Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [295]
Above all, the West had to ensure that Mr Gorbachev’s reforms led to practical improvements in our own security. Were the Soviets prepared to reduce their military threat? Were they prepared to withdraw from Afghanistan? Would they end their policy of international subversion? We must press them on all these matters, but not in such as way that Mr Gorbachev’s reform programme was discredited and so reversed, either by him or a hardline successor.
In the course of March I welcomed a stream of visitors to No. 10 and Chequers to brief me before my visit. The Chief Rabbi came to see me about the plight of the refuseniks. Peter Walker gave me his own impressions of the Soviet Union, gained on a recent visit. I discussed arrangements for the trip with the Soviet Ambassador. General Abrahamson, the Pentagon’s Director of the SDI programme, came to Chequers to give me an up-to-date account of the state of research and the strategic issues. Oleg Gordievsky gave me the benefit of his analysis. So did the human rights activist, Yuri Orlov.
I was not going to Moscow as the representative of the West, let alone as a ‘broker’ between the USSR and the United States, but it was clearly very important that other western leaders should know the line I intended to take and that I should gauge their sentiments beforehand. I knew President Reagan’s mind and had, I knew, his confidence. I therefore limited myself to sending him a lengthy message. There was only one specific policy point at issue which I felt it necessary to raise. This was a proposal, which I had made to the Americans and which they were studying but were not so far prepared to accept, that the United States should give the Soviets an assurance about the shape and time-scale of SDI — what was known in the jargon as ‘predictability’. My argument was that since it would take a number of years before the decision about the deployment of SDI need be reached there was no point in alarming the Soviets unnecessarily now.
I also arranged to meet President Mitterrand and then Chancellor Kohl on Monday 23 March. The French President — socialist or not — has the use of a number of delightful châ teaux. He also seems to have access to the best chefs in the French Republic. Lunch with him at the Châ teau de Benouville in Normandy was no exception. And of course each dish had to have a traditional Norman flavour, with sauces of cider or calvados and some of that aromatic Camembert against which the health-conscious bureaucrats of the European Community were to labour in vain. President Mitterrand’s attitude to the Soviets was very like my own. He believed, as I did, that Mr Gorbachev was prepared to go a long way to change the system. One of his shrewdest and most perceptive observations was that the Soviet leader would find that ‘when you change the form, you are on the way to changing the substance.’ But the French President knew too that the Soviets respected toughness. He said that we must resist the attempt to denuclearize Europe. I warmly agreed.
Nor did I find any disagreement with Chancellor Kohl. The division of Germany, past history and the existence of large numbers of Germans living as minorities throughout the Soviet bloc gave this very German leader a clear insight into the USSR. Moreover, as he reminded me, West Germany had for many years been the main target of Soviet propaganda. He had doubts about whether Mr Gorbachev would survive: he was running a high-risk policy. Nor should we assume that his reforms — which Chancellor Kohl saw as intended to modernize a communist system, not create a democratic system — could be carried through without suffering. Helmut Kohl always had a strong sense of history and he reminded me that from the time of Peter the Great the reforms of Russian leaders had not