Authors: David Hoffman
At the end of the hospitalization, he was given a pension and told to remain silent. Zheleznyakov suffered aftereffects for a long time, including chronic weakness in his arms, toxic hepatitis, epilepsy, severe depression and an inability to concentrate. Zheleznyakov had been a jovial man and was known as a talented woodcarver, but the accident left him unable to work or be creative. He died five years after the accident.
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Novichok
had shown its teeth.
R
eagan’s last hurrah with Gorbachev came on a warm spring day, May 31, 1988. Having finished the third plenary meeting of their fourth summit, they stepped out into the lilac-scented breezes for a walking tour around the Kremlin and Red Square, trailed by aides and journalists. They stopped near a thirty-nine-ton cannon dating from 1586 that stands in a plaza in the center of the Kremlin. Asked if he still considered the Soviet Union to be an evil empire, Reagan replied, “No.” Surprised, reporters asked why. Reagan paused, and tilted his head to one side. “You are talking about another time, another era,” he said.
The moment marked the end of Reagan’s cold war. On his first visit to the Soviet Union after so many decades of antipathy, Reagan and Gorbachev did not sign any nuclear arms treaties, a missed opportunity for deep cuts in strategic weapons, and they would not eliminate any more weapons together in the eight months remaining in Reagan’s term.
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But they began to put the superpower rivalry to rest, in a vivid and symbolic way, walking the cobblestones of Red Square for twenty minutes under the afternoon sun. Gorbachev, in a light business suit, showed Reagan, in a darker one, the onion-shaped domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, the GUM department store, the State Historical Museum and Lenin’s tomb. At one point, Reagan and Gorbachev put their arms around each other’s waists, like two tourists posing for photos. “What we have decided to do,” Reagan
said, “is talk to each other and not about each other, and that’s working just fine.”
Later in the day, Reagan delivered one of the most powerful speeches of his presidency to students at Moscow State University. He spoke in the lecture hall standing under a large white bust of Lenin with a mural spreading out behind him depicting the Bolshevik Revolution. Reagan articulated his themes of democracy, capitalism and freedom, ideas that had so animated his anti-communism. Reagan declared the world stood at the start of a new revolution “quietly sweeping the globe without bloodshed or conflict.” This was the “information revolution,” Reagan said, describing the power of one computer chip, and “its effects are peaceful, but they will fundamentally alter our world, shatter old assumptions, and reshape our lives.” Reagan celebrated freedom, entrepreneurship and dissent. And, quoting Boris Pasternak, he championed “the irresistible power of unarmed truth” to the students. Reagan endorsed Gorbachev’s drive for change, and voiced anew his goal of abolishing nuclear weapons. Those days in May marked the zenith of his extraordinary partnership with Gorbachev.
Reagan’s enthusiasm was not shared by his vice president, George Bush, who was watching the spectacle at his home in Kennebunkport, Maine. Bush was campaigning that year to be Reagan’s successor, running against a liberal Democrat, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Bush was profoundly cautious by character. His guiding principles were good stewardship—public service in an old-fashioned sense—and avoiding mistakes. He had doubts about whether the changes in Moscow were real, and he was uneasy at the scenes from Red Square. A few weeks later, speaking in San Francisco to the World Affairs Council of Northern California, he expressed this uncertainty. “We must be bold enough to seize the opportunity of change,” he said, “but at the same time be prepared for what one pundit called ‘The Protracted Conflict.’” Bush clearly had not made up his mind. He was more certain about the past than the future. “The Cold War is not over,” he declared.
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The next few months underscored how wrong he was. Gorbachev rushed toward fundamental change. The Soviet leader announced troops
would begin a pullout from Afghanistan by May 15, 1988, and they did. In private conversations in the Kremlin, the Cold War was being tossed into the waste bin of history. For example, on June 20—nine days before Bush said the Cold War was not over—Gromyko, once the hardest of the hard-liners, gave strong voice to the new thinking, declaring at a Politburo meeting that decades of competition in the arms race had been senseless. “And so we made more and more nuclear weapons,” he said, according to a transcript of the meeting. “That was our mistaken position, absolutely mistaken. And the political leadership bears the entire blame for it. Tens of billions were spent on production of these toys; we did not have enough brains” to stop.
