Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989

Chapter 1

Reinventing Communism: Russia and China

The 7th of December 1988. Manhattan was abuzz that evening. Thousands of New Yorkers and tourists lined the streets, cheering, waving and giving thumbs-up signs behind the police barricades as Mikhail Gorbachev rode down Broadway in a forty-seven-car motorcade.

Gorbymania in Manhattan

Suddenly, in front of the Winter Garden Theater where the musical Cats was playing, Gorbachev ordered his stretch limo to halt. Smiling, he and his wife Raisa jumped out and had their pictures taken. The Soviet leader was photographed beneath a huge neon Coca-Cola sign, raising his clenched fists in triumph – like Robert ‘Rocky’ Balboa.

Gorbachev was really soaking up American adulation. A block south, in the middle of Times Square – the Mecca of world capitalism – the electronic billboard was flashing a red hammer and sickle with the message ‘Welcome, General Secretary Gorbachev’. He might still have been a communist at heart and the leader of America’s rival superpower, but that night in New York, ‘Gorby’ was a superstar, hailed above all as a peacemaker. Indeed most of his time in Manhattan the Soviet leader was mixing with celebs, billionaires and high society, rather than rubbing shoulders with the American proletariat.[1]

One of the visits tentatively scheduled was to Trump Tower. Real-estate developer Donald Trump could not wait to take Mrs Gorbachev around the glitzy shops in his tower’s marble atrium. He was also dying to show off to the Gorbachevs a suite on the sixtieth floor with a swimming pool that he claimed was ‘virtually regulation size, within the confines of an apartment’ and, of course, his own opulent $19 million domicile on the sixty-eighth floor. He said he wanted them to get ‘a good shot of what New York and the United States are about’ and he hoped that they would ‘find it special’. In the end, Gorbachev’s itinerary was altered and Trump Tower slipped off the list. That afternoon, however, when a Gorbachev lookalike was seen strolling past Tiffany’s and down Fifth Avenue followed by a horde of film crews drawing huge crowds, Trump and his bodyguards rushed down from his office thinking that the Soviet leader had changed his mind and was now keen to view his temple of consumerism. Squeezing on to the sidewalk, the tycoon enthusiastically pumped the fake Gorbachev’s hand.

The real Gorbachev was actually sequestered inside the Soviet mission. Caught out, Trump assured journalists he had seen through the stunt, declaring ‘I looked into the back of his limo and saw four attractive women. I knew that his society had not come that far yet in terms of capitalist decadence.’ Mikhail Gorbachev certainly did not share Donald Trump’s ideal of decadence. Nevertheless, he was clearly fascinated by the market economy. Bystander Joe Peters reckoned that Gorbachev was ‘going to learn all our tricks of capitalism and become the Donald Trump-ski of the Soviet Union’.[2]

The sense of anticipation was palpable. That very morning Gorbachev achieved perhaps his greatest international triumph so far. At the United Nations he had delivered a truly astounding address, one that would become pivotal for future Soviet foreign policy and for the course of world politics. Gorbachev’s intention was to deliver ‘the exact opposite’ of Winston Churchill’s notorious Iron Curtain speech of 1946.

Over the course of one hour, the Soviet leader dropped a succession of bombshells on specific policy issues. Most striking, he declared the termination of the international class struggle, insisting that ‘the use or threat of force no longer can or must be an instrument of foreign policy’. Instead, he urged the world to embrace ‘the supremacy of the universal human idea’ and lauded the significance of the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights which had been adopted, almost to the day, forty years before.[3]

These were amazing words from any Moscow policymaker, let alone the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. On the eve of 1989 Gorbachev stood before the world as the master of reform, apparently in control of events.

In reality, he would unleash a revolution that swept everything before it – eventually even himself. And the Western leader who would have to cope with the fallout was a cautious new American president who felt considerable scepticism about his magnetic Soviet counterpart and was wary about the true intentions behind Russia’s headline-grabbing reforms. George H. W. Bush had been vice president for all eight years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency (1981–9). He would enter the White House determined to take stock of US–Soviet relations and rethink his priorities as he started building a new agenda that would distinguish him politically from the Reagan administration.[4] In fact, his main concern in early 1989 was how to handle the ‘reinvention’ of communism that was under way not in Europe but in Asia.

