bout de papier, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2010) — Summer 2010 // Été 2010, pp. 30–31
I look back from time to time on my working life and ask myself what it was all about. I was in the foreign service for 40 years from 1953-93. Much of what I did in those years had something to do with one or the other of two great decolonization. Perhaps there was really of empire,’ because the end of the Cold War ended the Russian empire.
By 1989, we had become used to the Cold War. We were pretty sure by then it was not going to turn hot. It hadn’t always been this way. The first 15 years, up to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, had been a nervous time. The original imitation Stalinist regimes imposed on the satellite states of Central and Eastern Europe by the Russians were hardly reassuring. Western Europe then was still weak and disarmed. There were large communist parties in France and Italy. The communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in 1948, and Soviet encouragement of aggression by North Korea in 1950 seemed to pose a world-wide threat. These events had provoked first the creation of NATO and then the rearmament of the Western alliance. There was endless tension around Berlin. In the summer of 1948, at the time of one crisis over Berlin, I was told at the School of Infantry, “You’ll be in the trenches by September.” Stalin died in 1953, but Khrushchev, who denounced him, seemed in some ways even worse. Whereas Stalin had been a steady menace, Khrushchev was dangerously erratic. With him came further rounds of pressure in Berlin (provoking contingency planning in NATO which involved envisaging the use of nuclear weapons) and finally the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. In the end even the Russians had had enough. Khrushchev was thrown out and succeeded by a troika, from which Leonid Brezhnev was emerging as the principal figure when I went to Moscow in 1967.
Brezhnev’s era (roughly the late 1960s to the early 1980s) had its record of crises — for example over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1980-81, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But it was also a period of growing stability and certainty in East-West relations. Internally in the USSR, the period came to be known by the Russians themselves as “the era of stagnation.” The Soviet Union, far from being the dynamic leader of the Soviet bloc, was in economic decline, plagued by grave social problems, and dragging the countries of Eastern Europe backwards with it as the West prospered. For a long time, Western publics, and even Western governments, were bemused by the Soviet Union’s military power, and tended to exaggerate the Soviet Union’s economic strength. sians were really good at was producing ns. The ubiquitous Kalashnikov is the classic example. But most other Soviet industrial products were junk, unsaleable in Western markets. It was only gradually that Western opinion came to realize that the Soviet Union, in economic terms, was “Upper Volta with missiles.” Maybe this was one reason why the events of 1989 took the world by surprise: how could a supposed superpower fall apart so quickly?
With the passage of time, it became clearer every year from the mid-1960s onwards, that the Soviet Union and its empire were held together in the last analysis by force or the threat of force. That was evident from the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the Polish crisis of 1980—81. In the West, we could have concluded that, if ever a leadership came to power in Moscow that ruled out using or threatening to use force, what remained of the ties between the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union would not be enough to counter the attractions of the increasingly prosperous West. The whole Soviet empire, including parts of the Soviet Union itself, would split apart.
Throughout the Brezhnev years, however, such an outcome seemed inconceivable. We appeared in the 1970s and early 1980s to be headed for something different: a slow evolution of a Europe
that would remain divided in two camps, even if it became rela-
– tively stable and peaceful. It was hard to imagine that any Soviet government would ever give up the chief prize of its victory in the Second World War, the permanent division of its principal enemy’s territory, and control of all the intervening land between Germany and Russia across the historic invasion routes from the West. True, this meant for the Russians not only keeping the German people permanently divided, but also finding a successful formula for dealing with the unending national rebellions of East Germans, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians and Romanians — in the end every one of the Soviet Union’s putative allies in central and Eastern Europe but the Bulgarians. Yet it seemed at the time that the Russians were succeeding at this interminable task. The Hungarian formula for revolt suppression of 1956, with Soviet tanks firing on crowds in the streets of Budapest, could not safely be repeated, especially in the television age. But suppression in Czechoslovakia in 1968, while it did not give the Politburo everything the Russians wanted, brought the Czechs and Slovaks back into line after the excursion of Prague spring, and furthermore was accomplished without bloodshed. Putting the Poles in their place in 1980-81 seemed an even more successful iteration, in that the Russians pressed the Poles into suppressing themselves, and such bloodshed as there was, which was in any event minor, was on General Jaruselski’s hands rather than on Brezhnev’s. An East German counterpart in the early 1980s predicted to me that the Berlin Wall would become over time like the Great Wall of China: a monument to an age long past, that would remain in place but cease to be a barrier to exchanges between peoples.
