Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [279]
There was a new chill in East-West relations. We had entered a dangerous phase. Both Ronald Reagan and I were aware of it. We knew that the strategy of matching the Soviets in military strength and beating them on the battlefield of ideas was succeeding and that it must go on. But we had to win the Cold War without running unnecessary risks in the meantime.
The Cold War itself had never really ended, at least from the Soviet side: there were merely variations of chill. At times, as in Korea and Vietnam, it had been far from cold. But it was always, as I never forgot, a conflict of one system against another. In this sense, the analysis of the communist ideologues was right: ultimately, our two opposing systems were incompatible — though, because both sides possessed the means of nuclear destruction, we had to make the adjustments and compromises required to live together. What we in the West had to do now was to learn as much as we could about the people and the system which confronted us and then to have as much contact with those living under that system as was compatible with our continued security. In a cold as in a hot war it pays to know the enemy — not least because at some time in the future you may have the opportunity to turn him into a friend.
Such was the thinking which lay behind my decision to arrange a seminar at Chequers on Thursday 8 September 1983 to pick the brains of experts on the Soviet Union. The difficulty of tapping into outside thinking even in our own open democratic system of government shows just why closed totalitarian systems are so sluggish and mediocre. I had been used to wide-ranging seminars from our days in Opposition and had always found them stimulating and educative. But instead of the best minds on the Soviet system I now found myself presented with a list of the best minds in the Foreign Office, which was not quite the same thing. I minuted on the original list of suggested participants:
This is NOT the way I want it. I am not interested in gathering in every junior minister, nor everyone who has ever dealt with the subject at the FO. The FO must do their preparation before. I want also some people who have really studied Russia — the Russian mind — and who have had some experience of living there. More than half the people on the list know less than I do.
Back to the drawing board.
In fact, by the time the seminar went ahead I felt that we did have the right people and some first-class papers. The latter covered almost all of the factors we would have to take into account in the years ahead in dealing with the Soviets and their system. We discussed the Soviet economy, its technological inertia and the consequences of that, the impact of religious issues, Soviet military doctrine and expenditure on defence, and the benefits and costs to the Soviet Union of their control over eastern Europe. The one issue which, in retrospect, we underestimated — though it figured briefly — was the nationality question, failure to solve which would ultimately lead to the break-up of the Soviet Union itself. Perhaps for me the most useful paper was one which described and analysed the power structure of the Soviet state, and which put flesh on the bones of what I had already learnt in Opposition from Robert Conquest.
Of course, the purpose of this seminar was not ultimately academic: it was to provide me with the information on which to shape policy towards the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc in the months and years ahead. There were always — right up to the last days of the Soviet Union — two opposite outlooks among the Sovietologists.
At the