Personal experience and qualities helped Gorbachev to assume a destructive role. Far more than earlier Soviet leaders, except Lenin, Gorbachev had traveled widely. As “Eurocommunism” was peaking, he visited Belgium and Holland in 1972, France in 1966, 1975, 1976, and 1978, and Germany in 1975.414 He visited Canada in 1983. Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, a Social Democrat, beguiled Gorbachev. Gorbachev admired the West German “social market economy,” comparing USSR economic performance not with its own backward Czarist past or with the contemporary Third World but with Germany, France, and Britain. From his student days through the 1990s Gorbachev maintained a friendship with Czech “Prague Spring” dissident, Zdenek Mlynar. He thought of himself as a “Sixties” man. His weaknesses as a personality also contributed to his weakness as a political leader. Even friendly analysts observed shallowness. William Odom, a U.S. observer, stated Gorbachev had no firm convictions.415
Gorbachev’s revisionist policies could have taken hold only if organizational conditions were ripe. The corrosive effects of the policies of Khrushchev and Brezhnev had a cumulative impact on the caliber of the Soviet leadership. As Ligachev confessed, only a ruling party with an inadequate level of theoretical development and political skill among its leaders could have allowed such a fiasco.416 Only a party with a weak tradition of collective leadership could have countenanced a party leader who repudiated basic party theory and policies. In 1964 Brezhnev and Suslov had ousted Khrushchev from office for lesser sins than Gorbachev’s.
Moreover, Party theory had suffered before Gorbachev and helped prepare the way for him. The theoretical weaknesses included a rosy view of the national question, over-optimistic estimates both of socialism’s strength and imperialism’s weakness, and a Communist Party program with an overly upbeat assessment of the stage of socialist construction achieved. Yuri Andropov made a start toward correcting these organizational and theoretical shortcomings, but his life ended before he could finish the task.
Because of the slowing of the USSR’s pace of economic growth, new burdens imposed by Reagan’s dramatic escalation of the arms race, and a buildup of domestic problems, the Soviet Union needed a period of reform, rejuvenation, and renewal. Under these circumstances, some kind of retreat may have been needed. Lenin knew how to retreat if necessary, in difficult moments such as in 1918, with the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, or in 1921, with NEP. Later Soviet leaders did so, too: Stalin, in 1939, with the Nazi-USSR pact; Khrushchev in 1962, in the Cuban missile crisis. For Leninists, however, a retreat was a particular phase of struggle, when an unfavorable balance of forces required a backward step. Retreats were acknowledged as such, and a retreat was never the abandonment of struggle. Gorbachev’s retreats in foreign policy assumed an entirely different character. His foreign policy rested on the notion that the Soviet Union’s problems required an adaptation to the capitalist world.417 Gorbachev portrayed his retreats as tremendous advances for mankind.
Gorbachev’s failure to achieve anything at the Reykjavik Summit set the stage for the 180-degree turn in 1987-88. Soviet peace diplomacy then assumed a different character. What started as Soviet concessions in return for a better Soviet image became concessions in return for nothing at all. The USSR began to make concessions unilaterally without regard to the consequences. In the immediate aftermath of Reykjavik, the Soviet position on the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) issue repeated Andropov’s in 1983. That is, the Soviet negotiators would not allow one more missile than what was already in the British and French arsenals. Early in 1987, however, Gorbachev changed. D’Agostino wrote that “instead of continuing to seek U.S. acceptance of the linkage between an agreement on missiles in Europe and the American SDI program,” Gorbachev made a “sharp break” with the past and accepted essentially the Reagan formula to eliminate all INF missiles in Europe.418
In 1987-88 the Communist Party of Italy (CPI), began to influence Soviet thinkers and writers on foreign policy.419 For years, in West European Communist politics the Italian Party had spearheaded thinking conciliatory to capitalism. It had, for example, defended Czech leader Alexander Dubcek and had condemned the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. The CPI urged the Soviets to take a benign view of NATO as a “defensive and geographically limited alliance.”420 The CPI also hailed Gorbachev’s universal human values slogan as vindication of the ideas of its leaders Enrico Berlinguer and Achille Ochetto. On intermediate range weapons, the Italians had obtained the idea of supporting the zero option from the German Social Democrats, and had pressed this on the Soviets.
In mid-1988, after weakening the CPSU, Gorbachev made nuclear weapons the centerpiece of his revisions in foreign policy.421 To make way for unilateral Soviet nuclear cuts, Gorbachev needed to undermine the Brezhnev-era arms doctrine, the idea that the Soviet achievement of nuclear parity with the U.S. formed the basis of détente. The leap to revisionist positions on arms policy, as with so much else, came at the June 1988 Nineteenth Party Conference, where Gorbachev drew a distinction between political and military means to protect USSR security. Gorbachev actually blamed the nuclear arms race on the Soviet leadership and the idea of strategic parity. Gorbachev said, “As a result [of the idea of parity] we let ourselves be drawn into an arms race which was bound to affect the socioeconomic development of the country and its international position.” In November 1988, the Politburo authorized drastic arms cuts. In December, Gorbachev announced the cuts at the UN in New York.422 Increasingly, Soviet foreign policy consisted of unilateral disarmament without regard for the military, political, and economic consequences.
In November 1987, the keynote speech by Gorbachev on the seventieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, “October and Perestroika: the Revolution Continues,” like a freeze frame in a video, captured the fierce rivalry in the CPSU leadership over Soviet foreign policy. Most Western commentators stressed the speech’s attempt to straddle warring views of Party history, but the speech’s new formulations on foreign policy had far more significance. The speech tried to bridge more than one chasm: with representatives of both Communist and social democratic parties in Moscow, Gorbachev sought to foster a reconciliation of the Communist and social democratic left. After noting that diplomats had accomplished little to rid the world of intermediate and long-range nuclear weapons, Gorbachev “examined the theoretical aspects of the prospects for advancement toward a durable peace.” Certainly, he declared, imperialism was warlike and had militarism and neocolonialism as essential characteristics. What, then, was the basis for optimism that the Soviet peace offensive could succeed? New phrases entered his answer. Gorbachev proclaimed: “Contradictions can be modified,” and “we are facing a historic choice based on our largely interconnected and integral world.”423 He stated, “The class struggle and other manifestations of social contradictions will influence the objective processes favoring peace.” This approach revised the traditional Soviet view that the class struggle was itself an objective process favoring peace, that peace was the result of a struggle to impose peaceful relations on a reluctant and bellicose imperialism. Instead, Gorbachev was proposing “a joint quest for a new economic order which takes into account the interests of all on an equal basis.” In the final analysis, the speech represented Gorbachev’s opportunism straining against orthodox Marxist-Leninist formulations. He was seeking to retain the vocabulary of orthodoxy while evading its implications. The speech was less a call for a Soviet peace struggle than a call for Soviet reconciliation and integration with imperialism.