Media reports

Back to newsline

31 March 2005

It was truth, not arms, that won the cold war

By William Pfaff

Turin – The prophet Isaiah said that in the good time of the Lord the wolf would dwell with the lamb, and the leopard lie down with the kid.
Last week in Turin, around a vast table in an Italian army school, former general and president of Poland Wojciek Jarulzelski metaphorically lay down with Lech Walesa, former shipyard worker.
Jack Matlock and Rodric Braithwaite, former western ambassadors to the Soviet Union; Alexander Bessmertnykh, former Soviet ambassador to the United States, Geoffrey Howe, British deputy prime minister in the late cold war, and Richard Allen and Robert McFarlane, former national security advisors to President Ronald Reagan, joined them, as did Soviet dissidents Elena Bonner and Natan Sharansky, all at the invitation of Mikhail Gorbachev.
They were in Turin to reconsider the attempted reform and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, the consequences of this for the ex-Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the disastrous errors (accompanied by much bad American advice) that undermined the effort to make Russia a democracy, and the geopolitical consequences since it all began in the mid-1980s. (I was there to speak to some of the geopolitical issues.)
The spectacle of this kind of meeting is in one respect unnerving, even angering. What was it all about – all those deaths, that misery and waste? Why should we have taken it so seriously then if now we can sit together with drinks and talk about it as history?
It was dreadfully serous then. Yet the lesson, which few seem able to perceive, is that very little is as serious as it is made out to be. The real issues play themselves out and lose their content, and then someone has to call it all off. That is what Gorbachev did.
The British historian, Eric Hobsbawm, an old man now but loyal to the dream of Communism as it was presented in the 1930s and 1940s, spoke regretfully of when the world seemed young and the perfection of society possible.
Well, yes; although that was mostly a West European dream, shaped mainly by the utopian socialism of the 19th century, sentimentally projected onto a Soviet reality that was cruel from the start, founded on the belief that violence can make utopia.
By the end of Stalin’s absolutism and terror, in 1953, the Soviet Union was a society dominated by fear – fear among the leaders, who were never really safe, and among the people.
It was also a society dominated by ignorance, since it was necessary to act as if nothing interesting or progressive existed outside the Soviet Union. To be curious was dangerous. It had to be believed that every western country was more oppressive and more backward than the U.S.S.R.: the skyscrapers of New York a façade behind which people lived lives of slavish labor and racist oppression.
This is why the post-Vietnam détente and the Helsinki accords in 1975 were so important. They created a situation where information circulated in the Soviet Union as never before, and where members of the Communist leadership traveled abroad to scientific and academic conferences, and even took vacations there. Mikhail Gorbachev, a young and rising Communist party official, spent part of a summer traveling in France with his wife. People traveled, went home, and made comparisons.
The initial impetus for reform came from where people knew the most, the intelligence services. It came when Yuri Andropov, who headed the KGB from 1967 to 1882, became secretary general of the Soviet Communist Party, following the disastrous Leonid Brezhnev.
Andropov brought a generation of younger men into the leadership. He died within two years as, in turn, did his successor, Konstantin Chernenko. In March 1985 the poliburo elected Gorbachev, its youngest member, to head the party. He installed his own people, and embarked on “glasnost” and “perestroika” (restructuring).
Glasnost was by far the more important. It meant telling the truth. This had been impossible in the Soviet system since Lenin’s time. Telling the truth proved revolutionary. It was truth, not Reagan administration rearmament, which won the cold war.
I myself recall a known KGB officer telling a public meeting in Stockholm in the 1980s that his country suffered from “a spiritual crisis.” This was a revolutionary (as well as “unscientific”!) expression in Soviet terms, spoken to a western audience.
In Turin, last week, Gorbachev said that when he met the leaders of the Warsaw pact governments after 1985, he said to them that they were free. It was they who had to find the solutions to the problems in their countries. At first they didn’t believe him. As is now known, in the end he had to push a party coup that became a bloody revolution in Romania, to overturn the all but demented dictators of that country, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu.
He believed that reform was possible inside the existing Marxist framework, by democratizing how it functioned. It is orthodox, in the West, to say that this would have been impossible. The experiment could not be carried through because Gorbachev was kidnapped by a rightist party coup, which then was rejected by a popular uprising in Moscow, successful opposed, in Gorbachev’s absence, by Boris Yeltsin.
The result of that today is that Russia is once again in need of glasnost and perestroika.