The Downing Street Years

by Margaret Thatcher

  When I got back to London I telephoned President Reagan to let him know about our discussions. I told him what I had said on Afghanistan and arms control. I also said that though the President must be prepared to tackle Mr Gorbachev on human rights he should also be prepared for a sharp reaction. President Reagan said that he expected some tough sessions with Mr Gorbachev but that I had clearly softened him up. He also asked me if I thought that he should try to get on first name terms with the Soviet leader. I advised him to go carefully on this, because although I found Mr Gorbachev friendly and open he was also quite formal, something which the whole rigid Soviet system encouraged.

  NATO SUMMIT IN BRUSSELS, MARCH 1988

  In fact, the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Washington was a success. The INF Treaty was agreed and a further summit in Moscow in the first half of 1988 was arranged in principle at which the treaty would be signed and possibly agreement reached on a START Treaty as well. In February 1988 Mr Gorbachev announced that Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan would begin in May. We were clearly moving into new territory and it seemed to me the right time to take our bearings at a NATO summit. The first NATO heads of government summit for six years — incidentally, the first attended by a French president for twenty-two years — was scheduled for March in Brussels.

  It was clear from the start that the West Germans were likely to be the main source of difficulty. Mr Gorbachev had launched a very successful propaganda drive to win over German opinion to a denuclearized Germany. Within the Federal German Government, I knew that Chancellor Kohl was still fundamentally sound on the need to avoid a ‘third zero’ and denuclearization. Herr Genscher, the Federal Foreign minister, by contrast, was not. Chancellor Kohl insisted on NATO adherence to what was called its ‘comprehensive concept’ — that is, regarding the different elements of defence strategy, of which SNF was one, as a whole. Within this ‘comprehensive concept’ he was prepared to support measures agreed, after proper study by the alliance as necessary, to maintain flexible response; but he had said publicly in Washington that there was no present need to make a decision on SNF modernization. It was possible for the Americans and us to take account of German sensitivities in the NATO communiqué while still maintaining the right stance both on the military doctrine and modernization of nuclear weapons. Consequently, I was not at all displeased by the wording which resulted. The heads of government agreed on: ‘a strategy of deterrence based on an appropriate mix of adequate and effective nuclear and conventional forces which will continue to be kept up to date where necessary’. That was enough.

  After the Brussels summit officially broke up I met President Reagan to discuss the outcome. I told him that I thought the summit had been a great success because Britain and the United States had stood together. This demonstration of NATO’s unity would be helpful to him when he went to Moscow to meet Mr Gorbachev in May. I regretted that it had not proved possible to get the Germans to accept explicitly that negotiations to reduce shorter-range nuclear weapons in Europe should only take place after parity on conventional weapons and a ban on chemical weapons had been achieved. But I said that it was quite clear to me that these were in fact the only circumstances in which NATO should negotiate on short-range systems. President Reagan said that he entirely agreed and that NATO could not go any further down this road until these conditions had been met. We were equally in accord on the approach to a START Agreement. I said that though I supported START as a goal it was more important to get the right agreement than to have it quickly. The President said that he too was being cautious in his public comments. He did not want people to say that the Moscow summit was a failure if no START Agreement could be signed. He also recognized that the START negotiations would be far more complex than those on INF, particularly as regards verification. I left Brussels reassured that the President and I were at one as we faced up to all the difficult and complicated arms control negotiations which would now ensue.

  PRESIDENT REAGAN’S VISIT TO LONDON, JUNE 1988

  President Reagan was as good as his word when he went to Moscow. Although the INF Treaty was signed there was tough negotiation and no compromise on START, where the Soviets wanted the United States to have Sea-Launched Cruise Missiles (SLCMs) included in the agreement. But, as with my own visit in 1987, it was the opportunity for President Reagan and the Russian people to meet one another face to face which was probably of greatest importance. He told me when he came to London on Thursday 2 June, on his way back from Moscow, how moved he had been by the huge, welcoming crowds there. The only thing which had upset him was the brutal way in which the KGB had dealt with the people who wanted to approach him. I told him that now the Russians had seen for themselves the sort of person he was it would be that much more difficult for the Soviet authorities to convince them that the United States was a dangerous enemy. He had given high prominence to human rights matters — particularly to freedom of worship — when he was in the Soviet Union and I said how right I thought he had been to do this. The President also told me about the difficult arms control talks. He said he had been determined not to give an inch on SDI and he was not going to be rushed on START. In the meantime, NATO must move ahead with modernization of its short-range nuclear forces and the West Germans must be persuaded to approach this in a positive way. He would continue to insist that a balance had to be achieved in conventional forces in Europe before there could be negotiations to remove short-range nuclear weapons.

