The Pravda man, Tomas Kolesnichenko, tried to argue with Mrs Thatcher. The principles of a socialist society, he suggested, were the right ones and they brought real advantages. ‘Well, you have tossed out a quite provocative comment there!’ she replied. ‘So, what exactly do you think are the advantages of a socialist society?’ ‘Its planned economy,’ ventured Kolesnichenko. ‘In economy that is an advantage; and all the years of planning, not just a centralised plan, but also local…’ Mrs T pounced – her list of advantages was considerably longer: ‘Life in Britain, you know, the standard of living is high. It is higher than it has ever been. We are working very hard. In our housing we have perhaps a different system from you. Out of every hundred families, sixty-four families … own their own home, they own it! It is my ambition to get that up to seventy-five families out of every hundred. We have an excellent health service, very, very good indeed1 and we are building more and more hospitals … Unfortunately, we do have unemployment and I do not run away from it. When you get technological change, you are almost bound to get some unemployment. It is now falling. But let me make this clear: the people who are unemployed, they live like other people, in houses. They are rented and their rent is paid for them, because they have not the income to pay. And every week they get a weekly benefit, a considerable weekly benefit. It is more if they have children and the weekly benefit for some of them will be as much as some of the wages which some people get in industry. They will get that weekly sum for as long as they are unemployed and after six months when they have been unemployed, we will take each one of them in. We will try to get them a job or will try to get them fresh training or we will put them on what is called a community programme. So, we are tackling our problems and we are hoping that we shall gradually get unemployment down so that those people too may have the higher standard of living which our other people enjoy.’
For Mikhail Gorbachev, who watched the interview in the Kremlin, there were several important wins. Mrs Thatcher had pointed out the stifling effects of the old-style Soviet command system that he was struggling to transform; she had laid out the benefits that accrue from incentivised work, just as he was about to introduce limited competition in some areas of the economy; and she had praised his liberal reforms, calling on the Soviet people to support his open-society initiatives: if the USSR were to become more open and more democratic, she said, its people would begin to enjoy the ‘Western’ benefits of freedom and prosperity.
‘You [in the USSR] are introducing a much more open society; you can discuss things much more openly than you ever have done before. That is part of our beliefs … I have a much better idea now of Mr Gorbachev’s hopes and this tremendous challenge for the Soviet people under your restructuring [perestroika] and the new open society. We wish you well in this great endeavour and we hope it will be very successful.’
Mrs Thatcher ended the interview by painting a picture of the future that many Russians wanted for themselves; a future in which they would be permitted not only to travel to the West, but to share in the advantages that seemed to flow from liberal free-market democracy.
‘We want you to travel more frequently to us because we think it is more and more important to build up friendship between peoples and to build up trust and confidence between the people of the Soviet Union and the people of Western Europe and in particular the United Kingdom. I have loved my visit here. I have very much enjoyed the warm welcome you have given me. I will not forget it and I hope to see quite a lot of you in the United Kingdom so you may know more of our way of life and how we do things and more of our people will come to see you. Thank you for your good wishes, thank you for your kindness. Let us hope that there is a better future ahead for all of us.’
It was a powerful message and it was greeted with approbation by the majority of those watching. Unused to challenging debate, the three Soviet interviewers felt they had been trounced by a masterly opponent. One of them, Vladimir Simonov, reflected that he and his colleagues had been ‘as ineffective as village chess players taking on Garry Kasparov’. Boris Kalyagin agreed. ‘She was excellent; very quick; and she always found the right words to answer us. We didn’t make any cuts, any changes; so for the first time, everything she said, everything was on air. People could listen to it and make their own conclusions. I think it was the beginning of glasnost in international affairs. Mrs Thatcher was the winner of the discussion.’
An estimated 100 million people tuned in, and the broadcast sparked a lively debate. Many viewers complained about the interviewers’ ‘aggressive’ and ‘impolite’ conduct. Women especially leapt to Mrs Thatcher’s defence. ‘You lost the battle – three men against a single woman,’ Kalyagin recalled people saying. The admiration for Mrs Thatcher as a representative of Western values was evident. In despatches assessing the impact of the prime minister’s appearance, the British ambassador, Bryan Cartledge, wrote about the ‘Maggie-mania’ that had gripped the country, with Russians reportedly referring to her as Nasha Masha – ‘our Maggie’ – and hanging on her words as if they were the promise of a new life. ‘Spectaculars like MT’s visit, and especially the live TV interview, dramatically demonstrated his [Gorbachev’s] commitment to glasnost,’ Cartledge suggested. ‘One might add perhaps the importance to Gorbachev of giving the Soviet public a sense of progress in the direction he sought to go.’
Barely 18 months earlier, Britain and the USSR had been at loggerheads, engaged in a bitter round of diplomatic expulsions following the defection of Oleg Gordievsky, the London KGB chief. And Mrs Thatcher was not slow to confront Gorbachev. On the eve of her visit, a demonstration in Moscow by Jewish families denied permission to emigrate to Israel had been broken up by police. At a meeting in the Kremlin, she brought up the incident and spoke on behalf of persecuted dissidents such as Anatoly Shcharansky, Josef Begun and Andrei Sakharov. Her refusal to go soft on the Kremlin’s human rights record enhanced her moral authority and her reputation; she was seen as close to Ronald Reagan and speaking on behalf of ‘the West.’
Margaret Thatcher hugs a little girl during her Moscow visit in 1987
Margaret Thatcher waves and smiles at the crowds during the same trip
Mrs Thatcher made a visit to a church service at the Russian Orthodox monastery at Zagorsk, outside Moscow, and attended a performance of Swan Lake at the Bolshoi with Gorbachev and his wife Raisa. But most memorably, she went walkabout, mingling with the Russian people, listening to their views and answering their questions. There was no attempt to curb her interaction with the crowds who turned out to greet her on the streets of Krylatskoe, a recently built but already down-at-heel suburb in western Moscow, and their excitement was plain to see.