The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991

INTRODUCTION

Cold War was the state of neither war nor peace between America and the Soviet Union in the decades after the Second World War. Victory in 1945 over Germany and Japan had left them as the two global superpowers and their own subsequent stand-off could at any time have erupted into a ‘hot’ war with nuclear weapons that no one, anywhere on earth, would survive. On both sides, politicians and public alike quickly recognized the dangers of the situation. But although everyone wanted to prevent a Third World War, the US–Soviet struggle seemed interminable as ever more destructive atomic arsenals were built up.

In the contest of ideologies one corner was occupied by America, which stood for capitalism, while in the opposite corner the Soviet Union championed communism. After crushing the Third Reich, the USSR exported the Marxist-Leninist model of state and society to Eastern Europe. Revolutions quickly followed in China and elsewhere, and Joseph Stalin proclaimed that the global balance of power was tilting in favour of communism. America shored up governments in every continent that were willing to resist the spread of communist influence. The superpowers founded vast military coalitions, NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Washington denounced the Kremlin’s abuse of human rights; Moscow condemned the American limits on welfare provision. They endlessly accused each other of being predatory imperialists. They financed coups and counter-coups, revolutions and counter-revolutions all over the world. They subsidized client states and sought to control them in their own interests. When forecasting the inevitable demise of the rival superpower, they predicted that all manner of evil would vanish from the earth on that joyous day.

At the same time they knew very well – and Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove made it vividly clear – that any small miscalculation could lead to the firing of nuclear missiles which would produce a planetary disaster. Despite every technological advance, mistakes could much too easily still occur along the chain of surveillance. The political leaders with responsibility for war and peace depended on their counter-espionage agencies and alarm systems for information about whether the other side was about to get their retaliation in first. The consequences of a false alert could be catastrophic.

America and the USSR constantly struggled with each other. In June 1950 the communists of northern Korea, with covert Soviet assistance, invaded the American-backed south of the country. America and its allies sent forces to halt their advance in a war that lasted three years. In October 1962 the superpowers teetered on the brink of world war when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchëv began to install strategic ballistic missiles in Cuba as a challenge to American power. Khrushchëv backed down only after President John Kennedy threatened to use force to halt the process. The missile crisis shocked the rival leaderships into agreeing strategies to prevent the recurrence of such an emergency. They also negotiated about how limit the size of their nuclear weapon stockpiles. Under President Richard Nixon and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev they moved towards a peaceful rivalry known as détente, at the same time vying for influence in what was known as the Third World. President Jimmy Carter suspended détente in December 1979 in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. After Ronald Reagan’s victory in the presidential election in November 1981, the stand-off between the superpowers sharpened. In late 1983 Soviet leaders received intelligence reports that the Americans were planning a pre-emptive nuclear offensive under cover of NATO’s Able Archer military exercise. The atmosphere cleared only when Washington provided assurances about its peaceful intent.

What held the two sides back from a ‘hot’ war, not just in the early 1980s but throughout the Cold War, was the certain knowledge that the enemy had the weapons to mount a devastating counteroffensive. Only a fool in the Kremlin or the White House could expect to emerge unscathed from any conflict involving nuclear ballistic missiles. Yet no serious attempt was made to end the Cold War. At best, the leaders strove to lessen the dangers. Their policies were conditioned by influential lobbies that promoted the interests of national defence. For decades the Soviet ‘military-industrial complex’ had imposed its priorities on state economic policy, and the Western economic recession that arose from the rise in the price of oil in 1973 encouraged American administrations to issue contracts for improved military technology to stimulate recovery.¹ The Cold War therefore seemed a permanent feature of global politics, and pacifists and anti-nuclear campaigners seemed entirely lacking in realism.

Things changed sharply in March 1985 when Mikhail Gorbachëv became Soviet General Secretary and formed a partnership for peace with Ronald Reagan. Not long before becoming President in January 1981, Reagan was shocked to hear that America had no defence against a nuclear attack. Wanting an end to the arms race, he called for a reduction in the stocks of atomic weapons held by both superpowers. Gorbachëv echoed his appeals to eliminate all nuclear weaponry, and the Chernobyl power station disaster of April 1986 heightened his awareness of the dangers of even civilian nuclear energy. A serious meeting of minds occurred as General Secretary and President directed their administrations towards cooperation in reducing the number of nuclear missiles held on land, at sea and in the air. As the rapprochement grew, Reagan and his successor George Bush watched with wonder as the USSR dismantled its totalitarian politics and communist ideology and permitted a growing measure of civil freedom and economic reform. As a result, in 1987–1990 alone, against every expectation, the superpowers signed agreements on intermediate-range and strategic nuclear weapons, on Afghanistan, on conventional forces and on German reunification. Anticommunist revolutions swept across Eastern Europe in 1989. Global politics would never be the same again and Bush felt safe in declaring the Cold War to be over.

