[inaudible conversations] my name is Mark Harrison and its my pleasure to introduce Robert Service to you. Robert is going to tell us about his new book, the end of the cold war. The book will be published by Public Affairs and by great britain. He is among the worlds historians and rush and author of viagra please of lenin and trotsky. He discovered america in the year 2004. Ever since then he has been delving in the records held by the Hoover Institution. All of their research that Robert Service has done is done in the archives. He took part in the annual Hoover Institution totalitarian regimes directed by hoover fellow gregory. The scholarly audience presentations on the keynote events of the workshop program. Robert service will now address us on the end of the cold war. [applause] thank you very much mark for that very generous introduction. What i want to talk about today is the subject of my new book, which is about a war that never became a war. Its about the cold war rather than a hot war. Although it was a cold war in a sense that there was a threat that military conflict throughout its existence, it was a single nonwar, the third world war which could have a liberated human and animal life obliterated human and animal life on the entire planet all around the earth. It really was a truly dangerous phenomenon, the cold war for that there have been many cold wars in history. The british and the french were in cold war most of the centuries back to the norman conquest. They had many hot wars with each other but the cold war, the war that we know as the cold war, that was the most dangerous war of all and thank god it never became. A hot war. There were wars between the principle allies of the principle agents of the cold war, mainly the soviet union and the United States of america. There were wars in many states of africa between allies on one side and allies on the other side of america and the ussr never went to war with each other. Even though it came very close to that at times, for example in 1962 and again in 1983. The accounts at the end of the cold war tend to be onesided, tend to concentrate either predominantly on the american side or predominantly on the soviet side and the reason i thought it was worth writing a new book about the end of the cold war was that it seemed to me that very few people had looked at the end of the cold war as a twosided process, as a bilateral process and looked properly at the interaction between the two superpowers. Thats extremely important because the cold war didnt end with a peace treaty because there was no hot war. It didnt and in the way that wars normally end. As the cold war was going to end as a cold war it was always going to and with a fundamental process of interaction, and so i concentrated on looking at a number of materials principally here. I did look at materials in moscow. We do have some very good Gorbachev Administration materials in oxford. There are some marvelous materials in simi valley and the reagan president ial library but above all it was the materials inside the institution over there, the Hoover Institution archives that i used more than anything else and they are so rich in showing us, to look at the end of the cold war, this very very dangerous period and World History not just through memoirs because as we know politicians write memoirs so as to look good to posterity and anyway there are bound to be somewhat onesided. Interviews are very very helpful i did have a disastrous interview with Mikail Gorbachev in the mid90s before even thought of this book and i remember him saying at a point in the conversation, what are you interested in and i said well i writing a lacquer feel lenin at the moment and he said, very interesting and then he quickly cut the conversation short because to him soviet ideology and particularly the figure of lenin remained it remains a sensitive topic. I have to say i got much more out of secretary shultz in my interviews with him over the years. He didnt have the same sensitivity to marxism and leninism that gorbachev did. Its possible here to look at diaries from the ministry of foreign affairs, the soviet ministry of foreign affairs, quite extraordinary diaries by aides to foreign minister particularly a man named stephanos malabos and the diaries of the deputy minister in the soviet administration but also the Party Defense official the tally could tie f. Two the captain mats and copies of discussions that the military Industrial Complex had brought the years of the late 1980s. If you add those materials to the materials of the american side we can now have marvelous access to the papers of Ronald Reagan to some extent George Shultz bill casey and then we can get a way forward to understand how this terrible threat of a third world war was avoided by that particular generation of leaders and i picked out for leaders as being cardinal figures in the process of ending the cold war. On the american side Ronald Reagan and George Shultz. On the soviet side because gorbachev and his foreign minister shevardnadze and. One of the questions that one has to ask about the process of ending the cold war is what was it that made the ussr jump . Why did they resist western pressure particularly the american pressure for so many years in the 14th, 15, 60s and 70s and yet they started to make massive concessions in the second half of the 1980s. What i found was contrary to what Mikail Gorbachev bikes to suggest. The change of attitude to the problems of the soviet internal crisis did not occur only when he came to power in 1985. The materials showed the politburo repeatedly looked at