Gorbachev's Gamble

Soviet Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War

Andrei Grachev

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745655321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Gorbachev's Gamble offers a new and more convincing answer to this question by providing the missing link between the internal and external aspects of Gorbachev's perestroika. Andrei Grachev shows that the radical transformation of Soviet foreign policy during the Gorbachev years was an integral part of an ambitious project of internal democratic reform and of the historic opening of Soviet society to the outside world. Grachev explains the motives and the intentions of the initiators of this project and describes their hopes and their illusions. He recounts the story of the internal debates and struggles in the Kremlin and behind-the-scene decisions that led to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the break-up of the Warsaw Pact and eventually the demise of the Soviet Union itself. The book is based on exclusive interviews with the leaders of the Soviet Union including Gorbachev, personal notes and diaries of their assistants and advisers and transcripts of the discussions inside the Politburo and Secretariat of the Central Committee. Together they constitute a multi-voice political confession of a whole generation of decision-makers of the Soviet Union that enables us better to understand the origin and the breathtaking trajectory of the events that led to the end of the Cold War and the unprecedented transformation of world politics in the closing decades of the 20th century.

1

PREPARING THE CHANGE

We reformers dreamed of ending . . . the division between East and West, of halting the insanity of the arms race and ending the ‘Cold War’.

Aleksandr Yakovlev, ‘Gor’kaia chasha’¹

Dual-Track Diplomacy

In order to understand what made possible the emergence of ‘new thinking’ as a conceptual base for Soviet foreign policy in the Gorbachev years, it is necessary to explore the political and intellectual ‘soil’ from which it arose. It is also essential to recall the basic characteristics of the ‘old political thinking’ that determined USSR behaviour on the world scene during the long years of the Cold War period. How had it influenced the international position of the USSR at the time of Gorbachev’s election to the position of General Secretary in March 1985? An analysis of this kind should identify the ideas that began to ferment within circles of the Soviet political elite several years before 1985. It would otherwise be impossible to explain the colossal change that occurred in Soviet political behaviour with the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev, other than by the caprice of a Providence that chose him as its arm.

One of the most crucial factors paving the way for future changes in Soviet foreign policy at the end of Brezhnev’s reign was a growing feeling within Soviet society that the civilization project initiated at the time of the 1917 October Revolution had reached a stage of general exhaustion, if not fiasco. Associated with initial Bolshevik political ambition, its main message consisted initially in proposing an alternative model of societal organization founded on an ideological base imposed and supervised by the state: its protagonists were absolutely convinced that this model was destined to prevail throughout the world.

However, the initial messianic ambitions of the founding fathers of the Soviet state soon had to be revised. Not long after his death, Lenin’s hopes of unleashing the world communist revolution were rapidly reduced by his more sober and disillusioned successors to Stalin’s project of building ‘socialism in one country’.

In accordance with this evolution of ideology, the command centre of Soviet foreign policy gradually moved from the structures of the Communist International (created in March 1919) to a much more traditional state institution – the People’s Commissariat (later Ministry) for Foreign Affairs. But a con genital contradiction remained at the heart of the Soviet state. Throughout its entire history, Soviet foreign policy never abandoned the ‘double track’, constantly oscillating between support for ‘revolutionary forces’ (thus challenging the existing world order) and a quest for stability that required traditional great power behaviour and the application of realpolitik.

The innate duplicity of this policy was carefully managed by the Soviet Party-state leadership’s highest political ‘instance’ (a term usually used in Soviet bureaucratic jargon to identify the Party apparatus), and found its reflection in the parallel handling of the different aspects of foreign policy by its two ‘arms’ – mutually complementary and at the same time rival structures – the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) and the International Department of the Central Committee (ID), the unofficial heir of the Secretariat of the Communist International.

While the MID was charged with looking after ‘stability’ and assuring the Soviet state’s presence and position in the world ‘concert of powers’, the ID was supposed to encourage and introduce the ‘change’ needed to provide evidence of the advance of the world ‘revolutionary process’ and of the continuous shift of the world balance of power to the advantage of the USSR. These two dimensions of Soviet foreign policy, the ‘realist’ and the ‘ideological’, not only often were in competition with each other but also regularly changed places in the hierarchy of the Soviet leadership’s political priorities depending upon internal policy concerns.

