Gorbachev was in a position to seize the initiative when Chernenko died in the early evening of 10 March 1985. He called and chaired a meeting of the Politburo which convened at 11 p.m. that same day, was effectively ‘pre-selected’ as leader there and then, and by the following afternoon was general secretary.⁴⁷

What is especially important is that Gorbachev’s views continued to evolve once he became Soviet leader. In 1985 he believed not only that the Soviet Union needed reform but also that the system was, indeed, reformable. By the summer of 1988 he had come to the conclusion that reform was inadequate and that the system needed to be comprehensively transformed. His speech to the Nineteenth Conference of the Soviet Communist Party in that year was, as he later wrote, nothing less than an attempt to make a ‘peaceful, smooth transition from one political system to another’.⁴⁸ In the same speech Gorbachev said that every country should have the freedom to choose its own way of life and social structure, and that any attempt to impose these from without, especially by military means, was ‘from the dangerous armoury of past years’.⁴⁹ In that June 1988 report, and again in a speech at the United Nations six months later, Gorbachev made clear that this was a universal principle, allowing no exceptions. That gave a green light to the peoples of Eastern Europe to take him at his word the following year. Had Gorbachev already believed in 1985 that reform was not enough and that systemic change was required, it would not have been sufficient to be as circumspect as he was; he would have needed to be a consummate actor to succeed in being chosen as general secretary. It was of decisive importance that Gorbachev’s political goals – not merely many of his specific attitudes – changed while he held the most powerful office within the highly authoritarian Soviet system.50

The strictly hierarchical nature of the Communist Party, the political resources (including substantial power of appointment) concentrated in the general secretaryship, and the superior authority of the top leader in relation to the party bureaucracy, the government machine, the KGB and the armed forces meant that the general secretary had a far greater chance of introducing fundamental change than had any other political actor. Nevertheless, no Soviet leader after Stalin had the power of life and death over his colleagues, and if he alienated them sufficiently, he could be overthrown, as Nikita Khrushchev discovered to his cost in 1964. To weaken the authority of institutions long accustomed to wielding great power was extremely dangerous. Therefore, Gorbachev had to use the powers of his office with immense political skill in order to introduce radical change that undermined existing institutional interests. As he later wrote: ‘Without political manoeuvring, it was no good even to think about moving aside the powerful bureaucracy.’⁵¹ One of Gorbachev’s closest reformist allies during the first four years of perestroika, Aleksandr Yakovlev (to whom he had given accelerated promotion) put it more strongly: ‘A consistent radicalism in the earliest years of perestroika would have destroyed the very idea of all-embracing reform. A united revolt of the bureaucracies – party, state, repressive and economic – would have returned the country to the worst times of Stalinism.’ The political context, he added, was utterly different in the mid-1980s from what it was later to become.⁵²

Gorbachev, especially during the first few years of his leadership, was very careful to get the approval of the Politburo for each reformist step he wished to take. The meetings became much longer than they were in Brezhnev’s time, with members feeling free to contribute and to disagree with the party leader. On many occasions, documents which, under Gorbachev’s supervision, had been prepared by his aides and brought to the Politburo, had to be amended, even though Gorbachev had already approved them. For example, when the draft of the speech he was to make in November 1987 on the seventieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution was submitted to the Politburo for its approval, several members objected strongly to the statement within it that an ‘authoritarian-bureaucratic model of socialism’ had been built in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev characteristically responded by making a tactical retreat, saying that the word ‘model’ should, perhaps, be replaced by ‘methods’ or ‘means’. At the same Politburo meeting there were objections to the use of the phrase, ‘socialist pluralism’, with ‘pluralism’ being condemned as an alien concept.53 Gorbachev’s flexibility meant that each document that became official policy, even though some of the formulations he had jointly developed with his advisers were lost in the process, nevertheless broke new ground – and, crucially, the Politburo had taken collective responsibility for it. No matter what doubts they harboured, they could not easily disassociate themselves from the final product.

Gorbachev never had a majority of like-minded people in the Politburo. In common with many other heads of government, including those in democratic countries, he had more leeway over foreign policy than he had in relation to the economy. He was able to replace the entire top foreign policy-making team within a year of becoming general secretary.⁵⁴ Promotion to the Politburo, however, could only be from the ranks of people who were already members of the Central Committee. The general secretary had more influence than any other Soviet politician on those promotions, but in the post-Stalin era did not have a completely free hand. The Politburo collectively co-opted new members. One of the important reforms eventually adopted was the creation of a state presidency in March 1990, to which Gorbachev was elected by the legislature.*

Especially in the period up until March 1990, Gorbachev had to handle the predominantly conservative membership of the Politburo with finesse. One of them, Vitaliy Vorotnikov, described how he did it. Gorbachev’s style, according to Vorotnikov (whose testimony is supported by that of several of his colleagues), was ‘democratic and collegial’. Everyone who wished to speak in the Politburo was given the chance to do so, and Gorbachev would listen carefully to their arguments. If there was significant disagreement, Gorbachev would say that ‘we need to think a bit more about it, do some more work’. He would find a form of words that would reassure those who had expressed concerns or would postpone a decision until a later meeting. But in the final analysis, Vorotnikov ruefully observes, Gorbachev would get his way, sometimes accepting a middle position which he would then move away from at an opportune moment.55 From his different standpoint, Yakovlev notes in his memoirs that Gorbachev found himself in ‘a circle of people much older than him and more experienced in underhand games who at any moment could reach an agreement to cast him aside’.⁵⁶ He stresses the fact that Gorbachev was powerful only up to the point at which he encroached on the interests of the ‘most powerful elites and clans at that time’.⁵⁷

The Power of Persuasion

The more Gorbachev liberalized the Soviet system, the more he needed to rely on his powers of persuasion rather than on the authority of the general secretaryship. Vorotnikov admits to having been swept along for some time by Gorbachev’s arguments. He often spoke in the Politburo, expressing doubts about Gorbachev’s reforms and argued against them not only orally but sometimes also in writing. ‘But in the end,’ he says, ‘I often yielded to the logic of his [Gorbachev’s] conviction. That was also my fault.’⁵⁸ He and his colleagues were too late in seeing that Gorbachev was engaged in a process of democratization, moving power away from Communist Party officials, and replacing Marxism-Leninism by competitive elections as the source of political legitimacy. By embracing freedom of speech, Gorbachev at the same time substantially liberated publishing houses and the mass media and galvanized Soviet society, putting conservative Communists, in particular, on the defensive. The same point is made differently by Vorotnikov: ‘The train of pseudo-democracy had gathered such speed that to stop it was beyond our powers.’⁵⁹

