Хмурые будни холодной войны. Ее солдаты, прорабы и невольные участники - [133]

¹⁰ As George Kennan advised Truman, Ronald Reagan might have been cautioned that the Soviet Bloc was expansionist and a natural response was “containment”, there being two variables in its modern form. The first was the Warsaw Pact crumbling through over extension and lack of investment. Secondly, a technology was needed to confound nuclear devastation. Reagan’s response was the Strategic Defence Initiative – derided as “Star Wars” – sustaining the view of history which perpetuated the Cold War: an unwavering belief in scientific advancement and yet a readiness to pull the trigger.

The Soviet historiography, also extending the Cold War, shared the sense of stalemate. This perspective, beginning with proletarian revolution, readily expressed the Cold War as a class struggle. Gorbachev, considering nuclear attack less likely, possibly believing the potential of SDI or perceiving its naive foundation, was able to transcend Soviet orthodoxy creating a radical comprehension of past systemic failure. Added to this reassessment of the Soviet world view was the fragmentation experienced in the Eastern Bloc with previously passive satellites like Poland contentiously espousing liberalism. Whereas the United States held to an unyielding perception of Soviet totalitarianism, parts of the Soviet regime understood that change was inevitable.

Gorbachev’s reforms, highlighted by glasnost and perestroika, refuted the command economy and regarded totalitarianism as an unworkable ethic. As the Berlin Airlift and the Cuban Missile Crisis represented tipping points in Cold War historiography, the fall of the Berlin Wall, where Gorbachev played a keystone role, marked its demise.

Whether late eighties summits resulted in a meaningful exchange between the folksy Reagan and the emollient Gorbachev is problematic although they did result in the abolition of an entire class of nuclear weapons. The view of history which perpetuated the Cold War, driven by equally culpable states harnessed to a technology fuelled race for supremacy, was being re-defined. A new openness was manifest. At the Brandenberg Gate, Reagan called out to Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall!” Drama has a role to play in international relations and perhaps Gorbachev responded to Reagan’s theatrics by refusing East German requests for Soviet tanks in Liepzig to suppress protestors using the Nikolai Church as the focal point for liberalisation demands. These events, together with Hungary opening its borders, precipitated the collapse of the Berlin Wall by popular action.

Gorbachev’s predecessors viewed the Berlin Wall as emblematic of East West confrontation. Gorbachev’s insights viewed the Wall as largely irrelevant and dispensable. The New York Times cited the Premier: “The wall can disappear when those conditions that created it fall away…I don't see a major problem here.” He went on, ‘7 think we have come out of a period of cold war, even if there are still some chills and drafts… We are simply bound to a new stage of relations, one I would call the peaceful period in the development of international relations.” ¹¹ Gorbachev surpassed a view of history which saw Cold War “conditions” as immutable. He had support from Medvedev, Chemyaev, Yakolev and Shevardnadze – an iconoclastic cell aimed at reform.¹²

Gorbachev resisted reactionary elements in the Soviet administration, challenged the unrepresentative nature of the public franchise, countered corruption in State enterprises and popularised a view of coexistence eschewing nuclear arsenals. This was a supersession of a world view; a seismic shift in a historical paradigm. In his final speech as President of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev described the world he inherited “ The society was suffocating in the vice of the command-bureaucratic system, doomed to serve ideology and bear the terrible burden of the arms race. It had reached the limit of its possibilities.”¹³ This was the last gasp of the Cold War. A renunciation of an ideology. Gorbachev blended realpolitik executive authority with considerations of simple social right. This leavening so contradicted the language of the Cold War, that its transcendence provided an alternative view of history which largely persists in international relations today.

Endnotes

¹ Alexis de Toqueville: “Democracy in America”, pp.412–413, 1835.

² Miller Centre of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, Multimedia Archive, First Speech to Congress (April 16, 1945)

³ Address to the People, May 9th, 1945. On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1946

⁴ Miller Centre of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, Multimedia Archive. President Truman’s address to the U.N. San Francisco: April 25th, 1945.

⁵ “The Fifty Years War: the United States and the Soviet Union in World Politics, 1941–1991”, Richard Crockatt. Routledge, London, 1995. ISBN 0-415-13554-0. See page 87 for references to Stalin’s ambivalence towards a united Germany and the Eastern Bloc in the years before his death in 1953.