As for arms control, on which, she predicted, they would spend the most time, she avoided the word ‘Reykjavik’. ‘My aim will be to get Gorbachev to accept in practice, if not formally, the priorities which you and I identified at Camp David last November.’36 At the forefront of these proposals was a deal on INF. The prospects now looked better because, on 28 February, Gorbachev had announced, contrary to his Reykjavik all-or-nothing approach, that the Soviet Union would consider a stand-alone deal. So the ‘zero option’ was back on the table. She would accept the removal of intermediate missiles, so long as this was not a step, as Reagan was all too prone to see it, to denuclearizing Europe entirely: ‘I shall remind him [Gorbachev] that although democratic countries are slow to do battle, he should not doubt our determination to retain strong defences based on nuclear deterrence. Nor should he be under any illusion that he can separate Europe from the United States.’37 She also stood behind the Camp David position on SDI which they had agreed in 1984, but warned Reagan that she would raise with Gorbachev the possibility of giving him ‘some assurance’ about ‘the shape, scope and timescale of programmes’. This was something she had raised with Reagan even before Reykjavik, but the President had shown little enthusiasm. In fact, Reagan had sought to discourage her from broaching the topic, but Mrs Thatcher brushed his concerns aside. She pledged not to imply that Reagan had endorsed her ideas, but she refused to take them off the table. She arrived in Moscow late on Saturday 28 March, and descended from the plane in her black coat and fur hat, carrying a black crocodile skin handbag. Presented with a bunch of roses, as Crawfie recalled, ‘she looked stunning.’38
A unique aspect of the Moscow visit was that Mrs Thatcher was permitted to go where she had asked, to meet Christians, dissidents and ordinary Soviet citizens, and to speak at length on Soviet television. Gorbachev encouraged this, to reinforce the impression that he believed in openness, and because he thought Mrs Thatcher’s endorsement of his reforms would be valuable to him at home.* Public appearances alternated with talks, mainly with Gorbachev himself. But in Charles Powell’s view, ‘The most memorable aspect was the reaction of the Russian people. She was the first leader to go everywhere and insist on the right of the people to turn out to see her. There were huge crowds everywhere … She symbolized the opposition to communism.’39 Amanda Ponsonby, who accompanied Mrs Thatcher as her personal secretary, was struck by how public excitement built up. As the party drove in from the airport, they saw no one on the streets, but the next day, when Mrs Thatcher visited the Orthodox monastery at Zagorsk, wearing smart beige boots and the camel coat with sable collar, people started to gather. At the service in the monastery church, Mrs Thatcher was asked to light a candle. Being a good Methodist, she had no experience of the liturgical role of candles and did not realize that lighting a candle is an occasion for placing it before the shrine and saying a prayer. She held it reverently but confusedly until told what to do. Mrs Thatcher noticed, in discussion afterwards, that at least some of her priestly interlocutors were supporters of the regime – the KGB had thoroughly penetrated what remained of the Orthodox hierarchy. ‘Discarding my own prepared text, I answered [a speech by a patriarch against nuclear weapons] by stressing instead the need to release prisoners of conscience.’40
That afternoon, when Mrs Thatcher went to a supermarket and a show flat in Moscow, a woman standing outside another flat was desperate to meet her, and Ponsonby steered the Prime Minister through her door.† Friendly crowds gathered outside and ‘She started to be mobbed.’41 Mrs Thatcher recalled, ‘I was determined to see some real live people as it were … The KGB would push them back and I would say “Stop it! Stop pushing them back!” ’42 By the last day of the visit, which ended in Tbilisi, Georgia, people stood ‘seven-deep’ on the pavements to see her pass. ‘There was a feeling that she was a tremendous breath of fresh air. No one knew quite how to handle it, but everyone was very receptive,’ Ponsonby remembered. ‘She adores attention. She played to that.’