Gorbachev was not, in the conventional sense, a ‘strong leader’. He was not overbearing and was willing both to make tactical retreats and to absorb criticism. In particular, he did not fit Russians’ traditional image of a strong leader. The head of Soviet space research, Roald Sagdeev, had opportunities to observe Gorbachev in small group discussions in the early years of perestroika.60 He noted that there were ‘only a few people who did not fall under the spell of Gorbachev’s personal charm and the magnetism of his verbal talent’. Admiring his zeal as ‘a genuine born missionary’, Sagdeev remarked, however, on Gorbachev’s tendency to overestimate what he could achieve with his formidable powers of persuasion. He had come to believe that ‘he could persuade anyone in the Soviet Union about anything’.⁶¹ Yet what was especially important about Gorbachev’s leadership, Sagdeev adds, was precisely that he attempted to persuade his interlocutors, albeit in ‘a most impassioned and eloquent way’. That, said Sagdeev, was ‘a sign of great progress in the political culture of my country’, for this approach ‘was in sharp variance to the tradition that bosses usually adopted’. Hitherto, they had ‘never tried to change people’s genuine opinions or beliefs, but simply issued an instruction and demanded that it be followed’.⁶²

That Gorbachev’s style of leadership was at odds with traditional Russian political culture, in the way Sagdeev suggested, attracted that eminent scientist, but it was not of universal appeal in Soviet society. Gorbachev’s popularity declined quite steeply between the spring of 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991 (although it was as late as May 1990, more than five years after he became general secretary, that Boris Yeltsin overtook him as the most popular politician in Russia).⁶³ Gorbachev’s aide and adviser on political reform, Georgiy Shakhnazarov, argued that his authority was undermined from the spring of 1989 when he presided over the new legislature, the Congress of People’s Deputies – and its inner body, the Supreme Soviet – which had come into being as a result of the first genuinely competitive national elections in the history of the USSR, held in March of that year.⁶⁴ Wishing to encourage the development of ‘a culture of parliamentarism’, Gorbachev spent whole days chairing the legislature, in effect becoming its speaker as well as the head of state and leader of the Communist Party. Well-wishers, says Shakhnazarov, told Gorbachev that by taking upon himself the role of speaker, he was contributing to the decline of his personal authority: ‘When millions of people, sitting in front of their television, witnessed some unknown young deputy engaging in argument with the head of state who patiently explained himself and even took in his stride patent insults’, they concluded that nothing good lay in store for the country. ‘In Russia,’ said Shakhnazarov, ‘from time immemorial people have admired and even loved severe rulers.’ It was difficult for them to accept mild and tactful people as leaders. How could they expect such a leader to provide order and security, in exchange for which they would willingly serve him?65 *

The person who was in charge of management of the Soviet economy for most of the perestroika period was Nikolay Ryzhkov, Chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1985 to 1990. At first a conditional ally of Gorbachev, he later became a stern critic. He deplored, in particular, Gorbachev’s pursuit of democratization at the expense of what he saw as more pressing economic problems. In fact, Ryzhkov’s own technocratic approach to the economy was a major reason why marketizing reform was not embraced earlier. In the present context, however, it is Ryzhkov’s observation of Gorbachev’s leadership style which matters most. By nature and character, Ryzhkov observed, Gorbachev was incapable of being a Machiavellian prince, even though it was an error to believe him to be indecisive.⁶⁶ But ‘long before our native parliamentary games began’, said Ryzhkov, Gorbachev ‘was a leader of a parliamentary type’, adding: ‘How he was thus formed in a party-bureaucratic system, God alone knows.’ Gorbachev, observed Ryzhkov, had become that kind of a leader in spite of the fact that from his earliest youth he had risen, rung-by-rung, up the traditional career ladder of Komsomol (Communist Youth League) and the Communist Party.⁶⁷ He had neither the temperament nor the desire to rule by making himself feared, as Machiavelli taught and Stalin imbibed.† That does not mean that Gorbachev lacked ambition to lead. On the contrary. In conversation with a close friend, he remarked: ‘From my earliest days I liked to be a leader among my peers – that was my nature. And this remained true when I joined the Komsomol . . . and later when I joined the party – it was a way of somehow realizing my potential.’68

Gorbachev was, as already noted, the most popular politician in the country for the first five out of the almost seven years in which he was Soviet leader. That owed a great deal to his openness, to removing the fear of war (which in a country that lost twenty-seven million people during the Second World War counted for a great deal), and to his presiding over the introduction of a host of new freedoms, including freedom of speech, religious freedom, and elections with choice. What was especially important – a weakness for some observers, a strength in the eyes of others – was the extent to which he was willing to change his mind when presented with new evidence or persuasive arguments. Much of the change was startlingly obvious. Other changes in Gorbachev’s outlook were disguised by some linguistic continuity. Some of his radical critics downplayed the extent of the evolution of Gorbachev’s thinking by seizing on his continuing attachment to ‘perestroika’ and to ‘socialism’. They missed the fundamental point that in the course of his first five years in the Kremlin what he meant by those terms changed utterly. ‘Perestroika’ had begun as a euphemism for reform of the Soviet system at a time when the very word ‘reform’ was taboo. It gradually came to stand for the root-and-branch transformation of the Soviet system which Gorbachev sought – a system of pluralist democracy founded on a rule of law, not the guaranteed rule of the Communist Party. As for ‘socialism’, Gorbachev moved from being a Communist reformer in 1985 to a socialist of a social democratic type by the end of that decade – a qualitative change.⁶⁹

By the spring of 1990 the Soviet Union no longer had a Communist system, but one characterized by political pluralism, a burgeoning civil society, a developing rule of law which was replacing arbitrariness, and rapidly advancing democratization. The political system, in short, had been transformed. For the first four years of perestroika, this was very much a ‘revolution from above’, one dependent on Gorbachev’s tranquillizing the hardliners, even as he radicalized the political agenda, thus avoiding the kind of internal coup that would have turned the clock backwards with a vengeance. There is a parallel here with Suárez. Gorbachev, too, managed to postpone the coup by the hardliners for so long – until August 1991 in his case – that by the time it came, there were institutions in place and enough people who had turned from obedient subjects into active citizens successfully to resist it. It was especially important that just two months earlier Boris Yeltsin had been elected President of Russia (as distinct from the Soviet Union) by universal suffrage in a competitive election and had, therefore, democratic legitimacy to defy the putschists at a time when Gorbachev and his family were under house arrest in their holiday home on the Crimean coast.70

By playing the principal role in the transformation of Soviet foreign policy, Gorbachev had also been the key figure in changing the international system. The Cold War had begun with the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe. It ended when the countries of East and Central Europe became, one by one, independent and non-Communist and Gorbachev calmly accepted that outcome. So far as the economic system is concerned, Gorbachev in the course of 1990–91 accepted the principle of a market economy, but one of a social democratic type. Cooperatives were legalized in 1988 and many of them rapidly became thinly disguised private enterprises. Yet, Gorbachev was much later in accepting the market as the main regulator of the economy than he was in accepting the need for democracy. He was also faced by powerful bureaucratic opposition to marketization. As a result, the economy was in limbo when the Soviet Union came to an end – no longer a command economy but not yet a market one.