*

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was not a ‘normal’ Soviet leader. Born in 1931 in Privolnoye, a small village near Stavropol in the north Caucasus, he grew up witnessing his family’s suffering under Stalin’s collectivisation drive and later the Great Purge. When Gorbachev was ten, his father was drafted into the army and did not return for five years. Privolnoye was spared destruction during the Great Patriotic War but Stavropol was occupied by the Germans for five months in 1942–3, so Gorbachev experienced the ravages of war close-up and did not forget. Academically gifted and interested in politics, he shone at school and was cultivated from an early age by the local leaders of the Communist Party. Thanks to their patronage, he was sent to the prestigious Moscow State University (MGU) to study law; in order to gain entry he wrote an essay entitled ‘Stalin is our battle glory, Stalin is the Flight of our Youth’ – evidence that his political views then were still ‘straight Stalinist, like everyone else at the time’, as his best friend at university put it. At a third-year ball he met Raisa Maximovna Titarenko, a chic and clever philosophy student. A year later, in 1954, they were married.

Sent back to Stavropol, Gorbachev rose steadily through the Soviet nomenklatura system in the usual way, while Raisa taught Marxism at the local polytechnic and studied for a PhD on the peasantry in the region’s collective farms. Gorbachev’s youthful Stalinism was shaken by First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 ‘secret speech’ which denounced his predecessor Stalin’s monstrous crimes and laid bare the endemic problems of Russian industry and agriculture. Henceforth Gorbachev, though continuing to believe faithfully in communist ideology, recognised how flawed it had become in Soviet practice. Through his travels with Raisa to France, Italy and Sweden from the 1960s onwards, he encountered the West and glimpsed an alternative future. Meanwhile, his political career accelerated. In 1967, he became the regional party boss, aged only thirty-five; twelve years later he was put in charge of Soviet agriculture, moving to the centre of power in Moscow, while Raisa was given a teaching post at MGU. One of his leading patrons was KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary in November 1982.[5]

Although nearing fifty, Gorbachev was almost a spring chicken by the standards of the Soviet Politburo. Andropov, nearly seventeen years his senior, suffered from acute kidney failure and died in February 1984. His successor Konstantin Chernenko was two decades senior to Gorbachev: afflicted with heart and lung problems, he expired in March 1985. Finally the old men of the Kremlin decided to jump a generation and opt for Gorbachev. Justifying to Raisa why he was taking the job, Mikhail said ‘all those years … it’s been impossible to achieve anything substantial, anything on a large scale. It’s like coming up against a wall. But life demands it. We can’t go on like this.’[6] Yet what should be done instead was much harder to determine. First Gorbachev tried an anti-alcohol campaign; after that failed he looked for deeper remedies and new slogans, espousing first ‘uskorenie’ (acceleration), then ‘perestroika’ (restructuring) and ‘glasnost’ (transparency). But these did not entail revolutionary changes: Gorbachev was still a party man and wanted to re-form the Soviet system to make it more viable and competitive: his motto was ‘Back to Lenin’.

His frequent invocations of Lenin were in part to justify to the party his policies of innovation and restructuring, which so sharply deviated from the Stalinist and Brezhnevite practice that in Gorbachev’s opinion had perverted ‘socialism’. But more than that, he identified his own view of fundamental reform of the Soviet system under the auspices of perestroika with Lenin’s 1920s ideas of a New Economic Policy: a guided and limited system of free enterprise. His goal at this stage was not a turn to capitalism or to social democracy. For him Lenin remained the source of legitimacy for policy changes within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) – the pure font of Soviet doctrine. He wanted to restructure the traditional Soviet sociopolitical order ‘within the system’, which is why under glasnost he also advocated ‘socialist pluralism’ ahead of full ‘political pluralism’ – all this to reinvigorate the Soviet Union.[7]

To achieve reform and rejuvenation, Gorbachev had to reduce the burden of the military-industrial complex on the Soviet economy, intensified during the 1980s by the war in Afghanistan and the spiralling arms race with America.