How and why did the great change come about? The relationship between Moscow and Washington was acutely hazardous at the start of the 1980s, and yet by the end of the decade the USSR and America had achieved an historic reconciliation. That this happened so peacefully was a colossal achievement; the Cold War could easily have ended in catastrophe.

This is hardly a neglected topic, for the end of the Cold War has attracted a massive literature. Memoirs have poured from the pens of the leaders and their officials and there has been a flood of documentary collections, not to mention scholarly accounts. There have always been rival schools of explanation. In the eyes of Gorbachëv’s admirers, a nimbus of acclaim hangs over him alone for reconciling the superpowers and giving peace a chance. This perception was widespread in East and West while he was in power and is an enduring article of belief even among some of his detractors. The General Secretary’s determination and charisma are seen as the tools with which he realized his idealistic conception of politics in the USSR and around the world.² According to a rival school, however, it was really Reagan’s anticommunist policies that dragged Gorbachëv to the negotiating table. The President is said to have achieved his purposes by the firm pursuit of American military modernization, and his Strategic Defense Initiative is regarded as the straw that broke the camel’s back. He is praised for striking up a rapport with the Soviet leader without compromising his national objectives.³

Gorbachëv and Reagan were truly exceptional politicians working in cooperation in extraordinary times.⁴ But even when Gorbachëv’s contribution is recognized, the question arises as to whether he jumped or was pushed into reforming Soviet policy. And though Reagan is increasingly regarded as having achieved a decisive impact on the process, the need persists to assess the importance of his nuclear disarmament programme. In his handling of Gorbachëv, moreover, Bush by common consent was initially less nimble than his predecessor. In fairness to him, however, Bush rose to the highest office at a time of extraordinary change in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.⁵ It makes sense to ask how it was that the leaders interacted and why they changed their minds about each other. This requires the sharing of attention equally between the superpowers. General Secretary and President in fact did nothing of importance in foreign policy without thinking about the likely response of the other, and the thread that holds together the events under scrutiny in this book is the desirability of a genuinely bilateral analysis.

American and Soviet leaders brought much pragmatism and improvisation to their dealings, and the stunning disintegration of communist order in the USSR and Eastern Europe required them to be hugely adaptive.⁶ White House and Kremlin displayed this quality in abundance. Reagan, Gorbachëv and Bush coped skilfully with the unknown unknowns that arrived daily on their desks for rapid decision.

The importance of ideas also demands some fresh consideration. The Soviet reformers proclaimed their quest for a middle way between authoritarian socialism and advanced capitalism. They saw themselves as a vanguard on active service in a clash of value systems. The American administration displayed the same combative spirit when advocating principles of democratic choice and the market economy and defending what it regarded as the West’s interest.⁷ Crusaders fought on both sides, and Reagan and Gorbachëv were passionate about the righteousness of their campaigns. It soon became clear that Reagan favoured a goal of denuclearization that failed to convince most of his leading officials. Gorbachëv, though, claimed to share Reagan’s disarmament objectives and pressed for rapid signature of treaties. Whether or not Gorbachëv genuinely believed in the total elimination of nuclear weaponry, he acted as if he did; and as political and economic difficulties piled up in the USSR, the practical pressure on him to deepen the rapprochement with America intensified. The balance between pragmatic pressure and intellectual conviction is something that deserves examination.

It was never easy to build a durable confidence between Washington and Moscow. Such were Bush’s suspicions that the first thing he did on becoming President in January 1989 was to order an exhaustive review of American foreign policy. The two leaderships continued to have much to learn about each other. The media of each superpower were consistently sceptical, if no longer aggressive, in depicting the other side. Gorbachëv has been said to have drawn his early analysis from the brighter products of Soviet research institutes.⁸ But the influences on his subsequent thinking have to be examined in the light of his dismissive remarks about the briefings he received from both academics and the KGB. As regards Reagan and Bush, many of their own officials implored them to look on Gorbachëv as a trickster who was trying to coax undesirable concessions out of the Americans. Expert reports were heavy and frequent, and the task is now to establish what each President made of them and how much they relied on their personal instincts and face-to-face observations. Reagan’s trust in Gorbachëv grew at the summits in Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington and Moscow in 1985–1988. Bush was Gorbachëv’s friend from the Malta summit of 1989 onwards.