Gorbachev has been regarded by some as a ‘weak’ leader, or even a failure, because the country over which he presided – the Soviet Union – ceased to exist at the end of 1991. The state could have been held together for many more years had he not embarked on the liberalization and democratization of the Soviet system and the transformation of Soviet foreign policy. The relevance of foreign policy was that when the most disaffected of Soviet nationalities – especially Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians – saw the peoples of Eastern Europe acquiring independent statehood in 1989, this raised their aspirations from seeking greater autonomy within a Soviet state to demanding full independence. Gorbachev consciously sought the dismantling of the Soviet system, but he sought to prevent the dissolution of the Soviet state. He was not, however, prepared to resort to the kind of sustained use of force that would have been required to crush independence movements once expectations were aroused. Before his policies had generated the belief that national independence for Soviet union republics might be possible, the status quo could have been maintained by the pre-existing system of rewards and severe punishments. Gorbachev tried to keep a union together – in its ultimate proposed form not even a renewed USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) but a USS, a Union of Sovereign States – through a process of negotiation, persuasion and compromise. That was already several steps too far for many party and state officials, military leaders and the KGB. Gorbachev was accused by them of being far too conciliatory to radicals and nationalists, and too reluctant to use the coercive power at his disposal to preserve the Soviet Union intact.*

He was later told by a leading Russian nationalist that he did not have the historic right to allow either the Warsaw Pact or the Soviet Union itself to be dissolved. If he had not been prepared to use force to prevent these things, he should have made way for a ‘more decisive patriot’.⁷¹ Yet, the fact that the Soviet Union was dissolved largely peacefully (in contrast with another multi-national Communist state, Yugoslavia) was also in some ways an achievement on Gorbachev’s part. For him it was very much an unintended consequence of systemic change, but he resisted repeated calls to declare a state of emergency, meaning martial law, and put a stop to the fissiparous processes. Most fundamentally, it was Gorbachev’s liberalization and democratization that made pursuit of independence movements possible. His ‘guilt’ in relation to the break-up of the Soviet state lay in replacing fear by freedoms and in an aversion to shedding blood.

Ideas were important for Gorbachev and for the demise of Communism, just as they had been in its rise. But especially in a highly authoritarian system, ideas – if they are to be politically effective – require institutional bearers. It was the combination of ideas that were radically new in the Soviet context, innovative leadership, and political power (of a general secretary with a different mindset from that of any of his predecessors) which was decisive in producing transformative change in the Soviet Union – and, as a consequence, metamorphosis in that part of Europe whose sovereignty had been strictly limited by an unreconstructed Soviet leadership over the previous four decades. Aleksandr Yakovlev, who by the 1990s had become a far from uncritical admirer of Gorbachev, said, nevertheless, in 1995: ‘I consider Gorbachev to be the greatest reformer of the century, the more so because he tried to do this in Russia where from time immemorial the fate of reformers has been unenviable.’72 It is certainly difficult to think of anyone in the second half of the twentieth century who had a larger (and generally beneficent) impact not only on his own multinational state but also internationally. By temperament a reformer rather than revolutionary, he, nevertheless, pursued (as he put it) ‘revolutionary change by evolutionary means’.

DENG XIAOPING

Deng Xiaoping was a transformational leader of a very different kind from Gorbachev. Deng was the key political figure in the transformation of the Chinese economic system, while Gorbachev transformed the Soviet political system. Of an older generation (he was born in 1904, Gorbachev in 1931), Deng was one of those who made the Chinese revolution, whereas Gorbachev emerged into a Communist order that had already been established. Both men were born in villages far from the capital, but Deng Xiaoping into an established landlord family, Gorbachev in a peasant household. Both Deng and Gorbachev placed a high value on education and on listening to well-informed specialists. Unlike Gorbachev (who unusually for a boy from a peasant family studied in Russia’s leading university), the Chinese leader did not have access to higher education. Deng Xiaoping spent the first half of the 1920s in France, where he had hoped to study as well as to work, but spent his time as a low-paid worker before moving to office tasks on a Communist journal, produced by young Chinese who had become radicalized during their time in France. Deng’s immediate superior there was Zhou Enlai, who was six years older – later to become, after Mao Zedong, the second most prominent member of the Communist government of China. Believing in January 1926 that he was about to be arrested and deported for his political propaganda work, Deng escaped to the Soviet Union. There he studied for a year at the Sun Yat-sen University, which had been established by the Comintern to train members both of the Chinese Communist Party and of the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party. The fact that activists of these two parties were brought together under one roof led Deng to have as one of his classmates Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Chiang Kai-shek. (During the years when Deng Xiaoping was the paramount leader of China and Chiang Ching-kuo his equivalent in Taiwan, Deng tried to meet with him, but Chiang refused.)73

Deng was one of those who took part in the famous Long March with Mao Zedong in the mid-1930s, as the Communists retreated, under attack from the Chinese Nationalists, to a new base in Shaanxi province in north-west China. Only one in ten of the 80,000 men and 2,000 women who embarked on the march reached their destination.⁷⁴ Although at times in later years he incurred Mao Zedong’s wrath, Deng early on earned Mao’s respect for his intelligence and organizational ability. Long before the Second World War Deng had, accordingly, established good personal relations with both Mao and Zhou. In the Chinese civil war, which ended with the Communists taking power in 1949, Deng was a political commissar and the effective leader of some half a million troops in one of the decisive campaigns of the conflict.⁷⁵ As early as 1956, Deng was appointed general secretary of the Communist Party. In most Communist countries, that would have been the top position, but in China Mao had the title of Chairman of the party and there was no questioning his supreme authority. Nevertheless, Deng was in charge of the day-to-day administration of the party and also a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the inner sanctum of the party leadership.⁷⁶

Mao combined ruthless power-seeking, vindictiveness towards those who thwarted him, and encouragement of the cult of his personality with romantic revolutionary ideas of surging ahead to some kind of full communism, in the process overtaking the Soviet Union, which had started earlier, in the pursuit of that wholly fanciful goal. Deng, although he never wavered in his belief in the absolute power of the Communist Party and of strict hierarchy and discipline within it (‘democratic centralism’), was much more of a pragmatist than Mao in his approach to governmental organization and economic modernization. Thus, it was not difficult for Mao Zedong, in his later years, to suspect that Deng had serious reservations about the wisdom of his ‘Great Leap Forward’ and the ‘Cultural Revolution’. Both of these Maoist initiatives were disasters. The Great Leap Forward – between 1958 and 1960 – saw the creation of enormous ‘people’s communes’ in the countryside with mass mobilization turning out to be a very poor substitute for the smaller agricultural cooperatives and for professional expertise. The calamitous loss of life caused by the Great Leap into communization of Chinese society is discussed more fully in Chapter 6.

