20

Gorbachev

By the early 1980s the Soviet Union was roughly where the United States had been a decade before. Its economy seemed set on a downward turn. Its politics seemed dysfunctional, to the point that real leadership and direction were hard to attain. And the public mood was dismal. People who had been proud of Soviet achievements and at least tolerant of the system’s imperfections now started to doubt the future of Communism and their own role within it. Like in the United States a decade earlier, few Soviet people could envisage any alternative form of state and society. But there was a distinct doubt about whether the regime could continue as it was for much longer.

The Soviet Union in the 1980s also had two additional challenges that the United States had not had to face in the previous decade. Never having been tested at the voting booth, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had much less legitimacy than the US government, even under weak presidents such as Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter. The Communists had of course created the Soviet state and the advances that went with it, in science, education, welfare, and military power, but ever since Stalin’s time Soviet leaders had seemed afraid of their own people and in no way convinced of the support the CPSU would get from them in a time of crisis.

Internationally the Soviet Union also had challenges that the United States had not had, even in the 1970s. Granted, Brezhnev’s détente policies, and the massive Soviet military buildup that had accompanied them, had genuinely made the Soviet Union the other Superpower. It had by far the most powerful forces in Europe or Asia and had shown that it was capable of intervening globally when it so wished. But the USSR was isolated from the global economic system to a degree that even its eastern European allies were not. In 1985 only 4 percent of the Soviet gross national product was connected to foreign trade outside the East Bloc. Foreign investments were negligible. Even the much-vaunted gas exports to western Europe were slow to make an impact. By 1985 the Soviets supplied less than 3 percent of western Europe’s natural gas.

This isolation happened partly by the Soviets’ own design and partly through enforcement by others. Soviet leaders were concerned that economic interaction with the capitalist world, and especially a foreign presence inside the Soviet Union, would lead to the spread of capitalist thinking and practices. Such a development could usher in political unrest and eventually foment a counterrevolution against the Communists. Foreign trade was of course acceptable and the Soviets would have liked to expand it, but only on their conditions of state-led initiatives and strict reciprocity. Any Communist official charged with handling foreign commercial links had to be doubly careful. Not only did political rectitude have to be shown at all times, but any whiff of corruption by foreign interests had to be avoided, or the KGB would swoop. No wonder some Soviet officials preferred safety over ambition, even if that meant dealing with collective enterprises in Omsk rather than more enticing foreign ventures.

But the Western allies, and especially the United States, also tried to prevent the Soviet Union from benefitting too much from economic interaction with the West. Since the late 1940s, the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom) had placed restrictions on products countries allied with the United States would be allowed to export to the Soviet Union. These lists were quite extensive, ranging from advanced agricultural equipment to aircraft components to computers and software. Some of it the Soviets were able to get through industrial espionage, but by no means all. At the same time, direct trade with the United States nose-dived with the collapse of détente. Already in 1974 the US Congress introduced an act (the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the Trade Act) that restricted normal trade relations with countries that did not allow free emigration (read, the USSR). In 1980 President Carter embargoed US grain sales to the Soviet Union as a reaction to the invasion of Afghanistan. Although Ronald Reagan lifted the embargo the following year, having found that it did more damage to US farmers than to the Soviets, it did much to undermine Soviet trade relations with the West.

Up to the late 1970s the Soviets could ignore economic relations with the rest of the world, although they had done so at their peril. They could claim that their own form of modern development, a socialist, centralized planned economy, could deliver economic progress at least to the same extent as the capitalist West. But as capitalist globalization grew and more and more regions were linked up through it, Soviet isolation began to stand out. The USSR, after all, had been designed to overtake capitalism, not to fall further and further behind. Especially as the US economy began a very strong expansion from 1984 on, it seemed as if the Americans were benefitting from trends the Soviets could not be part of. Almost as bad, from a Soviet perspective, was the growth in the eastern Asian economies, where even small countries that the Soviets had never been much concerned about had growth rates three or four times the USSR’s average.

Domestically, leaders of the Andropov kind had believed that they could will the Soviet economy to work better. Their campaigns against corruption, drunkenness, and slovenliness showed little result in terms of output, however. Before the 1917 revolution Russia had been a grain exporter. By 1985 it was entirely dependent on foreign imports, bringing in more than forty-five million tons that year alone. It also imported nine hundred thousand tons of meat just to feed its population.¹ And real reform was not forthcoming. The aging Politburo simply refused to experiment with the economy in any meaningful sense. Even limited reforms such as those in eastern Europe, not to mention China, were off the table.

Ironically, one real danger for the Soviet economy was its increasing dependence on oil and gas exports for access to hard currency. As we have seen, Soviet foreign trade was small in size. But it needed hard currency income in order to service its import credits. The profits from energy exports, in good times, had also been used to expand beyond the plan in domestic production of high-end consumer goods, which the plan itself did not allow much room for. When oil prices nose-dived in 1981, these parts of the Soviet economy had taken a real hit, even though the planning bureaucracy tried to explain it as a temporary setback. But people, especially in the cities, noticed that stores emptied out even quicker and that lines for consumer products were longer than they had been even during the 1950s.

And then there was the war in Afghanistan. Brezhnev had been promised a short intervention, the sending of a “limited contingent” of Red Army troops to help the “real Communists” in the Afghan party set things right. They would be out within months, according to the materials the Politburo discussed in December 1979, when the final decision to intervene was taken. But by 1985 Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan had been fighting there for five years, and the chances of any withdrawal seemed remote. Both Brezhnev, in the waning years of his life, and his successor, Iurii Andropov, had been keen to arrange a negotiated withdrawal. But the overall direction of the Cold War counted against it. The Afghan Communist regime feared it would collapse without Soviet troops in the country. And the Soviets would only withdraw if the Americans and the Pakistanis agreed to stop supplying the Afghan Islamist resistance. Chances for a withdrawal anytime soon seemed remote.