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By autumn, Gorbachev was preparing his most daring proposal yet, a major speech to the United Nations announcing a massive Soviet troop pullback from Europe. Meeting with a small group of his foreign policy advisers October 31, he recalled Winston Churchill’s famous speech, “Sinews of Peace,” at Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946. In the address, Churchill warned that “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent” with Soviet control tightening over “all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.” Gorbachev declared his own ambition was to mark the end of the era. “In general, this speech should be an anti-Fulton—Fulton in reverse,” Gorbachev said.
On November 3, after a Politburo meeting, Gorbachev brought up his plan with a wider group of senior officials. Chernyaev recalled that Gorbachev was “clearly nervous.” He carefully maneuvered so as not to ignite opposition from the military. He did not disclose the full details of the planned one-sided pullback. He noted that the Soviet military was far larger than would be required under the new doctrine Akhromeyev had drafted. This would be difficult to admit publicly. “If we publish how matters stand, that we spend over twice as much as the United States on military needs, if we let the scope of our expenses be known, all our new thinking and our new foreign policy will go to hell,” Gorbachev said. “Not one country in the world spends as much per capita on weapons as we do, except perhaps the developing nations that we are swamping with weapons and getting nothing in return.”
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Gorbachev’s address to the United Nations on December 7 was a milestone in his retreat from the Cold War. He condemned the “one-sided reliance on military power” that had been a pillar of Soviet foreign policy,
and he announced unilateral reductions in the Soviet armed forces of five hundred thousand men, including six tank divisions in Eastern Europe. It was a profound break from the past to make such a sizable one-sided pullback. Gorbachev said the Soviet Union would no longer hold the nations of Eastern Europe in its grip, another breathtaking change in approach. “Freedom of choice is a universal principle,” he said. “It knows no exceptions.”
After the speech, Gorbachev took a ferry to meet Reagan for a farewell lunch on Governor’s Island, joined by Bush, who had just been elected president. In the twilight hours of his presidency, Reagan was ebullient, and wrote in his diary that the meeting was a “tremendous success” and Gorbachev had “a better attitude than at any of our previous meetings. He sounded as if he saw us as partners making a better world.”
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Yet on substance, Reagan did not discuss Gorbachev’s remarkable speech in any detail, and they parted without having realized their most cherished goal, eliminating the long-range nuclear weapons, the brass ring they had nearly grasped at Reykjavik. The hope of cutting the arsenals by 50 percent was bogged down in negotiations.
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At the Governor’s Island meeting, Bush, the president-elect, kept quiet, not wanting to upstage Reagan.
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Gorbachev noticed the hesitation. “We should take into account that Bush is a very cautious politician,” Gorbachev told the Politburo on his return to Moscow. Georgi Arbatov, director of the Institute for the Study of the U.S.A. and Canada, the leading Soviet specialist on America, was more blunt. Gorbachev read out to the Politburo group Arbatov’s assessment that the United States has “suddenly sent a trial balloon: we are not ready; let’s wait, we will see. In general, they will drag their feet, they want to break the wave that has been created by our initiatives.”
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Bush did not share Reagan’s hopes of eliminating nuclear weapons. He decided against an early summit with Gorbachev. Two days after Bush was inaugurated, Brent Scowcroft, his national security adviser, said, “I think the Cold War is not over.”
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Within a month of taking office in January 1989, Bush ordered a series of internal foreign policy studies, including one on U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union, which produced little and wasted months. “In the end, what we received was mush,” said Bush’s close friend and his new secretary of state, James A. Baker III.
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In general, Bush saw Gorbachev’s dynamic of change, but interpreted it as a
competitive threat to the United States rather than an opportunity. “I’ll be darned if Mr. Gorbachev should dominate world public opinion forever,” Bush wrote to a friend March 13.
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Baker recalled many years later that Bush paused in early 1989 primarily to put his own stamp on foreign policy, and because slowing down the pace with the Soviets would also help calm the right wing of the Republican Party. Baker said the pause was driven by these needs, and was not a response to Gorbachev or the situation in Moscow. The administration soon came up with the idea of “testing” Gorbachev, setting up hoops and demanding that Gorbachev jump through them.
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On April 29, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney predicted in a televised appearance that Gorbachev would “ultimately fail.”
