The West posed a problem for Communist systems simply by being there. The countries people in Eastern Europe knew most about – those of Western Europe and North America – offered an attractive alternative to Soviet-type rule on many grounds. In the post-Stalin era a majority of citizens in the European Communist states knew that ‘the West’ enjoyed both a higher material standard of living and far more freedom than they did. The most popular aspect of Communist systems with the population as a whole was the welfare state – free education, largely free health care, and full employment.1 However, it was not in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe that the best medical and other social services on the European continent were provided. They were far surpassed by the Scandinavian countries and such major Western European states as the Federal Republic of Germany, France and Great Britain. A well-informed minority of those living under Communist rule were aware of this – a higher proportion of the population in the central European countries than in the Soviet Union.
Another area where the Communist world lagged well behind the West – in this case, behind the United States in particular – was that of high technology. There was nothing remotely equivalent to Silicon Valley in any of the Communist states, including the Soviet Union, although, ironically, much of the assembling of the world’s electronic equipment now takes place in China. There were certain areas of technology where the Soviet Union, in particular, achieved a very high level, such as rocketry (whether for space exploration or military purposes), but in most spheres a substantial gap remained between Communist Europe and the West. As a result, the foreign intelligence services of Communist states put a lot of effort into stealing technological blueprints in the West. What they were unable to steal, they sometimes had to buy, although Western countries put restrictions on the export of high technology which could be put to military use. The Russian novelist, philosopher and political essayist Alexander Zinoviev, who had a love – hate relationship both with the Soviet Union and with the West, was an astute observer of the doublethink characteristic of the Brezhnev era. On the problem of the West, he wrote in his satirical novel, The Yawning Heights: ‘On top of all that, there’s abroad. If only it didn’t exist! Then we’d be home and dry. But they’re eternally dreaming up something new over there. And we have to compete with them. To show our superiority. No sooner have you pinched one little machine from them than it’s time to pinch the next one. By the time we’ve got it into production, the bastard’s obsolete!’2 It was only in that self-same ‘abroad’, of course, that such a novel could be published, as it was in 1976. In addition to technological lag, there was a chronic shortage of consumer goods in the unreformed Communist countries. That is not true of China today, with its reformed economy and ample availability of consumer durables, but it was true of the European Communist states whose systems collapsed at the end of the 1980s.
The Helsinki Process and Détente
The 1970s are known as a period of détente. The fundamentals of Communist systems did not change during that time; nor did the essence of the East – West relationship. Nevertheless, three successive American presidents – Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter – held summit talks with Leonid Brezhnev. A more fundamental, although controversial, part of détente was what became known as the Helsinki process. This turned out to be a more significant challenge from the West than the Soviet leadership had bargained for when they persuaded Western countries to embark on the road which led to Helsinki. The Helsinki process consisted both of the negotiations, which began in 1972 (and took place mainly in Geneva) and led to the signing of the Helsinki Agreement on Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1975, and the follow-up conferences that were held periodically to check that the signatories were complying with the Helsinki principles.
‘Détente’ meant different things to different people, but could be broadly defined as signifying a relaxation of tension and a reduction of the likelihood of war, which did not, however, preclude struggle in the realm of ideas. Indeed, Soviet leaders made clear that neither their favoured term, ‘peaceful co-existence’, nor détente (razryadka, which also means ‘unloading’, in its Russian version) meant ideological co-existence. The Soviet Union aimed to triumph ideologically by all means short of world war. Yet they were far from favouring a free contestation of ideas. They devoted vast resources to political censorship and to jamming foreign radio in order to keep unwelcome ideas out of Communist Europe. The Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, which resulted in the Helsinki agreement – known officially as the Final Act3–was very much a Soviet initiative, but one which backfired. All the European states apart from Albania participated in the talks leading up to the Final Act, and the United States and Canada also took part. The participation of the USA, in particular, was already a concession from the Soviet side and tacit rejection of the view that what went on in Europe was none of America’s business.
The United States did not, of course, wish to be excluded from discussions of any significance on security in Europe, and their European allies wanted them to be involved. Yet neither Richard Nixon (who had been succeeded as president by Gerald Ford before the signing of the Final Act) nor Henry Kissinger, in his roles as Nixon’s national security adviser and subsequently secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford), were in the least enthusiastic about the Helsinki process as such. Nixon told British officials that the US government ‘had never wanted the conference’, and Kissinger was impatient with the emphasis of European negotiators on human rights. He tried to persuade his NATO allies to adopt a more ‘realistic’ stance, which would have meant acceding more readily to the Soviet view.4 It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Kissinger was uncomfortable with multilateral discussions. He preferred important negotiations with the Soviet Union to be handled in bilateral relations with the United States, preferably by himself. In the several years leading up to the Helsinki Agreement, however, European negotiators played a crucial role. Especially important was the cohesion and determination shown by ‘the Nine’, the members at that time of the European Economic Community (EEC), which later, with expanded membership, was to become the European Union.