Whatever his private thoughts at the time, Deng Xiaoping loyally and ruthlessly helped to implement on Mao’s behalf that policy which led to massive famine.⁷⁷ During the Cultural Revolution in the second half of the 1960s and first half of the 1970s, Deng’s distaste was more immediately discernible for what was in effect an anti-intellectual, anti-educational and anti-cultural mobilization of young radicals against almost all authoritative institutions, other than Mao’s inviolable supreme leadership. Deng himself became a target of abuse and was condemned as a ‘capitalist roader’. He was exiled to the countryside in 1969 and worked for a time as a fitter, a job that he had done some forty years earlier in a Renault factory in France. Deng’s elder son, trying to escape from Red Guard persecutors, was crippled for life when he jumped from a high dormitory window of Peking University.⁷⁸

Although Mao fully approved Deng’s removal from the political leadership and his exile to the countryside, he did not endorse demands for his expulsion from the Communist Party. Had that occurred, it would hardly have been possible for Deng to make a political comeback. Mao, however, retained a residual respect for Deng who had been his strongest supporter in factional struggles in the 1930s and had proved himself in war and peace. Deng and his family were allowed to return to Beijing in February 1973 and the following month Deng was restored to the post he had held on the eve of his expulsion, that of Vice Premier.79 Nevertheless, he was dismissed again in 1975. When Deng met the American Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in 1977, by which time he was back in high office, he recalled that they had last met just before his dismissal two years earlier. Deng joked that if he was well known internationally, it was ‘because I have been three times up and three times down’.⁸⁰ After Mao’s death in 1976, Deng, who was highly respected by a great many senior party officials (although he was bitterly opposed by the ‘Gang of Four’ who had led the assault in the Cultural Revolution), quite rapidly consolidated his position within the leadership.

Deng never held the top post of party Chairman, nor did he again become general secretary of the party. Yet, by the end of the 1970s, he was more powerful than Mao’s chosen successor as party Chairman, Hua Guofeng.⁸¹ This was a rare case in a Communist system where a leader’s individual authority became more important than his rank within the party. However, it was not a personal rule over the party, but governance through it, and it reflected Deng’s high standing with influential party officials. His dominance grew as he was able to bring an increasing number of allies into key positions. By February 1980, there was a majority of Deng supporters in the Politburo. By 1981 Deng himself held three posts – vice premier, vice chairman of the party, and, not least, Chairman of the Central Military Commission. Formally, he was not the country’s leader, but informally from the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s he unquestionably was. Deng did nothing to create a cult of his personality. In contrast with Mao, there was no question of students having to waste time memorizing quotations from his writings.⁸²

Having attained a position of ascendancy, although not of dictatorial power, Deng proceeded to pursue economic policies that were to change utterly the character of the Chinese economic system. Mao in 1957 had described Deng to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev as a ‘little man’ (Deng was barely five feet tall) who was ‘highly intelligent’ and had ‘a great future ahead of him’.⁸³ Mao was right, but he hardly imagined that Deng’s greatest legacy would be to destroy the essentials of Maoism. Deng did not encourage frontal attacks on Mao, for that would mean ‘discrediting our Party and state’.⁸⁴ Mao, after all, was China’s Lenin and Stalin rolled into one. He had led the Chinese party to victory in revolution and had then been the country’s ruler for the greater part of its existence as a Communist state. Deng Xiaoping’s policies, however, marked a fundamental break with Maoism. Deng began with agricultural reform, and in the early 1980s collectivization gave way to a return to peasant household farming, stimulating a dramatic improvement in agricultural productivity. Four special economic zones were set up in coastal areas and gradually opened up to inward investment from international companies. Deng’s approach was ‘consistent experimentation before widespread adoption of a particular policy’,85 although with the firm intent of introducing far-reaching change into the economy as a whole.

The transformation of the economic system since the late 1970s has enabled China to experience one of the most remarkable periods of economic growth in human history.⁸⁶ An economy of state, or public, ownership became a mixed economy with a substantial private sector. A command economy was gradually turned into an essentially market economy, albeit one in which there was a close relationship between private enterprise and state institutions. Over time, although Deng was not personally implicated in this, cosy relationships developed between high officials and business enterprises (including those with multiple offshoots abroad), with many of the party-state cadres acquiring immense wealth.⁸⁷ The growth of corruption and of extreme inequality were among the results of the systemic changes in the economy which Deng set in train. They are also an Achilles heel of the system, for in the absence of democratic accountability, popular anger about these outcomes is potentially dangerous for the regime.

Nevertheless, it is not only a new category of super-rich who have benefited from China becoming the workshop of the world and emerging as a key player in the international economic system. Economic growth rates of 10 per cent annually raised the standard of living of hundreds of millions of people. Urbanization has proceeded at a remarkable pace. Whereas 80 per cent of the Chinese population still lived in the countryside at the time of Mao’s death in 1976, by 2012 almost half the population of 1.3 billion people lived in cities.⁸⁸ A majority of the urban population are now factory workers, but there has also been a huge growth of a well-to-do middle class. In spite of the extremely uneven distribution of the rewards for fast economic growth, the fruits of Deng’s reforms have brought far more concrete benefits to the many than did Mao’s penurious egalitarianism.