the fundamental economic, social, religious and indeed imperial problems with relation to Eastern Europe that it confronted, problems that it couldnt afford to solve than the old way of as the soviet economy was going through the plughole. It was draining away resources particularly after the invasion of afghanistan at the end of 1979. So repeatedly in the first half of the 1980s the politburo was looking at matters that it had edged away from an earlier decades. But what it did was look at the symptoms. Didnt face up to the possible realistic options or the cure so it had a crisis on its hands. It knew things were very very bad but it turned its face away from options that might have led it to a realistic internal cure to all of those problems. Now if you look at the National History of recent years, the french claimed to have spotted gorbachev early. The british repeatedly make the same claim. The canadians have a very good case for being the first to predict that if gorbachev came to power he would be the one who would make the big transformation. It doesnt really matter who spotted him first. Perhaps Margaret Thatcher have the most influence in recommending gorbachev to Ronald Reagan but a number of countries knew that this was a man who was waiting in the wings and was an important man to befriend and to enable. The crucial electorate go of this great changer of soviet history was the politburo itself and it was the politburo that on balance decided after half a decade of crisis in the early 1980s to make gorbachev the general secretary and then the reforms began and then the process of fundamental reform began under his general secretaryship which began in march 1985. So the second question to answer is why did he get away with it . My answer to this is partly that the problems had piled up so vividly that practically everyone in the politburo knew that something drastic had to be done. It wasnt just this magician in the kremlin, Mikail Gorbachev who alone could sense the movement of history. The entire politburo was becoming demoralized. He got away with this program really in Foreign Policy i think its fair to say the documents do suggest that he got away with what he wanted to do in foreign and Security Policy as late as 1989. There was practically no dispute in the politburo about the general orientation towards a rapproachment with america. He wasnt dragging the politburo by its head of hair. The politburo went along with him. They went along with him because they confidently said that he was a communist believer, that he would conserve communist rule it so happened that he destroyed the ussr in the end, but that wasnt how he presented himself or was thought of in their early years of his rule. In the out of hoover archives, again and again, the politburo went along with this not because they wanted to quiet the scale of , but because for various reasons, the leaders of each of the big Public Institutions saw the need for the ussr to have a breathing space in which to conduct some kind of internal adjustment of economic, political, social system. For some of them, it was a moral matter but foremost, a practical, pragmatic, and economic matter. The ussr is looking more and more dead on its feet. Something drastic needs to be done. To politburo went forward with this change for advance reasons. One of the cardinal features of the negotiations between the americans and the soviets was that Strategic Defense Initiative. We can now see if we look at the Party Defense department discussions, but a lot of soviet officials thought that it was a sham. Actually, a lot of american officials even inside the Reagan Administration thought that it would never work. But they tended to endorse the Strategic Defense Initiative because it did seem to scare the soviets. And it did seem to be provoking fundamental change in attitudes to international negotiations. This soviets most of them, among those people didnt really believe that the Strategic Defense Initiative would work. Thought what that he would build a much cheaper version of it and not wreck the soviet economy, he latterly decided it would wreck the soviet economy. But the point is that the soviet leadership couldnt take a risk if they thought that the fbi was a sham. They couldnt take the risk of acting on the basis that it was not going to work. It was always a possibility, however, outlandish that it would work. And from that point of view, the Reagan Administration really did place an additional, crucial pressure on the soviet union. Most of the big, Public Institutions went along with the reconciliation of america for the reasons that are just described. And this was really quite striking to me that that included the general start. When there were problems with the arms negotiations, the general staff was very obstructive. He handled them really brilliantly. He nursed them along, he made the chief of the general staffing to his own military advisor. He did a lot of things to nurse them along. But even the general staff recognized that if the ussr was going to remain a World Military power, there had to be a change in the soviet economy that had to mean also that confessions had to be made from the old principle what the general staff wants, it has to get. Even the general staff was less obstructive than it might have been. He got into problems when Eastern Europe broke away in 1989 and 1990. It was then that elements in the Public Bureau and ruling elite started to question whether the reconciliation with america was really worth continuing with. And one does have to say that the records show that he retreated into a kind