What the Soviet Union sought from the conference was an acknowledgement both by the United States and by the countries of Western Europe of the immutability of the borders established at the end of World War Two. They had some success in portraying the results of the conference in precisely those terms, but in fact, Western negotiators were able to insist on important qualifications on this issue. The borders were declared to be ‘inviolable’ rather than ‘immutable’, and this meant that they could be changed consensually, although not by armed force. That was explicitly ruled out. The agreement, however, said plainly that ‘frontiers can be changed, in accordance with international law, by peaceful means and by agreement’.5 Among those who insisted on this were the West German negotiators, and indeed, this Helsinki precept was one of the foundations for the eventual reunification of Germany. In principle, the wording of the Final Act also appeared to rule out the kind of military intervention the Soviet Union had undertaken in Czechoslovakia, stating that ‘the participating states…will refrain from any manifestation of force for the purpose of inducing another participating State to renounce the full exercise of its sovereign rights’.6
The discussions leading up to the Final Act, and the document eventually agreed, were divided into four parts, which became known during the negotiations as Baskets One, Two, Three and Four. Basket One contained security and confidence-building measures and included useful provisions designed to make more difficult surprise attack or war by accident. It also included the strongest commitment to human rights to be found in any part of the document. The participating states were signing up to ‘respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion’.7 Basket Two included economic co-operation, science and technology. Basket Three, the one which caused greatest trouble to the Soviet side both during the negotiations and later, spelled out in greater detail what was entailed by the human rights principle contained already in Basket One. This included ‘freer and wider dissemination of information of all kinds’. Basket Four contained what was, in a sense, the first step in implementing Basket Three, since it obliged the signatories to publish and disseminate widely the text of the agreement and to attend follow-up meetings.8
The Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, was strongly committed to securing what became the Helsinki agreement, as was the foreign minister, Andrey Gromyko. Having initiated the process, they then staked Soviet prestige on getting what they thought would be a higher level of recognition of the Communist states which had existed since the second half of the 1940s. To achieve this, they had to authorize concessions, especially on the human rights aspect of Basket One and on much of Basket Three, which caused apprehension to some of their colleagues. Indeed, they worried Gromyko himself, who told the leader of the Soviet negotiating team, Anatoly Kovalev, that ‘it would be good to cut out the bottom from this Third Basket’.9 On both the Soviet and Western sides there were internal differences in the lead-up to the signing of the Final Act. However, those in the Soviet Union were kept under wraps, while the disagreements among Western politicians and commentators were very much in the open. Now much more is known about the doubts and dissension on the Soviet side. Yury Andropov, as KGB chairman, could see that the third part of the agreement was likely to bring a basket of troubles to that institution. He observed: ‘The principle of inviolability of borders – this is of course good, very good. But I am concerned about something else: the borders will be inviolable in a military sense, but in all other respects, as a result of the expansion of contacts, of the flow of information, they will became transparent…So far the game is being played on one side of the field – the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is gaining the points, and the KGB is losing them.’10 Suslov, behind the scenes, also viewed the agreement with suspicion, but since Brezhnev hailed it as a triumph, and since the Soviet mass media emphasized only those parts of the accords which the leadership wished to see stressed (although they fulfilled their obligation to publish the actual text in full), no one was in a position to dissent publicly.11
Many in the West did not observe what Andropov foresaw, and opposed the Helsinki Agreement on the grounds that it was a sell-out to the Soviet Union. Among conservative politicians, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were among the most prominent of those opposed to Helsinki. Reagan, still governor of California but a presidential aspirant, declared that ‘all Americans should be against it’. Mrs Thatcher in 1990 conceded that she had been mistaken in her scepticism about the Helsinki accords, having underestimated their long-term effects. In fact, she said, they had been ‘a tremendous encouragement and inspiration to dissident groups’, and ‘many people in East and Central Europe today can trace their new freedom to the Helsinki Agreements’.12 At the time, many Western critics – politicians, journalists and academics – took at face value the Soviet claim that the accords ratified the division of Europe. Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal criticized President Gerald Ford for signing the agreement. In a more balanced assessment, the British ambassador to Moscow at the time of the signing of the Helsinki Final Act, Sir Terence Garvey, discussed the pros and cons of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) in a lengthy dispatch to the foreign secretary, James Callaghan. He saw more pluses than minuses, and advocated moving ‘quite soon on points where current Soviet practice is clearly incompatible with the Final Act’. Garvey summed up:
The CSCE has given the Russians something that they had long wanted very much, perhaps even come to over-value. But the Western Governments have gained also – in limiting and qualifying their endorsement of a situation they do not intend to change, in forcing the Russians to do battle on ground hitherto taboo and, not least, in cohesion and the practice of co-operation…And in the longer perspective, the practice of détente may foster developments in Soviet policies which ultimately make the USSR a less intractable, even a more reliable, partner.13
In fact, dissident groups both within the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe were soon citing the Helsinki Final Act to legitimize their activities. The groups which set themselves up to monitor their own countries’ adherence to the CSCE principles posed particular problems for the authorities. The secret police could, and did, harass such groups. It was, however, more than usually embarrassing for state signatories to the Helsinki accords to arrest and imprison their own citizens when they were exercising their moral right to try to ensure that governments abided by the norms they had signed up to. In the short run, though, it seemed that, so far as the Soviet Union was concerned, the critics of the Helsinki Agreement were right. Embarrassing it may have been, but Yury Orlov, a physics professor who became the leader of what was called the Public Group to Assist the Implementation of the Helsinki Accord in the USSR, was arrested in 1977 and not released from prison camp until 1986. Yet Orlov had seen the potential of the Helsinki Final Act. Meeting his fellow dissident Ludmilla Alexeyeva in 1976, he had said: ‘Lyuda, don’t you see this is the first international document in which the issue of human rights is discussed as a component of international peace?’ Orlov said that the document provided an opportunity ‘to involve other countries in monitoring the Soviet performance on human rights’. Alexeyeva agreed, adding in her memoirs: ‘Our message wasn’t that difficult to understand, but the West had focused its attention on the narrow issue of Jewish emigration. The Soviet democratic movement had not been able to generate such support.’14
Now, though, heads of governments and foreign ministers, visiting the Soviet Union and the Eastern European states, had the authority of the Helsinki Final Act to bring up human rights issues. These could no longer be so easily dismissed by their hosts as internal matters on which they had no need to respond.15 While Helsinki was very far from being the only factor that contributed to the striking enhancement of civil liberties in the Soviet Union after 1985, the desire of Gorbachev and of Gromyko’s successor as foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, not to be put on the defensive on the CSCE accords was certainly one of them. Dramatic change in the treatment of dissidents, a widening of the opportunities for foreign travel, and a freer flow of information and ideas began to emerge in 1986. By 1988 they had become qualitatively different from the practices of the Brezhnev era.