Under Deng and his successors there has also been some political relaxation. His policies of encouraging young Chinese to study abroad and opening the country to foreign direct investment could not avoid bringing in a greater knowledge of the outside world, including of other political systems. The limits of the possible in political discussion have become broader than they were during most of the Mao years. Nevertheless, while embracing systemic change of the economy, Deng firmly resisted qualitative change of the political system. He remained committed to the monopoly of power of the Communist Party and was prepared to act ruthlessly against those who challenged it in the name of democracy. Thus, when hundreds of demonstrators (as well as some mere bystanders) were massacred in the vicinity of Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989, it had been Deng more than anyone else who was insistent on calling in the army and tanks to put an end to the protests at whatever cost in blood.89 The general secretary of the Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, who had earlier as premier implemented Deng’s economic reforms with skill and enthusiasm, opposed this introduction of martial law on the streets of Beijing. As a result, from that time until his death in 2005, he was kept under house arrest.⁹⁰

Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev remain the two great transformers of Communist systems, but their achievements were very different. How these are weighed against each other depends ultimately on the values of the assessor. Gorbachev played a decisive role in facilitating a host of personal freedoms (of speech and publication, assembly, religion, communications, civil association and travel) of several hundred million people – the population of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Deng Xiaoping played a no less significant part in raising the material living standards of even more millions without according them any of the above-mentioned freedoms other than that of foreign travel. China today is a hybrid, having a Communist political system and a non-Communist economic system. Although he preserved the former, Deng’s credentials as a transformational leader are well established by the decisive role he played in the transition to the latter. Deng’s legacy is, indeed, more visible in contemporary China than is Gorbachev’s in contemporary Russia. China today is, in many respects, what Deng Xiaoping made it. If it continues to combine fast economic growth with relative political stability, the China which Deng bequeathed may be more influential in the twenty-first century than was the China of Mao Zedong in the twentieth.

NELSON MANDELA

The end of the apartheid regime in South Africa has already been touched upon in the previous chapter in the context of viewing F.W. de Klerk as a redefining leader. As we saw, the rapid transition to majority rule in South Africa in the early 1990s owed much to the changes in the Soviet Union, especially the transformation of Soviet foreign policy and the end of the Cold War. For white supremacists to play up the spectre of Communism, which, they claimed, a transition to majority rule would mean for South Africa, had become more implausible than ever by the end of the 1980s. F.W. de Klerk acknowledged this, although he puts the point differently, writing that, without the changes initiated by Gorbachev, ‘our own transformation process in South Africa would have been much more difficult and might have been delayed by several years’.91

Nelson Mandela had long been the most internationally recognized opponent of the apartheid regime. The son of a minor chief, he was born in the Transkei territory of South Africa in 1918. Mandela was only nine years of age when his father died, and Jongintaba Dalindyebo, the paramount chief of the Themu people, to which Mandela belonged, took him into his own household and became his guardian. His style of leadership, which (as Mandela recollected it) was more collective than individual, had a significant impact on South Africa’s future president. From time to time chiefs and headmen, but also many others, from miles around would be summoned to a meeting at the Great Place where they would be welcomed by Jongintaba who would explain why he had called them together. ‘From that point on,’ says Mandela, ‘he would not utter another word until the meeting was nearing its end.’⁹² Mandela, who as a boy sat fascinated through these meetings, describes them thus:

Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard: chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and labourer. People spoke without interruption and the meetings lasted for many hours. The foundation of self-government was that all men were free to voice their opinions and were equal in their value as citizens. (Women, I am afraid, were deemed second-class citizens.)93

Apart from the reference to women’s subordination, Mandela may, in his old age, have had a somewhat gilded memory of the degree of democracy. But perceptions and selective memory of personal experience can influence later conduct more than an objective account by a dispassionate historian or anthropologist. Both Mandela’s experience of tribal culture and his anglicized education in South African schools and colleges contributed distinctive elements to his sense of identity. He notes that the regent (as the paramount chief was also known) was often criticized, sometimes vehemently, but he ‘simply listened’ and showed ‘no emotion at all’. The meetings continued until either a consensus was reached or all agreed to disagree, leaving a solution to the problem for a subsequent meeting. There was, Mandela says, no question of a minority being crushed by a majority. The regent would speak only at the end of the meeting, summing up what had been said. Mandela adds: ‘As a leader, I have always followed the principles I first saw demonstrated by the regent at the Great Place. I have always endeavoured to listen to what each and every person in a discussion had to say before venturing my own opinion.’ Often, he adds, what he himself subsequently said represented no more than ‘a consensus of what I heard in the discussion’.⁹⁴

Mandela was educated at mission schools, and at the major higher educational institution for Africans, the University College of Fort Hare (from which he was expelled for organizing a strike), and subsequently at the University of Witwatersrand. Distinguished by his height (he was almost as tall as de Gaulle), Mandela soon acquired other features that set him apart. He became one of the few black lawyers in South Africa, and he was politically active from the early 1940s. Along with his friends and long-term leading colleagues in the African National Congress (ANC), Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo, he founded the ANC Youth League in 1944. This was, in many respects, a radical offshoot of the moderate ANC. Initially, it espoused a racial nationalism, its members being suspicious of cooperation with whites, which included white Communists who had exercised some influence in the African National Congress. Mandela in 1949 called for their expulsion from the ANC. However, when the South African government introduced the Suppression of Communism Act in 1950, they drafted it sufficiently broadly that it could be used to outlaw any organization or individual opposed to the authorities.95 The shared threat encouraged Mandela to make common cause with the Communists in the struggle against white minority rule. Addressing a South African court in 1964, Mandela distinguished the goals of the Communist Party from those of the ANC. The Communists, he said, aimed to remove the capitalists and bring the working class to power, whereas the ANC sought to harmonize class interests. However, he added:

Theoretical differences amongst those fighting against oppression are a luxury we cannot afford at this stage. What is more, for many decades communists were the only political group in South Africa who were prepared to treat Africans as human beings and their equals; who were prepared to eat with us; talk with us, live with and work with us. Because of this, there are many Africans who, today, tend to equate freedom with communism.⁹⁶

Mandela made clear his position was different. He stressed his admiration for the British parliament, for the separation of powers in the United States, and for the independence of the judiciary in particular. Against the argument that the ANC had become an instrument of the Communist Party, he drew the comparison of American and British cooperation with the Soviet Union in the struggle against Nazi Germany during the Second World War, adding that only Hitler would have dared ‘to suggest that such cooperation turned Churchill or Roosevelt into communists or communist tools’.⁹⁷

Mandela and Tambo in 1952 opened one of the first legal practices to be run by black lawyers. Throughout that decade Mandela was frequently banned and sometimes arrested. At one point when there was a warrant for his arrest, he moved from house to house and evaded the police for long enough to become known as the ‘Black Pimpernel’. When sixty-nine African protesters were shot dead and many more wounded at Sharpeville, south of Johannesburg, on 21 March 1960, further outraging the black African majority as well as opinion abroad, the apartheid government declared a state of emergency and banned the African National Congress.⁹⁸ The ANC resolved to become an underground organization and formed a five-member coordinating committee, with Mandela chosen as one of its members. He was allotted the task of explaining these decisions in secret meetings with the rank and file.99 Mandela spent the evening of the Sharpeville massacre, discussing the ANC response to it, in the company of Walter Sisulu at the home of Joe Slovo, one of their white colleagues who was also a leading figure in the South African Communist Party. They decided to call for a nationwide burning of the passes that black Africans were legally obliged to carry. Mandela burned his pass on 28 March in front of a specially invited group of journalists. Two days later he was arrested and he spent the next five months in prison.¹⁰⁰