The curious amalgam of ideological ambition and permanent fear within a Soviet leadership obsessed by the danger of being ‘crushed’ (a term used by Stalin) by the powerful capitalist enemy quite often provoked an ostentatiously aggressive image of the country’s foreign policy, even at times when the real intentions of its leaders (and certainly their capacities) were rather modest. As prisoners of communist dogma, the leaders of the USSR regarded the capitalist world and its member states as historic enemies with which one was obliged to coexist and sometimes even to cooperate only because of the (temporary) unfavourable balance of forces. Even the solemnly proclaimed Khrushchev policy of peaceful coexistence² was perceived to be forced by circumstances and was intended to fill in an interval in the expectation that ultimately the capitalist rival would disappear, condemned by history in accordance with Marxist doctrine. Thus, even after initial hopes of world revolution evaporated, the ‘coexistence’ façade of USSR foreign policy directed at the Western world remained largely an expression of political tactics, while competition, confrontation and worldwide ‘continuous class struggle’ represented the real political strategy that would lead to the happy ending of History.

However, from the end of the 1960s, even the most convincing ideological arguments or persuasive citations from Marx and Lenin could no longer obscure the reality of the economic situation of the Soviet Union for the leadership of the country. Unable to nourish any hope of being able to do away with the capitalist world by military means, especially since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, they nevertheless continued to use ideological jargon stressing the ‘antagonistic conflict’ between the two systems, mostly as a means of legitimizing the totalitarian regime within Soviet society and in order to justify the state of the permanent economic disaster produced by administrative mismanagement of the economy.

In fact, having started out in the first post-revolutionary years as fundamentalist missionaries of Marxist doctrine, by the 1970s and 1980s Soviet leaders had become its prisoners. The ‘dual-track’ foreign policy of the USSR quite naturally became the programmed victim of a broadening gap between the requirements of a sterile ideological project and the reality of a changing world. More and more often obliged to deal with the aggravating internal problems of the communist regime, Soviet leaders were forced to sacrifice official strategy based on ideology, replacing it with survival tactics. And although formally the declared strategic horizon of the Soviet state’s long-term policy continued to be the predetermined victory over capitalism, this hypothetical goal virtually disappeared from the field of practical policy, passing to the sphere of propaganda, while the foreign policy sector was exclusively engaged in the daily exercise of obligatory coexistence.

After Khrushchev, who was perhaps the last sincere believer in the possible victory of the world communist cause, the ideological dimension of Soviet foreign policy was gradually reduced to rhetoric and propaganda while the conservative structure of the MID, headed by Andrei Gromyko, definitely gained the upper hand over the International Department (led by Boris Ponomarev) in the handling of foreign affairs. The MID’s new status was confirmed in 1973 by Gromyko’s elevation to the position of full member of Politburo, which demonstrated his superiority over Ponomarev, who continued to remain a candidate member.

Of course, rhetoric devoted to the continuous advance of the ‘world revolutionary process’ still could be heard in the public statements of Soviet leaders and continued to occupy an honourable place in the political reports of the General Secretary to Party congresses. Yet it was mostly meant for internal consumption and used as one of the elements of the stabilization mechanism of the system. It was increasingly evident that the actual foreign policy of the Soviet Union, although maintaining some relation to its ideological origin, had sacrificed its revolutionary ambition for the sake of great power pragmatism.

* * *

It could be argued that the institutionalized confrontation with the West became one of the basic factors assuring the survival of regime, at least until the time it reached the stage of virtual collapse at the beginning of the 1980s with a succession of deaths among its ailing top leaders.³ By this time the logic of superpower competition had so tightly chained together the military-industrial complexes of the Soviet Union and the United States that their functioning and development became de facto interconnected. Because it was rather obscurely defined, the mutually accepted formula of strategic balance offered large margins of interpretation for both sides, allowing each to present the other’s moves as a real or potential breach of the strategic equilibrium. And despite the fact that political calculations or corporate and financial interests on each side must have played an important role in the misinterpretation of the opponent’s acts and intentions, in many cases it was based on genuine mutual misgivings.

In fact it was only after the end of the Cold War, when decision-makers of both sides (with their experts and advisers) could confront and compare the mutual suspicions of those times, that the unprecedented, jointly constructed ‘hoax of the century’ was gradually unveiled. A striking incident of this kind took place when top political and military advisers of the US and the former Soviet Union met during an Oral History Conference, ‘Understanding the End of the Cold War’, that took place at Brown University, in the USA, between 7 and 10 May 1998. At this conference, President Reagan’s former National Security Adviser, Robert McFarlane, argued that the character of the defence spending of the Soviet Union in this period could hardly be justified by feelings of insecurity since ‘much of the money was going not into defensive systems but into force projection’. For the former US Ambassador to the USSR, Jack Matlock, Soviet foreign and security policy ‘did not seem to be one of retrenchment but rather expansionist with the situations in Angola, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Mozambique and especially Afghanistan providing apparent proof of it’. At the same time their Soviet colleague, Anatoli Chernyaev, maintained that since the Cuban missile crisis, any support for ‘revolutionary change’ remained largely a ‘hollow shell’, verbal ideological wrapping destined (and designed) mostly for internal consumption to support the image of the Soviet Union as an mighty superpower. ‘No one would seriously think of going to war with the West over Angola or Ethiopia.’⁴