Eurocommunism
Western challenges to the Soviet Union and to orthodox Communism came in many different forms. One such challenge was the movement that became known as ‘Eurocommunism’. In the West itself, it was greeted with even more scepticism than the Helsinki process. There was legitimate debate on how sincere was this attempt on the part of a significant number of Western Communists to achieve a reconciliation between the democratic values of their own societies and the ideology they espoused. There should have been no doubt, however, about its deviation in important respects from Soviet orthodoxy. If it was not taken seriously by Western governments, for whom it posed little threat, it was taken seriously enough by the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, for whom it did appear to be at least potentially dangerous. This change in the thinking and behaviour of important West European Communist parties – most notably the Italian and Spanish parties and, to a much lesser extent, the French – did not prevent their subsequent drastic decline. The development did, though, challenge Soviet assumptions of ideological hegemony. Soviet leaders were especially concerned that it was the Communist parties which at the time had some serious popular support in their own countries (although they had been happy to accept Soviet financial aid) that were no longer willing to see Moscow as the fount of all political wisdom. Also worrying, not just for the CPSU but for a number of ruling Communist parties, was the fact that some of their members were attracted by the ideas of their West European comrades.
Among the more important stimuli to Eurocommunism was the Prague Spring, which attracted many members of Western European parties, including the major Italian one and the underground Spanish party (Spain at that time being still under the authoritarian rule of General Franco). The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was a blow to these Communists, for whom the Czech reformers seemed to have much to offer. It led them within a few years to take a more critical look at their Soviet mentors. The atmosphere of détente, including the Helsinki process, was also a factor stimulating the development of more independent thinking among West European Communists in the early and mid-1970s.16 In the coldest years of the Cold War they offered unconditional support to the Soviet Union.
The term ‘Eurocommunism’ was coined by a Yugoslav journalist, Frani Barbieri, in an article published on 26 June 1975. There had already been some signs of fresh thinking in several of the European Communist parties, and Barbieri wrote his piece a fortnight before the meeting which later was seen as the official launch of the movement – a gathering in Tuscany at which the leaders of the Italian and Spanish parties, Enrico Berlinguer and Santiago Carrillo, both spoke.17 A joint declaration by these two parties was published on 12 July 1975. It referred to the recent fall of the Portuguese and Greek dictatorships and the forthcoming change in Spain, and declared that in the ‘new conditions created by the positive progress of international détente’, it was time to find ‘new ways of bringing about closer co-operation among all democratic forces for a policy of democratic and socialist renewal of society, and for a positive outcome of the crisis now affecting European capitalist countries’. Emphasizing the importance of ‘reflection on the specific historical conditions of each country in the West European context’, they claimed that ‘in our countries socialism can only be strengthened by the development and full operation of democracy’. In a passage particularly irksome for their Soviet official readers, they observed that ‘there must be no official state ideology’, but there must be competing political parties, independent trade unions, religious and other freedoms. Setting themselves somewhat apart from the international Communist movement, orchestrated from Moscow, they concluded with the declaration: ‘The Italian and Spanish communist parties, which work out their internal and international policies in complete autonomy and independence, are fully aware of their grave national and European responsibilities. From these common viewpoints they will in future develop their fraternal relations sealed by a broad and solid friendship.’18
Neither of these parties had embraced social democracy. They remained in the 1970s unremittingly hostile to capitalism, and in their internal organization they preserved the strict discipline and limited rights of debate characteristic of democratic centralism. Yet Berlinguer and Carrillo were making a break with the past, not least in questioning Soviet orthodoxy and elements of Soviet history which had never been disowned by Stalin’s heirs. Thus, Carrillo, in a book entitled ‘Eurocommunism’ and the State (for the Spanish and Italian parties soon embraced the term ‘Eurocommunism’, even though they had not invented it), was highly critical of the fact that Moscow had been so slow in embracing a popular front against fascism. He cited the case of the leader of the British Communist Party, Harry Pollitt, who had considered that an anti-fascist war began the day Nazi Germany attacked Poland – and was sacked from his post as general secretary for this deviation from the Soviet line. Later, when the Soviet Union was attacked by Germany, Pollitt was reinstated. Carrillo also criticized the lies that had been told about Trotsky – as an ‘agent of fascism’, for example – and said it was ‘high time that Trotsky’s role in the Revolution was presented in an objective way’.19 There were strict limits to Carrillo’s deviation. He had become neither a Trotskyist nor a social democrat, but he was particularly outspoken on the matter of Czechoslovakia. In words which were to bring down the wrath of Moscow on his head, he wrote:
For us, for the Communist Party of Spain, the culminating point in winning our independence was the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The preparations for that operation had been carried out with methods similar to those employed in the famous trials of 1936, which had been exposed at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or similar to those used in the denunciation of Yugoslavia in 1946…stories were concocted that were light-years away from the truth. This was more than we could be expected to swallow. Czechoslovakia was the straw which broke the camel’s back and led our parties to say: ‘No.’ That kind of ‘internationalism’ had come to an end as far as we were concerned…True internationalism must be something else.20