From the time the organization went underground, Mandela began to look like its future leader. The President of the ANC, Chief Albert Luthuli, was widely respected abroad – in 1961 he became the first African to receive the Nobel Peace Prize – but he was regarded as too moderate by the ANC’s more radical members, partly because of his willingness to cooperate with whites and partly because of his strong commitment to non-violence. Mandela was one of those who decided, following Sharpeville, that the continuing intransigence of the regime and its violence against the black majority would have to be met with armed struggle. He became the principal founder of an offshoot from the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). It adopted a policy of economic sabotage rather than of terrorism against persons on the grounds that this offered more hope of later reconciliation. Umkhonto, the joint creation of the ANC and the South African Communist Party, was headed by Mandela who appointed Slovo as his chief of staff.¹⁰¹ During 1962 Mandela, wanted by the South African police, slipped out of the country and spent half a year visiting different African leaders to garner support for the ANC and the new phase of the struggle. He also had military training in Ethiopia and Morocco.¹⁰² Before going back to South Africa, he visited London where he had meetings with Oliver Tambo, his old friend and leader of ANC members in exile, with Labour and Liberal Party leaders and with Christian fundraisers for the ANC.¹⁰³ Shortly after his return to South Africa, Mandela was arrested on 5 August 1962. He spent the next twenty-seven and a half years in prison, not being released until 11 February 1990, nine days after the South African government’s ban on the ANC was lifted.

Originally, Mandela was sentenced to five years of imprisonment. However, when evidence was uncovered of his leadership of Umkhonto, he was tried again in 1964 and narrowly escaped being sentenced to death, receiving instead a life imprisonment sentence. Mandela ended his four-hour address to the court on that occasion by saying:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.104

Many of Mandela’s years of imprisonment were spent in the extremely harsh conditions of Robben Island, although later he was transferred to more normal prisons, albeit isolated in separate sections. From 1985 the South African government began making contact with him, with President P.W. Botha offering him release from prison if he would renounce violence as a political strategy. Mandela, however, refused such terms and it cost him almost five more years in prison. He continued to show almost superhuman patience, having become increasingly conscious by the 1980s that one day he would be released. He was determined that it would be on his, and the ANC’s, terms.

Mandela’s resilience, together with the growing pressures on the South African government (including capital flight), meant that de Klerk and his National Party (NP), both before Mandela’s release in 1990 and in the period of negotiations which followed it, were able to get only a little of what they wanted – protection of minority rights, property rights and agreements on electoral rules. Essentially, however, ‘the NP leadership could only bargain on how it would give up power’.¹⁰⁵ Mandela was elected President of the ANC in 1991 at its first national conference in South Africa since its banning in 1960 and in 1993 he and de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Even as President of the ANC, and with the heroic status conferred upon him by his long imprisonment, during which he had become the major symbol of opposition to apartheid, Mandela did not always get his way in the ANC’s policy discussions. With South Africa’s first democratic election in the offing, he proposed, for example, that the voting age be lowered to fourteen, but he retreated in the face of strong opposition from members of the ANC’s National Executive Committee.106 During those years Mandela was reflecting on the nature of political leadership. He wrote in a notebook: ‘The leader’s first task is to create a vision. His second is to create a following to help him implement the vision and to manage the process through effective teams. The people being led know where they are going because the leader has communicated the vision and the followers have bought into the goal he had set as well as the process of getting there.’¹⁰⁷

There was a tension between Mandela’s belief in principle in collective leadership and his heroic status. Against the odds, he won the respect and even affection of the majority of the white South African population after he became the country’s first black president, democratically elected in 1994. He resented, however, the share of credit for the South African transition to democracy which had been accorded de Klerk.¹⁰⁸ After what he had been through, that was more than understandable. He chaired Cabinet meetings rather in the manner of the regent at the Great Place. According to one of its members, Mandela ‘listened impassively, taking in everything and then intervening’.¹⁰⁹ He sometimes took a different line from the ANC. They, for example, had been critical of the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which Mandela had set up. His own response was to say that ‘they have not done a perfect but a remarkable job and I approve of everything they did’.¹¹⁰ Mandela devolved the making of economic policy to others, especially his deputy Thabo Mbeki, but was himself active in foreign policy, taking delight ‘in personal diplomacy, telephoning heads of state in blithe disregard of international time zones’.¹¹¹

Mandela was devoted to the advancement of human rights, greater socio-economic equality, non-racialism and reconciliation among South Africa’s different ethnic groups. Some of these aims were realized in practice more than others. What was especially remarkable was the extent to which Mandela won over a great many Afrikaners, embracing cultural symbols that had in the past been regarded as deeply alien by black South Africans. An especially notable occasion was when he appeared at the World Cup Rugby finals wearing a Springbok jersey, winning the warm appreciation of the players and the wholehearted approval of the crowd. The task of building a harmonious multiracial society and new forms of national unity, especially in conditions of continuing great inequality, was never going to be other than arduous. It is hard, though, to imagine anyone making a better or more gracious start than Mandela, especially in the light of all that had gone before in the history of the country and in his own life. He himself played by the new rules of the democratic game and, on a continent which has seen too many ‘presidents for life’, he set a worthy example by standing down in 1999 after just one five-year term. He died, aged ninety-five, in December 2013. More than anyone else, Mandela had been instrumental in producing the transformation of the political system which turned South Africa from a country of white minority rule, with the great majority of the population disenfranchised, into a democracy. Apartheid would have ended sometime, but without Mandela it is very unlikely that the transition to democracy could have been so relatively peaceful and ultimately accepted by the white minority who had lost political power.