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Bush also found reinforcement from Scowcroft, who was extremely cautious because he feared that Gorbachev was trying to rope the United States into another period of détente in order to gain some advantage, as many felt had happened in the 1970s. “Once burned, twice shy,” Scowcroft said later.
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When Baker visited Moscow on May 10, Shevardnadze told him Gorbachev was eager to eliminate the whole class of tactical, or short-range, nuclear weapons in Europe. “Do not dodge” the issue, Shevardnadze warned Baker. A day later, Gorbachev announced he was unilaterally withdrawing five hundred warheads from Eastern Europe, and promised even more if the United States would take similar steps. But Baker brushed off the proposal as a political ploy.
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On May 16, Marlin Fitzwater, the White House press secretary, told a press briefing that Gorbachev was throwing out arms control proposals like a “drugstore cowboy,” a slang term meaning someone who makes promises they can’t keep.
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On July 20, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, Jack F. Matlock Jr., met with Alexander Yakovlev, one of the leading architects of Gorbachev’s new thinking. “There is only one danger—nuclear weapons,” Yakovlev insisted, imploring the United States to accelerate negotiations. Matlock replied that Reagan’s dream of nuclear abolition was no longer on the table. “Reagan believed in the possibility of liquidation of nuclear weapons,” Matlock said. “Bush thinks that we need to reduce them to a minimum, but not liquidate them. He believes that without nuclear weapons the risk of war being unleashed would increase.”
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While Bush delayed, Gorbachev’s ambitions for disarmament were as
keen as ever. Katayev’s files contain a Politburo work plan on arms control and defense issues for 1989—with dozens of instructions and tight deadlines, starting in early January and running well into the next year—which underscored how the Kremlin wanted to move briskly on many fronts. The list, ten pages long, included the new initiative to reduce tactical or short-range nuclear weapons; the elimination of chemical weapons; publication of once-secret data on Soviet military spending; creating a global space organization; reducing foreign aid to other states in the Soviet bloc; boosting science and technology for the civilian sector; and downsizing the military-industrial complex. The list included directives to various ministries and agencies aimed at jump-starting defense conversion, or switching military production to civilian goods, with an aim of creating better living standards for a society staggering under shortages and economic hardship.
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Katayev drafted a five-page instruction, prepared for the Central Committee’s approval in January 1989, laying out the rationale for a dramatic cut in Soviet weapons. The document is yet another powerful piece of evidence that Gorbachev at this point was pushing to slash military spending. The goal of defense cuts, the instruction said, was to free up resources “for accelerated development of the national economy” and provide for the most urgent everyday needs of the Soviet people.
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Another document in Katayev’s files shows that Soviet military spending peaked in 1989 and began a sharp decline thereafter.
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As promised, the Soviet army retreated from Afghanistan by February 15, when the last Soviet commander of the 40th Army, Lieutenant General Boris Gromov, walked back across the Amu Darya River bridge at Termez.
By late 1988 and early 1989, just as Bush was taking office, Gorbachev may have reached the zenith of his powers as a leader. It would have been an ideal time to seize the initiative and lock in a 50 percent cut in strategic weapons, as well as reductions in other systems, such as tactical nuclear weapons. A strategic arms treaty also might have been easier because Bush was not dazzled by Reagan’s grand dream of a defense against ballistic missiles that had proven so contentious in earlier years. But Bush hesitated.
In Moscow, Gorbachev’s room for maneuver soon began to shrink. The forces of freedom and openness he had unleashed began to overtake him, creating obstacles and open resistance: new forces of democracy at
home; a sweeping tide of change in Eastern Europe; the reawakening of old nationalist dreams in the Soviet republics. On March 26, the first relatively free election since the Bolshevik Revolution was held for a new Soviet legislature, the Congress of People’s Deputies. In the balloting, the Communist Party leadership in Leningrad was turned out, pro-independence parties won in the Baltics and Yeltsin, the radical reformer, triumphed in Moscow. The Communist Party establishment took a shellacking. When the new legislature met for the first time from May 25 through June 9, Gorbachev ordered the proceedings broadcast on television. People stayed home from work to watch the broadcasts; the country was transfixed by debates that broke new ground in freedom of speech. One result was that Gorbachev, the party, the KGB and the military were lambasted with open and often trenchant criticism. The virus of freedom seemed to be spreading fast.