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Above all, Ronald Reagan won it. Only when (and if) the full, undoctored records of the Soviet Union are released and studied will a full correlation be possible between the actions of the Reagan administration and the reactions of the Kremlin. But it is already possible to show that President Reagan deserves to be regarded as the supreme architect of the West’s Cold War victory. This is, surely, the deduction to be made from the remarks of the last Soviet Foreign Minister, Alexandr Bessmertnykh, at a fascinating conference reflecting on Soviet—American relations in the 1980s.*

Among Mr Bessmertnykh’s observations are the following:

On America’s deployment in the autumn of 1983 of Cruise and Pershing II missiles in Europe in the face of both the previous deployment by the USSR of its SS-20s and a fierce barrage of propaganda and threats –

… the decision was definitely a great disappointment … [T]he situation had tremendously deteriorated as far as Soviet interests were concerned. But looking back from today’s position, I think that the fact itself … helped to facilitate and to strongly concentrate on solutions.

On President Reagan’s announcement earlier that same year of his plans for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) –

… I would say that one of the major moments when the strategists in the Soviet Union started maybe even to reconsider its positions was when the programme of SDI was pronounced in March of 1983. It started to come … to the minds of the [Soviet] leaders that there might be something very, very dangerous in that.

And, finally, on the relationship between the Reagan defence build-up (which both the deployment of intermediate range nuclear weapons in Europe and the decision to go ahead with SDI signified) and the internal weakness of the Soviet Union –

… When Gorbachev came to power in Moscow, the economic statistics already indicated that the economy was not doing so good. So when you were talking about SDI and arms control, the economic element … was sometimes in my view the number one preoccupation of Gorbachev, especially when we were preparing ourselves for Reykjavik. [Emphasis added]

The October 1986 Reykjavik summit, to which Mr Bessmertnykh here alludes, was – as I have written elsewhere – the turning point in the Cold War.* Mr Gorbachev already knew from earlier discussions with President Reagan how passionately committed he was to SDI, which he saw as not just practically necessary but morally right – a programme aimed at the defence of lives and one which did not rely only on a balance of nuclear terror. But the Soviet leader also knew from all the information available to him that the Soviet Union, with its stagnant economy and its technological backwardness, could not match SDI. He had to stop the programme at all costs. So he tempted President Reagan with deep cuts in nuclear weapons, before springing on him the condition – that SDI must stay ‘in the laboratory’.

Mikhail Gorbachev won and Ronald Reagan lost the public relations battle in the wake of the consequent breakdown of the talks. But it was the American President who had effectively just won the Cold War – without firing a shot. In December 1987 the Soviets dropped their demands for the abandonment of SDI and agreed to the American proposals for arms reduction – notably the removal of all intermediate range nuclear weapons from Europe. Mr Gorbachev had crossed his Rubicon. The Soviets had been forced to accept that the strategy they had pursued since the 1960s – of using weaponry, subversion and propaganda to make up for their internal weaknesses and so retain superpower status – had finally and definitively failed.

I still find it astonishing that even the left should try to deny all this. It is, of course, not a crime to be wrong. But it is not far short of criminal to behave as some of them did when they thought that the Soviet Union was on the winning side. These people were blind because they did not want to see, and because they were intoxicated with the classic socialist fantasy of believing that state power offers a short-cut to progress. Thus the American journalist Lincoln Steffens observed after visiting the Soviet Union in 1919: ‘I have seen the future; and it works.’