of sofa government. He took decisions on german reunification in the summer of 1990, mainly on the basis of discussions with his own close aids and involved rather than ventilating in advance what he was going to agree with how much coal, regarding german reunification, and germanys future, nato membership. So things went well for him because he had a good start. He was wished well by the Public Bureau, and when he ran into difficulties, he was acor from weak ruler. He made lots of errors, his management was economy was catastrophic. The ruin nation of the soviet economy was dramatic. I remember going to moscow in 1990 into a gigantic dairy supermarket where nothing was sold but butter, milk, yogurt and associated products. There were about 20 dairy counter assistants in that supermarket, and there was absolutely no milk. Not a single belittle bottle, or can or tub of milk in the supermarket it was an absolutely catastrophic period of management of the economy. But on the side of International Relations, he got his way right, right towards the end. Of the soviet unions entire existence. Now i said that i wanted to focus on interaction as a much as possible. Where do americans come into, into all of the this . Well the Strategic Defense Initiative did make a difference. What also made a difference was a succession of american president s have maintained more or less in its entirety the technological transfer embargo on the ussr. This didnt have an a immediate impact. But it had an impact that meant that the soviet union was cut off from really new Technological Innovations that were then spreading through the western economies. The i. T. Revolution more or less left the ussr gasping, and the only way that the ussr could have acquired this new technology was to steal it through industrial espionage. So that the ussr was left gasping by the embargo, and then in addition to that along comes reagan. He certainly sells some grain. But he wont sell them apple computers. He wont sell them microsoft. And the leadership recognizes that it is being left behind, and it is being called by secretary schultz you are being left behind. You are a backward power now. Hes really, hes really direct with them in negotiations with him and dont you realize that youre being left in the economic dust bin of history . The american demands are tied not just to the need for disarmorment. But also to the demands for disengagement from military intervention in africa. Disengage from the the alliance with cuba, and probably the most important demand was for the internal reform of the ussr. Reagan administration was very, very firm about this. That it had to have a reliable partner in these negotiations, and a totaltarian system that one state was even to some intent on him. That wouldnt make for reliable negotiations. So time and again the debate was put on the hook to the fish. The big fish. If you want disarmament to ease your economic problems, you have to do something about the internal, political situation in the ussr, and theres no confessions on the americans from the american side on this. So the americans were very, very crucial in moving this process forward. There were crucial in another way that they would limit their economic assistance. This didnt crop up too often in the negotiations when reagan was in power. It cropped up often under george bush. And bush and his secretary of state baker were frequently asked by the soviets side to bail out the soviet economy, and they refused. Baker was direct with him and to the effect that until they reformed their economy, this would be money wasted which indeed i think personally, i think it would have been wasted. He really did know how to waste money. He was a great figure, a great political figure in history. He reformed the ussr, he destroyed the ussr in the process of reforming it. As an economic manager he was quite appallingly inept. European leaders didnt always help the process as long as as they might have done. Thatcher having welcomed ascension of power then started to regard him as a dangerous enemy. It was only in the middle of 1987 that thatcher had any time for garbatroff at all. In the early period between america and ussr, the preeminent leadership was in washington. This was very striking to me when looking at the french records and the to the extent that they played a cardinal role, it was mainly as now can see because they were being very closely with washington. About practically all of the steps that they took in 1989 and 1990 towards german reunification. Europeans have intended to overplay their role when they wrote their memoirs. Generous in as opening their archives as the americans are over here. Firm to continue the Foreign Policy line of Ronald Reagan three he engaged in with the soviets called a haus. A pause. Frosty relations between washington and moscow in the first have of 1989. Gorbachevcame clear countenance, the independence of east european ,tates, and decolonization george bush changed his stance, and basically became a reaganite. And december 1989 he pushed a line Ronald Reagan would have pushed if he had still been president. You have therefore the soviet leadership responding to , responding to its own internal crisis. You have americans continuing to pile on the pressure, making friendly gestures reconciliation to take place. The interaction was very far from being a smooth process. Gorbachev was hamfisted in the way he made announcements without prior consultation with reagan. He in the first year or two delighted in in paris thing reagan in embarrassing reagan. January in 1986 he promised Global Nuclear