The Russia Conundrum

CHAPTER 2

AN OPEN SOCIETY

Russians who have struggled for freedom and democracy have traditionally looked to the West for inspiration. The values of Western liberal democracy, and the prosperity associated with it, inspired generations with the knowledge that the repressive autocracy imposed on their homeland was not inevitable, and that there was a better way of doing things. In the years of Bolshevik rule, the Kremlin recognised the danger of such aspirations and strove to prevent the Russian people from learning about the advantages of life in the West. The communist state exercised a monopoly on the sources of mass information, bringing the media under its control, preventing access to foreign news outlets and banning travel abroad. The Kremlin’s censors decreed what could be written in the press and dictated how the media should describe life outside of the Soviet Union. Much was made of the defects of capitalist society – the inequality, the poverty, colonial exploitation, crime and racial discrimination – and only very limited reporting was permitted of its achievements. Many Soviet citizens – me included – grew up believing what the Kremlin told them. It took independence of mind and assiduous curiosity to discover that the reality was different from the official portrayal. We did catch glimpses of the good things in the West, however, amplifying them through word-of-mouth and samizdat publications that were consumed with great eagerness, largely because they contrasted so sharply with the unpleasantness of day-to-day life in the USSR.

Matters changed in the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev permitted a cautious easing of the secrecy practised by his predecessors. There were several reasons for Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (openness), including his need to circumvent the old-style orthodox communists in the Kremlin who were opposed to his liberalising reforms. Because the hardliners controlled many of the official levers of power, Gorbachev took the bold decision to appeal directly to the Soviet people, over the heads of the apparat, the hidebound politicians and officials who ran the system. In order to encourage a groundswell of support for his perestroika policies, he actively encouraged people to think for themselves – something that had long been frowned upon – by allowing them access to much greater information than in the past, including greater truth about life in the West.

When UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher came on an official visit to the USSR in March 1987, Gorbachev took it as an opportunity to expand his glasnost initiative. Not since Richard Nixon in 1959 had a Western politician been permitted to speak openly on Soviet television, and on that occasion things had ended badly, when Nikita Khrushchev was widely seen to have come off worse in an ill-tempered exchange with the then US vice-president. Gorbachev knew it was a gamble to accept Mrs Thatcher’s demand that any interview with her should be broadcast unedited, but he did so.

Margaret Thatcher greets the crowds in Moscow during her official visit in 1987

Many Russians who saw her realised for the first time that the West was different from what they had been told.

Three of the Soviet Union’s top journalists were assigned to grill the zheleznaya leidi – the iron lady – whom the Kremlin had long portrayed as an enemy of the USSR, a capitalist ogre who had described Moscow as ‘bent on world dominance’ and Soviet communism as ‘synonymous with getting one’s way by violence’. Boris Kalyagin, political editor of Soviet Television and Radio, Tomas Kolesnichenko, international editor of Pravda, and Vladimir Simonov, a political commentator from the Novosti Press Agency, agreed that the interview would last 45 minutes and that all of Mrs Thatcher’s answers would be broadcast in full. Speaking many years later, Kalyagin said the three of them were confident they could run rings round any capitalist.

It didn’t work out that way. The journalists pressed Mrs Thatcher on why Britain insisted on maintaining nuclear weapons and, at first, the iron lady was studiously polite. When the interviewers tried to cast doubt on her answers, however, she showed her steely character, saying things that the Soviet people had never heard before.

‘Well, you have more nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union than any other country in the world,’ declared an unflustered Prime Minister. ‘You have more intercontinental ballistic missiles and warheads than the West. You started intermediate weapons; we did not have any. You have more short-range ones than we have. You have more than anyone else and…’ The hapless interviewers tried to cut her off, but Mrs Thatcher was having none of it. ‘One moment!’ she commanded. ‘Please may I say this to you … All weapons of war are dangerous. Would it not be marvellous if we did not have to have them? But we can only get to that stage when we have more trust and confidence in one another. That means much more open societies. And let me put this to you: since the First World War, which finished in 1918, there has been no case where one democracy has attacked another. That is why we believe in democracy. So, you want to get rid of the weapons of war. It would be marvellous if we could, but we have to get more trust and confidence.’

Mrs Thatcher had steered the debate to the relative merits of Western democracy versus Soviet communism. Millions of television viewers pricked up their ears.