TRANSFORMATIONAL AND INSPIRATIONAL LEADERS

The criteria for counting someone as a transformational leader, set out at the beginning of this chapter, are very demanding. The five examples considered here are of people who held the highest executive posts in their respective countries (in Deng Xiaoping’s case, de facto rather than de jure), and it would be difficult to meet the criteria without doing so. It is extremely rare, however, for a head of government to make that degree of difference and play an indispensable part in introducing systemic change. A transformational leader is not the same as an inspirational leader, although these are not, of course, mutually exclusive categories. It would be hard to think of a more politically significant example of an inspirational leader than Mahatma Gandhi, though he never held governmental office. He not only played a crucial part in the Indian struggle for independence from Britain but his example of non-violent resistance was an inspiration to countless protest movements in different countries. A contemporary inspirational leader who might yet become also a transformational leader is Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the democratic opposition to the Burmese military regime. If the modest liberalization of that regime were to develop into systemic change, she would have played a huge part in bringing it about and would surely be regarded as the founding mother of Burmese democracy. In South Korea Kim Dae Jung was an inspiration for those opposed to the authoritarian rule that prevailed until well into the 1980s. Having been imprisoned and at one time sentenced to death, Kim did as much as anyone to give substance to the development of democracy in Korea and was eventually elected to the presidency in 1998. During that time he freed many political prisoners and initiated a ‘sunshine policy’ towards North Korea, aimed at unfreezing the relations between the two parts of the peninsula, with some limited but temporary success. Since the democratization process was already underway in South Korea before he came to power, Kim Dae Jung was not quite a transformational leader, but a courageous and important figure, nonetheless, in Asian politics. (He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000.)

There are other leaders who may be considered both charismatic and politically important but who did not play the decisive role in systemic change. One such person is Boris Yeltsin who was sometimes, and quite wrongly, portrayed as ‘the father of Russian democracy’. Yeltsin had broken with the Communist Party leadership in 1987 (although he remained a member of the party until 1990) and was without influence when the most important decisions – not least, to move to contested elections – were taken by Gorbachev and his inner circle in 1988. American President Bill Clinton said it preyed on Yeltsin’s mind that he ‘got so little credit for starting a democracy’.112 There was, however, a good reason for that: he did not initiate the process of democratization and was in no position to do so. What Yeltsin did do with great initial success was to move into political space which the Gorbachev reforms had created.

The nearest Yeltsin came to being a transformational leader was in the sphere of economic change. The idea of a market economy had already been accepted in the last years of the Soviet Union and the country had ceased to have anything that could be called a planned or command economy. However, a number of practical steps to creating a market were taken during Yeltsin’s years in power, starting with the very important freeing of most prices in January 1992. But what was built in the 1990s was less a market economy than ‘a bad case of predatory capitalism’, as the title of a book by the Swedish scholar Stefan Hedlund puts it.113 Russia’s natural resources were handed over at a fraction of their international market value in rigged auctions to people who were ‘appointed billionaires’. Popular discontent with this, and with the extremes of inequality and corruption which developed, undermined support in Russia for democracy. Yeltsin in the last years of the Soviet Union had acquired a large following. He had a commanding presence and an impulsive political style which fitted Russian notions of a ‘strong leader’. Long before the year 2000, when Yeltsin handed power over to Vladimir Putin, who promised him and his family immunity from prosecution, his early popularity had largely evaporated, and he had done the cause of democracy more harm than good.*¹¹⁴

A somewhat stronger candidate to be considered as a transformational leader is Lech Wałsa. In the 1970s he emerged as a leader of Polish shipyard workers, and in 1980–81 he was an inspirational and politically astute leader of Solidarity, the workers’ mass movement that rocked the foundations of the Polish party-state. There was a de facto political pluralism in Poland from the summer of 1980 until December 1981 and a vibrant civil society, of which Solidarity and the Catholic Church, overlapping bodies with many millions of members, were the most visible and authoritative components. Had the Polish regime not succeeded in introducing martial law in December 1981, arresting Wałsa and other leading figures in Solidarity, and reducing that movement to a shadow of its former self, Wałsa would, indeed, have been a transformational leader. However, the transition to democracy in Poland came not at the beginning of the 1980s – for a Communist order was re-established – but at the end of that decade, by which time external influences were decisively important. When Solidarity was legalized again – in 1989 – and went on to win a stunning victory in a national election, the Polish Communist leadership was responding to the changes in Moscow, the rising expectations of Polish society engendered by those changes, and the drawing to an end of the Cold War. Wałsa remained for a time a focus of identification for Poles – and in late 1990 was elected president (after which his popularity began to decline) – but even without him, Poland would very rapidly have become non-Communist and independent. All that was required for that to happen was for Poles to believe that if they cast aside their domestic Communist rulers, this would not lead to Soviet military intervention.*

The same point applies to Václav Havel and to Czechoslovakia’s ‘Velvet Revolution’ of late 1989. Havel was a leader of great moral authority, since he was a distinguished writer who had chosen a life of harassment and frequent imprisonment rather than accept the rules of the game laid down by the conservative Communist regime put in place after the crushing by Soviet tanks of the Prague Spring of 1968. The overwhelming majority of the population of Czechoslovakia, however, in the years between 1969 and 1988, had opted for a quiet life. Having the dubious honour of being the last European country to experience a Soviet invasion (to reimpose Communist orthodoxy and Moscow-approved leaders), they were extremely cautious about risking a repeat intervention. Before the invasion of August 1968, Communists were in a minority in Czechoslovakia, but a very much larger minority than they were in Poland. Following the invasion, there were far fewer Communist believers in either the Czech lands or Slovakia than before. People simply retreated into their private lives. There was no reason to doubt that Czechoslovakia would become non-Communist very quickly indeed if and when it became clear that to do so would not lead to foreign troops on the streets of Prague and Bratislava. It was fortunate for the population of the country that they had someone of the moral authority of Havel, even though he was not a natural politician, to call on when that time came. He was an impressive leader, both in the eloquent expression of his ideas and his willingness to take the consequences of disseminating them. He was not, however, a transformational leader, for in his absence Czechs and Slovaks would still have made a rapid transition to democracy, once they had observed Poles and Hungarians moving undisturbed in that direction and even East Germans getting away with mass demonstrations against their unpopular regime.

Transformational leaders play that role not only because of exceptional personal qualities, for a leader such as Havel had those, too, and there have been many inspirational leaders who have never held any kind of governmental office. Of the five transformational leaders examined in this chapter, the least exceptional in personal attributes was Suárez and the most remarkable, in terms of endurance of suffering and magnanimity in victory, was Mandela. In dignity and charisma, he is rivalled only by de Gaulle. The two who made the biggest differences to most lives were Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping. In the one case, this was through facilitating the democratization of half of Europe; in the other, it was by raising the living standards of even more millions of people through transforming the economy of the world’s most populous state. What they all had in common was that time, place and circumstance put them in a position where they had just a chance, which they seized, to make the decisive difference in changing the system.

