Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography

by Margaret Thatcher

  I subsequently learnt that George Shultz thought that I had secured too great a concession on the Americans’ part in the wording; but in fact it gave them and us a clear and defensible line and helped reassure the European members of NATO. A good day’s work.

  March 1985 saw the death of Mr Chernenko and the succession of Mr Gorbachev to the Soviet leadership. Once again I attended a Moscow funeral: the weather was, if anything, even colder than at Yuri Andropov’s. I had almost an hour’s talk with Mr Gorbachev that evening in the Kremlin. The atmosphere was more formal than at Chequers and the silent, sardonic presence of Mr Gromyko did not help. But I was able to explain to them the implications of the policy I had agreed with President Reagan the previous December at Camp David. It was clear that SDI was now the main preoccupation of the Soviets in arms control.

  Mr Gorbachev brought, as we had expected, a new style to the Soviet Government. He spoke openly of the terrible state of the Soviet economy, though at this stage he was still relying on the methods associated with Mr Andropov’s drive for greater efficiency rather than radical reform. As the year wore on, there was no evidence of improvement in conditions in the Soviet Union. Indeed, as our new – and first-class – ambassador to Moscow, Bryan Cartledge, pointed out in one of his first dispatches, it was a matter of, ‘jam tomorrow and meanwhile, no vodka today’.

  A distinct chill entered into Britain’s relations with the Soviet Union as a result of expulsions which I authorized of Soviet officials who had been spying. The defection of Oleg Gordievsky, a former top KGB officer, meant that the Soviets knew how well informed we were about their activities. I had several meetings with Mr Gordievsky and repeatedly tried to have the Soviets release his family to join him in the West. (They eventually came after the failed coup in August 1991.)

  In November President Reagan and Mr Gorbachev had their first meeting in Geneva. Not much of substance came out of it but a good personal rapport quickly developed between the two leaders (though not, sadly, between their wives).

  During 1986 Mr Gorbachev showed great subtlety in playing on western public opinion by bringing forward tempting, but unacceptable, proposals on arms control. Late in the year it was agreed that President Reagan and Mr Gorbachev – with their Foreign ministers – should meet in Reykjavik, Iceland, to discuss substantive proposals.

  In retrospect, the Reykjavik summit on that weekend of 11 and 12 October can be seen to have a quite different significance than most of the commentators at the time realized. Ever greater Soviet concessions were made during the summit: they agreed for the first time that the British and French deterrents should be excluded from the INF negotiations; and that cuts in strategic nuclear weapons should leave each side with equal numbers. They also made significant concessions on INF numbers. As the summit drew to an end President Reagan was proposing an agreement by which the whole arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons – bombers, longrange Cruise and ballistic missiles – would be halved within five years and the most powerful of these weapons, strategic ballistic missiles, eliminated altogether within ten. Mr Gorbachev was even more ambitious: he wanted the elimination of all strategic nuclear weapons by the end of the ten-year period.

  But then suddenly, at the very end, the trap was sprung. President Reagan had conceded that during the ten-year period both sides would agree not to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, though development and testing compatible with the treaty would be allowed. Mr Gorbachev said that the whole thing depended on confining SDI to the laboratory – a much higher restriction that was likely to kill the prospect of an effective SDI. The President rejected the deal and the summit broke up. Its failure was widely portrayed as the result of the foolish intransigence of an elderly American President, obsessed with an unrealizable dream. In fact, President Reagan’s refusal to trade away SDI for the apparent near fulfilment of his dream of a nuclear-free world was crucial to the victory over communism. He called the Soviets’ bluff. The Russians may have scored an immediate propaganda victory when the talks broke down. But they had lost the game and I have no doubt that they knew it.* For they must have realized by now that they could not hope to match the United States in the competition for military technological supremacy and many of the concessions they made at Reykjavik proved impossible for them to retrieve.