The leaders in Moscow and Washington had to find ways to carry their political establishments along with them. For years before the mid-1980s it had been argued that the American military-industrial complex had no interest in moves towards global peace. The heavy industry ministries and army high command in the USSR were similarly regarded as eternally attached to militarist objectives.⁹

Reagan and Bush were conscious of the scepticism among American conservatives about the agreements that they wanted to finalize with the Kremlin. Growing unease was also noticeable among Soviet communist conservatives about the concessions that Gorbachëv made to White House demands as he pursued rapprochement. Reagan succeeded in reassuring his political constituency; Gorbachëv did the same, at least until the end of the 1980s. Of the two, Gorbachëv had the tougher task, since he was all too obviously giving up to the Americans more than he appeared to gain; and whereas Reagan inherited a stable political and economic order, Gorbachëv was frantically trying to overturn decades of communist thought and practice. But why did the armaments lobbies in both countries prove to be the dogs that did not bark – or how did the leaders succeed in restoring calm when some barking took place? One part of the answer is that Reagan satisfied his military manufacturers and armed forces by boosting the contracts for research and production. But the same can scarcely be said about Gorbachëv and fellow reformers who switched the state budget away from the old priorities of defence. Leading officials in the party, KGB and Defence Ministry united against Gorbachëv in August 1991, but a question remains about why it took them so long to make their attempt.

Behind this lies another question that is seldom considered: to what extent did the Politburo understand the scale of its difficulties even before Gorbachëv became its General Secretary? Commentators have long recognized the economic pressures that were bearing down on the USSR’s budget by the early 1980s.¹⁰ Though the Politburo knew its allies in Eastern Europe to be mired in debt to Western banks, it was in no condition to bail them out or provide a path to technological regeneration. Poland was in chronic political crisis. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was expensive in lives and money. Moscow’s support for Cuba, Vietnam, Ethiopia and guerrilla campaigns in southern Africa was a relentless drain on finances. Meanwhile the economic revolution inaugurated by the new information technology was leaving the USSR behind. Ever since the late 1940s America and its allies had imposed an embargo on selling advanced equipment with a potential for military use to the Soviet Union. They had interpreted this broadly to include many basic items of civilian industrial machinery, and the consequence was an ever wider gap in productivity. And the Politburo stayed vulnerable to international diplomatic pressure because of its human rights obligations under the terms of the Helsinki Final Act that Presidents Brezhnev and Ford had co-signed in 1975 with the leaders of Eastern Europe, Western Europe and Canada.

The USSR’s difficulties by themselves do not amount to proof that the Soviet leadership recognized them for what they were. Fortunately, it is now possible to examine the Kremlin deliberations before 1985. Gorbachëv was to claim that the Politburo was unaware about the real situation in the country until he introduced his programme of reforms. Was his picture of Kremlin politics a credible one or merely a self-serving caricature? Much hangs on the answer. If he is to be believed, then he kicked down a barred door; if not, it was already half-ajar. This is an important field for enquiry, yet it does not exhaust the list of mysteries about Gorbachëv’s contribution to change. The question also arises about how, once he started his reform of foreign policy, he succeeded in keeping the support of the rest of the Soviet leadership.

Of course, Gorbachëv and Reagan experienced many other demands on their time and energies. Though they are lauded for the results of their foreign policy, little attention has been paid to their management of the process. Gorbachëv’s choice of Eduard Shevardnadze as his Foreign Affairs Minister has attracted inadequate attention. Shevardnadze pressed for radical options in foreign policy, and until 1989 their partnership was largely harmonious. Reagan’s choice to head the State Department fell upon George Shultz, who was excited by the opportunities that presented themselves for arms reduction agreements. Whereas Shevardnadze initially enjoyed almost the entire Politburo’s approval, Shultz had to struggle against several leading officials of the Reagan administration who opposed any conciliation with Moscow. Not until 1987 did Reagan definitively come down on Shultz’s side against them. Shevardnadze and Shultz were imaginative planners who showed themselves indispensable as the strategic enablers of agreements on disarmament that their leaders could sign. This book will scrutinize how the statesmen whom I have called the big four – Reagan, Gorbachëv, Shultz and Shevardnadze – made their crucial collective contribution to rapprochement between America and the USSR.