‘We have an open society,’ the prime minister continued. ‘This goes to the depth of our fundamental freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and freedom from want; a much more open society means that you [in the USSR] could discuss all of the things in the same way as we do … You really have two ways in which you can work: you either have a completely centralised control system in which you are told what to produce, how much it will cost, how much you are paid – and that does not really work to best advantage, as you have discovered, because it does not pay people if they do better. Or you go to what is called an incentive society when the harder you work, the more reward you get; and one has to recognise, you know, that people work not only for their country but they work to better their families. They work for a higher standard of living and so if they see the point of working harder, they will. And, you know, no matter what the theory, and there are lots of political theories – I wish there were fewer – no matter what the theory, there is no person alive and no computer which can plan a country as large as the Soviet Union, take into account all its various different conditions in all its various republics, all the various ambitions and needs and wants, the requirements of the people. You have got to disperse responsibility to the people who are much nearer to the life in those republics, towns, rural areas and then you have got to give them responsibility – and for that they must have incentives.’

The Pravda man, Tomas Kolesnichenko, tried to argue with Mrs Thatcher. The principles of a socialist society, he suggested, were the right ones and they brought real advantages. ‘Well, you have tossed out a quite provocative comment there!’ she replied. ‘So, what exactly do you think are the advantages of a socialist society?’ ‘Its planned economy,’ ventured Kolesnichenko. ‘In economy that is an advantage; and all the years of planning, not just a centralised plan, but also local…’ Mrs T pounced – her list of advantages was considerably longer: ‘Life in Britain, you know, the standard of living is high. It is higher than it has ever been. We are working very hard. In our housing we have perhaps a different system from you. Out of every hundred families, sixty-four families … own their own home, they own it! It is my ambition to get that up to seventy-five families out of every hundred. We have an excellent health service, very, very good indeed¹ and we are building more and more hospitals … Unfortunately, we do have unemployment and I do not run away from it. When you get technological change, you are almost bound to get some unemployment. It is now falling. But let me make this clear: the people who are unemployed, they live like other people, in houses. They are rented and their rent is paid for them, because they have not the income to pay. And every week they get a weekly benefit, a considerable weekly benefit. It is more if they have children and the weekly benefit for some of them will be as much as some of the wages which some people get in industry. They will get that weekly sum for as long as they are unemployed and after six months when they have been unemployed, we will take each one of them in. We will try to get them a job or will try to get them fresh training or we will put them on what is called a community programme. So, we are tackling our problems and we are hoping that we shall gradually get unemployment down so that those people too may have the higher standard of living which our other people enjoy.’

For Mikhail Gorbachev, who watched the interview in the Kremlin, there were several important wins. Mrs Thatcher had pointed out the stifling effects of the old-style Soviet command system that he was struggling to transform; she had laid out the benefits that accrue from incentivised work, just as he was about to introduce limited competition in some areas of the economy; and she had praised his liberal reforms, calling on the Soviet people to support his open-society initiatives: if the USSR were to become more open and more democratic, she said, its people would begin to enjoy the ‘Western’ benefits of freedom and prosperity.

‘You [in the USSR] are introducing a much more open society; you can discuss things much more openly than you ever have done before. That is part of our beliefs … I have a much better idea now of Mr Gorbachev’s hopes and this tremendous challenge for the Soviet people under your restructuring [perestroika] and the new open society. We wish you well in this great endeavour and we hope it will be very successful.’

Mrs Thatcher ended the interview by painting a picture of the future that many Russians wanted for themselves; a future in which they would be permitted not only to travel to the West, but to share in the advantages that seemed to flow from liberal free-market democracy.

‘We want you to travel more frequently to us because we think it is more and more important to build up friendship between peoples and to build up trust and confidence between the people of the Soviet Union and the people of Western Europe and in particular the United Kingdom. I have loved my visit here. I have very much enjoyed the warm welcome you have given me. I will not forget it and I hope to see quite a lot of you in the United Kingdom so you may know more of our way of life and how we do things and more of our people will come to see you. Thank you for your good wishes, thank you for your kindness. Let us hope that there is a better future ahead for all of us.’