  My own reaction when I heard how far the Americans had been prepared to go was as if there had been an earthquake beneath my feet. The whole system of nuclear deterrence which had kept the peace for forty years was close to being abandoned. Had the President’s proposals gone through, they would also have effectively killed off the Trident missile, forcing us to acquire a different system if we were to keep an independent nuclear deterrent. Somehow I had to get the Americans back onto the firm ground of a credible policy of nuclear deterrence. I arranged to fly to the United States to see President Reagan.

  I have never felt more conscious than in the preparation for this visit of how much hung on my relationship with the President. I received the fullest briefing from the military about the implications of a defence strategy involving the elimination of all ballistic missiles.

  I flew into Washington on the afternoon of Friday 14 November. That evening I practised my arguments in meetings with George Shultz and Cap Weinberger. I saw George Bush for breakfast the following morning and then left for Camp David where I was met by President Reagan.

  To my great relief I found that the President quickly understood why I was so deeply concerned about what had happened in Reykjavik. He agreed the draft statement which we had finalized after talking to George Shultz the previous day and which I subsequently issued at my press conference. This stated our policy on arms control after Reykjavik. It ran as follows:

  We agreed that priority should be given to: an INF agreement, with restraints on shorter range systems; a 50 per cent cut over 5 years in the US and Soviet strategic offensive weapons; and a ban on chemical weapons. In all three cases, effective verification would be an essential element. We also agreed on the need to press ahead with the SDI research programme which is permitted by the ABM Treaty. We confirmed that NATO’s strategy of forward defence and flexible response would continue to require effective nuclear deterrence, based on a mix of systems. At the same time, reductions in nuclear weapons would increase the importance of eliminating conventional disparities. Nuclear weapons cannot be dealt with in isolation, given the need for stable overall balance at all times. We were also in agreement that these matters should continue to be the subject of close consultation within the alliance. The President reaffirmed the United States’ intention to proceed with its strategic modernization programme, including Trident. He also confirmed his full support for the arrangements made to modernize Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, with Trident.

  I had reason to be well pleased.

  It is easy to imagine what the effect of the Camp David statement must have been in Moscow. It meant the end of the Soviets’ hope of using SDI and President Reagan’s dream of a nuclear-weapons-free world to advance their strategy of denuclearizing Europe, leaving us vulnerable to military blackmail. It also demonstrated that, whether they liked it or not, I was able to have some influence on President Reagan on fundamental issues of alliance policy. Mr Gorbachev, therefore, had as much reason to do business with me as I with him, and it is no surprise that I was soon invited to Moscow.

  I prepared myself very thoroughly. On Friday 27 February 1987 I held an all-day seminar on the Soviet Union at Chequers. I also read through in detail the – usually long and indigestible – speeches which Mr Gorbachev had been making and I felt that something new was emerging from them.

  I was not going to Moscow as the representative of the West, but it was clearly very important that other western leaders should know the line I intended to take and that I should gauge their sentiments beforehand. I knew President Reagan’s mind and therefore limited myself to sending him a lengthy message.

  I also arranged to meet President Mitterrand a
nd then Chancellor Kohl on Monday 23 March. President Mitterrand believed, as I did, that Mr Gorbachev was prepared to go a long way to change the system. But the French President knew too that the Soviets respected toughness. He said that we must resist the attempt to denuclearize Europe. I warmly agreed.

  Nor did I find any disagreement with Chancellor Kohl.