Mrs Thatcher met the Gorbachevs formally shortly after arriving in Moscow. On her second night, she went with them to watch Swan Lake at the Bolshoi Theatre. She wore a dress which Amanda Ponsonby’s notes on her programme described as ‘Eleanor black lace evening’, Eleanor being the Christian name of Lady Glover, who had lent it to her.43 At supper in the interval, over Georgian wine, Gorbachev told Mrs Thatcher that ‘perestroika though not easy of attainment was more feasible than the elimination of the Russians’ love of (i.e. excessive) drink – indeed he deemed that impossible.’44 The conversation so engrossed them that they were late returning, with the result that, as Mrs Thatcher’s interpreter Richard Pollock reported, the ‘audience had apparently been literally in the dark for five minutes’.45
On Monday Mrs Thatcher began her full talks with Gorbachev at the Kremlin, with Geoffrey Howe conspicuously absent. Mrs Thatcher, who by this stage preferred to travel without her Foreign Secretary whenever possible, had tried to prevent Howe from coming to Moscow at all. After strong protests from the Foreign Office she relented, but, as Tony Bishop, the Foreign Office veteran who had interpreted for Mrs Thatcher during her 1984 meeting with Gorbachev recalled, ‘Mrs Thatcher characteristically had the final word by ensuring that whenever she was meeting Gorbachev during that trip, Howe would be meeting his opposite number Shevardnadze or others in a different building.’46 As had been the case at Chequers, her conversations with Gorbachev were long, gruelling, sometimes rude, but successful. As Charles Powell, the only British official apart from the interpreter to be present for all seven hours, noted in the thirty-page report he drafted immediately afterwards: ‘The talks were frank with no quarter asked or given. The Duke of Wellington would have recognised it as hard pounding. The mood varied considerably throughout, with some thunderstorms and occasional squalls but also some bright periods.’47 They overran dramatically, with the consequence that Mrs Thatcher did not have time to return to the Embassy to change before the banquet that evening at the Kremlin. She thus decided to forsake her normal regard for formality and turn up ‘in the short wool dress I had been wearing all day’.48*
The discussions did not begin easily. ‘Gorbachev at the start seemed keyed up,’ noted Pollock, ‘sitting back somewhat tensely, hands clasped across his midriff.’49 Gorbachev’s aide, Anatoly Chernyaev, also recorded the scene:
She was, as always, extremely attractive,* earnest but determined, stubborn, sometimes didactic. He was ironic, sarcastic, at times even abrupt. Gorbachev’s belief in the correctness of his cause translated into self-confidence in personal contacts … even with women. And Thatcher, for all her practical intelligence and astonishing competence, always showed a feminine side as well. She ‘tenderly’ looked over the men sitting in front of her as if also making sure about the impression she made as a woman.50
To Mrs Thatcher’s surprise, Gorbachev began by raising the speech she had given to her party’s Central Council in Torquay nine days earlier, in which she had promised ‘realism and strength’ against oppressive Soviet behaviour, as opposed to the ‘illusion or surrender’51 offered by Neil Kinnock, and attacked ‘the slaughter in Afghanistan’. Gorbachev protested that he and his colleagues ‘were feeling the breeze from the 1940s and 1950s’.52 ‘ “Once again, communism and the Soviet Union were presented as ‘evil forces’,” he said. “It was the same old talk about strengthening the West’s power position. We were very surprised by this. To tell you the truth, we even wondered if the prime minister would cancel her visit.” “I can’t believe this,” she retorted. “You couldn’t have thought that!” ’53
Rather than backing off, though, Mrs Thatcher tried to explain why the West feared the Soviet Union. What she could have said in her Torquay speech, but didn’t, she went on, was that there was ‘no evidence’ that the Soviets had ‘given up the Brezhnev Doctrine’.54† They were subverting Southern Yemen, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua, backing Vietnam to conquer Cambodia and occupying Afghanistan: ‘We naturall
y drew the conclusion that the goal of the worldwide spread of Communism was still being pursued.’55 She wanted to know whether his internal reforms would lead to changes in these external policies. Gorbachev’s immediate answer was that Communist world domination was ‘only an extrapolation of Soviet theory … It was no more than a scientific concept,’56 but her mention of the Brezhnev Doctrine stuck in his mind. For the moment, he hit back with an attack on Western meddling in the affairs of other countries: ‘It might be more to the point to talk of Britain’s support for the racist regime in South Africa.’ ‘Apartheid cannot last. It must go,’ Mrs Thatcher responded, while insisting that sanctions against South Africa ‘only aid mass starvation’.
