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By Root 3048 0

over those I like and have shown themselves my friends simply because their fortunes change. And though this may have immediate disadvantages, in my experience it increases the respect in which one is held by those with whom one has to do business: respect is a powerful asset, as those in politics who fail to inspire it might secretly agree. But second, and more important, it did not seem to me that at the time anyone was better able than Mr Gorbachev to push ahead with reform. I wanted to see the fall of communism — indeed I wanted to see it not just in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union but in every corner of the globe — but I wanted to see this achieved peacefully. The two obvious threats to peace were a takeover — covert or overt — by hardliners in the Soviet military or the violent break-up of the Soviet Union. Throughout the summer of 1990 there were disturbing reports of possible rebellious activities within the Soviet military. Their authenticity was never certain but they carried some credibility. But it was the nationalities question — that is the future of the Soviet Union itself — which was most difficult for outsiders to assess.

I now believe that all of us in the West overestimated the degree to which a Soviet Empire whose core was provided by Marxist ideology and a communist nomenklatura — an empire constructed and bound together by force — could survive the onset of political liberty. Perhaps we listened too much to the diplomats and western experts and too little to the emigrés. That said, I did not go along with much of the thinking which characterized the British Foreign Office and US State Department on the issue of nationalities or nationhood.

We were all quite clear, as it happens, about the special legal status of the Baltic States: it was not a question of whether but of when they must be allowed to go free. (I had a long-standing interest in their future, having voted in 1967 against an agreement between the then Labour Government and the Soviet Union to use the Baltic States’ gold reserves — frozen in the Bank of England since the Soviets invaded them in 1940 — to settle outstanding financial claims.) I warned the Soviets about the severe consequences of the use of force against the Baltic States when I saw Mr Gorbachev in June. But I urged the greatest caution on President Landsbergis (of Lithuania) when I saw him in London in November. And I pressed both sides to negotiate throughout — though only on the clear understanding that the final destination of the Baltic States was freedom.

The case of the other republics was less clear cut. Ukraine and Byelorussia — by an ill-judged concession to Stalin in 1945 — were actually members of the United Nations so they could perhaps claim a somewhat different status too. I did not share the apparently hard-headed but in fact economically illiterate view that a state had to have a certain population, or GDP, or range of natural resources to be ‘viable’: it was the spirit of the people and the general economic framework created in order to harness it which would determine such matters. Nor, in general, was I happy with the argument that it was for us in the West to determine the future shape — or even existence — of the USSR. Our duty lay in thinking about the consequences of future developments there upon our own security. And it was this last consideration which led me to go very cautiously. It is one thing to expect a military super-power — even a sickly one like the Soviet Union — to change its internal and external policies in order to survive: it is quite another to expect it peacefully to commit hara-kiri. When I was in Paris in November for the CSCE summit at a lunch for heads of government I had been saying to President Iliescu of Romania that in working out a negotiating position you must always be clear on the stopping point — the point you would never concede. Mr Gorbachev, who had been listening, leant across the table and said that he agreed: his stopping point was the external perimeter of the Soviet Union. I did not accept this — and, as