The Spanish Communist Party (PCE) even went so far as to drop Leninism from its official ideology, although the party programme continued to describe the PCE as ‘Marxist’ and ‘revolutionary’ as well as ‘democratic’.21 Carrillo’s most heinous sin of all in the eyes of the Soviet leadership was, as Robert Legvold noted at the time, his justification of ‘an independent West European model of socialism as the most powerful means for “democratizing” the regimes in Eastern Europe’.22 Berlinguer, although serious in his deviation from Soviet ideology, was more tactful in his dealings with Moscow, while the French Communist Party (PCF) was the least convincing in its Eurocommunism of these three significant West European Communist parties.23 Its leader, Georges Marchais, made what was more of a tactical than a strategic shift, although he too joined Berlinguer in a joint declaration with the PCI, published in November 1975.24
Up until the perestroika period, the Soviet leadership and their ideologists made a clear distinction (not always picked up in the West) between what they called ‘different roads to socialism’ (which at most times they were ready to embrace) and the idea of ‘different socialisms’, which they denounced as a heresy. Thus, when the Prague Spring reformers spoke of a ‘pluralistic socialism’ or ‘socialism with a human face’, they were told firmly that there is only one socialism. Exactly the same response from Moscow greeted Santiago Carrillo. In a highly critical review of his ‘Eurocommunism’ and the State, the Soviet weekly, New Times, emphasized that the very concept of ‘Eurocommunism’ was erroneous because it appeared to refer not to specific features of the strategy of particular Communist parties but to ‘some specific brand of communism’. However, the review went on: ‘there is only one communism – if we speak of true, scientific communism – namely, that whose foundations were laid by Marx, Engels and Lenin, and whose principles are adhered to by the present-day communist movement.’25
In Eastern Europe, it was the leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia which felt most threatened by Eurocommunism. They owed their positions to the Soviet invasion which Berlinguer and Carrillo had deplored. Accordingly, they used the most extreme language in condemning Eurocommunism. The hard-line Slovak Communist, Vasil Bilak, declared that its content was ‘tantamount to treason’. The Bulgarian party leader, Todor Zhivkov, was quick to follow Moscow’s lead. He declared that the concept of Eurocommunism reflected the desire of reactionaries to raise a wall between the fraternal parties of the socialist community and those of Western Europe.26 The East Germans, perhaps surprisingly, were more restrained in their criticism and engaged in dialogue with the Italian Communists, while the Hungarian and Polish parties were reluctant to be drawn into the hostilities. The Romanian party leadership, while being careful not to associate themselves with anything resembling the pluralist democracy to which the Eurocommunist parties now paid tribute, were happy to select from the Western European parties’ statements those elements which seemed to shore up their own relative autonomy from Moscow. The Yugoslavs were still more openly sympathetic to Eurocommunism, seeing it as support for their policy of non-alignment.27
The impact of Eurocommunism on oppositionists and dissidents in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was less than on the party intelligentsia. For many of the opposition, not least in Poland, any kind of Communism was anathema, no matter what prefix was attached to it. However, for those in the Soviet Union whom Roy Medvedev termed the ‘party democrats’ (although he himself had been expelled from the CPSU in 1969), this critique from West European Communists reinforced their own doubts about such actions as the invasion of Czechoslovakia and added to their concern about many aspects of the Soviet system which they had also imposed on Eastern Europe.28
Travel to the West
During the Brezhnev years in the Soviet Union there was a Jewish joke about a rabbi in a provincial Ukrainian town who was asked what he would do if the borders round the country were one day opened. ‘I would climb the tallest tree,’ he replied. ‘But why?’ he was asked. ‘Very simple,’ came the response. ‘So I wouldn’t be swept away by the crowds rushing to leave.’29 As noted in Chapter 20, a great many Soviet Jews, in particular, did leave in the 1970s and 1980s, but of greater importance for long-term change in the Soviet Union and east-central Europe was the travel to the West of citizens from the European Communist states who then returned to their own countries. Only a minority were allowed to sample the wares of capitalism. As a percentage of their populations, there were more Poles and Hungarians than Russians or Romanians. For many of them, however, this travel exacerbated their dissatisfaction with what was on offer in their homelands and increased their desire for domestic change.
Those who travelled to the West from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had many incentives, in addition to patriotism, for going back to their native countries. Almost invariably, they had been obliged to leave close members of their families, including their spouses, at home. Since the Soviet Union had the last word on the scope and limits of change within most of Communist Europe (Yugoslavia, Albania and, to a lesser extent, Romania were the exceptions), the impact of the West on Soviet travellers was of particular significance. The authorities in the USSR quite consciously divided citizens into those considered ‘politically mature’ enough to be allowed to venture westwards and those who could not be sufficiently relied upon. The great majority of the population were not licensed to visit the West. Those who were on the list of vyezdnye (people permitted to travel abroad) belonged also to the category of solidnye lyudi – reliable people by Soviet criteria. This meant that most of them would be careful with whom they spoke favourably of what they had seen abroad. However, to the extent that they viewed what they had seen in the West positively, their social status and political standing made that the more potentially consequential. Those allowed to travel as individuals, rather than as part of carefully shepherded and supervised tourist groups, in many cases belonged to the party intelligentsia. They naturally included also some senior party and state officials.
