Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [285]
We went into lunch — I was accompanied by a rather large team of Willie Whitelaw, Geoffrey Howe, Michael Heseltine, Michael Jopling, Malcolm Rifkind (Minister of State at the Foreign Office), Paul Channon and advisers; he and Raisa by Mr Zamyatin, the Soviet Ambassador, and the quietly impressive Mr Alexander Yakovlev, the adviser who was to play a large part in the reforms of the ‘Gorbachev years’. It was not long before the conversation turned from trivialities — for which neither Mr Gorbachev nor I had any taste — to a vigorous two-way debate. In a sense, the argument has continued ever since and is taken up whenever we meet; and as it goes to the heart of what politics is really about, I never tire of it.
He told me about the economic programmes of the Soviet system, the switch from big industrial plant to smaller projects and ‘businesses’, the ambitious irrigation schemes and the way in which the industrial planners adapted industrial capacity to the labour force to avoid unemployment. I asked whether this might not all be easier if reform were attempted on a free enterprise basis, with the provision of incentives and a free hand for local enterprises to run their own show, rather than everything being directed from the centre. Mr Gorbachev denied indignantly that everything in the USSR was run from the centre. I took another tack. I explained that in the western system everyone — including the poorest — ultimately received more than they would from a system which depended simply on redistribution. Indeed, in Britain we were attempting to cut taxes in order to increase incentives so that we could create wealth, competing in world markets. I said I had no wish to have the power to direct everyone where he should work and what he or she should receive.
Mr Gorbachev, however, insisted on the superiority of the Soviet system. Not only did it produce higher growth rates, but if I came to the USSR I would see how the Soviet people lived — ‘joyfully’. If this were so, I countered, why did the Soviet authorities not allow people to leave the country as easily as they could leave Britain?
In particular, I criticized the constraints placed on Jewish emigration to Israel. He claimed that 80 per cent of those who had expressed the wish to leave the Soviet Union had been able to do so. I said that this was not my information. But he repeated the Soviet line, which I did not believe either, that those forbidden to leave had been working in areas relating to national security. I knew there was no purpose in persisting now; but the point had been registered. The Soviets had to know that every time we met their treatment of the refuseniks would be thrown back at them.
We now left the dining-room and had coffee in the main sitting-room. All of my team except Geoffrey Howe, my private secretary Charles Powell, and the interpreter left. Denis showed Mrs Gorbachev around the house.
If at this stage I had paid attention only to the content of Mr Gorbachev’s remarks — largely the standard Marxist line — I would have to conclude that he was cast in the usual communist mould. But his personality could not have been more different from the wooden ventriloquism of the average Soviet apparatchik. He smiled, laughed, used his hands for emphasis, modulated his voice, followed an argument through and was a sharp debater. He was self-confident and though he larded his remarks with respectful references to Mr Chernenko, from whom he brought a not very illuminating written message, he did not seem in the least uneasy about entering into controversial areas of high politics. This was even more so in the hours of discussion which followed. He never read from a prepared brief, but referred to a small notebook of manuscript jottings. Only on matters of pronunciation of foreign names did he refer to his colleagues for advice. His line was no different from what I would have expected. His style was. As the day wore on I came to understand