At the height of the famine of 1932, the worst in Russia’s history, the visiting biologist Julian Huxley found ‘a level of physique and general health rather above that to be seen in England’. Similarly, George Bernard Shaw wrote that ‘Stalin has delivered the goods to an extent that seemed impossible ten years ago, and I take my hat off to him.’ H.G. Wells was equally impressed, reporting that he had ‘never met a man more candid, fair and honest … no-one is afraid of him and everybody trusts him’. Harold Laski considered that Soviet prisons (stuffed full of political prisoners in appalling conditions) enabled convicts to lead ‘a full and self-respecting life’.*

Sidney and Beatrice Webb were similarly overwhelmed by the glories of the Soviet experiment. Their 1200-page book, which faithfully parroted any Soviet propaganda they could pick up, was originally entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?: but the question mark was removed from the second edition, which appeared in 1937 – the height of the terror.†

The capacity of the left to believe the best of communism and the worst of anti-communists has something almost awe-inspiring about it. Even when the Soviet system was in its economic death throes, the economist J.K. Galbraith wrote of his visit in 1984:

That the Soviet system has made great material progress in recent years is evident both from the statistics and from the general urban scene … One sees it in the appearance of well-being of the people on the streets … Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.*

Professor Galbraith was one of the exponents of the once fashionable notion of ‘convergence’, according to which the capitalist and socialist models were destined to become ever more similar to one another, resulting in a social democracy that reflected the best of each without the disadvantages. One large problem with this theory was that those who held it had constantly to be trying to find advantages in a Soviet system which had none that were apparent to Soviet citizens. As the former dissident Vladimir Bukovsky once remarked – referring to the Russian proverb to the effect that you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs – he had seen plenty of broken eggs, but never tasted any omelette.

A similar error – which I discuss in a later chapter – was made by those Sovietologists who tried to analyse and predict events in the Soviet Union in terms of doves and hawks, liberals and conservatives, left and right† (I am still perplexed as to why we should be expected to call hardline communists ‘conservative’ or anti-Semite fascists ‘right wing’ – except that it is a useful device of the liberal media to embarrass their opponents). For the advocates of ‘convergence’ and for certain advocates of détente it was assumed that a particular action by the United States would draw forth a parallel reaction from the Soviets.‡ Thus if we wanted peace we should not prepare for war, if we wanted security we should not threaten, and if we wanted cooperation we should compromise. This approach was entirely wrong – at least while the Soviet Union remained a superpower with an expansionist ideology, which it did until some time in the mid-to-late 1980s.

The proof of this is clear. While the United States was led by administrations (Nixon, Ford and Carter) which were intent on compromise with the Soviets, the Soviet Union expanded its military arsenals and intensified its military interventions around the world. But once there was an American President who openly proclaimed his aims of military superiority, systemic competition and the global roll-back of Soviet power, the Soviet Union cooperated, disarmed and finally collapsed. President Reagan’s former critics, in their desperation to find someone else to credit for an end to the Cold War, summoned up Mikhail Gorbachev as a kind of deus ex machina who transformed everything. And indeed Mr Gorbachev’s role was positive and important. But what President Reagan’s revisionist detractors fail to explain is (to use the words of Professor Richard Pipes) ‘why, after four years of Reagan’s relentlessly confrontational policies the Soviet Union did not respond in kind … by appointing a similarly hard-line, belligerent First Secretary, but settled on a man of compromise’.*

To be so wrong quite so often does not, it seems, in the post-Cold War world constitute any impediment to promotion. Far from it. Yesterday’s critics of the strategy which so triumphantly destroyed the Soviet Union were then trusted to manage relations with its successor. Mr Strobe Talbott, in his previous career as a journalist on Time, variously attacked the Reagan defence build-up, dismissed SDI, mocked the idea that external Western pressures could be effective, described the Cold War as a ‘grand obsession’ which diverted the world from other more important matters and described NATO’s continued existence as ‘at best a stop-gap’.† Mr Talbott went on to become President Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State.

And, yes, all this does matter now. If so many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against during the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.

The Cold War has sometimes been portrayed as a struggle between two superpowers, the United States (and its allies) on the one hand, and the Soviet Union (and its puppets) on the other. The term ‘superpower’ was not one that I relished at the time, because it always seemed to suggest a moral equivalence between the two political poles. Of course, at one level this was, indeed, a competition for advantage between broadly equivalent powers. But the equivalence reflected might not right. Much more important, and significant for us today, the Cold War was a struggle between two sharply opposing systems, encapsulating two wholly contradictory philosophies, involving two totally different sets of objectives.

