An analysis of the role of political leadership in the Cold War’s ending, which shows why the popular view that Western economic and military strength left the Soviet Union with no alternative but to admit defeat is wrong. The Cold War got colder in the early 1980s and the relationship between the two military superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union, each of whom had the capacity to annihilate the other, was tense. By the end of the decade, East-West relations had been utterly transformed, with most of the dividing lines – including the division of Europe – removed. Engagement between Gorbachev and Reagan was a crucial part of that process of change. More surprising was Thatcher’s role.
The Human Factor is published by Oxford University Press.
FIVE MINUTES WITH Archie brown
Archie Brown is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of the British Academy, and an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of numerous books on the former Soviet Union and its demise, including The Gorbachev Factor (1996) and The Rise and Fall of Communism (2009), both of which won both the Alec Nove Prize and the Political Studies Association’s W.J.M. Mackenzie Prize for best politics book of the year.
What explains your interest in Russia?
It came about by pure chance. I was in my final year at LSE doing a broad social science degree, specialising in politics (in particular) and economics. I wanted to write an essay on Soviet politics so that I’d be able to answer a question on it in the Comparative Government exam paper. My tutor, a specialist on British politics, said he was not qualified to judge it, so he gave it to Leonard Schapiro, the author of a major book on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He liked my essay and encouraged me to apply for a graduate studentship in Russian political studies. I had to start learning Russian from scratch aged 24. It wasn’t because I had a fascination with Russia at that time and I was certainly never attracted to Communism, but I became keenly interested and don’t regret the path my career took.
What drew you to studying Gorbachev?
I’ve been studying political leadership for a very long time and followed Mikhail Gorbachev’s career especially closely. I got a head start 42 years ago in a conversation I had with Zdenĕk Mlynář, the main author of the radically reformist 1968 Action Programme of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia whom I had first met in Prague in 1965. When Mlynář, who was in political exile, spent a month in Oxford in June 1979, I learned from him that had been a close friend of Gorbachev when they studied together in the Law Faculty of Moscow State University. I asked whether he thought Gorbachev had an open mind. His response was that this youngest member of the top Soviet leadership team was “open-minded, intelligent, and anti-Stalinist”. So I took a special interest in Gorbachev from that time on. Because of my good relations with Mlynář, who didn’t go public on his friendship with a rising Soviet politician until Gorbachev had become Soviet leader in 1985, I was aware earlier than others that he was likely to be a reform-minded General Secretary, a position that, from late 1980 onwards, I increasingly believed he would attain.
What distinguishes this book from your previous ones on Russia?
Most of what I’d written in the past was about the Soviet political system and, even when I began to publish extensively on its transformation under Gorbachev, I was more focused on the domestic sphere than on foreign policy. This book is the only one I’ve written which is primarily on international relations and the making of foreign policy – and in the USA and UK as well as the USSR. Domestic considerations play a huge part in foreign policy in the United States, and they did in the Soviet Union as well. More specifically, I looked at the evolution of the thinking of the top leaders, Gorbachev, Reagan and Thatcher, and at the significance of their interrelationship.
What are your key findings?
Among them is the importance of engagement. It was extremely significant that Reagan and Thatcher moved away from the view that the less they had to do with the “evil empire”, the better. International contacts across the East-West divide between leaders, officials and experts in different fields were very important. Even in Brezhnev’s time, some senior Soviet officials and specialists from policy-oriented research institutes (such as IMEMO and the Institute of USA and Canada) visited Western countries and were influenced by what they saw. Gorbachev’s short visits to West European countries, including not least that to the the UK in December 1984, as well as to Canada in 1983, made a big impression on him. And Alexander Yakovlev, a very important member of Gorbachev’s top leadership team, reassessed his previous political beliefs very radically during the 10 years he spent as ambassador in Canada. These are merely the two most important examples. The significance of such transnational interactions has been underestimated in most International Relations analyses of the end of the Cold War. Another key point: while there was laudable attention paid in Western mass media to Soviet overt dissidents, there was a failure to understand the extent and profundity of the diversity of opinion that lay behind the monolithic façade the ruling Communist Party presented to its own people and the outside world. That became apparent to Western governments, and even to many specialists, only when the differences came out into the open in the second half of the 1980s.