The Soviets did not want to undermine the West’s commercial needs, said Gorbachev, but they wanted the West ‘to accept that socialism was a reality. It was no good seeing the October Revolution as an aberration and the Soviet Union as an error of history.’ Each must respect the other’s system. He would not be able to make a Communist out of Mrs Thatcher, he told her: she should not expect to make a capitalist out of him. ‘The Prime Minister said that she was just trying to find out how much of a communist Mr Gorbachev really was.’57 Mrs Thatcher did not let go her attack on Soviet adventurism. Once Communism was established in a country, she stated, ‘all further choice ceased.’ But look at bourgeois democracy, said Gorbachev: it ‘had developed a mechanism which operated as exquisitely as ballet for fooling people about who really controlled the levers of power’. Mrs Thatcher and the Conservative Party, he complained, were ‘too closely linked to the interests of the haves’. Mrs Thatcher countered that ‘the capitalist system had shown that it could distribute far greater benefits to ordinary every day people than socialism could’.58 She told Gorbachev, she recalled in her memoirs, that ‘what I was trying to do was to create a society of “haves”, not a class of them.’59
The argument was fierce, and, given the stubbornness of both the participants, circular. ‘She is an audacious woman,’ Gorbachev later reported to the Politburo; ‘she acted as if she were in her own Parliament. You couldn’t see this in any theater.’60 Charles Powell recalled Gorbachev being ‘very brutal’ about the Conservative Party and against the British role in Northern Ireland. Sometimes the tension was so great that ‘I thought we’d be thrown out at once.’61 But then it was Mrs Thatcher who, according to Gorbachev, ‘struck a more conciliatory note. Suddenly changing the course of the conversation, she said: “We follow your activity with great interest and we fully appreciate your attempts to improve the life of your people. I acknowledge your right to have your own system and security, just as we have the right to ours, and we suggest taking this as a basis for our debate.” ’62 The contemporary record shows that she professed herself ‘appalled’ by some of the things Gorbachev had said, but that it had been ‘helpful to clear the air’.63 Yes, said Gorbachev, it had stirred up ‘the stagnant pond’. And so the talk turned readily to arms control.
Once again, Gorbachev was fierce. Relaying the conversation to President Reagan two days later, Mrs Thatcher wrote, ‘I endured a long lament about how the West responded to Soviet initiatives by creating new linkages and conditions.’64 She glossed over the fact that the lament was directed more at her personally than at the West in general. The Soviet leader was angry with her for her efforts, which had apparently succeeded at Camp David, to move Reagan away from talk of eliminating nuclear weapons. In effect, she was arguing against the desires of both the Soviet and the American leaders. As ever, she insisted to Gorbachev that ridding the world of nuclear weapons was unrealistic: what was true was that there were far too many of them.
Gorbachev challenged her: ‘You, Madam Thatcher, with your stance on nuclear weapons, hamper the negotiations and hinder efforts to start a process of genuine disarmament … When you solemnly declare that nuclear weapons are beneficial, it’s clear that you are an ardent supporter of them who is prepared to accept the risk of war.’65 This stung Mrs Thatcher. ‘You had to see what those words did to her,’ wrote Chernyaev.
She got very tense, blushed, and her expression hardened. She reached out and, touching Gorbachev’s sleeve, began to talk without letting him get in a word. She poured forth the reasons why she considered it impossible to give up nuclear weapons: they had been ensuring peace in Europe for forty years … And how could he suspect her of such ghastly intentions?
She became so excited that the conversation got completely out of hand. They started to interrupt each other, repeat themselves, assure each other of their best intentions. And compliments, compliments for Gorbachev and his new policies, which she hoped would be successful.66
Matters calmed down enough, however, for Mrs Thatcher to be able to explain her more specific anxieties and put forward some of her specific ideas. The Soviet leader must understand, she said, that Europe was uniquely vulnerable to conventional war. She supported a 50 per cent reduction in the strategic nuclear weapons of the two superpowers. She also favoured an INF agreement. While Gorbachev spoke of the need to stop the arms race and reduce the levels of nuclear weapons, she was looking for ‘something deeper: a guarantee of the preservation of peace. She would prefer peace based on a few nuclear weapons to the danger of war with no nuclear weapons.’67 As Powell recorded it, ‘Mr Gorbachev said sarcastically that surely he and the Prime Minister could agree to destroy one nuclear weapon each.’ Mrs Thatcher replied that ‘Mr Gorbachev was not taking the matter sufficiently seriously.’ She urged him to hurry up and take advantage of the only one and a half years before President Reagan left office to get an agreement.