By 1985 the Red Army had more than one hundred thousand troops in Afghanistan. Most of the country seemed to be under control by them and by the government army of the Afghan Communist Party, led by the vain and ineffectual Babrak Karmal. But that was only during the day and when Communist troops were nearby. At night, or when these troops had to be concentrated or redeployed, the resistance had begun to move into villages all over Afghanistan. Some of this resistance was local, tribal, or clan-based. People were defending their own areas against infidel foreigners and what they saw as a rapacious atheist regime in Kabul. But increasingly these local fighters joined up with one of the several Islamist parties based across the border in Peshawar, Pakistan, in order to get access to weapons and supplies. In turn, these links changed the tenor of the resistance ideology. In the 1970s nobody would have thought that Islamism in its Middle Eastern form would have stood much of a chance in idiosyncratic and recondite Afghanistan. But in the decade that followed, groups such as the Hizb-i-Islami (the Islamic Party)—with slogans borrowed from the Islamic Brotherhood, from extremist preachers in Saudi Arabia, and even from the otherwise much maligned Iranian Shia revolution—began to dominate the resistance discourse in Afghanistan.

A key reason why the Afghan Islamists won out over other groups in the resistance was the support they received from the Pakistanis and the Americans. For the Reagan Administration the calculus was simple: The Islamist groups seemed the best organized and the most effective part of the resistance. They were less corrupt and less likely to engage in the thousand local compromises that warfare in Afghanistan normally demanded. Mostly they killed more Soviets. “We had a very… cold-blooded view of things,” commented Charles Cogan, the CIA’s south Asia chief in the early 1980s. “Our interest was in reversing the tables on the Russians, after Vietnam.”²

The Pakistani military dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq encouraged CIA director William Casey and Reagan in seeing the Afghan liberation struggle as a battle of religion against Communist atheism. Zia used conservative religious authorities as tools for ruling Pakistan, especially after he had his democratically elected predecessor, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, hanged in prison in 1979. The following year he introduced Sharia courts, a novelty (to put it mildly) in Pakistani jurisprudence. A US-trained officer with a particular fixation on the Indian threat to Pakistan, Zia believed that it was only through increased support from Washington that his country could maintain its independence. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was Zia’s lucky break. With considerable success, he presented his case to Reagan: the real Soviet aim, Zia claimed, was to destroy Pakistan in cooperation with India. In that way the Soviets could dominate the Indian Ocean and control oil transports from the Gulf.

Even though they did not accept all of Zia’s pretentious claims of his country’s importance, the Americans knew that without the Pakistani dictator’s cooperation, there was no way US supplies could get to the Afghan resistance. By 1985 these supplies had become a major operation. Reagan believed that by hitting Afghanistan and other Soviet-supported regimes in Asia and Africa, he could increase the price the Soviets paid for their foreign involvements. Although there is no evidence that the president thought the United States could force the Soviets to withdraw entirely, Reagan did expect that US arming of anti-Leftist guerrilla forces could discourage Moscow from such interventions in the future.

The Reagan Administration’s aid for the Afghan mujahedin soon got entangled with a dramatic stepping up of US assistance to other movements worldwide. By 1985 this had turned into a major US offensive against the Left in what used to be the Third World. In Angola the United States supported, armed, and trained the guerrilla fighters of Jonas Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), who were fighting against the Cuban-supported government. In Cambodia the Americans helped the forces fighting against the Vietnamese-supported government, including (at least indirectly) the remnants of the notorious Khmer Rouge. In both of these countries, the opposition stood no chance of winning outright militarily. But their access to US weapons and military training ensured that the Left-wing governments were unable to consolidate their hold on all of their territory. It also prevented all forms of economic growth and increased the cost to the Soviets, Cubans, and Vietnamese of keeping their allies in power. For the moment, at least, this was good enough for Washington. The United States was now using the same methods to put pressure on the Soviets that the USSR had used against America in the 1970s, Reagan believed.

Central America was a different case, and US aims were much wider. Since Nicaragua and El Salvador were nearly on America’s doorstep, Reagan’s appetite grew, from ensuring the Sandinistas end their support for Left-wing rebels in El Salvador to the overthrow of the Nicaraguan regime itself. In 1984 the CIA secretly mined Nicaraguan harbors to cut it off from the outside world. But Reagan’s problem was that Congress, increasingly wary of another Vietnam-style quagmire, balked at funding the US allies in Nicaragua, the Contras. In spite of his overall popularity, Reagan could not get Congress to budge. The 1984 Boland amendment prohibited any US government measure that “would have the effect of supporting, directly or indirectly, military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua by any nation, group, organization, movement, or individual.”³ The CIA reported that the Contras, “even with American support, cannot overthrow the Sandinistas.” The only solution, the Agency’s chief analyst Robert Gates believed, was to “acknowledge openly… that the existence of a Marxist-Leninist regime in Nicaragua… is unacceptable to the United States and that the United States will do everything in its power short of invasion to put that regime out.”⁴

With the president’s tacit encouragement, the Reagan White House and the CIA put in place a network for increased support for the Contras that was badly thought out and almost certainly illegal. The centerpiece of the system was donations, and sometimes weapons, that the administration had solicited from friendly countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Brunei. These supplies could be used covertly to aid not only the Contras but also UNITA and the Afghan mujahedin. By late 1985 the White House had expanded this system into a totally harebrained scheme to sell weapons to Islamist Iran, now fighting for its life against an Iraqi attack, and give the proceeds secretly to the Contras. The aim would be to reach out to Iranian “moderates” to engage them in the Cold War against the Soviets and get them to assist with the release of US hostages held by Islamist terrorist groups in the Middle East. The plans failed, and the ensuing political fallout came to threaten the political survival of the Reagan presidency. But they showed clearly how far Reagan and his assistants were willing to go to in battling Soviet associates worldwide.

