Statecraft. Margaret Thatcher
fleet of government-owned lorries – later that afternoon I visited one of the privatised transport firms and was extremely impressed with all I saw, not least the enthusiasm of the manager and his staff.
It was now time to gain some further information and some exercise, as amid what seemed a large proportion of the population of Nizhny Novgorod, the Governor and I took a walk down Bolshaya Pokrovskaya street. All the stores here were privately owned. Every few yards we stopped to talk to the shopkeepers and see what they had to sell. No greater contrast with the drab uniformity of Moscow could be imagined. One shop remains vivid in my memory. It sold dairy produce, and it had a greater selection of different cheeses than I have ever seen in one place. I ate samples of several and they were very good. I also discovered that they were all Russian, and considerably cheaper than their equivalents in Britain. I enthusiastically expressed my appreciation. Perhaps because as a grocer’s daughter I carry conviction on such matters, a great cheer went up when my words were translated, and someone cried, ‘Thatcher for President!’ But the serious lesson for me – and for my hosts – was, of course, that in this one privately owned shop in this distant Russian city, a combination of excellent local products, talented entrepreneurs and laws favourable to enterprise applied by honest and capable political leadership could generate prosperity and progress. There was no need of a ‘middle way’ or of special adjustment to Russian conditions. In that cheese shop was proof that capitalism worked. The doubters would have been astonished.
THE PERILS OF PREDICTION
But then, Russia has always had a unique capacity to surprise. Every prediction about it should be hedged around with qualifications if whoever makes them would be secure from embarrassment. And before going any further I would like to make my own modest contribution to the current wave of apologising. For I too was wrong – about some things.
I never had any doubt that the communist system was doomed to fail, if the West kept its nerve and remained strong. (On occasion, of course, that seemed a very large ‘if’.) I believed this simply because communism ran against the grain of human nature and was therefore ultimately unsustainable. Because it was committed to suppressing individual differences, it could not mobilise individual talents, which is vital to the process of wealth creation. It thus impoverished not just souls but society. Faced with a free system, which engages rather than coerces people, and so brings out the best in them, communism must ultimately founder.
But when? We did not know how desperately incompetent, indeed how near total breakdown, the Soviet system was in the 1980s. Perhaps that was for the best. Had some in the West been aware just how limited and over-stretched were the Soviet Union’s resources the temptation would have been to drop our guard. That could have been fatal, for the USSR remained a military superpower long after it had become a political and economic fossil. I would, though, never have predicted that within a decade of my becoming Prime Minister the countries of Central and Eastern Europe would be free, let alone that two years later the Soviet Union would itself have crumbled.
I must also confess to being at least half-wrong about another important aspect of the Soviet Union in my time, namely its durability. I was never attracted by the idea of deliberately trying to hold the Soviet Union together. Such strategies were, in any case, bound to fail because we in the West lacked the knowledge and means to give effect to them. As I have related elsewhere, I was thus alone in opposing an attempt by the then President of the European Commission to have the EEC ‘guarantee’ the integrity of the USSR in the face of independence movements by the Baltic states.*
But like just about everyone else, I underestimated the fundamental fragility of the Soviet Union once the Gorbachev reforms had begun. A non-communist Soviet Union, which was what we at that time wanted to see, even though we did not put it like that, was actually an impossibility. This was because what held the USSR together was the Communist Party.
The Sovietologists, with their subtle analyses of Soviet society, were wrong: the dissidents with their emphasis on the role of a monolithic party ideology were right. Communism was, in fact, like a parasite, occupying merely the shells of state institutions. These institutions were thenceforth effectively dead and could not be revived.
In the period which has elapsed since those dramatic events, other confident predictions have exploded, though not I think any of mine. Some economic liberals were, for example, led astray by too much confidence in the prescriptions of their own ‘dismal science’. It was not actually, as I shall explain, that the prescriptions were wrong. Rather, they took insufficient account of non-economic factors. The liberal economists assumed that with the Communist Party shattered and Western-style ‘reformers’ in the Kremlin it would be quite easy to instal the institutions of a free economy with rapid benefits for the Russian population. There appeared to be encouraging parallels with Poland, another former communist state where precisely such a crash programme of economic reform, masterminded by Leszek Balcerowicz in the early 1990s, had brought positive results within two or three years. But Russia was not Poland.
On the other hand, the gloomiest predictions about Russia have also been largely – though it is premature to say permanently – disproved. Some foresaw a new Russian imperialism set on achieving by force the recreation of a Russian-centred Soviet Union. So far, at least, this has not happened. Tensions remain between Russia and her neighbours. But there have been no large wars, no use of weapons of mass destruction, no return of communism, no turn towards fascism. It is right that among the many criticisms which can be made of Western policy such important if negative achievements should also be acknowledged.
In truth, the story of Russia over the last decade is not one of progression or even regression along a clear path, rather it is a tale of twists and turns, accelerations and occasional derailments, of integration countered by disintegration, of reform and reaction, all alternately or even simultaneously in play. We have to try to understand what has happened and why, because only by doing so can we predict, let alone influence or steer, what happens in the future.
And that is important. Russia cannot and must not be written off. Personally, I feel this with a conviction bordering on passion. The Russian people suffered so much in the twentieth century – and they were so frequently left to their unhappy lot by those Westerners who lied and collaborated with their oppressors – that we must be indignant at the state in which they remain. In the Cold War the West’s greatest allies were always the ordinary Russian people. They now deserve better.
But taking Russia seriously today is also a matter of calculation. When ex-President Yeltsin went to Beijing in December 1999 and reminded us undiplomatically that Russia still had a formidable nuclear arsenal, he was only telling the truth. Whether weak or powerful, an opportunity or a headache, Russia matters.
THE BURDEN OF HISTORY
The best analyses of the Soviet Union were by and large those of historians rather than Sovietologists, because the historians had the benefit of perspective, while the Sovietologists had to glean most of their material from the turgid and mendacious statements of one or other Soviet authority. With Russia’s recent return to an older shape and identity, history is even more important as a basis for our assessments.*
It has been well-said that ‘of all the burdens Russia has had to bear, heaviest and most relentless of all has been the weight of her past’.† Russia might have developed differently. The course of history is not inevitable. But it is unarguably irreversible. One would have to go far back through the centuries to find a glimmer of any indigenous Russian tradition that might have spawned liberalism of the kind that has flourished in the West. From the late Middle Ages the tsars ruled their vast expanding domains in a fashion which explains much about modern Russia.
First, they recognised no property rights except their own, because they treated all their realm as if they owned it, and they regarded all secular lords as their tenants in chief. With no private property – above all, no private land – there could be no law, other than the tsar’s autocratic decrees. With no law, there could be no flourishing