* De Gaulle’s unwillingness to go along with his senior governmental colleagues and accept defeat was on a par with the spirit of the British prime minister. At that June 1940 meeting in France, which de Gaulle attended, Churchill (as reported by another participant, General Ismay) said: ‘If it is thought best for France in her agony that her Army should capitulate, let there be no hesitation on our account, because whatever you may do we shall fight on for ever and ever and ever.’ (Churchill, The Second World War: Volume II: Their Finest Hour, Cassell, London, 1949, p. 138.) De Gaulle’s most interesting observations on his relations with Churchill appear in the passage in his memoirs when he reflects upon the abrupt removal of the Prime Minister from 10 Downing Street as a result of the 1945 British general election. De Gaulle valued the fact that ‘this great politician had always been convinced that France was necessary to the free world; and this exceptional artist was certainly conscious of the dramatic character of my mission’. He admitted to envy of the fact that Churchill had the resources of a state, ‘a unanimous people’, an intact territory, ‘a tremendous Empire’ and ‘formidable armies’ at his disposal, whereas he, de Gaulle, had to answer alone for the destiny of a nation. ‘Yet,’ de Gaulle concludes, ‘different though the conditions were under which Churchill and De Gaulle had had to accomplish their tasks, fierce though their disputes had been, for more than five years they had nonetheless sailed side by side, guiding themselves by the same stars on the raging sea of history.’ Above all, de Gaulle acknowledged that without Churchill, ‘my efforts would have been futile from the start, and that by lending me a strong and willing hand when he did, Churchill had vitally aided the cause of France’. (De Gaulle, The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle, Carroll & Graf, New York, 1998, pp. 900–901.)

* The Spanish scholar, Sonia Alonso, has noted the growing support in Catalonia in recent years for secession, while stressing that this is not an argument against the kind of devolution of power that has taken place (in the years since democracy was restored in Spain) to territories where there is a strong sense of local national identity, since the experience of ‘systematically ignoring the grievances from the periphery’ and ‘imposing a centralized homogeneous state . . . guaranteed neither the territorial integrity of the state nor the survival of democracy’. (Sonia Alonso, Challenging the State: Devolution and the Battle for Partisan Credibility. A Comparison of Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012, pp. 247–248.)

* Democratization in Spain and Portugal was, however, a stimulus and encouragement to the spread of democracy in Latin America – what has been called the Third Wave of democratization. What happened in the late 1980s, and which began in the Soviet Union, was unconnected with the earlier change in southern Europe and Latin America. It constituted a Fourth Wave of democratization.

* A fundamental lurking problem was the nationalities issue. Among the non-Russian nations of the Soviet Union, and especially in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, there was a majority of the indigenous population who would have welcomed independent statehood, had this been an option. Prior to the perestroika years, however, citizens of those Baltic republics knew that to assert a demand for independence led to nowhere but the Gulag or, in earlier years, to execution.

† The Soviet leadership prior to Gorbachev’s coming to power reacted to the policies of the first term of the Reagan administration in the traditional manner. There was no dissent from the view of the veteran Soviet Minister of Defence, Dmitriy Ustinov, when he told a Politburo meeting in May 1983: ‘Everything that we are doing in relation to defence we should continue doing. All of the missiles that we’ve planned should be delivered . . .’ (Zasedanie Politbyuro TsK KPSS, 31 maya 1983 goda, Hoover Institution Archives, Fond 89, Reel 1.1003, Opis 42, File 53.) Even in 1986 the Chairman of the KGB at that time, Viktor Chebrikov, insisted at a Politburo meeting that ‘the Americans understand only strength’. (Zasedanie Politbyuro TsK KPSS 14 oktyabrya 1986 goda, Volkogonov Collection, R9744, National Security Archive, Washington, DC.)

* According to the law passed at that time, future elections of the President of the USSR were to be by the whole people. However, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist before any such election could take place. From March 1990 onwards, Gorbachev governed more through that state office than through the general secretaryship and proceeded to bypass the Politburo even on many major issues. Until 1990 the Soviet Union had remained a party-state, and the Politburo had the power to frustrate a general secretary and, if he overstepped the mark, to depose him. By the last two years of the Soviet Union’s existence, power had been transferred from party to state institutions. When I had a meeting with the deputy head of the Ideology department of the Central Committee in January 1991, he said that he thought he had just about enough power left to get coffee delivered to us in his room. It was only in the last two years of the Soviet Union’s existence, when power had essentially left the Central Committee building, that a foreign non-Communist scholar could gain access to that secular temple of the Communist Party.

* Russia was, and remains, a diverse country, and the attitudes Shakhnazarov attributed to the population were far from universal. Nevertheless, there were a great many Russians for whom the sight of a leader reacting calmly to public criticism signified weakness.

† A Russian scholar, Dmitriy Furman, observed that people who would be regarded as monsters in everyday life, among whom he numbers Ivan the Terrible and Peter I, have traditionally been regarded as ‘great’ in Russia, whereas the tsar who ended serfdom, Alexander II, was not ‘great’. Where, he asks, does Gorbachev fit into that system of evaluation? Nowhere at all is his answer: ‘In a system of evaluation in which the great are Ivan the Terrible, Peter and Stalin, Gorbachev not only is “not great”, he is the antithesis of greatness.’ (Dmitriy Furman, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 1 March 2011.) However, Furman goes on to contend that in a system of evaluation ‘normal for the contemporary developed world, Gorbachev is simply a great ruler and politician, perhaps the very greatest in Russian history’.

* It was in order to reverse the process of disintegration and, in the first instance, stop Gorbachev and at least five of the fifteen leaders of Soviet republics from signing a treaty to form a new, voluntary and loose federation in place of what had been the Soviet Union, that the August coup of 1991 (which collapsed within a few days) took place.

* As the Russian political analyst Lilia Shevtsova has observed: ‘It is paradoxical that the degeneration of Yeltsin’s leadership strengthened demands, not for independent institutions as a means of avoiding a repetition of that leadership, but for more powerful, authoritarian rule.’ (Lilia Shevtsova, Russia – Lost in Transition: The Yeltsin and Putin Legacies, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC, 2007, p. 32.)

* We now know from Soviet Politburo transcripts that an invasion of Poland was being seriously considered in August 1980, but that by 1981 the Soviet leadership had turned firmly against this. They were in increasing trouble in Afghanistan, Poland was the largest of the East European countries, and its people had a tradition of standing up to invaders. This was also early in the Reagan administration’s first term and an invasion of Poland would have raised East–West tensions dangerously. The Poles, however, were unaware in 1981 that the Soviet leadership, who were putting intense efforts into persuading the Polish Communist leader Wojciech Jaruzelski to institute his own domestic crackdown, had decided against invasion. By 1989, with Gorbachev having already publicly declared that every country, including ‘socialist’ countries, had the right to choose the kind of system their people wanted, Poles could be much more confident that by removing their own Communist leaders they would not be paving the way for foreign intervention, thus making a bad situation worse.