The Human Factor at the Grand Café

The Grand Café is an Oxford institution. According to Samuel Pepys’ Diary of 1650, it is the site of the first coffee house in England, as much known for its teas as its history and the opulence of its marble pillars and gold-leafed interior.

In the heart of Oxford, on the High Street, and close to the Bodleian Library and Magdalen College, the Café has over the years served also as an inn, hotel, grocer and Teddy Bear shop, a co-operative, marmalade factory and post office.

It’s an apt meeting spot for another legend, Professor Archie Brown, Emeritus Professor of Politics, expert Sovietologist, and author of several critical books on Cold War history and the mythology of leaders. The 87 year old is famously among those outside advisers called in to update Margaret Thatcher on contemporary developments and likely futures, playing a part in transforming the Iron Lady from Cold War warrior to peacemaker in bridging the divide between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan.

Professor Brown participated in three seminars with Thatcher, two at Chequers in 1983 and 1987, and one at 10 Downing Street in 1984. He was among a carefully select group, who presented concise papers to the prime minister, someone who famously did not suffer much the opinions of others.

Thatcher was the archetypal “conviction politician” – “I am not a consensus politician. I am a conviction politician,” she declared – and she campaigned on the basis of her values and ideas rather than a popular or pre-existing position. But she still sought out the knowledge and views of others, holding government seminars with academic specialists who were chosen for their particular expertise. These meetings were quite distinct from an entirely different set of partisan (separate from governmental) seminars she held with ideologically aligned advisers who were devotees of her brand of radical Conservatism.  

The most significant of the seminars with the non-partisan specialists was that of 8 September 1983. According to declassified Cabinet Office papers, it led directly to a change of UK government policy to one of greater engagement with the Communist world. The eight external specialists were asked to present papers not longer than eight pages each, and to open the discussion of them with opening remarks of not more than five minutes.

Listened attentively

While not famous for being a patient listener, Thatcher, who had read and annotated the papers in advance, listened attentively to the outside experts and only rarely interrupted any of them. Although she became ever more certain of her own views on many subjects the longer she served as prime minister, she did modify her previous opinion on the impossibility of change in the Soviet Union emanating from within the leadership of that Communist state. The advice she received and passed on to Reagan was crucial: “both that deliberate destabilisation of the Soviet Union would be dangerous and counterproductive and that a resumption of dialogue was necessary”.

For a man who has written extensively on the top leaders within different political systems, Brown says that “you should not put your faith in a single person”. He is generally in favour of a “more collegial system”, which helps to avoid the “dangers of groupthink and sycophancy” around a strong personality.

Thatcher’s own strong views notwithstanding, she was willing to listen, whether to ministers or specialists, if they could back up their arguments.  A scientist by education, “she had a respect for evidence.”

The 1983 seminar, in particular, “persuaded her to engage with the Soviet leadership and that of other Communist states. Previously, along the lines of Reagan’s ‘evil empire’ rhetoric, she had believed that the less you had to do with the Soviets, the better”. But Brown, among others, appreciated that “there was a range of opinions within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union behind the monolithic façade” which came into the open at the 19th All Union Party Conference in 1988, which elevated Gorbachev from being “a reformer of the system, to being a systemic transformer.”

Brown describes the last Soviet leader as an “outstanding example” of a transformational leader, one “by temperament and conviction a reformer rather than a revolutionary”, who transformed the Soviet system, relying not only on the power concentrated in his office as General Secretary but on “his political skills and powers of persuasion”. This role is different, Brown argues, from revolutionary leadership in that, while this too might also produce systemic change, the means are violent, and frequently replace “an authoritarian regime with another form of authoritarianism”.

“Qualitatively different”

Gorbachev, says Brown, was able to make “the Soviet political system qualitatively different from what it had been hitherto”.

Gorbachev himself later wrote that when he became general secretary of the CPSU, the leadership “knew that changes of great magnitude and depth were necessary” and that they were “unanimous” that “leaving things as they were was not an option”. While that may have been so, others in the leadership saw different things (and threats and opportunities) in perestroika and glasnost, and it would take great skill to advance a radically reformist agenda while dealing with these contradictory views.

Another way to appreciate the extent of the transformation is to consider what would have happened without such leadership. It has been argued that, if not Gorbachev, another Politburo member would have been obliged to pursue similar reforms. But as Brown summarises, “none of them would have opted for democratisation. No other member of that Politburo would have aroused expectations of greater political independence in Eastern Europe in the way they were galvanised by Gorbachev’s domestic reforms and his transformation of Soviet foreign policy. It is inconceivable that they would have declared, as Gorbachev did, that the people of every country had the right to decide for themselves in what kind of political and economic system they wished to live.”  

In his speech to the UN in December 1988, Gorbachev had declared that a “one-sided emphasis on military strength” ultimately “weakens other components of national security”. In the same speech, he said that “freedom of choice is a universal principle”, one to which “there should be no exceptions. We have not come to the conclusion of the immutability of this principle simply through good motives. We have been led to it through impartial analysis of the objective processes of our time. The increasing varieties of social development in different countries are becoming an ever more perceptible feature of these processes.”

“Destinations in mind”

The American scholar John Lewis Gaddis has argued that, whatever his human qualities, “Gorbachev was never a leader in the manner of Václav Havel, John Paul II, Deng Xiaoping, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Lech Wałeşa – even Boris Yeltsin”, for they, he suggests, “all had destinations in mind and maps for reaching them”. However, it’s far-fetched to think, as Brown counters, that anyone “could become General Secretary of the CPSU with a destination in mind of pluralist democracy, a market economy, independence for the East European states, and the transformation of a purely formal federation into a genuine and voluntary federal state”.

Gorbachev had of necessity to be modest in his reformist aims to get into the job, in which he developed more ambitious objectives. If he had stuck with what he could propose publicly in 1985, “it is hard to see how the Cold War would have ended, for the Soviet Union would still have been a Communist state, albeit with a degree of cultural liberalization, a widening of the limits of the possible for political discussion, and some economic revitalisation, while the countries of Eastern Europe would have remained within the Soviet orbit”.

The tale is thus, as Brown entitles his most recent book, about the “human factor” and the interplay between the three main protagonists and especially about the coming of Gorbachev whose place in history must surely be assured. Thatcher proved to be an unlikely ally of Gorbachev, who recognised early on that she was dealing with a man with a reformist agenda. The result was that she was able to play a constructive role as a go-between with Reagan, a more difficult task than encouraging Gorbachev. 

Gorbachev, a brave and farsighted man, was replaced by Boris Yeltsin who formally collapsed the Soviet Union, even though the seeds were already sown in the Baltics and elsewhere, including Ukraine.

Unclear

The relevance of this passage of history for contemporary politics is unclear. It is questionable whether the West possesses leadership today of the charisma of Reagan and character of Thatcher as much as Putin is no Gorbachev. If anything, it seems as if the West will tire of supporting Ukraine before Putin disappears.

With Gorbachev, Thatcher and Reagan, an “advantage was that all could remember World War II. It was also useful that Reagan was a Republican, since a Democrat in the White House could have been criticised for being soft on communism. But whereas change was possible to imagine with an American president other than Reagan and a British prime minister who would play a less significant role than did Thatcher, it is impossible to imagine a peaceful transition from Communism within Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union without Gorbachev.”

The rest, as they say is history.

Written by Dr Greg Mills for the Daily Friend.