The aging leadership group in Moscow therefore feared not only Reagan’s rhetoric and America’s technological advances; they were also looking closely at what the US president was doing in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. They understood it as a counterrevolutionary offensive and associated it with a decisive US break with détente. On this matters had been turned upside down as well. In the 1970s Ford and Carter had been complaining of the Soviets risking détente for Angola or Ethiopia. Now Andropov’s successor, Konstantin Chernenko, claimed that Reagan’s aggression risked war. But the Soviet leader neither was nor seemed to be in a position to stand up to the United States. Chernenko, born in 1911—the same year as Ronald Reagan—was fading. He could hardly read his prepared texts in public. The day he was appointed leader of the CPSU, Chernenko had shuffled along to Andropov’s graveside, where he nearly fell in and had to be steadied by other old-timers in the Politburo. These were not men to face down such a massive US challenge.

On 10 March 1985 Chernenko died. When the Politburo members met to consider his successor, it was already clear that a younger man would have to be found. The seventy-six-year-old Andrei Gromyko, who had been foreign minister since 1957, nominated Mikhail Gorbachev, who at fifty-four was the youngest member of the Politburo. When each individual member, as usual, spoke to confirm his support for a decision that had already been taken by the top leaders, Vladimir Dolgikh, one of the lesser lights of Soviet politics, in a somewhat tragi-comic manner provided the best summing up. “We are all united,” he said, “in the opinion that he [Gorbachev] not only has great experience in his past, but he also has a future. Today our country needs an energetic leader who would be capable of going deeply into the substance of problems, a leader who is sincere, courageous and demanding.”⁵ And that was exactly what the CPSU got in Gorbachev, to a degree that nobody in March 1985 could have imagined possible.

Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was born in Stavropol in southern Russia in a mixed Russian-Ukrainian family. Both of his grandfathers were purged during the Stalin era, and one of them was sent in exile to Siberia. Gorbachev studied law at the prestigious Moscow State University, making him the first Soviet leader with a university degree. While there, he married the Ukrainian Raisa Titarenko, a philosophy graduate who would have a great influence on her husband’s career. And he joined the Communist Party, which by 1970 had made Gorbachev the party leader in his hometown and a member of the CPSU Central Committee at the ridiculously young age of forty.

Ten years later Gorbachev was a member of the ruling Politburo. His portfolio was agriculture, and one might guess that this notoriously unrewarding assignment was given him at least in part to balance the fact that his rise as a party leader was unprecedentedly quick. But in between the stages in his meteoric political rise, Gorbachev also found time to do what young people in 1960s and ’70s USSR longed to do above all else: go abroad. In the summers of 1977 and ’78 he and his wife traveled through France and Italy as tourists, seeing the sights but also meeting with ordinary people in a way that few other Soviet leaders-in-training had done. The Gorbachevs could of course make these trips only because they were especially trusted by the state; ordinary Soviets could only dream of such an opportunity. But even so they wondered about what they saw and about the reasons why it had so little impact in the Soviet Union. “It seemed,” wrote Gorbachev later, “that our aged leaders were not especially worried about our undeniably lower living standards, our unsatisfactory way of life, and our falling behind in the field of advanced technologies.”⁶

These concerns were precisely what the Gorbachevs set out to deal with after Mikhail’s election as general secretary. Gorbachev believed that Soviet society needed to be invigorated through the strict oversight of the Communist Party. People’s morale needed to be rebuilt and their faith in the future strengthened. He had few concrete proposals at first, and those he had were taken straight out of Andropov’s playbook: an anticorruption campaign, a campaign against alcoholism. The latter, by the way, did not exactly improve the new general secretary’s popularity, earning him the nickname “General Secretary Mineral Water.” “There was this long line for vodka, and one guy just could not stand it any longer,” went a favorite Moscow joke. “‘I am going to the Kremlin, to kill Gorbachev,’ he said. An hour later, the guy came back. The line was still there, and everyone asked him, ‘Did you kill the General Secretary?’ ‘Kill him?’ he responded. ‘The line for that is much longer than this one!’”

To begin with, Gorbachev’s style was more important than his substance. He was young, vigorous, and liked to be seen outside talking to people. But he was also authoritarian and impatient. When a representative from the Ministry of Finance pointed out that a significant part of government taxes came from alcohol consumption, Gorbachev interrupted him: “There is nothing new in what you have just said. Each of us knows that there is nothing to be purchased for the cash held by people. But you are not proposing anything other than forcing people to drink. So just report your ideas briefly, you are not in the Finance Ministry, but at the Politburo session.”⁷