  The President spoke to a large City and diplomatic audience at Guildhall the next day. It was a vintage performance and one of some significance in the light of later events. He harked back to the speech he had made to Members of Parliament in 1982 in which he had enunciated what came to be called the ‘Reagan Doctrine’.* Neither he nor I knew how close we were to its triumphant vindication; but what was clear was that great advances had been made in the ‘crusade for freedom’ we had been fighting. It was now time to restate the cause, which was as much spiritual as political or economic. As the President put it:

  Our faith is in a higher law … we hold that humanity was meant, not to be dishonoured by the all-powerful state, but to live in the image and likeness of Him who made us.

  VISIT TO POLAND, NOVEMBER 1988

  Just five months later — in November 1988 — I visited Poland. If anyone had wanted a demonstration of the value of President Reagan’s vision he would have found it in that country, where Catholic faith, national consciousness and economic frustration had come together to expose the empty sterility of Marxism and shake the foundations of communist rule. I was determined to accept the invitation I had earlier received from General Jaruzelski to go to Poland. I always felt the greatest affection and admiration for this nation of indomitable patriots, whose traditions and distinctive identity the Prussians, Austrians and Russians (in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) and the Nazis and communists (in the twentieth century) had sought vainly to extinguish. I could not forget the Polish airmen who had fought with the RAF against Nazism, and how a war begun over the freedom of Poland had ended leaving them trapped under tyranny. But, for all that, these were diplomatically treacherous waters I was entering; and I knew it.

  My aim in going to Poland was to continue that strategy towards the eastern bloc countries which I had first begun in Hungary in 1984. I wanted to open up these countries — their governments and peoples — to western influence and to exert pressure for respect for human rights and for political and economic reform. But Poland’s recent past demonstrated how dependent events in such countries were on the intentions of the Soviet Union. Whether one regarded General Jaruzelski as a patriot stepping in to prevent worse things befalling his fellow countrymen or just as a Soviet puppet, the circumstances under which martial law was imposed and Solidarity crushed in 1981 were an unforgettable lesson in the reality of power politics. Now the political and economic bankruptcy of the Jaruzelski Government was again apparent and its authority challenged by a revived Solidarity. The role
of the West — above all of a visiting western leader — was to give heart to the anti-communists, while urging on them a carefully calculated response to the opportunities they had to improve conditions and increase their influence; and in dealings with the Government it must be to combine straight talking about the need for change with an attitude which avoided outright and counterproductive conflict. It would not be an easy task.

  For their part, the authorities were determined to make it harder still. On the eve of my visit the Government announced their intention to close the Lenin Shipyard at Gdansk, the home of Solidarity. It was a trap and one no less dangerous for being clumsy. The communists hoped that I would be forced to welcome the closure of uneconomic plant and to condemn Solidarity’s resistance to it on the grounds of ‘Thatcherite’ economics. Some commentators fully expected me to fall for this. For example, a leader in The Times on the eve of my visit noted:

  The Prime Minister sets out today on a visit many will say she should not be making. Her trip to Poland was always a questionable proposition, capable of being interpreted as a gesture of succour to the Jaruzelski regime. Now it is doubly so.

  In fact, even the official published figures suggested that although the Lenin Shipyard was in a very weak economic position it was not making the greatest ‘losses’, which clearly implied that the decision to single it out had been politically not economically motivated. Anyway, since 90 per cent of the work at the shipyard was done for the Soviet Union, its viability depended on little more than the exchange rate between the rouble and the zloty. Where there is no real market there can be no real estimates of ‘profit’ and ‘loss’. But there was far more to it than that. I was convinced that you cannot expect people to shoulder the kind of economic responsibility which would be expected in a western economy unless they are granted the freedoms we expect in a western society.

  In the light of these manoeuvrings I was glad that from the beginning I had insisted that there should be an unofficial as well as an official side to my visit. I was not prepared to be prevented from meeting Lech Walesa and the leading opponents of the regime. To his credit, I felt, General Jaruzelski did not raise objections to my doing so. Otherwise, of course, I would indeed have run the risk of unwittingly serving the cause of communist propaganda.

  In planning my visit I had consulted the Pope whose own visit there in June 1987 had provided the main impetus for the revival of Solidarity and the pressure for reform. It was clear that the Vatican thought my visit could do good but also that the Church was proceeding with great caution — a caution which was even more evident when on the first day of my visit I had a meeting with Cardinal Glemp.

  In preparing my Polish trip there was another matter on which I felt I must consult a wise authority and that was what I should wear. A Polish lady who served me at Aquascutum said that green was the colour which represented hope in Poland. So green was the colour of the suit I chose.

  My first official meeting in Warsaw on the evening of Wednesday 2 November was with the recently appointed Polish Prime Minister, Mr Rakowski. He was not an impressive or persuasive advocate of the line the Polish Government was taking about the Lenin Shipyard, though he did his best. He said how much he agreed with my public statements about the need for economic reform and portrayed closure of the shipyard as part of this process. In somewhat forced ‘Thatcherite’ tones he told me that rationalization was the only way to extricate Poland from its crisis and that Poland’s great weakness historically had been lack of consistency, which was something he was determined to change. I replied that going from a centralized economy to one based on private enterprise and competition was immensely difficult. But it was not just a matter of changing economic policies. There had to be personal, political and spiritual change. Under communism, people were like birds in a cage: even when you opened the door, they were afraid to go out. The vital task facing his Government, I said, was to take the Polish people with it in making the changes; and the problem was that there was no political mechanism for consulting them and allowing them to express their views. The difference between the situation I had faced in 1979 and that which confronted Mr Rakowski was that I had been democratically elected — and twice re-elected — to carry out the changes required.