disarmament around the world by the year 2000. What do you said really intend to do . The stages ofaded disarmament in such a way as to at the only the ussr expense of the usa. This was a hamfisted way of going on. Sometimes the american side overdid it. As we can see from the soviet records of conversation Ronald Reagan could make jokes on inappropriate occasions. He liked making irish jokes which he thought were inoffensive. They were extremely offensive. Funny to the foreign minister. Foreign t at all funny to him because hes a Georgian National and he didnt like the little peoples of the world being mocked. He didnt look at these jokes with the same spectacles westerners look at irish jokes. He said mr. Reagan. I wish you would stop the irish jokes. George schultz rebuked his own president about this. He wasnt the perfect negotiator. I dot engage in think he was a brilliant negotiator. He did know how to hang out for a deal. Reagan sometimes overdid it. Always overdidkc it. Always said to reagan you should not be dealing with these people. Old way we hade in the early 1980s of piling on the pressure. Theres no deal yet that is acceptable to the u. S. And nato interests. This made it extraordinarily hard for the state department to go on conducting the disarmament agreements. Harde schultz had to fight to get the show on the road. The reykjavik stomach of failure in986 was a a comprehensive Nuclear Disarmament deal which distancen reaching slipped away at the last because of gorbachevs formulation about the Strategic Defense Initiative. Was still ation positive process. When George Schultz got back he went around the country saying although no deal had been findable, no deal should have other ever been signed on the terms gorbachev insisted on. So many concessions have been made the emphasis ought to be on keeping the soviets to those concessions in the near future. A part of theo process that is really impressive. Terrible cold andre grimika, press the case for alternating the package on gorbachev himself. We think of him as a man always leading the charge for sensible negotiations. Of 1986 into 1987 it was the rest of the bureau, people like the old foreign yearser of the postwar who pressed this case. Cracked and gave way to his own bureau. Reluctant to do this. This was not just some sort of show of false politics. Inyou read the record february 1987 you will see what i mean. Tople said strong things force gorbachev. This was becoming a positive process of reconciliation and it had many brought aspects. Broad aspects. Werell of reagans jokes in appetite. A lot of them were about the way of life in the ussr compared to the way of life in america. They hit home. Started as communist believers. People who thought they could save the communist system of rule. Gradually they became demoralized in their philosophical principles and reagans jokes had their impact. Schultzs george economic charts. He went over the atlantic with a to prove tocharts the ussr that if the portion of the World Economy would shrink steadily through the year 2000. Acquaintanceship, this instructional, educational aspect of the interaction was very important in altering the balance of opinion inside of the bid for. The scholz, gorbachev americans were very subtle in the way they did this. It was always a bruising contest. It was bruising on both sides. The Reagan Administration was notoriously internally divided and the state department had real problems with the cia and the defense department. Fourman, lets give george bush is due after he put , in theo the pause middle of 1989, he more or less to bringstructively this terrible phenomenon to an end. We live in a generation where we think of the ussr of having been a pack of cards waiting to be blown over. We forget how consolidated it was and how easy it would have been for soviet leaders to turn back to a repressive internal policy and Dangerous International policy. First important the Nuclear Reduction agreement took thee in the second half of 1980s. Armed limitation agreements but production agreements. Was freedstern europe from the grasp of the ussr. That was a stupendous change. The World Communist Movement practically fell apart. Fantasy of the few apologists by the end of the 1980s. Of 1991 more or less peacefully put itself into the biggest dustbin of history. Since the turnofthecentury we have been living in a period where new oil revenues for into the kremlin coffers. Russia has become more assertive and dangerous. There isowards talk of a new cold war. Is to at the moment this be little the scale of the dangers that faced the world from the late 1940s through the mid1980s. It belittles the achievement of the u. S. And ussr in bringing that to an end. Something tok does explain while we should be reflections on our own age and what happened in that era. Thank you very much. [applause] thank you. We have a few moments for questions and answers. The floor is yours. We have a microphone. If you would like to raise your hand the microphone will come to you. Putin is blackmailing the west with nuclear weapons. I wonder if you have found in gorbachevs documents a similar tactics similar to blackmail without some ground. To use this as a negotiation tactic. He quickly gave up any thought of nuclear blackmail. His priority was always to get a deal with the u. S. The dangerous period in the cold war was when they were in power and they responded to becomingpressures by more dangerously antiamerican than they had been. Part ofblackmail wasnt gorbachevs agenda. Increasingly he is going hat in hand to the western powers. Off the equal of any ownican president