Thus it was natural to conclude at the time a new Soviet leader came to power in March 1985, that Gorbachev was not running any unreasonable risks, from the Soviet point of view, in undertaking a programme of fundamental economic and political reforms. He obviously could not have imagined, in doing so, and in refusing to intervene with force to get other communist regimes out of trouble when they refused to reform, that he was triggering the disappearance not only of the Soviet empire, but of the Soviet Union itself. He did not appreciate, any more than anyone else, Just how fragile the whole structure was, or he would presumably have gone about his programme more cautiously.
In any event, it was clear that, whatever happened, the West was not going to intervene. While all the previous crises in Central and Eastern Europe had to be blamed by the Soviet authorities on American imperialists and West German revanchists — because the real source of the problem, which was the Russians themselves, obviously could not be admitted — there had never been any serious destabilizing moves from the West to exploit these periodic crises in Eastern Europe. The NATO countries wanted stability. They believed that diplomatic processes like the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and Mutual Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR) would eventually lead to ever more civilized relations between the two opposing alliances.
The CSCE negotiations, culminating in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, provided that, as the West saw it, borders could still be changed in Europe, but only peacefully; so far as the Soviet Union was concerned, it meant that the borders that had emerged from the war were permanent. CSCE also gave not only the Western parties to the Final Act, but the peoples of Eastern Europe themselves a basis for calling repressive governments to account for their human rights records. Meanwhile, the complementary MBER process was intended to reduce conventional forces in the two alliances without risk of destabilizing imbalances. And so far as the nuclear risk was concerned, the high point of tensions in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was followed by a generation of growing conviction that the nuclear threat was extremely difficult to deploy usefully in support of diplomacy; that the actual use of nuclear weapons in war would be disastrous; that their only useful purpose was as a deterrent, to keep the other side from using them; and that for this purpose there was no need for such a huge accumulation of nuclear weapons. A series of arms control and disarmament negotiations acted to confirm all this.
So Europe by the late 1980s was, from the Western point of view, moving slowly in the right direction. The slow pace seemed to many to be the part of wisdom. It gave stability and certainty, time for adjustment. No boats were rocked. That seemed to be in everyone’s interest. In this scenario, German reunification was a dream never to be abandoned, but it was something for our grandchildren. Leaders like Margaret Thatcher, as Brian Mulroney reminded us on the twentieth anniversary of German reunification, would have been happy never to see it in her lifetime. She was bitterly opposed when the prospect had immediately and unexpectedly to be faced. That was what was thrilling but almost frightening about 1989 and its consequences: the unravelling of the Soviet empire went so far and so fast that people feared it would end in some kind of disastrous accident.
Retrospectively, for all the differences between the Warsaw Pact countries, a broadly similar pattern emerged. At the outset, the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe did not know what the limits were when they began to push their rulers and the Russians in the direction of reform. But gradually, they all learned how to organize peaceful mass movements that progressively escaped the control of orthodox communist governments — like Solidarnosc in Poland and the Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia. Eventually reformers obtained the right to organize unions, to constrain the police state, to obtain first half-free and then free elections — all the while carefully avoiding confrontations and violence. Meanwhile, from 1985 onwards, a regime had come to power in the Soviet Union which was not prepared to use force to rescue reactionary leaders like Honecker in Fast Germany. Progressively, the reactionary communist leaderships were driven from power. The example of one country inspired the others, while the example of Eastern Europe in turn infected the Soviet Union itself; the Baltic states, for example, obtained their independence by adopting tactics that imitated what was happening in neighbouring countries.
The pressure of superpower competition with the United States and the example of Western Europe’s economic success undeniably weakened the Soviet grip. But we in the West were largely bystanders. The notion that the West somehow “won the Cold War” involves a distortion of history. It ignores the decisive roles played on the one hand by the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe themselves, and on the other, by a Soviet leader committed to reform and totally opposed to preserving the status quo, either in the Warsaw Pact countries or in the Soviet Union, through the use of force. And unintended consequences played an important part. Gorbachev certainly did not set out to destroy the Warsaw Pact, let alone the Soviet Union, nor did the East German leaders who opened the wall in response to public pressure on November 10, 1989, think that in doing so, they were bringing down the Wall and themselves with it.
James H. Taylor is a retired foreign service officer who served as Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Ambassador to Japan and NATO.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2010) — Summer 2010 // Été 2010, pp. 30–31. Read the rest of this issue →