For the Soviet experts of the war-time generation (Anatoli Chernyaev, Georgi Shakhnazarov, Georgi Arbatov – the former two served as principal political aides to the President while the latter played the role of an ad hoc adviser to Gorbachev), one of the explanations for a seemingly irrational ‘obsession’ with security concerns that characterized Soviet behaviour in the postwar years could be found in the ‘1941 syndrome’. This of course was the year of Hitler’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union which provoked the disorderly retreat of the Red Army, caused heavy losses among the military and the civilian population and almost resulted in the seizure of Moscow by the rapidly advancing German army. After the experience of 1941, an obsession with the danger of sudden invasion or a ‘disarming strike’ coming from the West continued to condition the political behaviour of an entire generation of Soviet leaders such as Brezhnev, Ustinov and Andropov; they were programmed to give absolute priority to the question of national defence and to accept the logic of an exhausting arms race not only with the United States but also, more or less, with the rest of the world. ‘While talking about “equal security”, it was the ambition of the Soviet leaders to match not only US capabilities but also those of America’s European allies in NATO and China as well,’ states General Viktor Starodubov.⁵

This kind of paranoiac policy started to produce devastating effects on the Soviet economy, which could ill afford the expense of an unlimited arms race, especially after the fall of world oil prices. It was also at this time that the entire Soviet political and economic model began to show signs of systemic crisis. As confirmed by one of the chief analysts of the former KGB, Nikolai Leonov, ‘the people from the military-industrial complex or its representatives didn’t take economics into account at all. They thought that our resources were unlimited. As if they had not been informed as to the country’s real situation.’⁶

After almost sixty years in power, the communist regime proved incapable of keeping its initial promises and was apparently losing its historic bet against its capitalist rival. Rejecting the very idea of any reform or modernization, the ailing Soviet Party leadership and state bureaucracy comfortably settled into the climate of ‘stagnation’, seeking to perpetuate the status quo.

The only sphere in which the decaying regime could hope to produce any sign of ‘historic dynamism’ was in the foreign policy arena, and particularly with regard to the expansion of the Soviet presence and influence in the ‘third world’. Soviet leaders preferred to rely on ‘external’ success to demonstrate the ‘historic superiority’ of the communist project for a number of reasons. First of all, it was a way of diverting the attention of the Soviet population from the rather obvious failures inside the country. Secondly, they believed that indirect confrontation with their main Western rival, the United States, in the ‘no man’s land’ of ‘third world’ countries was relatively safe and presented no risks of a dangerous military conflict between the two superpowers. Furthermore, the military-industrial complex remained the only sector of the Soviet economy that was rapidly increasing its production, was competitive on the world market and apparently supplied the political leadership with ‘cheap’, convincing arguments capable of winning the favour of a number of ‘third world’ leaders, dragging them into the Soviet sphere of influence.

Finally, Soviet Party and military bosses convinced themselves that the Western world, and above all the US, especially after the humiliating defeat in Vietnam, was being pushed into strategic retreat, leaving them a chance to gain the offensive. During the 25th Party Congress in February 1976, Leonid Brezhnev could boast that the historical ‘correlation of forces’ was shifting in favour of socialism’.⁷

The events that followed in the late 1970s seemed to confirm this conclusion, including the April 1978 coup staged by the radical leftist officers in Afghanistan, the June 1978 ‘antiimperialist’ coup in South Yemen, the toppling of the Shah and Khomeini’s accession to power in Iran in February 1979, and in July the victory of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas over Somoza. All these developments in the ‘third world’ could be considered to be American defeats, along with the impressive scale of the anti-nuclear movement in Western Europe that forced President Carter to abort his neutron bomb programme.

It was in these years that the Soviet military, backed by the monstrous industrial complex, gained a position of almost unrestrained domination of the political and economic life of the country, able to prevail over the Party apparatus. This process was strengthened and accelerated by two parallel events – the beginning of the rapid physical decay of the General Secretary of the Central Committee, Leonid Brezhnev, and the appointment of Dimitri Ustinov to the post of Minister of Defence in 1976. Since he had been Weapons Minister under Stalin and subsequently, putting Ustinov at the head of the Ministry of Defence combined the functions of purchaser and supplier; this had the effect of exempting the giant military-industrial complex, of which he became the sole ruler, from any political control. As confirmed by the International Department’s military expert, General Viktor Starodubov:

Ustinov brought the psychology of the producer of armaments into the strategic planning of the Defence Ministry. Since it was customary in his previous role to de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Gorbachev Years: A Chronology
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Preparing the Change
• 2. Ambitions and Illusions of the ‘New Political Thinking’
• 3. Breaking the Ice
• 4. Up to the Peak and Down the Slope
• 5. The Winds of Change
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index