It was a powerful message and it was greeted with approbation by the majority of those watching. Unused to challenging debate, the three Soviet interviewers felt they had been trounced by a masterly opponent. One of them, Vladimir Simonov, reflected that he and his colleagues had been ‘as ineffective as village chess players taking on Garry Kasparov’. Boris Kalyagin agreed. ‘She was excellent; very quick; and she always found the right words to answer us. We didn’t make any cuts, any changes; so for the first time, everything she said, everything was on air. People could listen to it and make their own conclusions. I think it was the beginning of glasnost in international affairs. Mrs Thatcher was the winner of the discussion.’

An estimated 100 million people tuned in, and the broadcast sparked a lively debate. Many viewers complained about the interviewers’ ‘aggressive’ and ‘impolite’ conduct. Women especially leapt to Mrs Thatcher’s defence. ‘You lost the battle – three men against a single woman,’ Kalyagin recalled people saying. The admiration for Mrs Thatcher as a representative of Western values was evident. In despatches assessing the impact of the prime minister’s appearance, the British ambassador, Bryan Cartledge, wrote about the ‘Maggie-mania’ that had gripped the country, with Russians reportedly referring to her as Nasha Masha – ‘our Maggie’ – and hanging on her words as if they were the promise of a new life. ‘Spectaculars like MT’s visit, and especially the live TV interview, dramatically demonstrated his [Gorbachev’s] commitment to glasnost,’ Cartledge suggested. ‘One might add perhaps the importance to Gorbachev of giving the Soviet public a sense of progress in the direction he sought to go.’

Barely 18 months earlier, Britain and the USSR had been at loggerheads, engaged in a bitter round of diplomatic expulsions following the defection of Oleg Gordievsky, the London KGB chief. And Mrs Thatcher was not slow to confront Gorbachev. On the eve of her visit, a demonstration in Moscow by Jewish families denied permission to emigrate to Israel had been broken up by police. At a meeting in the Kremlin, she brought up the incident and spoke on behalf of persecuted dissidents such as Anatoly Shcharansky, Josef Begun and Andrei Sakharov. Her refusal to go soft on the Kremlin’s human rights record enhanced her moral authority and her reputation; she was seen as close to Ronald Reagan and speaking on behalf of ‘the West.’

Margaret Thatcher hugs a little girl during her Moscow visit in 1987

Margaret Thatcher waves and smiles at the crowds during the same trip

Mrs Thatcher made a visit to a church service at the Russian Orthodox monastery at Zagorsk, outside Moscow, and attended a performance of Swan Lake at the Bolshoi with Gorbachev and his wife Raisa. But most memorably, she went walkabout, mingling with the Russian people, listening to their views and answering their questions. There was no attempt to curb her interaction with the crowds who turned out to greet her on the streets of Krylatskoe, a recently built but already down-at-heel suburb in western Moscow, and their excitement was plain to see.

The enthusiasm for the West was real, and it was at least in part explained by the next stop on Mrs Thatcher’s itinerary. In the longstanding tradition of Potemkin villages² – fake facades to impress outsiders – the prime minister was taken on a tour of a supermarket that had been specially stocked with supplies of bread and cheese, tinned fruit and fresh veg. Looking back, it is amusing to imagine what Mrs Thatcher thought to herself when she saw this array of very basic foodstuff – which for us back then represented unimaginable luxury. Those reporters who stayed behind after the motorcade had departed saw the efforts of local shoppers trying and failing to empty the shelves before the goods were all packed away.

Five decades earlier, the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova had recorded in her epic verse drama, Poem Without a Hero, how a brief encounter with a charming British diplomat had opened her eyes to another, undreamed of universe beyond the grim reality of Soviet life. Akhmatova called him a ‘guest from the future’, because she regarded him as the intimated herald of a future that Russia, too, might one day enjoy.

The future ripens in the past …

All the mirrors on the wall

show a man not yet appeared

who could not enter this white hall.

He is no better and no worse,

but he is free of Lethe’s curse:

his warm hand makes a human pledge.

This guest from the future, can it be

that he will really come to me…?

In 1987, Mrs Thatcher with her self-confident optimism and unwavering belief in Western values, her stylish hats, glamorous sable- collared coats and beige suede boots, also seemed like a ‘guest from the future’, a portent of what Russia’s future could be if the right choices were made and history were to look kindly on the nation’s efforts.