Hundreds of influential travellers to the West, whether from research institutes or even the heart of the party apparatus, plainly preferred the evidence of their own eyes to Soviet stereotypes. No such traveller was more important than Mikhail Gorbachev, who has made clear that his visits to Western Europe in the 1970s were, indeed, eye-openers for him.30 He has acknowledged that it was this foreign travel which first made him realize the gulf between Soviet propaganda about the West and the reality. Seeing how civil society and West European political systems worked led to a questioning of his ‘a priori faith in the advantages of socialist over bourgeois democracy’. Confronted with the reality of higher living standards in Western Europe, he asked himself the question, ‘Why do we live worse than in other developed countries?’31 Most of these visits by Gorbachev were as a member of a small and informal group of tourists or in a Communist Party delegation. They included short stays in Italy (as early as 1971, and again to that country later in the decade), Belgium, France, the Netherlands and West Germany.
When he was not yet general secretary but already one of the most important members of the Politburo, Gorbachev made three foreign visits in the first half of the 1980s which had an especially great impact on him. The first was in 1983 to Canada, where he saw at first hand how far ahead of Russian agriculture was Canadian farming. He also had his earliest opportunity to engage in East – West dialogue in conversations with Canadian officials and politicians. When he met with the Canadian prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, their talks ranged well beyond agriculture to include major foreign policy issues. When he was preparing for this trip, Gorbachev told the Director of the Institute of the United States and Canada in Moscow, Georgy Arbatov, that he would like to see him. As Arbatov later recalled, he prepared a lot of material about Canadian agriculture, only to be told by Gorbachev that he knew all about that. What he wanted was Arbatov’s evaluation of Canadian politics and foreign policy and his assessment of Soviet – American relations and the international climate.32 Having prepared himself well, Gorbachev was able to display flexibility in his discussions with the Canadian prime minister. Later in the same year, Trudeau told Margaret Thatcher that Gorbachev had ‘been prepared to argue and make at least verbal concessions’.33 During his Canadian visit, Gorbachev formed a political friendship with the Soviet ambassador to Ottawa, Alexander Yakovlev. As noted in Chapter 20, he was able to facilitate Yakovlev’s desire to return to Moscow after ten years in Canada. Following Gorbachev’s intercession with General Secretary Andropov, Yakovlev became director of the major think-tank, IMEMO. For Yakovlev himself, his years in Canada were of exceptional importance. He viewed the Soviet political and economic system much more critically at the end of his decade in a free and prosperous Western country than he had at the beginning of his exile from the Soviet corridors of power.
The second foreign visit by Gorbachev which had a big impact on him was to Italy in June 1984 for the funeral of the Italian Communist leader Enrico Berlinguer. Not only was Berlinguer the most senior of the Eurocommunists, but he had headed a party with genuine mass support. Gorbachev was impressed by the hundreds of thousands of people who spontaneously came out on to the streets of Rome, and by the fact that the farewell to Berlinguer became a national occasion. He was struck particularly by the attendance of the Italian president, Alessandro Pertini, at the funeral of a Communist leader, and by Pertini’s bowing his head before the coffin of the leader of such an opposition party. This, Gorbachev wrote later, was an example of ‘a different way of thinking and a different political culture’.34 It could not have deviated more from Soviet ideology and practice, and it was a culture which clearly appealed to him.
The third especially important foreign visit made by Gorbachev in the period before he became Soviet leader was to Great Britain in December 1984. This followed from a decision of Margaret Thatcher, at the start of her second term as British prime minister in 1983, to devote more of her time to foreign policy. East – West relations during the first Reagan administration were particularly tense, and ministers and officials in the British Foreign Office were concerned about the lack of dialogue between Britain (as well as the United States) and the Soviet Union. In the early 1980s, however, they were unable to persuade the prime minister that this was a problem. A decision, which was described by the prime minister’s private secretary as ‘a change of policy’,35 arose out of a two-day seminar at the prime minister’s country residence, Chequers, in September 1983. The meeting brought together ministers and academic specialists on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Both the Foreign Office and the academics advocated increased contact at all levels with the countries of Communist Europe.36 The foreign policy adviser to the prime minister from 1984 to 1992, Sir Percy Craddock, later noted that this seminar ‘inaugurated a more open approach to Eastern Europe and led eventually to the first meeting with Gorbachev’.37 The Foreign Office suggested that the prime minister might consider making a visit to Hungary. Mrs Thatcher did so in early February 1984, her first visit to a Warsaw Pact country since her arrival in 10 Downing Street. They also proposed that the foreign secretary should attempt to have meetings with all his East European counterparts. In the course of 1985 alone, the holder of that office, Sir Geoffrey Howe, visited Bulgaria, Romania, the GDR, Czechoslovakia and Poland.38
The prime minister decreed that the change of policy towards more active engagement with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe would not be publicly announced.39 But it was not by chance that Gorbachev came to Britain three months before he was chosen by the Politburo and Central Committee of the CPSU to become general secretary. It was a result of a conscious decision by the prime minister and the Foreign Office that the lack of high-level contact with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was unhelpful and conducive to dangerous misunderstanding.40 The meeting itself was important for both sides. Although Gorbachev and Thatcher disagreed on many issues in their meeting at Chequers, which far exceeded the time originally allotted to it, it engendered mutual respect. Gorbachev also had a fruitful meeting with British parliamentarians, and in his speech to them he used terms which were to gain in significance once he had become Soviet leader, such as the need for ‘mutual security’, ‘new political thinking’ and Europe as ‘our common home’.41 At the end of Gorbachev’s visit to Britain, Margaret Thatcher famously announced: ‘I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together.’42