But the Finance Ministry was not the only part of Soviet bureaucracy that Gorbachev was impatient with. Party secretaries and ministers were bombarded with letters and instructions about improving their performance, and threatened with severe sanctions if they did not. Before the 1986 Party Congress he purged many of the older leaders in the Politburo and replaced them with his own people, selected from the younger generation. Gromyko, who supposedly had remarked that Gorbachev had a nice smile, but teeth of steel, was promoted to the largely ceremonial role of Soviet president. His replacement as foreign minister was the reform-oriented party head of the Soviet republic of Georgia, Eduard Shevardnadze. Shevardnadze made up for his lack of foreign experience through his dedication to the Communist Party organization. For the new foreign minister, as for many Soviets who had waited almost a generation for a dynamic and decisive leader, the general secretary’s authoritarian manner was easy to accept. And Shevardnadze was a quick learner, someone Gorbachev could turn to with his ideas for a dramatic change in the flagging international fortunes of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev understood from the very beginning of his tenure that the USSR needed to reduce its expenses in the arms race and in support for revolutionary movements abroad. But he wanted to do so in ways that did not reduce the international status of the Soviet Union or its position as a global Superpower. The key, Gorbachev believed, was to get the Soviet economy going again. And to make that happen, some form of cooperation with the West was unavoidable. The general secretary doubted that much could be achieved with the Americans. He described them to his colleagues as “not serious.” But he was hopeful that western European governments, both in their own interest and in the interest of peace, would reach out to the Soviet Union. “The European direction of our diplomatic, political and other actions is extremely important for us. Here we have to be much more consistent and flexible” than in the past, Gorbachev said.⁸

In Washington, Reagan hoped for an early summit with the new general secretary. In a personal letter to Gorbachev, the president invited him to an early summit and referred, somewhat whimsically, to a common “goal of eliminating nuclear weapons.”⁹ Ever since the Able Archer incident, Reagan had been looking for concrete ways of getting negotiations going with the Soviets on nuclear weapons. The threat of nuclear war worried him deeply. After watching the ABC drama The Day After, which depicts Lawrence, Kansas, after a nuclear attack, Reagan noted that it “left me greatly depressed.”¹⁰ In January 1984, in his State of the Union address, Reagan turned directly to the Soviets with his appeal: “People of the Soviet Union, there is only one sane policy, for your country and mine, to preserve our civilization in this modern age: A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?”¹¹

Gorbachev, for some very good reasons, doubted the sincerity in Reagan’s appeal. But he worried about the increases in defense spending that the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program would inflict on the Soviet Union. He also needed time to develop his European initiatives, which he hoped would split the western Europeans from the United States in what he saw as Reagan’s warlike attitude to the Soviet Union. Although little progress had been made at the off-and-on negotiations between the two sides on nuclear weapons’ issues in Geneva, Gorbachev agreed to a summit meeting with the American president there, to take place in November 1985. It would be the first meeting between the top US and Soviet leaders for six years. Neither side expected much in terms of concrete results.

The Geneva summit allowed the two leaders to take the measure of each other, even though, as expected, it delivered very little in practical terms. Reagan, warm, breezy, and at times mundane, did little to impress Gorbachev, who came away with a sense of a president who was the hostage of his advisers. The only time Reagan really got through to him was when they parted. Past summits had not achieved very much, Reagan said. The president “suggested that he and Gorbachev say ‘To hell with the past,’ we’ll do it our way and get something done.”¹² It was an expression of Reagan’s frustrations with what he found to be a plodding, detail-oriented Soviet negotiating style. But it was also an indication of the president’s belief that he could deal with Gorbachev at the personal level and bring about results.

In his first year in power Gorbachev got increasingly impatient with the lack of progress that he witnessed in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev had believed that the new and inspirational leadership he provided would mean that people would be willing to work harder to achieve economic results within the plan. Instead Soviet economic growth continued to stall and shortages were as visible as before. Impatiently, Gorbachev rounded on his advisers. If they could not provide him with results, they were not only failing him, they were failing the greatness of Soviet society, he told them. At the twenty-seventh CPSU Party Congress in the spring of 1986, Gorbachev called for “a qualitatively new state of the Soviet socialist society.” But he also warned the delegates about “the shortcomings in our political and practical activities [and] the unfavorable tendencies in the economy and the social and moral sphere.”¹³ It was a very new form of report from the CPSU’s general secretary, who also used the Congress to underline his own leading position. After a year in power, Gorbachev had unequivocally nailed his colors to the mast of reform.

Already at his first meetings after taking over as head of the party, Gorbachev had referred to the war in Afghanistan as “a bleeding wound.” But that did not mean that he had given up on winning the war by securing the Communist regime and bringing the Red Army home in triumph. In meetings with his generals during the summer of 1985, Gorbachev told them they had a year to come up with a military strategy that actually worked in defeating the Islamist insurgency. He allowed them to attack the mujahedin closer to, and sometimes across, the Pakistani border, and agreed to more air support and more weapons for the Afghan Communist army. But he also made it entirely clear that if the new and more aggressive strategy did not work, then he would aim for a negotiated withdrawal of Soviet troops, even if the political aims for securing the regime had not been met.

A year later, Afghanistan was as much of a mess as it had been when Gorbachev took over. The Soviet offensive had simply led to more suffering for Afghan civilians, more refugees for the mujahedin to recruit from, and higher numbers of Red Army casualties. It had also led to more US, Chinese, and Pakistani support for the insurgents. In a move that shocked even its British allies, the Reagan Administration had supplied the Afghan Islamists with sophisticated portable ground-to-air missiles, Stingers, that had a range of twenty-six thousand feet. Soviet air operations had become much more risky. And a government victory on the ground was not in sight. In June 1986, Gorbachev told the Politburo that “we have to get out of there.”¹⁴

GORBACHEV: We got ourselves into this mess—we did not calculate it right, and exposed ourselves in all aspects. We weren’t even able to use our military forces appropriately. But now it’s time to get out.… We’ve got to get out of this mess!