It was the two superpowers that provided the crucial impetus for the process that brought the Cold War to a close. Both of them appreciated the need to carry their allies and friends along with them. In later years, West European presidents and premiers would line up to testify that they had worked consistently with the Americans to end hostilities with the USSR. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President François Mitterrand, Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Foreign Affairs Minister Giulio Andreotti each claimed to have made a decisive useful contribution. (Their Canadian, Japanese and Australian counterparts showed greater modesty in their recollections.) This calls for an audit of the pile of evidence that America’s NATO allies in the mid-1980s, with Thatcher to the fore, privately attacked Reagan for what they saw as his undue willingness to place his trust in the Kremlin.¹¹ Kohl and his Ten Points in favour of German reunification in November 1989 had a very obvious impact on events. The question arises about whether even he could have sustained his political campaign unless he knew he could count on American support. In addition, what influence is to be attributed to the pro-Gorbachëv campaigns of both the ‘peace movement’ and most communist and socialist parties in Western Europe?

Gorbachëv had an easier time with the Warsaw Pact than the American Presidents had with NATO. Though the East European party bosses felt disquiet about his attempt to reform the USSR, most of them endorsed his relaxation of the tension with America. They nevertheless became disorientated and confused as the communist order’s difficulties grew in the 1980s.¹² But they did not leave power voluntarily, and the pivotal factor in their fall was the bravery of the activists and crowds who took to the streets. Gorbachëv refused to sanction armed intervention to save communism. Few would deny that his policy of encouraging people to stand up for their rights contributed to the revolutions that overwhelmed the old leaderships. But it is still left to ask why the events of the year 1989 caught him so much by surprise – and to examine the impact they had on the situation in Lithuania and other Baltic Soviet republics.¹³ Indeed, his entire global strategy continues to raise questions. No one can doubt the importance of Soviet leaders’ decision to abandon almost all the USSR’s toeholds in the Third World despite their continuing objection to American global pretensions.¹⁴ But they still call for further investigation. World politics changed at astonishing pace, and each big or little shift affected all the others. And almost without anyone noticing it, the Soviet Union lost its superpower status.

The Cold War’s end was no pre-ordained process, but most accounts do at least agree that it was possible at any time for America and the USSR to relapse into their older postures of confrontation. Reagan, had he so decided, could have refused to deal constructively with the USSR. As an American conservative he had plenty of room for complaint about Soviet policies. Gorbachëv himself could have decided to halt or reverse his reforms. Many of those who had supported his appointment as General Secretary wanted him to do exactly this – and eventually his own leading appointees turned on him in the August 1991 coup. Enough of the communist system survived to have made this a practicable alternative. Gorbachëv, propped up by fellow reformers and prodded forward by Reagan and Bush, chose to travel in the opposite direction – and, step by step, the Cold War came to a peaceful end.

America won its struggle with the USSR, which fell into the ash-heap of history. Gorbachëv contended that the Soviet reformers were also victors since they had actively promoted conciliation between the superpowers and political democratization in the Soviet Union. Here a riddle awaits its answer. The American leadership made no attempt to disguise how it continued to pressurize the Kremlin. Reagan and Bush stipulated that if the USSR desired a rapprochement with America, it would not be enough to get out of Afghanistan and slacken the grip on Eastern Europe: Gorbachëv would also have to change the way that he treated his own people. The Americans made demands about radio jamming, exit visas, Baltic freedom, political prisoners and defamatory propaganda. The pressures were relentless before 1985 and lasted through all the years while Gorbachëv was in power.¹⁵ But as the USSR’s economic woes deepened from 1989, Gorbachëv found it ever harder to say no to Washington. What has yet to be established is how much of his willingness to compromise resulted from the stress applied by the Americans and how much from the Soviet economy’s current and long-term troubles.