The importance of the visit lay not only in Gorbachev’s exposure to leading Western politicians but in the good impression he made on his hosts. That was the more significant because of the warmth of the Thatcher – Reagan relationship and the fact that President Reagan trusted the British prime minister’s judgement. Thus, when Mrs Thatcher flew to the United States within days of her meeting with Gorbachev and conveyed to Reagan her positive assessment of him, this had some resonance. She told Reagan, his Secretary of State George Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Vice-President George H.W. Bush that Gorbachev was ‘much less constrained’ than the Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko. He was ‘more charming, open to discussion and debate, and did not stick to prepared notes’.43 When the British prime minister next met Gorbachev, it was in his capacity as the new leader of the Soviet Union. She was one of many world leaders in Moscow for Chernenko’s funeral. In a meeting with Gorbachev, scheduled to last fifteen minutes but which lasted for almost an hour, she told him that his visit to London had been ‘one of the most successful ever’.44 The foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, who was present at the conversation, reported that the bonhomie was not quite universally appreciated back home. On reading the note of the meeting, one ‘hard-boiled Foreign Office official’ said he was ‘bothered’ that ‘the PM seems to go uncharacteristically weak at the knees when she talks to the personable Mr Gorbachev’. In fact, Howe adds, although the two leaders ‘relished each other’s company’, they never completely ‘lowered their guard’.45
Foreign travel did not automatically broaden the minds of Soviet officials. Few were as well travelled as Andrey Gromyko but he remained set in his ways. Many Soviet politicians and bureaucrats found rationalizations for the extent to which the USSR lagged far behind its Western rivals. Others, for the sake of their careers, engaged in prolonged self-censorship. But the more East – West travel was allowed to take place, the greater was the erosion of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Ideas of liberty and democracy were under no such threat. Communist doctrine, including that purveyed in the official newspaper of each country’s Communist Party, was, in any event, legally available in democracies. Western governments had, or should have had, no reason for concern about an increase in the modest numbers of people allowed to travel to their countries from the Soviet and East European states. Pressure groups and politicians who tried to keep out Soviet visitors were slowing, rather than quickening, the process of change in the Communist world. Thus, when the Daughters of the American Revolution, back in 1959, passed a resolution opposing cultural exchanges with Communist countries because the ‘underlying purpose [is] the softening of Americans toward communism’,46 they were not only underestimating their fellow citizens. They were displaying also a lack of understanding (shared by some Western intelligence agencies) of which side in these exchanges had more to lose from the contacts by way of impact on their values and beliefs.
It was also the Communist side which suffered the embarrassment of defections. Defections to the Soviet Union of writers, artists or dancers were virtually unheard of. Those who did defect in that direction were mainly Westerners who had worked for the KGB, whether out of ideological belief or for mercenary reasons. They included some of the most famous British spies, who had, indeed, served the Soviet Union out of Communist conviction – Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and, later, George Blake. There was much more movement in the opposite direction. To take ballet dancers alone, the three most outstanding of those who defected, Rudolf Nureyev (in 1961), Natalia Makarova (in 1970) and Mikhail Baryshnikov (in 1974), came primarily in search of greater artistic freedom. They also resented the kind of surveillance to which they were subjected by their KGB minders when travelling abroad. During the perestroika era, there was a radical change of attitude in Moscow both to those artists who had, on their own initiative, defected and to those who had been forced into exile by the Soviet authorities. Thus, Baryshnikov and Makarova (who, like Nureyev, were graduates of the Leningrad Ballet School and had been members of Leningrad’s Kirov Ballet) were invited in 1987 to dance at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.
Foreign Radio
Seeing ‘the West’ was more important than hearing about it. However, while only thousands, during the Cold War years, were able to travel from Communist states to Western countries and return home again, millions were able to listen to foreign radio. The strict censorship which meant that the domestic mass media provided an almost exclusive diet of good news from the Communist homeland and bad news from the capitalist world was breached mainly by broadcasts from the west. The most popular were those given by fellow nationals in the languages of the countries concerned. Thus, the American taxpayer funded Radio Liberty (RL), which broadcast to the Soviet Union, and Radio Free Europe (RFE), which broadcast in the languages of all the East European states. Both radio stations were situated in Munich. West Germany itself was a major broadcaster. A particularly influential one was the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which operated in all the major languages of the Communist world. All these transmissions were, however, subjected to severe jamming. In the Soviet Union it was almost impossible to hear them in the cities above the screeching interference that had been superimposed on the voices from abroad. In the countryside it was often easier. Thus, many of the intellectually and politically curious could pick up the broadcasts at their dachas even when the jamming defeated them in the city.