To be sure, the Soviet command economy was performing poorly simply for structural reasons – a fact masked by the global oil price rise of the 1970s and the country’s vast Siberian reserves which fuelled a GDP growth rate of 2–3.5% between 1971 and 1980. But when the oil price dropped in the next decade, national income fell sharply. Indeed, in 1980–5 the USSR found itself at near zero growth. The increasing dissatisfaction of Soviet consumers was exacerbated by declining living standards and limited access to high-tech civilian goods. This was due in part to the inflexibility of the planned economy and the lack of industrial modernisation, but the root problem was that perhaps up to a quarter of GDP was being gobbled up by the military sector to the detriment of the civilian production.[8]

In order to galvanise the economy at home while slowly opening it up to the outside world, Gorbachev needed to foster a stable international environment and also to address the USSR’s ‘imperial overstretch’ in Eastern Europe and the developing world. This meant reducing US hostility (disengaging from the arms race) and making compromises in the Third World (including ideological recognition of the right to self-determination). So domestic policy was inextricably bound up with foreign policy. Seeking a less confrontational relationship with the United States, Gorbachev was keen to talk with his American opposite number.[9]

At first glance, however, US president Ronald Reagan seemed an unlikely partner. Born in 1911, and so the same age as the man Gorbachev had just replaced, Reagan was a vehement anti-communist who had intensified the arms race once he came to power in 1981. He was notorious for his denunciation of the USSR as an ‘evil empire’ and for his prediction that the ‘march of freedom and democracy’ would ‘leave Marxism–Leninism on the ash heap of history’.[10] This all-out ideological competition, he believed, justified the military build-up of his early years. But there was another side to Reagan – the would-be peacemaker, who saw military power as a basis for diplomacy to secure ‘peace through strength’. Even more surprising, this hard-headed realist cherished a utopian belief in a nuclear-free world.[11]

During his first term, Reagan had been unable to initiate dialogue with the sick old men of the Kremlin. But with the accession of Gorbachev, not merely dialogue but negotiation suddenly became possible. Over the course of four summits between Geneva in November 1985 and Moscow in May/June 1988 the discussions were often heated but the two leaders gradually forged a relationship based on personal trust and even affection. Gorbachev’s radical nuclear arms-reduction proposals at Reykjavik in October 1986 – six months after the horrendous Chernobyl accident – almost carried Reagan along with him, to the horror of some die-hard advisers. By the time of their Washington meeting in December 1987 they had moved on to first-name terms. There was also substance in the new relationship. At Washington, Reagan and Gorbachev signed away a whole category of nuclear weapons in the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty – the first time the superpowers had ever agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals. Here was a significant step in defusing the Cold War, making it less likely that a nuclear conflict would break out. Atomic scientists put back their celebrated ‘Doomsday Clock’ to six minutes before midnight, instead of three. And on 31 May 1988, when Reagan was asked in Red Square whether he still felt the USSR was an ‘evil empire’, he replied ‘I was talking about another time, another era.’[12]

Reagan was moving on – and so was Gorbachev. Six months later, the dramatic address at the UN on the morning of 7 December was for the Soviet leader a ‘watershed’ moment. He wanted to present himself as a shaper of international affairs but, unlike Churchill, moving the world out of the Cold War. And he was keen to wrong-foot the Americans, especially at a time of transition between presidents when their foreign policy would be in limbo. ‘The Americans are scared that we might do something as in the spirit of Reykjavik.’ He had been preparing the speech for months, ever since Reagan’s visit, and it went through many drafts, being tweaked right up to the last minute. Gorbachev was determined to use the occasion to show the world his belief in the bright future of the rejuvenated Soviet Union and to confirm his credentials as a visionary peacemaker. And he hoped that by setting out his new political thinking in such an eye-catching way he would secure Western credits and economic assistance.[13]

