Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [298]
Monday began for me with a meeting of what it would be perhaps impolite but only accurate to describe as impeccably distinguished Soviet stooges. This group of tame artists, academics and scientists took up again the themes which had been prominent in the Deputy Patriarch’s speech. They knew, presumably, that I was to have lunch with Dr Sakharov and other dissidents and wanted to extol the merits of communism first. Then I left for my discussions with Mr Gorbachev in the Kremlin.
I sat across the table from him, a long flower vase between us. I was accompanied by just one member of my staff and an interpreter. It was soon clear that he, glancing from time to time at the notes in front of him, intended to take me to task for my Central Council speech. He said that when the Soviet leaders had studied it they had felt the breeze of the 1940s and ‘50s. It reminded them of Winston Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Missouri (about the ‘Iron Curtain’) and the Truman doctrine. They had even considered whether they might have to cancel the visit.
I did not apologize. I said that there was one point which I did not make in my Central Council speech but which I would make now. This was that I knew of no evidence that the Soviet Union had given up the Brezhnev doctrine or the goal of securing world domination for communism. We were ready to fight the battle of ideas: indeed this was the right way to fight. But instead we in the West saw Soviet subversion in South Yemen, in Ethiopia, in Mozambique, in Angola and in Nicaragua. We saw Vietnam being supported by the Soviet Union in its conquest of Cambodia. We saw Afghanistan occupied by Soviet troops. We naturally drew the conclusion that the goal of worldwide communism was still being pursued. This was a crucial consideration for the West. We recognized that Mr Gorbachev was committed to internal reforms in the Soviet Union. But we had to ask ourselves whether this would lead to changes in external policies.
I went on to show that I had read Mr Gorbachev’s speeches with as much care as he seemed to have read mine. I told him that I had found his January Central Committee speech fascinating. But I wanted to know whether the internal changes he was making would lead to changes in the Soviet Union’s foreign policies as well. I added that I had not expected that we would have generated quite so much heat so early in the discussion. Mr Gorbachev replied with a roar of laughter that he welcomed ‘acceleration’ and was pleased we were speaking frankly.
The conversation went back and forth, not just covering regional conflicts (with me placing much of the blame on the Soviet Union and Mr Gorbachev blaming the West), but going right to the heart of what differentiated the western and communist systems. This I described as being a distinction between societies in which power was dispersed and societies based on central control and coercion.
Mr Gorbachev was as critical of Conservatism as I was of communism. But he was a good deal less well informed about it. His view was that the British Conservative Party was the party of the ‘haves’ in Britain and that our system of what he called ‘bourgeois democracy’ was designed to fool people about who really controlled the levers of power. I explained that what I was trying to do was to create a society of ‘haves’, not a class of them.
We then turned to arms control. As at our meeting at Chequers, he showed that he was well versed in all that was being written about the Soviet Union in the West.