  Later that evening I met a number of opponents of the regime and learnt a little more about its shortcomings. I knew that the communists had never managed to achieve the scale of collectivization of agriculture in Poland which they had elsewhere and that this — alongside the influence of the Catholic Church — had given the Poles a degree of independence which was unique in a communist country. I said to those present that since they at least had the land they must be doing quite well. No, they said, this was not so. Did I not realize that the state directed most of the seed, fertilizer, tractors and other equipment — not least spare parts — to the collective farming sector? The authorities also controlled prices and distribution. Under these circumstances the benefits of ownership were limited. In effect, socialism, which is only a less developed form of communism, was doing its usual work of impoverishment and demoralization. I later raised the subject with Mr Rakowski, who did not seriously dispute the facts.

  On Thursday afternoon I had my first real taste of Poland — the Poland which the communists had tried and failed to destroy. I visited the church of St Stanislaw Kostka in the north of Warsaw where Father Jerzy Popieluszko had preached his anti-communist sermons until in 1984 he was abducted and murdered by members of the Polish Security Services. (I also went to talk in their home to Father Popieluszko’s parents, who were grief stricken but immensely proud of their son.) The church itself was overflowing with people of every age who had come out to see me and on my arrival they broke into a Polish hymn. In Father Popieluszko they had evidently found a martyr, and I came away in little doubt that it was his creed rather than that of his murderers which would prevail in Poland.

  I said as much to General Jaruzelski when I met him for talks later. The General had spoken for one and three-quarter hours without interruption about his plans for Poland. In this, at least, he was a typical communist. He even said that he admired the trade union reforms I had put through in Britain. When he finished I pointed out that people in Britain did not have to rely on trade unions as a means of expressing their political views because we had free elections. I had just experienced the power of the Solidarity movement in that church in northern Warsaw. I said that, as a politician, all my instincts told me that this was far more than a trade union — it was a political movement whose power could not be denied. The Government was right to recognize that it had to talk to Solidarity and I hoped that the Solidarity leaders would accept its invitation.

  The next day, Friday, was one I shall never forget. I flew up to Gdansk in the early morning to join General Jaruzelski in laying a wreath at the Westerplatte, which saw the first fighting between the Poles and the invading Germans in 1939. It was a bleak peninsula above the bay of Gdansk and the wind was bitter; the ceremony lasted half an hour. I was pleased to get aboard and into the cabin of the small naval ship which was to take me down the river to Gdansk itself. I changed out of my black hat and coat into emerald green and then went back up on deck. The scenes at the arrival of our boat at Gdansk shipyard were unbelievable. Every inch of it seemed taken up with shipyard workers waving and cheering.

  After a walkabout in old Gdansk itself I was driven to the hotel where Lech Walesa and his colleagues came up to see me in my room. He had a somewhat ambiguous status at this time, being under a sort of liberal house arrest, and had been brought to the hotel, ironically enough, by Polish Security Police. I gave him the present I had brought with me — some fishing tackle, for he was a great fisherman — and we departed again for the shipyard. Again there were thousands of shipyard workers waiting for me, cheering and waving Solidarity banners. I laid flowers on the memorial to shipyard workers shot by the police and army in 1970, and then went to the house of Father Jankowski, Mr Walesa’s c
onfessor and adviser, for a meeting followed by lunch.

  The Solidarity leaders were a mixture of workers and intellectuals. Mr Walesa was in the former group, but he had a large physical presence as well as a symbolic importance which allowed him to dominate. He told me that Solidarity was disinclined to accept the Government’s invitation to join in round-table talks, believing — probably rightly — that the purpose was to divide and if possible discredit the opposition. Solidarity’s goal he described as ‘pluralism’, that is a state of affairs in which the Communist Party was not the sole legitimate authority. What struck me, though, was that they did not have a specific plan of action with immediate practical objectives. Indeed, when I said that I thought that Solidarity should attend the talks and submit its own proposals in the form of a detailed agenda with supporting papers my hosts looked quite astonished.

  Over lunch — one of the best game stews I have ever tasted — we argued through together what their negotiating stance might be and how in my final discussions with the Polish Government I could help. We decided that the most important point I could make to General Jaruzelski was that Solidarity must be legalized. De facto recognition was not enough. Throughout I was repeatedly impressed by the moderation and eloquence of Mr Walesa and his colleagues. At one point I said: ‘you really must see that the Government hears all this.’ ‘No problem’, replied Mr Walesa, pointing up to the ceiling; ‘our meetings are bugged anyway.’