By the time Gorbachev arrived at the UN, the vast General Assembly Hall was totally packed, with all 1,800 seats occupied. There was a buzz of excited chatter. Expectations were high. Gorbachev stepped up to the podium, dressed in a dark, well-tailored suit, white shirt and burgundy-coloured tie. At the start of his address, he spoke slowly and deliberately but then gathered pace, with increasing sweep and authority. In doing so, he set out his ideological blueprint for how Marxism–Leninism should evolve and how the world should extricate itself from the Cold War.[14]

He began with remarks that drew together Western and Eastern European history around the revolutionary idea: ‘Two great revolutions, the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, have exerted a powerful influence on the actual nature of the historical process and radically changed the course of world events. Both of them, each in its own way, have given a gigantic impetus to man’s progress.’ Having detoxified revolution and established common ground across the divided continent, Gorbachev expatiated on the universality of human experience – ‘today we have entered an era when progress will be based on the interests of all mankind’ – and insisted that further progress was possible only through a truly global consensus, in a movement towards what he called ‘a new world order’. If that were so, he added, ‘then it is also worth agreeing on the fundamental and truly universal prerequisites and principles for such activities. It is evident, for example, that force and the threat of force can no longer be, and should not be, instruments of foreign policy.’ Here was an explicit renunciation of the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’ – Moscow’s claimed right to deploy the Red Army within its own sphere of influence to save a fellow communist state – that in 1968 had justified the use of tanks to crush the Prague Spring. Instead, considering the ‘variety of sociopolitical structures’, he declared ‘freedom of choice’ to be a ‘universal principle’ that knows ‘no exception’.[15]

So Gorbachev was thinking big, way beyond the conventional bipolarities of East versus West. After more than forty years of Cold War, he was explicitly advocating the ‘de-ideologisation of interstate relations’ and thereby declaring an end to Third World interventionism. Indeed, with the world as a whole now seriously tackling hunger, disease, illiteracy and ‘other mass ills’, he argued for recognising ‘the primacy of the universal human idea’. Nevertheless, he did not intend to abandon Soviet values: ‘The fundamental fact remains that the formation of the peaceful period will take place in conditions of the existence and rivalry of various socio-economic and political systems.’ However, he went on, ‘the meaning of our international efforts, and one of the key tenets of the new thinking, is precisely to impart to this rivalry the quality of sensible competition in conditions of respect for freedom of choice and a balance of interests’. So the two systems would not blur into each other, but their relationship would become one of peaceful ‘co-development’. In this way, working together, the superpowers would be able to ‘eliminate the nuclear threat and militarism’ whose eradication was essential for world development and the survival of the human race.

In addition to his grand vision, Gorbachev made specific proposals, especially terminating the nine-year intervention in Afghanistan, the USSR’s equivalent of America’s Vietnam, and on disarmament, which he called ‘the most important topic, without which no problem of the coming century can be resolved’. He spoke of the need for a new strategic arms-reduction treaty (START), reducing each superpower’s arsenal by 50%. And, to put pressure on the United States, he unveiled a unilateral proposal to cut the Soviet troop strength in Europe by half a million men over the next two years. In this way Gorbachev sought to initiate a shift from the ‘economy of armament’ to an ‘economy of disarmament’.

Such a conversion had become absolutely essential to underpin his project of a ‘profound renewal’ of the entire socialist society – a project that had grown vastly in scope since 1985 as he developed his big ideas of perestroika and glasnost. Indeed, Gorbachev explained, ‘under the sign of democratisation, perestroika has now spread to politics, the economy, intellectual life and ideology’. Soviet democracy would be ‘placed on a solid normative base’ including ‘laws on the freedom of conscience, glasnost, public associations and organisations’. Nevertheless, in order not to tempt anybody to ‘encroach on the security’ of the Soviet Union and its allies while the Kremlin undertook the much-needed ‘bold revolutionary transformations’, Gorbachev was adamant that the USSR’s defence capability should be maintained at what he termed a level of ‘reasonable and reliable sufficiency’. Such language was a marked change from the pursuit of ‘superiority’ that had dominated East–West relations for most of the Cold War. Serious differences still existed, he admitted, and tough problems had to be resolved between the superpowers but the Soviet leader was essentially upbeat about the future as he looked around the hall: ‘We have already graduated from the primary school of learning to understand each other and seek solutions in both our own and common interests.’[16]