[MARSHAL SERGEI] AKHROMEIEV [chief of the general staff of the Red Army]: After seven years in Afghanistan, there is not one square kilometer left untouched by a boot of a Soviet soldier. But as soon as they leave a place, the enemy returns and restores it all back the way it used to be. We have lost this battle. The majority of the Afghan people support the counter-revolution now. We lost the peasantry, who has not benefited from the revolution at all. 80 percent of the country is in the hands of the counter-revolution, and the peasant’s situation is better there than in the government-controlled areas.¹⁵

In October 1986 Gorbachev met Reagan for a summit in Reykjavik. The meeting had originally been suggested by the Soviets as a preparatory meeting for a visit by Gorbachev to Washington. But it turned into something much more substantial. Gorbachev had decided to go all-out to break the dynamics of the arms race and prevent the militarization of space. He offered an agreement to remove all Superpower intermediate-range nuclear weapons from Europe, without including British and French weapons. He also proposed a 50 percent cut in intercontinental missiles. The condition was that the Americans did not deploy SDI in any form for the next ten years. Taken aback, Reagan, on his own initiative, proposed a deal to eliminate all ballistic missiles within ten years. Gorbachev, almost immediately, suggested eliminating all nuclear weapons within a decade.

But Reagan would not budge on SDI.

[REAGAN:] If we have eliminated all nuclear weapons, why should you be worried by the desire by one of the sides to make itself safe—just in case—from weapons which neither of us have anymore? Someone else could create missiles.… I can imagine both of us in 10 years getting together again in Iceland to destroy the last Soviet and American missiles.… By then I’ll be so old that you won’t even recognize me. And you will ask in surprise, “Hey, Ron, is that really you? What are you doing here?” And we will have a big celebration over it.…

GORBACHEV: We cannot go along with what you propose. If you will agree to banning tests in space, we will sign the document in two minutes.… I have a clear conscience before my people and before you. I have done everything I could.

REAGAN: It’s too bad we have to part this way. We were so close to an agreement. I think you didn’t want to achieve an agreement anyway.… I don’t know when we’ll ever have another chance like this and whether we will meet soon.

GORBACHEV: I don’t either.¹⁶

But Reykjavik was not entirely a failure. The fact that Soviet and US leaders could now negotiate outside the framework set by a generation of arms control talks pointed to a future where even the most basic of Cold War concepts could change very rapidly. The discussion, driven by the two leaders’ political and personal preoccupation with abolishing the risk of nuclear war, also alerted their assistants that the Soviet-American conflict was moving into a new phase with real opportunities for settling acute points of conflict. Although most advisers on both sides were mightily relieved that such a radical nuclear denouement was not achieved, at least not there and then, they all understood that from now on they were in new and entirely unchartered territory as to what could happen between the two sides.

Part of the reason for Gorbachev’s radicalism at Reykjavik was that he wanted a big foreign affairs victory to underpin his new, more radical initiatives at home. Throughout late 1986 Gorbachev and his advisers had been working on new initiatives in what they called perestroika(restructuring) and glasnost (openness). At a Central Committee Plenum in January 1987 the general secretary announced that a fundamental restructuring of the Soviet economy was necessary to overcome years of deterioration. Perestroika, Gorbachev said, was “a resolute overcoming of the processes of stagnation, destruction of the retarding mechanism, and the creation of dependable and efficient machinery for expediting the social and economic progress of Soviet society. The main aim of our strategy is to combine the achievements of the scientific and technological revolution with a plan-based economy and set the entire potential of socialism in motion.”¹⁷

But what was the concrete content of the restructuring to be? And how much openness would be allowed? At the January plenum Gorbachev had spoken about “free labor and free thought in a free country.” But he had also defended the Soviet past and the achievements of socialism. Besides, there was intransigence and outright opposition to fundamental reform within the Communist Party, the government, and not least the economic planning system. During 1987 and 1988 Gorbachev and his closest advisers, Aleksandr Iakovlev—a reformist former ambassador to Canada—Vadim Medvedev, and Georgii Shakhnazarov, began formulating a new strategy for the Soviet economy. In 1987 enterprises got more autonomy to set their own production goals and to sell any surplus production directly to consumers, but they also became responsible for balancing their own budgets. The following year the Communist Party allowed private ownership of businesses in some sectors, encouraged joint enterprises with foreign companies, and supported the transfer of control over some state-owned enterprises to workers’ collectives. Critics accused them of abandoning Communism. Gorbachev retorted that what he did, and only what he did, would save Communism. Continuing as before was simply not an option.

Gorbachev undoubtedly had a point. After oil prices fell by two-thirds from 1985 to 1986, the pressure on the Soviet economy increased. Gorbachev’s gamble was that new forms of enterprise and foreign investments would make the economy grow, so that dramatic cuts in state expenditure would not be necessary. But past thinking was hard to avoid. High taxes discouraged enterprise. Gorbachev’s refusal to increase state-mandated prices on food and key consumer goods kept shelves empty. The Central Bank kept printing money to make up for the shortfall in state finances. As a result, inflation rose and the black market became increasingly predominant in the cities. Reforming the Soviet system, Gorbachev soon learned, was a gargantuan task.

Some of the reform plans probably weakened the Soviet economy rather than strengthening it. GosPlan, the previously all-powerful State Planning Committee, was reduced to only “setting priorities,” rather than detailed planning of output at the factory level. By the late 1980s this was almost certainly a necessary reform. But the haste and lack of preparation with which it was implemented led to confusion and increased the lack of interaction among production units that was necessary for increasing output. By late 1988 the Soviet economy was changing fast. But not all of it was for the better. And none of it, thus far, contributed much to ordinary citizens feeling better off than they had been before.

Gorbachev’s energy and appetite for change seemed to know no boundaries. His policy of glasnost was originally intended to open up criticism of previous practices in order to stimulate support for perestroika. But soon the reduction in censorship opened the floodgates for criticism of Communist principles and for investigations of the crimes of the Soviet past. Gorbachev kept insisting that there were limits to criticism and that only “constructive” ideas should be put forward. But in reality he did very little to limit the outpouring of recrimination that Soviet citizens had pent up for so many years. Khrushchev, he believed, had been removed because he had not had enough people to support him against party conservatives. Exposing the misdeeds of the past would only strengthen his own position. And, crucially for Gorbachev, he thought it was the right thing to do. The more he learned about the true content of Soviet repression, the more horrified he was by it.