The meeting broke for lunch, which Mrs Thatcher (late again) had with Soviet dissidents led by Andrei Sakharov. They told her that they supported Gorbachev’s reforms, and she ‘told them firmly that it was not enough to support him now. They should continue to support him when the going got rough. The costs of reform would be evident long before the benefits came through.’68 But she also listened, noting down Sakharov’s remarks, one of which she relayed to Reagan in her conclusions about her visit: ‘We have an interest in supporting his reform policies, even if their results are modest. As Sakharov has said, an open society is safer for its neighbours. We should push Gorbachev to recognise that.’69
After lunch, Mrs Thatcher returned to the Kremlin for her next session with Gorbachev, which took place in what Powell described as ‘a jovial mood’70 and began with his internal reforms. Even more loquacious than she, he inflicted a sixty-five-minute introduction on his visitor, explaining that perestroika had barely begun. He spoke with what Mrs Thatcher, writing to Reagan, called ‘almost messianic fervour’71 about his plans. Gorbachev said he wanted businesses to be free to earn foreign currency, and that he sought ‘democratization’.72 Individual enterprises would acquire their own rights, he said, taking power away from the Central State Planning Commission, and there would be much more scientific development. There was ‘a boom in informations [sic] and computer technology. Soviet scientists had already constructed a computer capable of storing one billion bytes of information and by the end of the current five-year plan the figure would be 10 billion.* They had also solved the problem of personal computers and were now developing micro-processors for factories.’73 He admitted to Mrs Thatcher that the Soviet Union ‘lagged behind in the process of democracy’, but urged that ‘The conclusions which the Prime Minister should draw from the restructuring were that the West should forget any notion of putting the Soviet Union on the ash-heap of history and should abandon its evil-empire rhetoric.’74† Unlike in the earlier discussion, Mrs Thatcher did not pick an argument. She asked Gorbachev a polite question about the problems of applying science to industry (‘Mr Gorbachev said that it had been a weak point’), but did little to interrupt his flow or question what he said. It was as if, accepting the importance of his direction of travel, she did not want to be too critical of the almost comical inadequacy of what had so far happened. She simply wanted to find out more about w
hat was happening. Gorbachev, indeed, pre-empted potential criticism by admitting that ‘the roots of the problem had scarcely been touched’: she should ‘come back in two or three years’ time to look at progress’.75
They also discussed SDI. Despite Reagan’s efforts to discourage her from supporting any sort of constraint, Mrs Thatcher told Gorbachev that ‘she quite understood the Soviet Union’s wish for predictability in this area.’76 Proposed activities on both sides could be set out, and linked with an undertaking not to deploy SDI for a fixed period. This would allow the Soviet Union to ‘decouple’ the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (the successor to the SALT talks) from questions of SDI constraints. Gorbachev commented carefully that this was ‘an interesting, practical proposal’.77
The discussion was less combative than in the morning.* Mrs Thatcher (who once again raised the matter of Oleg Gordievsky’s family, this time in the margins of the discussion with only the interpreter present) made a series of strong points about human rights, including better treatment of Jews and observing the Helsinki agreements. But she added, as she did so, that she was ‘far more optimistic about the Soviet Union than she had ever been’.78 Gorbachev, she reported to Reagan, ‘objected strongly to my raising human rights, but nevertheless gave some quite useful assurances about the treatment of individual cases’.79
In her speech at the official banquet that evening, Mrs Thatcher did not pull her punches on human rights or the dangers of a nuclear-free world, but sought to strike a constructive tone. She ended with praise for Gorbachev’s reform effort: ‘you have certainly embarked upon a great endeavour and we most earnestly wish you and your people well.’80† This notwithstanding, the discussion over dinner became, in Pollock’s view, ‘more contentious’ once again. Mrs Gorbachev who, Mrs Thatcher told Reagan, played a notably ‘prominent role’81 throughout her visit ‘seemed keen … to resuscitate the “arms control” themes which had had a very thorough ventilation earlier in the day’.82 Her husband concluded the evening by saying that ‘he was beginning to think it would be easier to talk to the Americans than to the Prime Minister.’ It was ‘a somewhat sour tone on which to end the meal’. Pollock speculated that the Russians had ‘a “negative” lobby which they have to keep happy at the moment – not least when talking “on the record” ’. He may have been right, but Gorbachev’s complaint reflected one side of the double-edged feelings he had about Mrs Thatcher – that she was his inveterate ideological opponent. The other side – which he felt, perhaps, even more strongly – was that she was an honest, intelligent and powerful leader with whom agreement could be reached. Three months later, Gorbachev discussed Mrs Thatcher with the Zimbabwean leader, Robert Mugabe, who was, of course, no friend to her. Gorbachev remarked on how fierce was her attachment to nuclear weapons and how she had ‘an anti-Soviet mind-set … She is the vanguard of imperialist policies.’83 ‘She is a difficult woman,’ Mugabe replied. But Gorbachev qualified his own thought: ‘On the other hand … she is straightforward. She says what she thinks. She does not mince her words. She has a dislike for diplomatic fog.’84
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2 Page 80
