Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

GENEVA MARKED A CRUCIAL STEP on Gorbachev’s long journey from a collective farm in an obscure corner of the Soviet Union to the center of the world stage. Like Reagan, he was a complex, contradictory personality. He was a man with a soaring vision for his country, yet at times he could be infuriatingly obtuse. He earned the reputation in the West of being a decisive man of action, but there were long periods when he seemed gripped by indecision. He could work himself up into an emotional frenzy and then behave as if nothing had happened. He could be incredibly charming and almost heartlessly cold.

Some of these contradictions were explored in a psychological portrait of the Soviet leader that the Central Intelligence Agency prepared for Reagan on the eve of the Geneva summit. Among several passages carefully underlined by the president with his blue biro were the following: “Gorbachev has a greater measure of self-confidence, even arrogance, than recent Soviet leaders about his ability to revitalize the Soviet system, deal effectively with foreign leaders, and restore credibility to Soviet diplomacy…. Behind the smile and approachability, Gorbachev—like Khrushchev before him—has a tough, hard-nosed side…. Although Gorbachev’s background and approach are unusual, he remains a product of the Soviet system.” 95

Shortly after the Geneva summit Gorbachev entered what one of his top aides later described as his Lenin phase. 96He would pore over the writings of the founder of the Soviet state, searching for some clue to the country’s future direction. At times he even picked up a volume of Lenin’s collected works from his desk and read a passage out loud, remarking on its relevance to contemporary problems. This interest in Lenin’s writings was unusual for Soviet leaders. Politburo members quoted Lenin all the time but rarely went to the bother of actually reading him. But Gorbachev evidently regarded himself as the modern-day equivalent of the great revolutionary leader.

The keeper of the Leninist flame was also the ultimate Soviet yuppie. Everything about Gorbachev—from his fastidious clothes sense to his obsessive work habits—made him a symbol of upward mobility in an ostensibly classless society. As he moved upward—from the Privolnoye kolkhoz to a Moscow university dorm to a meteoric career in the Communist Party—he displayed a natural facility for making and discarding allies and collaborators. He had very few lifetime friends. His wife, Raisa, a beautiful and ambitious woman who had seemed a cut above him when he courted her at the university, was the ideal partner for him on this journey. His opinions and ideals remained his own, but the way he looked at the world was heavily influenced by those around him.

Joining the club of world leaders was the ultimate step up for the peasant boy from Stavropol. He began to look at the problems of his own country and its relationship with the rest of the world from a different perspective. The opinions of Reagan and Kohl and Thatcher began to matter to him almost as much as those of his Politburo associates. Some of his aides later complained that the gensek allowed the praise of Western leaders, and the “Gorbiemania” of the crowds, to go to his head. Always keen to improve himself, he had Dale Carnegie’s best-seller How to Win Friends and Influence People translated into Russian. He successfully adopted its precepts: the firm handshake; the sincere smile; the technique of remembering little details about his interlocutors. 97

A man of insatiable curiosity, Gorbachev soaked up facts and impressions of life in the West. As his plane flew over a city like Paris or London, he would look down at the tidy streets and neat little houses, making mental comparisons with the languorous squalor of street life in the Soviet Union. No detail was too small for his attention.

Gorbachev’s goal in going to Geneva was to create the right international climate for his domestic programs. To accomplish perestroika (restructuring), he needed a peredyshka (respite or breathing space) from the East-West competition. A few months after the Geneva meeting, he outlined his new foreign policy strategy in a candid speech to a specially convened conference of Soviet ambassadors. The United States, he declared, was attempting to “exhaust” the Soviet Union economically by dragging it into a ruinous arms race. The central task of Soviet diplomacy was to “create the best possible conditions” for social and economic development at home. The most basic requirement was peace with the West, “without which everything else is pointless.” But it also involved abandoning outmoded ways of thinking. Pragmatism, not ideology, would become the watchword for Soviet foreign policy. Rather than dig themselves into entrenched positions, Soviet diplomats would be required to display political imagination and tactical flexibility. Gorbachev did not want his representatives to be nicknamed Mr. Nyet by their Western colleagues. 98

The reference to “Mr. Nyet” was aimed at Gromyko, the diplomat who had embodied Soviet foreign policy for almost four decades. In one of his first acts as Soviet leader, Gorbachev had pushed the seventy-five-year-old foreign minister upstairs to the largely ceremonial position of chairman of the Supreme Soviet, the country’s de facto head of state. He had entrusted the task of representing the Soviet Union abroad to his old friend Eduard Shevardnadze, the man who had originally come up with the expression “We cannot go on living like this.” Shevardnadze knew very little about foreign affairs, having spent most of his political career in his native republic of Georgia. Far from disqualifying him from the job of foreign minister, his ignorance of the way things were done in the past may actually have been an asset, in Gorbachev’s eyes. He needed a new face to embody his policies toward the rest of the world.

Gorbachev’s talk about “new thinking” angered the Kremlin old guard. “What kind of new thinking?” spluttered the octogenarian Boris Ponomarev, who had been in charge of the party’s foreign policy department for a quarter of a century. “We already have the right thinking. Let the Americans change their thinking!” 99

WHEN GORBACHEV LOOKED into Reagan’s eyes in Geneva, he still saw the face of world imperialism. He resented the president’s attitude of moral superiority and eagerness to subject him to long lectures on human rights. “I felt that my interlocutor was so weighed down by stereotyped thinking that it was really difficult for him to reason soberly,” he complained. 100He had little time for small talk and was put off by Reagan’s penchant for telling anecdotes and jokes and his lack of knowledge of detailed arms control issues. After their first meeting he made a comment to his chief foreign policy aide that suggested he did not believe that Reagan was up to the job. “He would make a very pleasant next-door neighbor, but a president…” 101

At the same time, Gorbachev understood that Reagan was politically strong and had the overwhelming support of his own people. He concluded that Reagan was a person with whom it was possible “to do business,” the very phrase that Mrs. Thatcher had used about Gorbachev himself two years before. 102

Soviet fears of a nuclear first strike by the United States faded after the Geneva meeting. Gorbachev accepted Reagan’s assurances that he was not a warmonger intent on the physical destruction of the rival superpower. He achieved his primary goal going into the summit, a joint statement proclaiming that “a nuclear war cannot be won—and must never be fought.” 103The Soviet leader took such rhetoric seriously. When military aides came to him a few weeks later with a routine contingency plan for the outbreak of nuclear war, he brusquely pushed them away. “Up until now, we assumed in our planning that a war [with the United States] is possible. But now, while I am general secretary, don’t even put such plans, such programs on my desk.” 104