In the Soviet press, cautiously at first, journalists began digging into the secrets of the past. New accounts of the horrors of Stalin-era prisoner camps were printed (prompting Gorbachev to release the last remaining political prisoners and allow others to return from exile). The 1930s purges were discussed openly, as was the woeful unpreparedness of the USSR to withstand the German attack in 1941. But some of most sensitive topics still took time to appear. The secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in which the Nazis and the Soviets divided up eastern Europe between them, were not admitted to before 1989. And it took up to 1990 for Soviet responsibility for the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn to be accepted. The Soviet government, Gorbachev then said, “expresses deep regret over the tragedy, and assesses it as one of the worst Stalinist outrages.”¹⁸ But for some Soviets it was too much, too fast. In a letter to a newspaper in March 1988, the chemistry professor Nina Andreeva deplored the new tendencies. “Recently,” she wrote, “one of my girl students puzzled me by frankly saying that the class struggle was an antiquated conception, like the leading role of the proletariat.”¹⁹ Andreeva wanted the basic Marxist principles to be kept in place, and many Soviet citizens, especially in Russia, agreed with her.

For Gorbachev it was important, though, that he and the party served all Soviet republics and not just Russia. Believing that some of his reforms would be more popular in the periphery than in the center, he and his closest advisers traveled much around the country, including to the Caucasus and to central Asia. Gorbachev also believed that the Soviet Union had to develop into a real federal union of equal republics, and that these republics should be as self-governing as possible. He kept telling his Moscow colleagues that reform, and especially political reform, could only be guaranteed from below, and that with the right kind of leadership much could be achieved in and through the republics. By the end of 1988 some of the republics had begun to assert themselves more than in the past, both in support of reform and in support of their own interests.

Two entirely unforeseen events also contributed to the speeding up of reform in the Soviet Union. In April 1986 reactor number four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on the Ukraine-Belorussian border exploded, sending massive amounts of highly radioactive fallout into the atmosphere. Through the heroic efforts of firefighters and military personnel the ensuing fire was brought under control. But everything else backfired. Authorities were slow in carrying out a general evacuation of the population in the worst affected area. For two days Soviet leaders said nothing about the accident. They only did so after high levels of radiation were picked up in faraway Sweden. Gorbachev, who had been unusually reticent himself as the crisis broke, later used the Chernobyl example as a telltale of why glasnost was needed throughout Soviet bureaucracy. For Soviet citizens, and for Europeans in general, it was a stark reminder of the terrible environmental record of the USSR.

A year after the Chernobyl disaster a German teenager, Mathias Rust, managed to fly a small airplane undetected from Helsinki to Moscow, and landed unopposed in the middle of Red Square. Rust said he did it for the sake of peace. For the Soviet military it was a public relations disaster. Gorbachev made use of the opportunity to pension off half the general staff and promote people he believed in, such as Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, a thinking man’s general if there ever was one. But the idea that the Red Army had created an impenetrable fortress lost some of its luster, in Russia especially. Rather, the generals became the aim of a new barrage of jokes. Groups of Russians, it was said, were now loitering around Red Square waiting for the next flight to Hamburg. Or that Red Square should be renamed Sheremetevo 3, since the new Terminal 2 at Moscow’s Sheremetevo Airport was already crumbling.

In eastern Europe people were watching in disbelief as the Gorbachev phenomenon was unfolding. To begin with, most people inside and outside the Communist parties believed that the reforms would lead to the strengthening of Soviet power and therefore of its hold on other countries. Even after Gorbachev himself began speaking openly about the need for eastern European leaders to reform their own countries, indicating that they would be allowed a great deal of leeway in choosing their own path, he was widely disbelieved. Eastern Europeans had seen periods of Soviet liberalization before and knew where they had all ended. But by 1987 it began to dawn, first inside the Communist parties, that Gorbachev was something completely new. For the party members who wanted reform, Gorbachev seemed the answer to their dreams. But for the party leaders, who feared change, perestroika and glasnost were the stuff of nightmares. When Gorbachev’s impish press secretary Gennadi Gerasimov, in Czechoslovakia, was asked what was the difference between Gorbachev’s reforms and Dubček’s in 1968, his response was “nineteen years.” Antireform Communists in eastern Europe had much to fear.

For Gorbachev, what mattered most with eastern Europe was to fit the states there into a more successful European socialist community, which could rival the achievements the general secretary saw in the capitalist western European Community. He wanted to learn from the practices of the more advanced states, first and foremost the GDR, in terms of technology and its implementation. But he was also aware that economically all eastern European states got a good economic deal from cooperating with the Soviet Union, especially in terms of energy and raw material prices set far below world standards. Fairness meant that prices within the Communist economic community, the ComEcon, should be similar to prices in international markets, Gorbachev thought, and paid in hard currency. Politically, the eastern Europeans should solve their own problems within the Warsaw Pact and the ComEcon, while adhering to the international policies of the USSR. In 1986, Gorbachev told East German leader Erich Honecker that he should “do what he regards as right for themselves, just like we do what we regard as right for us. It is best if we have confidence in each other.”²⁰ But the Soviet leader’s advice was that eastern European Communists needed to broaden the base for their own rule, just like he was trying to do at home.