This agenda for enquiry encompasses one of the cardinal episodes of recent world history. Time was when accounts of the closing years of the Cold War depended overwhelmingly on reminiscences by leaders and officials. From the Washington and Moscow vaults there subsequently emerged documentary collections that threw light on decisions at the highest level. Now it is possible to go to the archives and examine the original records of what Reagan, Gorbachëv and Bush said and wrote at the time. Copious holdings exist, scattered across Russia, the rest of Europe and America as well as on the World Wide Web. These are extraordinary enough in themselves. But there are also exceptional sources in the unpublished diaries and papers of Soviet and Western officials who were close to the seats of supreme power – those of Anatoli Adamishin, Rodric Braithwaite, Anatoli Chernyaev, Charles Hill, Vitali Kataev, Jack Matlock and Teimuraz Stepanov-Mamaladze. The personal records that they kept at the time give an unmatched sense of the exciting, important events they were witnessing.

The final justification for yet another account of the end of the Cold War is the idea of giving equal attention to the Soviet Union and America and their interaction in a churning world of transformation, a transformation that encompassed politics, economics, individual choice, institutional opportunity, ideology, cognitive growth and geopolitical challenge. The Cold War could so easily have had a different outcome, with baleful consequences for all of us. But things turned out as they did, and overwhelmingly for the better. What follows is the story of how and why Washington and Moscow achieved their improbable peace.

PART ONE

1. RONALD REAGAN

The man who entered the White House as US President on 20 January 1981 inspired anxiety in many people around the world. Ronald Wilson Reagan had the reputation of a Red-baiter. Few people thought highly of his intellect, and many attributed his success against the incumbent Jimmy Carter in the election of the previous November more to unease about recent foreign policy than to any confidence in Reagan as a competent leader.

As a former Hollywood actor, he had the reputation of having been born in a lucky shirt in 1911. In fact he experienced an unsettling childhood in Illinois because his salesman father was an habitual drunk. His mother, a devout follower of the Disciples of Christ, steadied the family. At school Ronald was outstanding at acting, sport and storytelling and had a holiday job as a lifeguard. He went on to Eureka College, where he majored in economics and sociology before finding work as a radio announcer. After taking a screen test with Warner Brothers in California he became a movie actor, and though he never belonged to the handful of global stars, he did play alongside Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn. He married the film actor Jane Wyman in 1940 and they started a family. Conscripted into the armed forces in the Second World War, he continued to make films in the First Motion Picture Unit and in 1947 became President of the Screen Actors Guild. Jane Wyman divorced him in 1949 and three years later he married Nancy Davis, who was also a film actor. As his film roles became fewer, he worked for General Electric as the host of its weekly drama show. His second marriage became the rock of his personal life. Reagan hated being away from Nancy even for a short time and constantly discussed public affairs with her.

As a young man he had voted for F. D. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party, but steadily his politics shifted away from the Democrats and it was as a Republican that he won election as California’s Governor in 1966. He unsuccessfully sought his new party’s nomination as its presidential candidate in 1968. He lost again in 1976, to the incumbent Gerald Ford, but was an undeniable force on the American political right. He had no serious Republican rival in 1980 and proceeded to sweep aside the incumbent Jimmy Carter in the November election.

From Truman to Carter, the assumption since the end of the Second World War had been that the West should only try to contain the USSR; no US President had ever truly endeavoured to reverse the expansion of Soviet influence around the world. Ronald Wilson Reagan was determined to change things. He saw America as a country that had lost faith in itself after the debacle of the Vietnam war. He planned to increase the American military budget and put the USSR’s finances under the strain of an arms race. He would challenge the Kremlin throughout the world. He intended to denounce communism in all its manifestations, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 appeared in every one of his speeches as proof that the USSR was an expansionist power. He wanted America to stand up for its values and protect its interests. As President he meant to pull NATO and other allies and friendly powers along with him. His values were those of an American conservative. A Christian believer, he sprinkled his speeches with references to God. He saw his religious faith as integral to his confidence in America, personal freedom and the market economy.

In Soviet official circles he was an object of instant fear and loathing. He was known as a Cold Warrior, and the central communist newspaper Pravda routinely denounced him as a warmonger. Moscow’s commentators had been no gentler on Jimmy Carter. Stunned by Carter’s reaction to the invasion of Afghanistan, they had professed indifference to the struggle for the presidency between Carter and Reagan. Soviet media routinely described both candidates as ‘anti-Soviet’.

In Washington Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin, who had headed the embassy since 1962, assured his Kremlin masters that he was doing everything to alert the Reagan administration to the current dangers to world peace. He drew attention to the propaganda of Gus Hall and the Communist Party of the USA.¹