How important was Gorbachev’s own role?
Only rarely does an individual leader make a fundamental difference. Gorbachev was such a leader. Ronald Reagan was an essential partner in the ending of the Cold War, and Margaret Thatcher played a significant supporting role, for she was Reagan’s favourite foreign leader by far and the one with most influence over him. More surprisingly, she established a strong and constructive relationship with Gorbachev. But it was the profound change in both Soviet domestic and foreign policy wrought by Gorbachev that was most crucial for ending the Cold War. I disagree strongly with the view that he was forced into such radical reforms or that any Soviet leader would have had to do what he did. The economic determinist argument about the end of the Cold War falls flat. The Soviet economy was not in good shape, to put it mildly, but it’s hard to say economic necessity forced his hand, for Gorbachev quite soon gave much higher priority to political than economic reforms. He didn’t embrace a market economy in principle until 1990 and the transition from command to market economy had still not happened when the Soviet Union ceased to exist at the end of 1991. The political reforms don’t fit into the economic determinist interpretation for, while they made Russia a vastly freer country, the economy went from bad to worse. It was in limbo – no longer an effective command economy but not yet a market economy. I disagree also with the triumphalist view that it was the Reagan administration’s military build-up that led the Soviet Union to admit defeat and accept that they couldn’t keep up. That’s quite a widespread view but a strange argument. Until the early 1970s the US had definite military superiority over the Soviet Union. Yet Communism, with Soviet support, expanded during the 1950s and 1960s. If we go back to the second half of the 1940s, the US had a monopoly of nuclear weapons, but that was the very time when the Soviet Union established Communist regimes in East-Central Europe. By contrast, in the mid-1980s there was a rough military parity between the US and the USSR. Each side had the capacity to annihilate the other. The Soviet military-industrial complex had a strong interest in the continuation of the Cold War and they were especially strongly opposed to any unilateral concessions. It took great political skill on Gorbachev’s part to outmanoeuvre them. His own values and evolving political beliefs were of decisive importance for the dramatic change which took place.
How would you describe the leadership styles of Gorbachev, Reagan and Thatcher?
I don’t focus only on the person at the top of the hierarchy. Leadership is important but it’s not only the top leader that counts. This is especially clear in Reagan’s case. He gave people in his administration wide leeway providing they were broadly in line with his outlook. His administration was deeply divided, and it was hugely significant that Reagan supported the pro-engagement stance of his Secretary of State George Shultz in the face of Defense Department opposition and CIA scepticism about any good coming out of negotiations with the Soviet Union. I define a strong leader as one who concentrates maximum power in his or her own hands and tries to take the big decisions in every area of policy. For some commentators, ‘strong leader’ is a synonym for ‘good’ leader, but that is seriously misleading. Reagan’s remoteness from decision-making in most areas of policy made him the furthest away of the three heads of government from being a strong leader. He did, however, pay particular attention to relations with the Soviet Union. Thatcher was the only one of the three who was clearly a strong leader in my sense. She wished to have the last word on everything, and she distrusted the Foreign Office. Gorbachev was more collegial and ready to deploy his powers of persuasion rather than rule by fiat. I regard him as a transformational leader, and I set the bar high for that: somebody who plays a decisive role in systemic change. That category includes Deng Xiaoping for his fundamental reform of the Chinese economic system. Gorbachev would get few plaudits for Soviet economic performance in the perestroika years, but his leadership was transformational for the Soviet political system and foreign policy.
How did you carry out your research?
I did a lot of archival work using declassified British sources, Politburo transcripts, materials in the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow, and in American archives. I’ve also acquired over the years a large collection of Russian, British and American political memoirs. Interviews and numerous conversations with people who were involved in policy-making in the three countries have been invaluable. There is a vast quantity of essential material in the Reagan Presidential Library archives. I did research there at the same time as Jack Matlock, the US ambassador to Moscow from 1987 to 1991 and, before that, Reagan’s top adviser on the Soviet Union within the National Security Council. So, during the day I was reading, among other documents, his memoranda and telegrams and then discussing these and related matters with him over a meal in the evenings.