Although all East Bloc leaders paid lip-service to the Soviet initiatives, in reality most of them tried to stave off any meaningful change for as long as possible. They knew that they could not liberalize their regimes without the risk of losing control. Their hope was that perestroika and glasnost would stall or be reined in inside the USSR. The relationship between Gorbachev and Honecker soon soured. Gorbachev tired of the East German leader’s constant reminders of the need for the USSR to support the GDR. Honecker also complained about less-than-flattering treatment of the GDR in Soviet papers. When Reagan dared the Soviet leader to end the division of Germany in a 1987 speech at the Brandenburg Gate—“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”—Gorbachev bristled. He told his advisers that he would not let the Americans set his European policy. But even so, Gorbachev’s closest foreign affairs aide, Anatolii Cherniaev, wrote in his diary, “He feels it in his heart that the problem cannot be removed and that someday the Germans will reunite.”²¹

What really galled Gorbachev was that East German intransigence prevented him from doing what he considered really important for the Soviet Union, not least economically: to draw closer to West Germany and, through the Germans, to western Europe. Gorbachev had not given up on the age-old Soviet Cold War dream of somehow politically detaching the Europeans from the Americans. But as his economic needs grew, especially for trade and credits, his priorities began to shift. Gorbachev was aware that the West German economy was the dynamo at the heart of the European Community, and also the source of much of the credit that had flowed into eastern Europe. Not believing that the United States would be a source of economic assistance, Gorbachev’s thinking concentrated more and more on West Germany and, perhaps in a longer perspective, Japan.

Still, it took up to late 1988 to arrange a proper meeting between Gorbachev and West German chancellor Helmut Kohl. East Germany was one big obstacle. Another was that Kohl feared the influence Gorbachev could have in western Europe through his enormous popularity there. “Gorbymania” in the West was at its peak in 1986–87. In West Germany, opinion polls showed that he was by far the most popular figure in world politics, well ahead of Reagan, Kohl, and Thatcher. In an offhand remark that really angered Gorbachev, Kohl in 1986 had said that the Soviet leader was only “a modern Communist leader who understands public relations. Goebbels,” added the chancellor tactlessly, “… was an expert in public relations, too.”²²

Gorbachev’s closest contacts in the West were with the two countries he had visited as a tourist twenty years before, France and Italy. The leaders there had experienced the moderation and political integration of their own Communist parties into the national mainstream, and therefore believed they could help socialize the Soviet Union into status quo world affairs as well. The Italian leader Giulio Andreotti and the French president François Mitterrand were probably among the most cynical entrepreneurs of power in postwar Europe, but their experience and insights fitted Gorbachev’s purpose of learning more about how the West actually operated. Margaret Thatcher, too, was a favored interlocutor, even if the general secretary expected to get less, both in terms of useful advice and support, from the prime minister the Soviet press had dubbed “the Iron Lady.”

Still, Gorbachev was realistic enough to understand that he needed to concentrate on relations with the United States if he were to achieve the two key breakthroughs he was looking for: nuclear disarmament and reduction of military tension, both in Europe and elsewhere. In late 1987 the Soviet leader went to Washington for his first summit on US soil. The official purpose was to sign a treaty on eliminating most intermediate nuclear forces, such as the SS-20s and Pershings, in itself a huge step forward for arms control. But the summit ranged much wider. Gorbachev told Reagan about his plans for democratic government in the USSR and spoke openly about his difficulties. The president was impressed both with his dedication and with his frankness. He startled Reagan by saying that the Soviet Union expected to withdraw fully from Afghanistan within twelve months (although Gorbachev’s appeals for the Americans to stop arming the mujahedin fell on deaf ears). Above all he got Reagan’s attention when he declared that he would “like to work together with the President to resolve regional conflicts.” In follow-ups from the summit the Soviets and the Americans for the first time sat down to discuss how they together could work to draw down the conflicts in Indochina, in southern Africa, and in Central America.

After the Washington summit, the two sides began to view each other, at least to a limited extent, as partners seeking solutions to world problems. There was little doubt that the Americans were in the driver’s seat. The Soviets often took over US positions or ameliorated them, at most. This reflected both genuine changes in Soviet views of regional conflicts and a sense of weakness on their side. Though under pressure toward the end of his presidency, Reagan had nothing like the problems Gorbachev had at home. But also just getting to know each other better actually did deliver results. Military to military contacts flourished, during which the generals discovered that some of their worst fears did not appear in the strategy of the other side, or that some procedures were merely mirror images of each other. Enemy stereotypes started to give way, although it was still unclear what they would be replaced by. For some allies of both countries, and especially for Soviet allies in Africa and Asia, the process seemed to happen with bewildering, unnerving speed.

Only six months after the Washington summit Ronald Reagan traveled to Moscow for the first visit to the Soviet capital by a US president in sixteen years. Although the two sides made progress on arms control and general bilateral relations, the real breakthrough was in political atmospherics. At a speech at Moscow State University, broadcast directly by Soviet television, Reagan lauded the new relationship between the two sides. They were now partners and friends, he said. “People do not make wars,” Reagan argued, “governments do. And no mother would ever willingly sacrifice her sons for territorial gain, for economic advantage, for ideology. A people free to choose will always choose peace.”²³ When asked by a reporter, as he walked across Red Square, whether he still believed the Soviet Union was an evil empire, Reagan said, “No. You are talking about another time, another era.”²⁴ He put his arm around Gorbachev and announced that “there is good chemistry between us.”²⁵

Reagan’s willingness to embrace the Soviet side did not extend to regional conflicts, however. When Gorbachev tried to explain to him that politics in Muslim countries was already moving from Cold War confrontations to a risk of new fundamentalist regimes, Reagan refused to listen. Gorbachev highlighted the dangers that existed in Afghanistan. But, the general secretary continued with some relief, “Afghanistan is now a thing of the past. We have reached our agreement. Let’s untie the Afghanistan knot and use it as a basis of untying other regional knots.” “The Soviet Union,” Gorbachev said, “was willing to act with the United States, but the US seemed uninterested or unwilling to work cooperatively.”²⁶

