Down with Big Brother (27 page)

The president’s announcement was greeted with dismay in Moscow. Kremlin leaders viewed it as a further escalation of the arms race, designed to deprive the Soviet Union of its hard-won military parity. They could not accept American assurances that SDI was purely defensive. Their reasoning was simple. If the United States succeeded in deploying an antimissile system that protected American cities from incoming warheads, it would enjoy a huge strategic advantage. Such a development would allow Washington to launch a first strike against the Soviet Union with impunity or, at the very least, engage in nuclear blackmail. The alternative—being dragged into another exhausting high-tech race with the rival superpower—was equally alarming to Soviet leaders.

It did not take Gorbachev long to realize that the Soviet Union could not afford to match the American investment in “Star Wars.” At the Geneva summit he offered Reagan a sweeping trade-off. The Kremlin would agree to a 50 percent reduction in the nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers, including its own SS-18 missiles, in return for a pledge from Washington to respect a 1972 treaty banning ballistic missile defenses. If the United States refused to compromise, the Soviet Union would be forced to take “countermeasures.” Rather than compete directly with SDI by building its own nuclear shield, it would attempt to overwhelm the American defenses with bigger and better offensive missiles.

“Everything is coming to a halt if we can’t find a way to prevent the arms race in space,” the Soviet leader warned.
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“I’m talking about a shield, not a spear,” replied Reagan, departing from his prepared notes. “Even if everybody reduces [offensive missiles] by 50 percent, it’s still too many weapons. SDI gets around that.”

“It’s emotional … one man’s dream,” Gorbachev shot back, exasperated
by Reagan’s stubbornness. “I want to reduce the number of weapons, but SDI is threatening a new arms race.”

F
OR ALL HIS SHORTCOMINGS
—the seemingly eccentric ideas and notorious inattention to detail—Ronald Reagan possessed an incredible political sense. His adversaries repeatedly underestimated him. His aides were amazed by his ability to glide through life, with seemingly minimal effort, achieving goals that were beyond the reach, or even the imagination, of workaday politicians. Even for those close to him, this was a paradox that was difficult to explain. “He knows so little,” marveled the detail-obsessed McFarlane shortly after his resignation as national security adviser in 1984, “yet he accomplishes so much.”
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Part of the reason for Reagan’s success in dealing with the Soviets was his abiding faith in the strengths of the American system of government. Shortly after he became president, a French intellectual named Jean-François Revel wrote a book entitled
How Democracies Perish
that became a bible for many American conservatives. It begins with an alarming prediction: “Democracy may, after all, turn out to be a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes.” The central thesis of the book is that it is futile to expect that economic crises would cause the mellowing or disintegration of Communist states. According to Revel, it is far more likely that the opposite would happen. In order to cover up their internal failures, Soviet leaders would become more aggressive, more militaristic. Totalitarian societies were, by their very nature, cohesive and well regimented. There was a growing danger that they would overwhelm the fragile Western democracies.

Reagan did not share the view that the Russians were ten feet tall. His political sixth sense told him that democracy was a much stronger form of government than totalitarianism, precisely because of its pluralistic nature. He believed instinctively that communism’s death knell was already sounding, a conviction that he expressed in his speeches. “In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right,” he told the British Parliament in June 1982. “We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union.”
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Reagan’s prediction that the “march of freedom and democracy” would leave communism on the “ash-heap of history” seemed like a vain hope at the time—certainly to thinkers like Revel—but it proved astonishingly accurate.

In his dealings with Gorbachev, Reagan displayed a flexibility and tactical finesse that belied his reputation as a Cold War warrior. His ingrained optimism, and his confidence in himself, led him to go further down the road to disarmament than many conservatives thought wise. “I bet the hard-liners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands,” he joked to the Soviet leader at the end of three days of discussions in Geneva.
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It was almost as if there were two very different Reagans: the confrontational Cold War ideologue and the pragmatic Hollywood negotiator.

One Reagan spoke as if treaties with Communist states were not worth the paper they were written on. The other concluded one of the most sweeping arms control agreements in history with the rival superpower. One Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” The other traveled to the heart of that empire and joined his Soviet counterpart in burying the Cold War. One Reagan spoke as if the only language that the Communists understood were force. The other was a dreamer who thought he could convince a Communist leader of the superiority of the capitalist system by flying with him in a helicopter over the villas and swimming pools of Southern California.

There was an objective need for both Reagans in the collapse of communism. Had the president failed to respond vigorously to the Soviet arms buildup or the invasion of Afghanistan, the Kremlin would have had less incentive to change its ways. On the other hand, if he had heeded the advice of his right-wing friends and spurned the olive branch offered by Gorbachev, a historic opportunity to negotiate a peaceful end to the Cold War might have been lost.

“If Reagan had stuck to his hard-line policies in 1985 and 1986, Gorbachev would also have been forced to take a much tougher position,” said Anatoly Dobrynin, the veteran Soviet ambassador in Washington. “Otherwise he would have been accused by the rest of the Politburo of giving everything away to a fellow who does not want to negotiate. We would have been forced to tighten our belts and spend even more on defense. Remember the party still had everything under control at that time, and this was a realistic option.”
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Reagan’s dream of constructing a nuclear shield around the United States bedeviled his future dealings with Gorbachev. But the president’s initiative also had the effect of altering the political dynamics between Moscow and Washington by exposing Soviet economic weakness. In a perverse kind of way it may have helped pave the way for the dramatic breakthrough in superpower relations.