Near the end of his speech he acknowledged the work of President Reagan and his Secretary of State, George Shultz, in forging agreements. ‘All this’, he said, ‘is capital that has been invested in a joint undertaking of historic importance. It must not be wasted or left out of circulation. The future US administration headed by newly elected President George Bush will find in us a partner, ready – without long pauses and backward movements – to continue the dialogue in a spirit of realism, openness, and goodwill, and with a striving for concrete results, over an agenda encompassing the key issues of Soviet–US relations and international politics.’[17] Bush was not in the audience – he watched the speech on television – but he could not have missed the message. As Gorbachev had told the Politburo before leaving Moscow, with his diplomatic offensive there would be ‘nowhere for Bush to turn’.[18]

Gorbachev’s aide Anatoly Chernyaev was in the audience. Having helped write the speech, he had expected it would make an impression but was not prepared for the reaction that morning. ‘For over an hour nobody stirred. And then the audience erupted in ovations, and they would not let [Gorbachev] go for a long time. He even had to get up and bow as if he were on stage.’[19] Gorbachev, a great showman, lapped it all up. Much of the press reaction was also positive. The New York Times editorialised, ‘Perhaps not since Woodrow Wilson presented his Fourteen Points in 1918 or since Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill promulgated the Atlantic Charter in 1941 has a world figure demonstrated the vision Mikhail Gorbachev displayed.’[20] But others looked behind the occasion and the rhetoric. The Christian Science Monitor, for instance, drew attention to what Gorbachev did not say. There was no suggestion that the Kremlin intended to pull back fully from its farthest positions of strategic influence gained in the Second World War – in East Germany and in East Asia. Indeed the speech said virtually nothing about Asia. Armed forces in Soviet Asia would be reduced, he promised, and ‘a major portion’ of Soviet troops temporarily stationed in the Mongolian People’s Republic would ‘return home’. But there was no mention of the bases in Vietnam, the Monitor complained, and not a word about the four northern Japanese islands seized by Stalin in 1945 whose disputed status had blocked a peace treaty between Japan and the USSR to formally end the Second World War.[21] The newspaper had a point – Gorbachev’s post-Cold War vision was selective – but the UN speech made clear that for him the cockpit of the Cold War lay in Europe. It was there that the tension had to be defused.

As soon as his show at the United Nations was over,[22] Gorbachev turned his mind to the next event in his packed New York schedule: a meeting with President Reagan and Vice President Bush on Governors Island, off the southern tip of Manhattan. Yet in the limo down to the pier at Battery Park, the Soviet leader had to take an urgent phone call from Moscow: a major earthquake had hit the Caucasus and the latest reports said that some 25,000 people in Armenia had died. Gorbachev decided to return home the next morning, without stopping over in Cuba and London as originally planned.[23] Controlling his anxieties, Gorbachev turned his mind during the short boat ride to what would be his fifth and farewell meeting with Reagan, the man he no longer considered an ‘unreconstructed Cold Warrior’ but instead with whom he had managed against the odds to develop a genuine fondness and friendship.[24]

As Bush watched the ferry coming towards him across the choppy waters of New York Harbor, he sensed a feeling of tense expectation among the waiting American and Soviet officials. He was certainly on edge himself. As president-elect, a few weeks away from inauguration and not yet in a position to set policy, he had to weigh his future role against his present status as merely Reagan’s deputy. He knew Gorbachev would be anxious to know in which direction he intended to take relations with the Soviet Union, but Reagan was still the man in the Oval Office. On this particular day Bush wanted to avoid doing anything that could be interpreted as undermining the current president’s authority or to circumscribe his own future freedom of action.[25]