Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [281]
Of Mr Gorbachev what little we knew seemed modestly encouraging. He was clearly the best educated member of the Politburo, not that anybody would have described this group of elderly soldiers and bureaucrats as intellectuals. He had acquired a reputation for being open-minded; but of course this might be just a matter of style. He had risen steadily through the Party under Khrushchev, Brezhnev and now Andropov, of whom he was clearly a special proté gé; but that might well be a sign of conformity rather than talent. Nevertheless, I heard favourable reports of him from Pierre Trudeau in Canada later that month. I began to take special notice when his name was mentioned in reports on the Soviet Union.
VISIT TO HUNGARY
For the moment, however, relations with the Soviets were so bad that direct contact with them was almost impossible. It seemed to me that it was through eastern Europe that we would have to work. The Deputy Prime Minister of Hungary, Mr Marjai, had come to see me in March, before the general election, and had renewed an invitation from his Government for me to visit Hungary. I had been fascinated by what he told me about the Hungarian ‘economic experiment’. At one point Mr Marjai, having noted the importance of profits and incentives, declared that it was not for the government to hand out money because the government did not have money. I commented that these remarks could have been made in one of my own speeches.
Hungary was the choice for my first visit as Prime Minister to a Warsaw Pact country for several reasons. The Hungarians had gone furthest along the path of economic reform, although they were anxious to describe it as anything but capitalism. A certain amount of liberalization had occurred, though outright dissent was punished. The strategy of Já nos Ká dá r, officially First Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party but in fact unchallenged leader, was summed up in the telling if hardly original slogan, ‘he who is not against us is with us.’ He used economic links with the West to provide his people with a tolerable standard of living while constantly asserting Hungary’s loyalty to the Warsaw Pact, socialism and the Soviet Union: a necessary consideration, given that some 60,000 Soviet troops had been ‘temporarily’ stationed in Hungary since 1948. By this time Mr Kâdâr seemed to be regarded with some respect, perhaps even affection, by many Hungarians because he was credited with avoiding a repetition of the events of 1956, while allowing a gradual process of reform to continue. Although he himself had been tortured by his comrades, his own past included the incidents of villainy which marked the careers of all that generation of old communist leaders: he had been responsible for the torture and trial of Cardinal Mindszenty, the execution of his friend, Foreign minister Rajk, and the betrayal of the Revolution of 1956. However, he denied to me personally that he had had any responsibility for the execution of Imre Nagy, the reformist communist leader; indeed he said he had obtained an undertaking from the Soviets that Nagy would be allowed to live. In any case, the fact that Kâdâr had been in power for so long meant that he had come to know the Soviets and their thinking better than any other eastern European leader. In particular, he knew Mr Andropov, who had been the Soviet Ambassador in Budapest at the time of the 1956 uprising, and, we believed, remained close to him. I hoped that he would report back to the Soviet leader what I had to say.
I stepped off the plane at 10 o’clock on the night of Thursday 2 February 1984 to be met by the Hungarian Prime Minister, Mr Lâ zâ r, and then walked across the thick snow to inspect a floodlit Guard of Honour. My first official engagement the next morning