The launching of “Star Wars” provoked a contradictory reaction in the
Soviet Union. Supported by some sections of the military, politically well-connected weapons developers immediately began an intense lobbying effort to be given the resources to counter the American program. A decision was taken to significantly increase defense spending during the 1986–90 plan period. At the same time, the prospect of a new high-technology arms race had a sobering impact on Kremlin policy makers.

“The Russians really believed that Reagan would do what he said he was going to do. The perception was the reality. They believed. This may have been Reagan’s greatest achievement. He conveyed political will,” said Suzanne Massie, who helped Reagan prepare for his meetings with Gorbachev.
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“The SDI program had a long-lasting impact on us,” acknowledged Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, a leading American expert in the Foreign Ministry. “We realized that we were approaching a very dangerous situation in the strategic counterbalance we had been living in.”
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G
ENEVA MARKED A CRUCIAL STEP
on Gorbachev’s long journey from a collective farm in an obscure corner of the Soviet Union to the center of the world stage. Like Reagan, he was a complex, contradictory personality. He was a man with a soaring vision for his country, yet at times he could be infuriatingly obtuse. He earned the reputation in the West of being a decisive man of action, but there were long periods when he seemed gripped by indecision. He could work himself up into an emotional frenzy and then behave as if nothing had happened. He could be incredibly charming and almost heartlessly cold.

Some of these contradictions were explored in a psychological portrait of the Soviet leader that the Central Intelligence Agency prepared for Reagan on the eve of the Geneva summit. Among several passages carefully underlined by the president with his blue biro were the following: “Gorbachev has a greater measure of self-confidence, even arrogance, than recent Soviet leaders about his ability to revitalize the Soviet system, deal effectively with foreign leaders, and restore credibility to Soviet diplomacy.… Behind the smile and approachability, Gorbachev—like Khrushchev before him—has a tough, hard-nosed side.… Although Gorbachev’s background and approach are unusual, he remains a product of the Soviet system.”
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Shortly after the Geneva summit Gorbachev entered what one of his top aides later described as his Lenin phase.
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He would pore over the writings of the founder of the Soviet state, searching for some clue to the country’s future direction. At times he even picked up a volume of Lenin’s collected
works from his desk and read a passage out loud, remarking on its relevance to contemporary problems. This interest in Lenin’s writings was unusual for Soviet leaders. Politburo members quoted Lenin all the time but rarely went to the bother of actually reading him. But Gorbachev evidently regarded himself as the modern-day equivalent of the great revolutionary leader.

The keeper of the Leninist flame was also the ultimate Soviet yuppie. Everything about Gorbachev—from his fastidious clothes sense to his obsessive work habits—made him a symbol of upward mobility in an ostensibly classless society. As he moved upward—from the Privolnoye kolkhoz to a Moscow university dorm to a meteoric career in the Communist Party—he displayed a natural facility for making and discarding allies and collaborators. He had very few lifetime friends. His wife, Raisa, a beautiful and ambitious woman who had seemed a cut above him when he courted her at the university, was the ideal partner for him on this journey. His opinions and ideals remained his own, but the way he looked at the world was heavily influenced by those around him.

Joining the club of world leaders was the ultimate step up for the peasant boy from Stavropol. He began to look at the problems of his own country and its relationship with the rest of the world from a different perspective. The opinions of Reagan and Kohl and Thatcher began to matter to him almost as much as those of his Politburo associates. Some of his aides later complained that the
gensek
allowed the praise of Western leaders, and the “Gorbiemania” of the crowds, to go to his head. Always keen to improve himself, he had Dale Carnegie’s best-seller
How to Win Friends and Influence People
translated into Russian. He successfully adopted its precepts: the firm handshake; the sincere smile; the technique of remembering little details about his interlocutors.
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A man of insatiable curiosity, Gorbachev soaked up facts and impressions of life in the West. As his plane flew over a city like Paris or London, he would look down at the tidy streets and neat little houses, making mental comparisons with the languorous squalor of street life in the Soviet Union. No detail was too small for his attention.

Gorbachev’s goal in going to Geneva was to create the right international climate for his domestic programs. To accomplish perestroika (restructuring), he needed a
peredyshka
(respite or breathing space) from the East-West competition. A few months after the Geneva meeting, he outlined his new foreign policy strategy in a candid speech to a specially convened conference of Soviet ambassadors. The United States, he declared, was attempting to “exhaust” the Soviet Union economically by dragging it
into a ruinous arms race. The central task of Soviet diplomacy was to “create the best possible conditions” for social and economic development at home. The most basic requirement was peace with the West, “without which everything else is pointless.” But it also involved abandoning outmoded ways of thinking. Pragmatism, not ideology, would become the watchword for Soviet foreign policy. Rather than dig themselves into entrenched positions, Soviet diplomats would be required to display political imagination and tactical flexibility. Gorbachev did not want his representatives to be nicknamed Mr. Nyet by their Western colleagues.
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The reference to “Mr. Nyet” was aimed at Gromyko, the diplomat who had embodied Soviet foreign policy for almost four decades. In one of his first acts as Soviet leader, Gorbachev had pushed the seventy-five-year-old foreign minister upstairs to the largely ceremonial position of chairman of the Supreme Soviet, the country’s de facto head of state. He had entrusted the task of representing the Soviet Union abroad to his old friend Eduard Shevardnadze, the man who had originally come up with the expression “We cannot go on living like this.” Shevardnadze knew very little about foreign affairs, having spent most of his political career in his native republic of Georgia. Far from disqualifying him from the job of foreign minister, his ignorance of the way things were done in the past may actually have been an asset, in Gorbachev’s eyes. He needed a new face to embody his policies toward the rest of the world.