  My last public pronouncement about the Soviet Union before I left had been my speech to the Conservative Central Council in Torquay on Saturday 21 March. It would have been easy to tone down my criticism of the Soviet regime. But I was not prepared to do so. Too often in the past western leaders had placed the search for trouble-free relations with foreign autocrats above plain speaking of the truth. I said:

  We have seen in Mr Gorbachev’s speeches a clear admission that the communist system is not working. Far from enabling the Soviet Union to catch up with the West it is falling further behind. We hear new language being used by their leaders. Words which we recognize, like ‘openness’ and ‘democratization’. But do they have the same meaning for them as they do for us? Some of those who have been imprisoned for their political and religious beliefs have been released. We welcome that. But many more remain in prison or are refused permission to emigrate. We want to see them free, or reunited with their families abroad, if that is what they choose … When I go to Moscow to meet Mr Gorbachev next week, the goal will be a peace based not on illusion or surrender, but on realism and strength … Peace needs confidence and trust between countries and peoples. Peace means an end to the killing in Cambodia, an end to the slaughter in Afghanistan. It means honouring the obligations which the Soviet Union freely accepted in the Helsinki Final Act in 1975 to allow free movement of people and ideas and other basic human rights … We shall reach our judgements not on words, not on intentions, not on promises, but on actions and results.

  I sat across the table from Mr Gorbachev in the Kremlin, a long flower vase between us. I was accompanied by just one member of my staff and an interpreter. It was soon clear that he intended to take me to task for my Central Council speech. He said that when the Soviet leaders had studied it they had felt the breeze of the 1940s and ′50s. It reminded them of Winston Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Missouri (about the ‘Iron Curtain’) and the Truman doctrine.

  I did not apologize. I said that there was one point which I did not make in my speech but which I would make now. This was that I knew of no evidence that the Soviet Union had given up the Brezhnev doctrine or the goal of securing world domination for communism. We were ready to fight the battle of ideas: indeed this was the right way to fight. But instead we in the West saw Soviet subversion in South Yemen, in Ethiopia, in Mozambique, in Angola and in Nicaragua. We saw Vietnam being supported by the Soviet Union in its conquest of Cambodia. We saw Afghanistan occupied by Soviet troops. We naturally drew the conclusion that the goal of worldwide communism was still being pursued. This was a crucial consideration for the West. We recognized that Mr Gorbachev was committed to internal reforms in the Soviet Union. But we had to ask ourselves whether this would lead to changes in external policies.

  I went on to show that I had read Mr Gorbachev’s speeches with as much care as he seemed to have read mine. I told him that I had found his January Central Committee speech fascinating. But I wanted to know whether the internal changes he was making would lead to changes in the Soviet Union’s foreign policies as well. I added that I had not expected that we would have generated quite so much heat so early in the discussion. Mr Gorbachev replied with a roar of laughter that he welcomed ‘acceleration’ and was pleased we were speaking frankly.

  The conversation went back and forth, not just covering regional conflicts but going right to the heart of what differentiated the western and communist systems. This I described as being a distinction between societies in which power was dispersed and societies based on central control and coercion.

  The afternoon discussion was less contentious and more informative. He explained to me the economic reforms he was making and the problems still to be faced. This led on to technology. He claimed to be confident about the Soviet Union’s capacity for developing computers in competition with the United States. But I was not convinced. And that led back to SDI which Mr Gorbachev promised the Soviets would match – in some way that he would not disclose. I tried to interest him in my proposal for greater ‘predictability’ as regards the progress of the American SDI programme, but apparently to no avail.

  Then I pressed Mr Gorbachev on human rights in general and the treatment of the Jews in particular. I also raised the question of Afghanistan, where I had the impression that he was searching for some way out. Finally, I listed the points which I thought we could agree on for a public account of our discussion which, he agreed, had contributed to better relations and greater confidence between us. But it was now very late. Guests were already assembling for the formal banquet at which I was to speak. Putting diplomacy ahead of fashion, I abandoned my plans to return to the embassy and change: I attended the banquet in the short wool dress I had been wearing all day. I felt rather like Ninotchka in reverse.

  Tuesday began with a rather dull meeting with Prime Minister Ryzhkov and other Soviet ministers. I had hoped to learn more about the Soviet economic reforms, but we got bogged down once again in arms control and then in bilateral trade issues.