in his view but by the end, the london summit of 1991, he was taking off his hat and begging for money. He did not get it. Excellentou for that discussion of your book. I couldnt help but think about the effort between the u. S. And iran negotiating and arms limitation. Told, i would like to hear more about both sides. The dynamics of the hardliners. Lifers whou had pushed gorbachev to make more concessions. And in the white house you had people who said they will never change. Reagan. Pushed back on what were the dynamics on both sides that forced through this shift . Isi think the answer to that looking at what was happening in the Political Leadership before gorbachev came to power. Whether you look at politics or europe,y, or eastern they could not afford to hold onto Eastern Europe but they did not want to let go. Contentious a internal matter. If youre talking about the military leadership or the pragmatic there was a there was a pragmatic acceptance something was basically wrong. Was any had not gone idea of a realistic cure. I personally dont think his cure was realistic. If you allow people to say what they think without being a them listen to radios and televisions, if you let them go abroad. Openlylet the press say things about the system that had never been stable before you are going to glue the system. What any hardliner could have told him what had happened, the selfdestruction of the ussr. , itt hadnt been for him might have been distraction. It might have been a popular revolt or interethnic denouement. It could have been war with the west. We have to count ourselves lucky i think that he came to power and he was greeted by an american president who intuitively understood he could make peace with this man. I have a question. Curious, white gorbachev learn about International Relations . Do you think he had a good understanding of Foreign Policy . I noted hes the first real 1931. Man born in i dont know how they shaped his worldview. Really interesting question. Always something of a secret reformer. The 2020 partyof congress. For two more decades they had to horrah behind their hands. Learned to keep his opinions to himself. I think like reagan he made up his mind on the basis of his own opinions. He was willing to change his mind. Distrusted the reports he got from the kgb. Basise up his mind on the of what he saw in the west. He had been to italy. He admired the Italian Communist Party which was becoming noncommunist. I think he learned a lot from fromtoface discussions all those reagan jokes, from those economic charts. A moment when james baker and the Bush Administration was flying on the same plane. Said turned to him and could you tell us what the military budget is in the ussr . It would be health for negotiations. Knowe said look, we dont what the military budget is. You know that better than we do. What do you think . They were learning from their western counterparts. Diplomacy really mattered. I think the particular individuals who rolled the superpowers at the time made a difference. Chronic, longterm, underlying features, factors that pushed towards reconciliation. The required leaders who recognized opportunities. To theink that was that suchnefit leaders were in existence. Two more questions. Elinorng to call on danielson. After that theow would you calibrate insolence of the dissident movement and this next of influences . Was it relevant . Was it central . How would you evaluate it. A tricky question to answer. As a practical threat to soviet power had been beaten. However, their ideas were making their way into the soviet political elite, into the heads of the political elites. Gorbachev himself had ideas that were not so very different from 1970s in manyhe positive ways. They werely think important in helping the process of making the ussr begin to rot from the inside. Had thathink the kgb much problem arresting people. 1980s. The early but they could not do was stop process of social modernization which meant soviet people said why do we put up with this . Why do we have this system. Not going to say we love it anymore. Part in have a major that in direct way. The last question. Give him a microphone. Thank you. I wanted to ask about the final two years of the time you recovery in your book. Transitionalif the or new leadership of the Eastern European countries affected relations in your estimate . These are wonderfully interesting questions. That is something i deal with to some extent. Allowhe ussr started to Eastern Europe to break away the idea, the first thing he does after the fall of the berlin to fly to romania. Soviet Foreign Policy was not totally dead yet. In moscow to drag something out of this and for the u. S. Are to remain the guarantor of International Security and Eastern Europe so that for a year or two after the fall of the berlin wall soviet entirely still was not bereft of optimism. It was bereft of realism. Polls were not scared of the germans. Themselves will the new germany except the old borders . Back now thatant they are rina five . It wasnt totally unrealistic. It was a dynamic process until the end of the ussr. You. Ank [applause] thank you for coming along. On history bookshelf here from the countrys bestknown American History writers of the past decade every saturday. Watch any of our programs anytime. Visit our website cspan. Org history. Youre watching American History tv all weekend. Next, the development from the u. S. And soviet union in a betterr competition to relations in that country. This event was hosted by the society for historians of American Foreign relations. It is 50 minutes. Good afternoon. I