Gorbachev was right that Afghanistan did not set a good precedent for cooperation with the United States on regional conflicts. In April 1988 the Pakistanis and the Afghans had signed the Geneva Accords, guaranteed by the USSR and the United States. All sides promised to respect principles of sovereignty and noninterference, and the Soviets stated that they would withdraw their troops no later than May 1989. Any internal settlement was left up to the Afghans themselves. Washington refused to stop arming the mujahedin, noting simply that “should the Soviet Union exercise restraint in providing military assistance to parties in Afghanistan, the United States similarly will exercise restraint.”²⁷ It was a sham of an agreement, which allowed the Afghan civil war to continue as before, minus the presence of Soviet troops. But for Gorbachev it was still a victory of sorts: it allowed him to bring the soldiers home and to draw a line under the Afghanistan fiasco. The withdrawal was completed by 15 February 1989, three months ahead of the deadline.

Gorbachev’s supporters had hoped that the Afghan settlement, if it could be called that, and Reagan’s public embrace of the Soviet leader in Moscow would give the general secretary some slack in dealing with domestic affairs. That was not to be the case. In late 1988 and early 1989 problems seemed to be peaking on the home front, with food shortages in the cities and growing political unrest in some of the republics. Much of the dissatisfaction was concentrated on Gorbachev himself. He had promised so much and delivered so little, many people thought. Some had already forgot that only a few years earlier such sentiments openly expressed could have landed them in prison or worse. Now, the reforms themselves seemed to be under threat because the Soviet state was breaking apart at the seams.

The only leader who seemed undaunted by these difficulties was Gorbachev himself. He spent much time in the winter of 1988–89 thinking about political reform and the decentralization of power to the republics. In March 1989 the Soviet Union held its first ever contested elections for a new parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies. The CPSU won in most precincts, often by dubious methods, but about 20 percent of the seats were won by independents. One of them was Andrei Sakharov, the dissident physicist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who had been released from internal exile only two years before. Another was the rebellious Boris Yeltsin, a former Moscow party chief and member of the Politburo who back in 1987 had threatened to resign in protest against the slow pace of reform and as a consequence had been fired by Gorbachev. The party’s monopoly on power had been broken. And the breaking had been designed by the man who was the Communist Party’s general secretary and the country’s supreme leader.

In his first years in power, Mikhail Gorbachev had attempted to redraw the political map inside and outside of the Soviet Union. To him, the Cold War no longer made sense, at least not in its classical form of global confrontation and lack of interaction. His starting point was Marxist-Leninist, or rather, Marxist and Leninist. He believed in materialist analyses but also in the ability of a small and determined minority to act on behalf of society as a whole. And he found that the USSR needed to adopt some of the practices of the West in order to retain and develop Soviet socialism. Learning and adapting was not a sign of weakness, Gorbachev believed, but a source of strength. His leadership qualities and the authority of the Communist Party would make perestroika a success.

Three things happened domestically to undermine Gorbachev’s project. The Soviet economy took a turn for the worse, in part because of the dislocation produced by uncertain reforms. Across the Soviet Union people began turning against the party’s hierarchical structures. And a sizeable number of Soviet leaders, including some of Gorbachev’s close advisers, had begun losing faith in even the basic tenets of socialism. The general secretary was caught between party conservatives, who wanted stability and political control, and those who were willing to abandon the party in order to pursue their own plans for the future of their countries and for their own future. Gorbachev himself wanted political, economic, and legal reform, but without throwing overboard the achievements of Soviet socialism. His aim, increasingly openly expressed, was a state ruled by law, in which the power of the party was not removed but curtailed. In October 1988 Gorbachev told the Politburo that “the reorganization of the apparatus is connected with the formation of a rule-of-law state.… The entire structure of our society and state must work on a legitimate basis, i.e., within the limits of the law. No-one has the right to go beyond the boundaries of the law, to break the law. And the most important violator… is sitting here, at this table—the Politburo, and also the Secretariat, of the Central Committee.”²⁸

In his international policies Gorbachev aimed to overcome the Cold War and move the Soviet Union closer to western Europe and especially to European social democracy. In conversations with the former West German chancellor Willy Brandt, now head of the Socialist International, and with Spain’s socialist prime minister Felipe González, he admitted that “talking with you is both easy and hard for us. Easy because the level of mutual understanding allows us to communicate like friends, openly, discussing any subject. But it is difficult because we cannot gloss over problems with general phrases.… Perhaps,” the general secretary told Willy Brandt in 1989, “it is time to consider what needs to be done to overcome the schism of 1914.”²⁹ Gorbachev saw his policies as part of Russia’s age-old linking up with Europe, but also as a coming together of socialists who had been split apart by their responses to World War I, at the dawn of the Cold War ideological conflict.

But Gorbachev’s plans for an international reordering reached beyond Europe. To him, getting rid of the Cold War meant more than a return to concepts of state interest, of the sort that had existed in the late nineteenth century, before the Cold War took hold. His vision was for a better-organized world, in which the UN and comprehensive international agreements regulated international affairs and prevented the kind of indiscriminate killing that both sides had engaged in far too often in regional conflicts during the Cold War. Given the US conviction that the world at large was turning toward American concepts of freedom and free market practices, Gorbachev’s vision might seem naïve. But it was another striking example of how, within the span of only a few years, a vigorous leader had been able to redefine the very purpose of what the Soviet state stood for and how Soviet power should be understood.