People did not necessarily accept, still less agree with, everything they heard, but in central Europe in particular these broadcasts from fellow nationals abroad were trusted more than the domestic mass media, especially on the major political issues of the day. Jamming was occasionally relaxed. Thus, the foreign-language broadcasts of the major national broadcasters, such as the BBC, were no longer jammed for a period leading up to and beyond the Helsinki Agreement of 1975. Even then, there was no let-up in the jamming of RL and RFE, which were seen by the Communist authorities as forms of psychological warfare. The jamming of all broadcasts in the languages of the European Communist states, including Russian, was resumed with a vengeance, however, when worker opposition in Poland got under way later in the decade. The last thing the authorities wanted was objective news about the rise of an independent trade union movement in a Communist state. In terms of information from ‘abroad’, East Germany was a special case, since people could not only listen to radio broadcasts from West Germany but also watch television emanating from there.
For the rest of Communist Europe, it is of some significance that broadcasts in English – by, most notably, the Voice of America and the BBC – were not jammed. That was partly because only a highly educated minority in the population could follow them, and also because their news was not specially focused on the Communist world (in the way RL and RFE broadcasts were) or towards contradicting the precepts of the Department of Propaganda of the Central Committee. These radio stations were tuned into especially at times of international crisis, when they provided a very different perspective from that of the official Communist media. While it is difficult to measure the degree of influence of foreign broadcasts, their importance lies in the fact that they deprived Communist regimes of the complete monopoly over the sources of information to which they aspired. They were listened to more, proportionately, in Poland than in the Soviet Union, but I took part in quite a number of conversations in Russia in which the starting point was something someone had heard on foreign radio. There were those who preferred the BBC to other broadcasters because they said it was the ‘most objective’, and others who preferred Radio Liberty because it provided more political information relating to the Soviet Union.
The party leadership needed these outside voices, as sources of information, less than did ordinary mortals, since they had summaries of what the foreign mass media were saying prepared for them. There were also books published in very small editions which were available only to Central Committee members – such as translations of Western politicians’ memoirs and some of the works of the Eurocommunists – and were not on sale to the broader public. Even so, it was far from uncommon for senior party and state officials to listen to foreign radio. Zinoviev, in The Yawning Heights, in which the Soviet Union is given the name Ibansk, has a section on ‘History yet to come’, in which Communism has prevailed worldwide and so there were ‘no fashions to imitate, nowhere to seek refuge from the stresses of Ibanskian life or to acquire a few foreign goodies, no one to blame all your troubles on, no one to brag about your amazing successes to’.47 The ‘beloved enemy’ who ‘had given life at least some degree of interest and meaning’ was no more. Zinoviev portrays the country’s leader searching in vain for some enlightenment from abroad: ‘On one occasion His Leadership spent an entire evening twiddling the knobs of his radio hoping to find some slanderous voice, no matter how faint and far away, and to hear some mite of truth about Ibansk. But alas there were no voices left at all.’48
In the real world, ‘abroad’ continued to exist and to be strikingly different. Broadcasts went in both directions – not only from West to East but, of course, also from the Communist states to Western countries. The latter were not jammed, but they were very little listened to. In the war of words, democratic countries had the advantage that broadcasts from Communist states were not forbidden fruit but boring propaganda, whose main thrust could be read quite freely (and more interestingly) in parts of the Western media.
Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II
When former president Ronald Reagan died in 2004, he was widely credited with having overthrown Communism. One year later, Pope John Paul II died and the same claim was made for him.49 In reality, both president and pope played a part in the demise of Communism, but far from the most decisive. Moreover, Reagan’s role has been much misunderstood. It was not his rhetoric – as when he described the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’ in 1983, or when, speaking at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in June 1987, he said, ‘Mr Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’50–that produced fundamental change in Communist systems. Nor was it primarily the United States arms build-up, including Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as SDI or ‘Star Wars’. Most of these things strengthened the hard-liners within the Soviet political elite more than the reformers. It made more difficult the task of those who were seeking a qualitative improvement in East – West relations. Politicians emphasizing success they attribute to Reagan’s support for military build-up generally overlook a very different aspect of his outlook. Reagan had a hatred of nuclear weapons and was ready to believe that SDI, the anti-missile system that would supposedly destroy incoming rockets armed with nuclear warheads, would make them obsolete. Those with more knowledge of the practicalities, such as the head of Soviet space research, thought the idea was absurd. What worried the Russians was the technological spin-offs which would come from the vast investment Reagan was proposing to devote to SDI, not a belief that the system would actually work.51
But alongside increased spending on military build-up and the hard-line rhetoric (which worried also some of America’s allies), there was a Reagan who saw himself as a peacemaker, not a warmonger, and who was ready to negotiate with the Soviet Union if he could find a negotiating partner. Even during his first term as president, he made overtures to Moscow that were rebuffed. On 24 April 1981 he wrote a personal letter to Brezhnev which was intended to thaw some of the frost between the two ‘superpowers’, but, in Reagan’s own words, he got ‘an icy reply from Brezhnev’.52 Moreover, it was no part of Reagan’s policy to aim to break up the Soviet Union. Jack Matlock, who was the senior Soviet specialist on the National Security Council in Washington in Reagan’s first term, and the United States ambassador to Moscow from 1987 to 1991, has stressed that ‘President Reagan was in favour of bringing pressure to bear on the Soviet Union, but his objective was to induce the Soviet leaders to negotiate reasonable agreements, not to break up the country.’53 An important internal American government document (which remained classified until long after the Soviet Union had ceased to exist), entitled ‘U.S. Relations with the USSR’, was issued on 17 January 1983. In Matlock’s words, it ‘contained no suggestion of a desire to destroy the Soviet Union, to establish U.S. military superiority, or to force the Soviet Union to jeopardize its own security’. It endorsed negotiations with the Soviet Union ‘consistent with the principle of strict reciprocity and mutual interest [italics added]’. The only respect in which this document for internal consumption of US policy-makers went beyond the public statements was in its intention ‘to promote, within the narrow limits available to us, the process of change in the Soviet Union toward a more pluralistic political and economic system in which the power of the privileged ruling elite is gradually reduced’.54
