Perestroika and the End of the Cold War

Abstract

The author argues, on the basis of a close examination of archival sources (including Politburo minutes) and the numerous memoirs of leading Soviet political actors, that an interdependent mixture of new leadership, new ideas, and long-standing institutional power in the Soviet Union was primarily responsible for the Cold War ending when it did. While acknowledging that the ‘Reagan factor’ was important in some ways, he rejects the view that the Reagan administration played the decisively important role in ending the Cold War, and he contests various arguments which have been advanced in the attempt to sustain a Realist interpretation of its ending.

Notes

 [1] All of these issues are addressed in my forthcoming book, Seven Years that Changed the World. The argument in this article is developed at much greater length in chapter nine (‘Ending the Cold War’) of that book. I am grateful to the Gorbachev Foundation, Moscow, the National Security Archive, Washington, DC, and the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, for permission to cite materials I gathered there.

 [2] In Grachev et al. , 1985–2005, 54 (italics in original).

 [3] Shakhnazarov, Tsena svobody, 3.

 [4] In Grachev et al., 1985–2005, 175.

 [5] In Grachev et al., 1985–2005, 175, 53.

 [6] Gorbachev, Ponyat' perestroyku, 70.

 [7] Gorbachev, “O nekotorykh aktual'nykh voprosakh sotrudnichestva s sotsranami, 26 Iyunya 1986g.”

 [8] Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, 26.

 [9] Chernyaev Diary 1985, entry for 17 October 1985.

[10] Chernyaev Diary 1985, entry for 17 October 1985

[11] See Gorbachev, Izbrannye rechi i stat'i, vol. 6 (1989), 323–397 at 347; vol. 7 (1990), 184–202 at 188. The language Gorbachev used about the universality of this principle at a time when ‘the survival of civilization’ was at stake was very similar in both the conference speech of 28 June and the UN speech of 7 December 1988.

[12] Brooks and Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War,” 44.

[13] “Zasedanie Politbyuro TsK KPSS, 14 oktyabrya 1986 goda,” Volkogonov Collection, R9744, National Security Archive.

[14] Reagan, An American Life, 571.

[15] Sagdeev, The Making of a Soviet Scientist, 273. Sagdeev (who is married to Susan Eisenhower, the grand-daughter of the former American president) recalled that in a small group meeting in the Kremlin, he almost died from suppressing his laughter when he heard an official from the Soviet space industry telling Gorbachev: ‘We are losing time while doing nothing to build our counterpart to the American SDI program’. Nevertheless, Sagdeev accepts that ‘if Americans oversold SDI, we Russians overbought it’; however, the attention devoted to the issue, by leading to the conclusion that even a fully developed SDI could be counteracted much more cheaply, ‘saved the country a few billion rubles’ (ibid.).

[16] Brooks and Wohlforth, “From Old Thinking to New Thinking in Qualitative Research,” 95.

[17] Kryuchkov, Lichnost i vlast', 174.

[18] See Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire; and, especially, Matlock, Reagan and Gorbachev.

[19] See Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph. See also Shultz interview of 20 June 2000, Hoover Institution Oral History Project, Hoover Institution Archives (HIA), Acc. No. 98067-16.305.

[20] Weinberger, speaking on 20 October 1998, said of Gorbachev: ‘I don't think he ever changed his philosophy. He talked a lot about perestroika, glasnost, all of those things, but he never really changed’. See Weinberger interview, Hoover Institution Oral History Project, Acc. No. 98067-16.305, HIA.

[21] Matlock, Reagan and Gorbachev, 75–6.

[22] See, for example, Reagan, An American Life, 635.

[23] Gaddis, The Cold War, 222.

[24] Pipes, “Misinterpreting the Cold War,” 158.

[25] See Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, 84–8.

[26] “Politbyuro 20 Iyunya 1988 goda, Obsuzhdenie proekta doklada Gorbacheva k XIX partkonferentsii,” notes of Anatoliy Chernyaev, Gorbachev Foundation Archives.

[27] “Politbyuro 20 Iyunya 1988 goda, Obsuzhdenie proekta doklada Gorbacheva k XIX partkonferentsii,” notes of Anatoliy Chernyaev, Gorbachev Foundation Archives

[28] Gorbachev, Ponyat' perestroyku, 39 (emphasis in original).

[29] Ronald Reagan quotes in full a memorandum from Shultz in which the Secretary of State said he ‘was struck by how deeply affected Gorbachev appeared to be by the Chernobyl accident’. It had left him with a ‘strong anti-nuclear streak’ (Reagan, An American Life, 710–11). See also Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 724.

[30] Gorbachev and Mlynář, Conversations with Gorbachev, 139.

[31] Gorbachev and Mlynář, Conversations with Gorbachev, 139

[32] See Howe, Conflict of Loyalty, 350; and Gates, From the Shadows, 272.

[33] “Zasedanie Politbyuro TsK KPSS 14 oktyabrya 1986 goda,” Volkogonov Collection, R9744, National Security Archive.

[34] In Grachev et al., 1985–2005, 149.

[35] Davis and Wohlforth, “German Unification,” 138.

[36] Davis and Wohlforth, “German Unification,” 138, 148.

[37] Indeed, as noted earlier, Gorbachev, from the beginning of his General Secretaryship, had been determined to put relations with Eastern Europe on a new footing, although he envisaged at that time relations of genuine co-operation rather than the radical breaks with the Soviet Union which were to occur in 1989.

[38] See Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, esp. chapters 4 and 7; English, Russia and the Idea of the West; and Brown, The Demise of Marxism-Leninism in Russia.

[39] This point is elaborated in Brown, Seven Years that Changed the World.

[40] Dobrynin, In Confidence, 574.

[41] Dobrynin, In Confidence, 574, 626.

[42] Dobrynin, In Confidence, 574

[43] Reytingi Borisa Yel'tsina i Mikhaila Gorbacheva po 10-bal'noy skale. Moscow: VTsIOM, 1993.

[44] As Pavel Palazchenko has noted, there was popular support in the Soviet Union for Gorbachev's foreign policy during the period the Cold War was brought to an end. That was one reason why Boris Yeltsin at that time ‘took little interest in foreign policy, and even less in theoretical concepts such as “new thinking” … There was … little that Yeltsin could do or say on foreign policy issues with a clear political benefit to himself’ (Palazchenko, My Years with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, 372).

[45] Both the significance of the new foreign policy team put together during the perestroika years and the importance for many of its members of seeing Western countries for themselves are discussed in Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, and especially in my forthcoming book, Seven Years that Changed the World.

[46] Neustadt, Presidential Power, 9–10.

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Archie Brown

Archie Brown is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University and Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College. His book The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford University Press, 1996) won the W.J.M. Mackenzie Prize of the Political Studies Association of the UK for best political science book of the year and the Alec Nove Prize for best book on Russia, Communism or Post-Communism. His most recent book, as editor and co-author, is The Demise of Marxism-Leninism in Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). His Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective will be published by Oxford University Press in spring 2007. Professor Brown, who has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1991, was awarded the CMG in 2005 ‘for services to UK–Russian relations and to the study of political science and international affairs’.