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By Root 2724 0

risk of over-simplification, these were as follows. On the one hand, there were those who played down the differences between the western and Soviet systems and who were generally drawn from political analysis and systems analysis. They were the people who appeared night after night on our television screens analysing the Soviet Union in terms borrowed from liberal democracies. These were the optimists, in search of light at the end of even the longest tunnel, confident that somehow, somewhere, within the Soviet totalitarian system rationality and compromise were about to break out. I remember a remark of Bob Conquest’s that the trouble with systems analysis is that if you analyse the systems of a horse and a tiger, you find them pretty much the same: but it would be a great mistake to treat a tiger like a horse. On the other hand, there were those — mainly the historians — who grasped that totalitarian systems are different in kind, not just degree, from liberal democracies and that approaches relevant to the one are irrelevant to the other. These analysts argued that a totalitarian system generates a different kind of political leader from a democratic one and that the ability of any one individual to change that system is almost negligible.

My own view was much closer to the second than to the first of these analyses, but with one very important difference. I always believed that our western system would ultimately triumph, if we did not throw our advantages away, because it rested on the unique, almost limitless, creativity and vitality of individuals. Even a system like that of the Soviets, which set out to crush the individual, could never totally succeed in doing so, as was shown by the Solzhenitsyns, Sakharovs, Bukovskys, Ratushinskayas and thousands of other dissidents and refuseniks. This also implied that at some time the right individual could challenge even the system which he had used to attain power. For this reason, unlike many who otherwise shared my approach to the Soviet Union, I was convinced that we must seek out the most likely person in the rising generation of Soviet leaders and then cultivate and sustain him, while recognizing the clear limits of our power to do so. That is why those who subsequently considered that I was led astray from my original approach to the Soviet Union because I was dazzled by Mr Gorbachev were wrong. I spotted him because I was searching for someone like him. And I was confident that such a person could exist, even within that totalitarian structure, because I believed that the spirit of the individual could never ultimately be crushed in the Kremlin any more than in the Gulag.

At the time of my Chequers seminar, although as I have explained East-West relations were worsening — and would become worse still when the Soviets pulled out of arms control talks in Geneva in response to the stationing of Cruise and Pershing missiles — it did seem that there would soon be important changes in the Soviet leadership. Mr Andropov, though he was no liberal, did undoubtedly want to revive the Soviet economy, which was in fact in a far worse state than any of us realized at the time. In order to do this he wanted to cut back bureaucracy and improve efficiency. Although he had inherited a top leadership which he could not instantly change, the high average age of the Politburo would present him with the opportunity of filling vacancies with those amenable to his objectives. There were already doubts about Andropov’s health. If he lived for just a few more years, however, it seemed likely that the leadership would pass to a new generation. The two main contenders appeared to be Grigory Romanov and Mikhail Gorbachev. I asked for all the information we had about these two. It was not very much and a good deal was vague and anecdotal. It was soon obvious to me, however, that — attractive as was the idea of seeing a Romanov back in the Kremlin — there would probably be other unpleasant consequences. Romanov as First Secretary of the Communist Party in Leningrad had won a reputation for efficiency