Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [501]
That afternoon I had an hour’s discussion with the Soviet military leadership. I had decided that I wanted to see how they were thinking and also let them know precisely what my own views were. Marshal Yazov, the Soviet Defence minister, was very much in charge and the others — including Marshal Moiseev, whose interventions and demeanour marked him out as someone of unusual intelligence and strength of character, only spoke when the Defence minister had nothing to say. This was a pity because what Marshal Yazov did say was conventional and predictable. I quickly turned the conversation to the subject of East-West relations. I said that it was good that we were entering a new period of better relations but that we should each of us understand the need for strong defence. There was scope for reducing conventional forces and nuclear weapons and for modifying our strategy to new circumstances. But we would continue to need some nuclear weapons which were the only effective deterrent. Marshal Yazov took up the line that I had heard so many times from the Soviets before about the need to do away with nuclear weapons altogether. I said that I took leave to doubt whether the views of Marshal Yazov and his colleagues on nuclear weapons were really very different from mine. After all, they did have an awful lot of them and presumably for some purpose. Unlike President Gorbachev, Marshal Yazov stated that the Soviets would simply not accept a united Germany in NATO. But whether this was because his views were genuinely different from the Soviet leadership or because he expressed them less subtly I could not fathom.
The following morning I flew to Kiev. My main purpose was to attend the ‘British Days’ Exhibition which was the return leg of an exchange which had opened with a ‘Soviet Month’ in Birmingham in 1988. When the idea of my going had first been mooted I had made enquiries with the Foreign Office about how much was being spent on the exhibition and — as usual — found that it had been subject to some penny pinching. Partly as a result of my pressure, the Kiev Exhibition turned out to be very good indeed. The intention was to portray a typical street in a typical British northern town showing shops and, in particular, the house of an ordinary working-class British family. When the local people looked around at the hi-fi and other domestic gadgets and luxuries and the car standing in the garage at first they could not believe their eyes. As I went round, they asked me whether this could really be true; did ordinary British people really live like this? I said that indeed they did. Well, came the reply, all we have been told was a lie and this proves it. In fact, everything in that house was typical, even down to the teenager’s bedroom which — like most teenagers’ bedrooms — had clothes and other possessions strewn about it. My immediate reaction was that it should all have been tidied up, but I was eventually persuaded that this was more authentic.
But if the Ukrainians had not been prepared for what life was like in Britain, I found that I had not been properly briefed on the situation in Ukraine. Everywhere I went I found blue and yellow bunting and flags (the colours of pre-Soviet Ukraine) and signs demanding Ukrainian independence. This put me into something of a quandary. Much as I admired General de Gaulle, I was not going to outrage my Soviet hosts by proclaiming the Ukrainian equivalent of ‘Vive le Quebec Libre’. It was not just that I was convinced that Mr Gorbachev was never going to let Ukraine out of the Soviet Union without a struggle. That not just the USSR but even Russia would be threatened by the emergence of a separate Ukraine was a view that non-communist Russians as well as communists held. (In fact, since the break-up of the USSR, the emergence of an independent Ukraine has proved to be strategically advantageous for Europe and the West and much still rides on its economic and political