Statecraft. Margaret Thatcher

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      I still find it astonishing that even the left should try to deny all this. It is, of course, not a crime to be wrong. But it is not far short of criminal to behave as some of them did when they thought that the Soviet Union was on the winning side. These people were blind because they did not want to see, and because they were intoxicated with the classic socialist fantasy of believing that state power offers a short-cut to progress. Thus the American journalist Lincoln Steffens observed after visiting the Soviet Union in 1919: ‘I have seen the future; and it works.’

      At the height of the famine of 1932, the worst in Russia’s history, the visiting biologist Julian Huxley found ‘a level of physique and general health rather above that to be seen in England’. Similarly, George Bernard Shaw wrote that ‘Stalin has delivered the goods to an extent that seemed impossible ten years ago, and I take my hat off to him.’ H.G. Wells was equally impressed, reporting that he had ‘never met a man more candid, fair and honest … no-one is afraid of him and everybody trusts him’. Harold Laski considered that Soviet prisons (stuffed full of political prisoners in appalling conditions) enabled convicts to lead ‘a full and self-respecting life’.*

      Sidney and Beatrice Webb were similarly overwhelmed by the glories of the Soviet experiment. Their 1200-page book, which faithfully parroted any Soviet propaganda they could pick up, was originally entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?: but the question mark was removed from the second edition, which appeared in 1937 – the height of the terror.†

      The capacity of the left to believe the best of communism and the worst of anti-communists has something almost awe-inspiring about it. Even when the Soviet system was in its economic death throes, the economist J.K. Galbraith wrote of his visit in 1984:

      That the Soviet system has made great material progress in recent years is evident both from the statistics and from the general urban scene … One sees it in the appearance of well-being of the people on the streets … Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.*

      Professor Galbraith was one of the exponents of the once fashionable notion of ‘convergence’, according to which the capitalist and socialist models were destined to become ever more similar to one another, resulting in a social democracy that reflected the best of each without the disadvantages. One large problem with this theory was that those who held it had constantly to be trying to find advantages in a Soviet system which had none that were apparent to Soviet citizens. As the former dissident Vladimir Bukovsky once remarked – referring to the Russian proverb to the effect that you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs – he had seen plenty of broken eggs, but never tasted any omelette.

      A similar error – which I discuss in a later chapter – was made by those Sovietologists who tried to analyse and predict events in the Soviet Union in terms of doves and hawks, liberals and conservatives, left and right† (I am still perplexed as to why we should be expected to call hardline communists ‘conservative’ or anti-Semite fascists ‘right wing’ – except that it is a useful device of the liberal media to embarrass their opponents). For the advocates of ‘convergence’ and for certain advocates of détente it was assumed that a particular action by the United States would draw forth a parallel reaction from the Soviets.‡ Thus if we wanted peace we should not prepare for war, if we wanted security we should not threaten, and if we wanted cooperation we should compromise. This approach was entirely wrong – at least while the Soviet Union remained a superpower with an expansionist ideology, which it did until some time in the mid-to-late 1980s.

      The proof of this is clear. While the United States was led by administrations (Nixon, Ford and Carter) which were intent on compromise with the Soviets, the Soviet Union expanded its military arsenals and intensified its military interventions around the world. But once there was an American President who openly proclaimed his aims of military superiority, systemic competition and the global roll-back of Soviet power, the Soviet Union cooperated, disarmed and finally collapsed. President Reagan’s former critics, in their desperation to find someone else to credit for an end to the Cold War, summoned up Mikhail Gorbachev as a kind of deus ex machina who transformed everything. And indeed Mr Gorbachev’s role was positive and important. But what President Reagan’s revisionist detractors fail to explain is (to use the words of Professor Richard Pipes) ‘why, after four years of Reagan’s relentlessly confrontational policies the Soviet Union did not respond in kind … by appointing a similarly hard-line, belligerent First Secretary, but settled on a man of compromise’.*

      To be so wrong quite so often does not, it seems, in the post-Cold War world constitute any impediment to promotion. Far from it. Yesterday’s critics of the strategy which so triumphantly destroyed the Soviet Union were then trusted to manage relations with its successor. Mr Strobe Talbott, in his previous career as a journalist on Time, variously attacked the Reagan defence build-up, dismissed SDI, mocked the idea that external Western pressures could be effective, described the Cold War as a ‘grand obsession’ which diverted the world from other more important matters and described NATO’s continued existence as ‘at best a stop-gap’.† Mr Talbott went on to become President Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State.

      And, yes, all this does matter now. If so many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against during the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.

      The Cold War has sometimes been portrayed as a struggle between two superpowers, the United States (and its allies) on the one hand, and the Soviet Union (and its puppets) on the other. The term ‘superpower’ was not one that I relished at the time, because it always seemed to suggest a moral equivalence between the two political poles. Of course, at one level this was, indeed, a competition for advantage between broadly equivalent powers. But the equivalence reflected might not right. Much more important, and significant for us today, the Cold War was a struggle between two sharply opposing systems, encapsulating two wholly contradictory philosophies, involving two totally different sets of objectives.

      The Soviet communist system was, in a sense, simpler. Its central purpose was to achieve domination over the world in its entirety by an ideology, Marxism-Leninism, and by the Communist Party, which was that ideology’s supreme custodian and unique beneficiary. That purpose was, in the eyes of its proponents, subject to no moral constraints – the very notion of which appeared absurd. Communism recognised no limits except those posed by the power of its enemies. Within such a system individuals were only of value in so far as they served the role allotted them. Similarly, the expression of ideas, artistic endeavour, all kinds of ‘private’ activity, were judged and permitted according to whether they advanced ‘the Revolution’, which in practice increasingly meant the interests of the old men of the Kremlin. The pursuit of world revolution was at times largely suspended. At other times, notably in Soviet relations with China, disagreements broke out between the proponents of the great socialist ‘idea’ about its pace, conduct and immediate goals. But the objective of creating worldwide a fully socialist society, consisting of radically socialist citizens, remained.

      Against this stood America and its allies. What we call in shorthand ‘the West’ was a reality as complex as ‘the East’ (in communist terms) was simple. First of all it consisted not of one power but of many. Within NATO, the institutional embodiment of Western defence resolve, individual states pursued constantly shifting policies, СКАЧАТЬ