Secretary of State George Shultz subsequently instituted a series of Saturday breakfasts for senior officials to try to iron out the disagreements among the various government agencies. Although those present included Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and CIA chief William Casey, as well as Shultz, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, and Vice-President George H.W. Bush, no one present argued that the United States ‘should try to bring the Soviet Union down’. They understood that American attempts to exploit Soviet problems ‘would strengthen Soviet resistance to change rather than diminish it’.55
These assumptions underlying American policy are far removed from what has been said by many of those who served in the Reagan administration. After the Soviet system and the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist, it was claimed that achieving those ends had been Reagan’s policy objectives all along. What is indisputable is that the president himself sent out mixed signals, especially in his first term. Some of his rhetoric indeed suggested that it was a policy aim to dispatch the Soviet system to the dustbin of history. Yet Reagan was aware that it was one thing to wish to see an end to Communism and another to take active measures to bring it about. That might have unintended consequences and would certainly get in the way of his desire for dialogue. Within the Reagan administration as a whole there were clear divisions – most notably between Shultz, after he succeeded Al Haig as secretary of state, and Weinberger, the secretary for defense. The divisions were, if anything, even sharper a rung or two lower in these departments.
If Reagan, as the evidence presented by Shultz, Matlock and others strongly suggests, wished to pursue a dual-track approach – anti-Communist values combined with military strength on the one hand, and a desire for dialogue and wish to reach concrete agreements on the other – the Soviet leadership in the first half of the 1980s thought Reagan sincerely believed only in the first of these tracks. As a result, nothing changed for the better in the US – Soviet relationship during Reagan’s first term. The Cold War got colder and there were even moments when nuclear war could have broken out by accident, as in 1983, when there was concern in Moscow that the United States was preparing a first strike against the Soviet Union. A NATO exercise was altered to make it abundantly clear that this was, indeed, only an exercise and not the lead-up to a surprise attack.56 Ronald Reagan’s presidency overlapped with four Soviet leaders – Leonid Brezhnev, Yury Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko, and Mikhail Gorbachev. No lessening of tension or amelioration of the Cold War took place until some months after the fourth and last of these became general secretary in March 1985. No liberalization occurred in Soviet policy towards Eastern Europe during Reagan’s first term. Nor did the countries of Eastern Europe become freer or more democratic.
The end of the Cold War is not the same phenomenon as the end of Communism in Europe, but there is an interconnection. The Cold War almost certainly did more to keep Communist systems going than to bring them down. The ever-present threat of an external enemy was used as a justification for highly authoritarian (at times totalitarian) rule. Political dissent was portrayed as a betrayal of the ‘socialist motherland’ and the external threat was used to justify censorship and restrictions on foreign travel. What Communist systems were far less equipped to survive was closer contact with more prosperous democratic countries and a marked relaxation of international tension. Thus, insofar as President Reagan contributed to the demise of Communism, it was not so much (as is widely believed) by his perceived contribution to making the Cold War colder between 1980 and 1984, but by helping, in partnership with Gorbachev, to ensure that it came to a peaceful end. This happened just a year after Reagan left office, when one by one the countries of Eastern Europe became independent and non-Communist. George Bush the elder and his secretary of state James Baker played their part in this, but the breakthrough to qualitatively better East – West relations had occurred on the watch of Reagan and Shultz.57
The contribution of Pope John Paul II has been discussed in the previous chapter. For Catholics in Eastern Europe, a formidable pope emerging from a state under Communist rule provided not only spiritual solace but also political inspiration. This was especially so in the Pope’s native Poland, where the remarkable growth of the Solidarity movement owed much to the galvanization of the nation brought about by John Paul II’s triumphal return to his homeland in 1979. Within the Soviet Union, the republic in which the Pope’s influence was felt most strongly was Lithuania, with its large Catholic population. Nevertheless, even in Poland, where the state appeared to be much weaker vis-à-vis society than elsewhere in Eastern Europe (and where autonomous organizations were stronger than elsewhere in the Communist world), that state was able to reassert itself. It was powerful enough to turn the mass movement of Solidarity (which had engaged in dialogue with the state authorities and been accepted almost as a legitimate partner in 1980–81) into the weakened, underground organization of 1982–87. Poles had a strong sense that behind their own Communist party and government stood a powerful Soviet state, unwilling to see Poland break with Communism and what was called (of all things) the Warsaw Pact. That perception undoubtedly helped the Polish party-state authorities to reimpose Communist ‘order’, using their own resources. Since the Soviet Union was the ultimate guarantor of that order, a vote by the Communist ‘cardinals’ in the Soviet Politburo in March 1985 turned out to be even more important than the vote of the cardinals in Rome in 1978. Although nothing could have been further from the intention of Politburo members when they cast their votes in the Kremlin, this was to open the way to the peaceful dismantling of Communism.