The Soviet communist system was, in a sense, simpler. Its central purpose was to achieve domination over the world in its entirety by an ideology, Marxism-Leninism, and by the Communist Party, which was that ideology’s supreme custodian and unique beneficiary. That purpose was, in the eyes of its proponents, subject to no moral constraints – the very notion of which appeared absurd. Communism recognised no limits except those posed by the power of its enemies. Within such a system individuals were only of value in so far as they served the role allotted them. Similarly, the expression of ideas, artistic endeavour, all kinds of ‘private’ activity, were judged and permitted according to whether they advanced ‘the Revolution’, which in practice increasingly meant the interests of the old men of the Kremlin. The pursuit of world revolution was at times largely suspended. At other times, notably in Soviet relations with China, disagreements broke out between the proponents of the great socialist ‘idea’ about its pace, conduct and immediate goals. But the objective of creating worldwide a fully socialist society, consisting of radically socialist citizens, remained.

Against this stood America and its allies. What we call in shorthand ‘the West’ was a reality as complex as ‘the East’ (in communist terms) was simple. First of all it consisted not of one power but of many. Within NATO, the institutional embodiment of Western defence resolve, individual states pursued constantly shifting policies, reflecting their own interests and the democratic decisions of their own peoples. America led; but America had to persuade its friends to follow. This reality reflected a fundamental philosophical difference. The very essence of Western culture – and the heart of both the strengths and weaknesses of Western policy during the Cold War years – was recognition of the unique value of the individual human being.

Put like this, it is easy to see why knowledge of the Cold War experience is important today. Still more important, though, is the fact that the struggle between two quite different approaches to the political, social and economic organisation of human beings has not ended and will never end.

Neither the fall of the Berlin Wall, nor victory in the Gulf War, nor the collapse of the Soviet Union, nor the establishment of free markets and a measure of democracy in South-East Asia – none of these has resolved the tension between liberty and socialism in all its numerous guises. Believers in the Western model of strictly limited government and maximum freedom for individuals within a just rule of law often say, and rightly, that ‘we know what works’. Indeed, we do. But equally there will always be political leaders and, increasingly, pressure groups who are bent on persuading people that they cannot really run their own lives and that the state must do it for them. And, sadly but inevitably, there will always be people who prefer idleness to effort, dependency to independence, and modest rewards just as long as nobody does better. There is always a danger that, as Friedrich Hayek put it in his Road to Serfdom, ‘the striving for security tends to become stronger than the love of freedom’.* It mustn’t.

Otherwise we will find ourselves in the circumstances of which that far-sighted French observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, warned, when considering how democracies might incrementally lose their liberty:

Over [the citizens] stands an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate. That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. It would resemble parental authority if, father like, it tried to prepare its charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood … Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living? Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choices less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties. Equality has prepared men for all this, predisposing them to endure it and often even regard it as beneficial …

I have always thought that this brand of orderly, gentle, peaceful slavery which I have just described could be combined, more easily than is generally supposed, with some of the external forms of freedom, and that there is a possibility of its getting itself established even under the shadow of the sovereignty of the people.*

Only if we remain convinced that freedom – the freedom for which we strove in those Cold War years of struggle with socialism – is of abiding value in its own right will we avoid wandering down the inviting but dispiriting cul-de-sac which de Tocqueville describes.

That is why my old sparring partner, Mikhail Gorbachev, was wrong in what he said in Prague about the alternative to communism which the West offered in the past and which we still have to offer today. The politics and economics of liberty are not a kind of lucky dip from which one treat may be drawn out and enjoyed without tasting the others.

In truth, the Western model of freedom is something positive and universally applicable, though with variations reflecting cultural and other conditions. The theologian Michael Novak has christened that system ‘democratic capitalism’.* It is a good phrase, because it emphasises the link between political and economic liberty. And it is significant that it comes from someone whose profession is more associated with supernatural doctrines than political programmes. Later in this book I shall try to describe the Western model of liberty more fully.† But perhaps its most important defining feature is that it is based upon truth – about the nature of Man, about his aspirations, and about the world he can hope to create.