  Far more exciting and worthwhile for all concerned was the interview which I gave to three journalists from Soviet Television. I learned afterwards that this had an enormous impact on Soviet opinion. Most of the questions related to nuclear weapons. I defended the West’s line and indeed the retention of the nuclear deterrent. I reminded them of their huge superiority in conventional and chemical weapons. I pointed out that the Soviet Union was ahead of the United States in ABM defences. Nobody had ever told ordinary Russians these facts. They learned them from my interview for the first time. The interview was allowed to go out uncut from Soviet Television, which I afterwards regarded as proof that my confidence in Mr Gorbachev’s basic integrity was not misplaced.

  That evening the Gorbachevs gave me dinner in an old mansion, converted many years before for entertaining foreign guests. The atmosphere was as close to that of Chequers as I ever found in the Soviet Union. In the rooms around which Mr Gorbachev showed us, Churchill, Eden, Stalin and Molotov had smoked, drunk, and argued. We were a small group, the Gorbachevs being joined by just the Ryzhkovs, who did not take a very active part in the conversation. A brightly burning log fire – again like Chequers – illumined the room to which we later withdrew to put right the world’s problems over coffee and liqueurs. I saw two interesting examples of the way in which old Marxist certainties were being challenged. There was a lively argument between the Gorbachevs, which I provoked, about the definition of the ‘working class’ about which we heard so much in Soviet propaganda. I wanted to know how they defined this in the Soviet Union – a point of some substance in a system in which, as the old Polish saying goes, ‘we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us’. Mrs Gorbachev thought that anyone who worked, whatever his job or profession, was a worker. Her husband argued initially that only the blue-collar workers counted. But he then reconsidered and said that this was largely an historical or ‘scientific’ (that is Marxist) term which did not do justice to the diversity of today’s society.

  The second indication of a break with old socialist certainties was when he told me – with tantalizingly little detail – of plans which were being discussed for increasing people’s incomes and then having them make some payment for public services like health and education. Not surprisingly, such plans, whatever they were, came to nothing.

  The following morning I had breakfast with refuseniks at the British Embassy. Theirs was a disturbing tale of heroism under mainly petty but continual persecution. Later that morning I left Moscow for Tbilisi in Georgia. I had wanted to see a Soviet republic other than Russia and I knew that Georgia would present a great cultural and geographical co
ntrast.

  It had been, quite simply, the most fascinating and most important foreign visit I had made. I could sense in the days I spent in the Soviet Union that the ground was shifting underneath the communist system. De Tocqueville’s insight that ‘experience shows that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally that in which it sets about reform’ sprang to my mind. The welcome I had received – both the warm affection from the Russian crowds, and the respect of the Soviet authorities in long hours of negotiations – suggested that something fundamental was happening under the surface. The West’s system of liberty which Ronald Reagan and I personified in the eastern bloc was increasingly in the ascendant. I sensed that great changes were at hand – but I could never have guessed how quickly they would come.

  * In February 1993 former senior Soviet officials confirmed precisely this point at a conference at Princeton University on the end of the Cold War.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Putting the World to Rights

  Diplomacy towards and visits to the Far East, the Middle East and Africa 1984–1990

  WHEN I WAS IN OPPOSITION I was very doubtful of the value of high-profile public diplomacy. To some extent I remain so. My political philosophy in domestic affairs is founded on a deep scepticism about the ability of politicians to change the fundamentals of the economy or society: the best they can do is to create a framework in which people’s talents and virtues are mobilized not crushed. Similarly, in foreign affairs, the underlying realities of power are not transformed by meetings and understandings between heads of government. A country with a weak economy, an unstable social base or an ineffective administration cannot compensate for these – at least for long – with an ambitious diplomatic programme. That said, my experience as Prime Minister did convince me that a skilfully conducted foreign policy based on strength can magnify a country’s influence and allow progress to be made in dealing with thorny problems around the world. As the years went by, I put increasing effort into international diplomacy.