What is your view on the Russian reaction to Gorbachev?
I think over time Gorbachev will be re-evaluated much more positively. The current view of most Russians does not do him anything like justice. What many forget is that, as we know from reliable survey data, during his first 5 years Gorbachev was the most popular public figure both in Russia and in the USSR as a whole. It was as late as May-June 1990 that Yeltsin overtook him. In the post-Soviet era, Yeltsin and his team disparaged Gorbachev and gave him and those who thought well of him very limited access to TV. They have had even less opportunity to give their side of the story to a large Russian audience in the first two decades of the present century. Putin wants strict top-down control, and he blames Gorbachev for losing it. For Putin and those around him political pluralism, involving separation of powers and competitive elections with unpredictable outcomes, equals loss of control. Russia’s experience of dispersed power has been short-lived. There is a tradition of looking to a leader who will rule with a strong hand. Gorbachev’s tolerance was, by his last two years in office, seen by many as weakness. He is particularly blamed by Russians for the breakup of the Soviet Union, though he sought to preserve a different kind of union through negotiation rather than coercion.
What lessons do you draw for western political relations with Russia today?
Demonisation of Russia doesn’t make much political sense. However much in the West we may disapprove of political developments, Russia today is not as highly authoritarian as was the pre-perestroika Soviet Union, yet even then it was possible to come together on matters of mutual interest such as the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. There were people at that time who thought it was very dangerous to speak to the Soviet leadership, that we were lowering our guard. But the engagement was invaluable. That’s true today as well. It’s never been the case that isolating Russia has made it more liberal. However, it’s not only Russians who benefit from such interaction. We need it, too. It would be a big advance if more people in the West, especially those in government, better understood how policies they regard as unexceptionable are perceived in Russia. If foreign policy is fashioned primarily to impress domestic public opinion and the best-organized lobbying groups, it should not be a big surprise if it is interpreted very differently in the country towards which the policy is directed.
What plans do you have for another book?
I’ve got a few ideas and have not yet decided which to pursue. I’m in my 80s so if I don’t make up my mind soon, it will be too late! One possible project is on Soviet studies: a look at what we got right and what we got wrong.
INTERVIEW FOR PUSHKIN HOUSE BY ANDREW JACK (@AJACK)
REVIEWS
"A fascinating and instructive read ... Everybody will learn something from this first-class book." – Dominic Sandbrook, The Sunday Times
"A masterly survey of the end of the cold war and the roles played in it by Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher." – Tony Barber, The Financial Times
"Lucidly written and scholarly." – The Spectator
"It is often a challenge for historians to find the right balance between the human factor and the historical forces at play. The value of Archie Brown's study [...] is that it does precisely that." – Christopher Coker, Literary Review
"Brown devotes several fine-grained biographical chapters to the "making" of Gorbachev, the "rise" of Reagan, and the "moulding" of the "Iron Lady", and then traces the three leaders' interactions... The result is a compelling picture of what led [them] to act as they did and how the difference each one made differed from the impact of the others." – William Taubman, The Political Quarterly
"Archie Brown, arguably the world's greatest authority on late-Soviet Russia, mounts a scrupulously detailed account of the three major players, their key roles, and those of senior advisors around them. However, 'Mutual trust painstakingly gained, and then lost, is especially difficult to re-establish.' Brown's judgment should be a motto on every Western leader's desk." – Gary Hart, United States Senator (Ret.)
"Thanks to Archie Brown, world-renowned author of several outstanding books on Mikhail Gorbachev, we now have his meticulous, definitive account of how Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher all contributed mightily to ending the Cold War." – William Taubman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Khrushchev: The Man and his Era and of Gorbachev: His Life and Times
"Another tour de force from Archie Brown: detailed scholarship, elegant prose, and a clear argument. Read this book to find why we should not ignore the 'human factor' underpinning great historical shifts. A fascinating account of how the Cold War ended, explored through the personal interactions between three world leaders - Gorbachev, Reagan, and Thatcher." - Bridget Kendall, Former BBC Diplomatic, Moscow, and Washington Correspondent
