At the time of writing these lines I have just learned that my portrait has been moved from the ‘Contemporary’ to the ‘Historical’ Room of London’s National Portrait Gallery. This is perfectly fair. After all, eleven years have passed since I left Number Ten Downing Street. The world has, as they say, ‘moved on’ in all sorts of respects.

For example, in 1990 we could not have foreseen the huge impact which the information revolution would have upon business, lifestyles and even war. We could not have imagined that the mighty Japanese economy would have stalled so badly, or that China would have risen so fast. We could not have envisaged that perhaps the most chilling threat to Man’s dignity and freedom would lie in his ability to manipulate genetic science so as to create, and re-create, himself. Nor, needless to say, would even the most far-sighted statesman have predicted the horrors of 11 September 2001.

But it is always true that the world that is can best be understood by those conversant with the world that was. And ‘the world that was’ – the world which preceded today’s world of dot.coms, mobile phones and GM food – was one which saw a life-and-death struggle whose outcome was decisive for all that has followed.

Of course, just to speak of the ‘Cold War’ nowadays is to refer back to an era which seems a lifetime, not a mere decade and a half, ago. In truth, as I shall argue at many stages in this book, the underlying realities have changed rather less than the rhetoric. But changes there have been – and, on balance, ones of enormous benefit to the world.

DEBATES IN PRAGUE

People will continue to argue about the significance of the collapse of communism for as long as there are books to write and publishers to print them. But on Tuesday, 16 November 1999 a number of the main actors in those dramatic events – myself among them – met in Prague to put our own interpretations. It was ten years since the Czechoslovak ‘Velvet Revolution’ had led to the fall of one of the most hardline communist governments in Europe and its replacement by democracy.

I had not participated in the celebrations a few days earlier in Berlin held to mark the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I would have felt uneasy doing so. This was not because I felt any nostalgia for communism. The Wall was an abomination, an indisputable proof that communism was ultimately a system of slavery imposed by imprisoning whole populations. President Reagan had been right in 1987 to demand of the Soviet leader: ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’

But nor could I then or now regard Germany as just another country whose future was a matter for Germans alone to decide, without involving anybody else. A united Germany was bound to become once again the dominant power in Europe. It would doubtless be diplomatic, but it would also be culpably naïve, to ignore the fact that this German drive for dominance has led in my lifetime to two terrible, global wars during which nearly a hundred million people – including of course nine million Germans – died. The Germans are a cultured and talented people; but in the past they have shown a marked inability to limit their ambitions or respect their neighbours.

Awareness of the past and uncertainty about the future led President Mitterrand and me, with not very effective assistance from President Gorbachev, to try to slow down the rush to German unification. In the end, we failed – partly because the United States administration took a different view, but mainly because the Germans took matters into their own hands, as in the end, of course, they were entitled to do. It was good that German reunification took place within NATO, thus avoiding the risk that it might have constituted a dangerous non-aligned power in the middle of Europe. It was also good that Germans were able to feel that they had won back control of their own country – as a patriot myself I certainly do not deny anyone else the right to be patriotic. But it would be hypocritical to pretend that I did not have deep misgivings about what a united Germany might mean. So I had no intention of going to Berlin in October 1999 to spoil the party.

Prague, though, was a different matter entirely – this was one party I hoped to enjoy. The Czechs, of course, have suffered the brunt of both Nazism and communism. And, having been failed by the democratic powers in the face of both totalitarian aggressions, they know a thing or two about the need for vigilance.

My favourite European cities all lie behind the former Iron Curtain – St Petersburg (for its grandeur), Warsaw (for its heroism), Budapest (for its leafy elegance). But Prague is quite simply the most beautiful city I have ever visited. It is almost too beautiful for its own good. In 1947 the historian A.J.P. Taylor asked the then Czech President Edvard Beneš why the Czech authorities had not put up stronger resistance to the seizure of Czechoslovakia by Hitler in 1939. Beneš might, I suppose, have replied that the Czechs were taken unawares, deceived by German promises. Or he could have answered that the Czechs were outnumbered and so resistance was useless. Instead, to Taylor’s surprise, he flung open the windows of his office overlooking the irreplaceable glories of Prague and declared: ‘This is why we did not fight!’

The Czech Republic has been one of the more successful post-communist countries, thanks mainly to the visionary economic policies of its former Prime Minister, my old friend and Hayekian extraordinaire, Vaclav Klaus. But he could not have succeeded as he did had the Czechs not retained an instinctive understanding of how to make a civil society and a free economy work. They gained these insights through the historical memory ingrained in their culture – it is, after all, worth remembering that before the Second World War Czechoslovakia enjoyed an income per head equal to that of France. The Czechs are a people who have never forgotten how to combine knowing how to live with knowing how to work. So, for all these reasons, when I was invited to Prague with George Bush Sr, Mikhail Gorbachev, Helmut Kohl, Lech Walesa and (representing her late husband) Mme Danielle Mitterrand, I eagerly accepted.

Our host was President Vaclav Havel. Czechoslovakia had been immensely fortunate in 1989 to have Mr Havel – someone of total integrity and enjoying near-universal respect – to symbolise popular resistance and eventually become its leader and the nation’s president. President Havel is the sort of leader you could not imagine coming to power in ordinary circumstances – which some people may consider quite a recommendation. He is a considerable playwright, an intellectual, a combination of gentleness and courage – he spent over five years in jail for his views. He speaks quietly but forcefully, no orator in the ordinary sense but with something of the preacher’s ability to convey moral certainty and to communicate inspiration.

Mr Havel’s office in the presidential wing of Prague Castle, where we met that afternoon, looks out onto the river and the old city beyond. The furnishing has doubtless changed since Beneš’s time. A large Egyptianesque nude female statue stands by his desk: for the President’s tastes in art, like his politics, are not altogether mine.

President Havel’s anti-communism is not in doubt. But he is a man of the left and his view of the world reflects this. As he would put it in a speech the following day: ‘The present calls for a new perception of the contemporary world as a multi-polar, multicultural and globally interconnected entity, and for a consistent reform of all international organisations and institutions in order that they might reflect this new understanding.’ This kind of utopian language, even from one so eloquent, worries me.

Mr Havel and I, though, agree entirely, I think, about what was wrong with communism – a system which (to quote him again) was ‘based on lies, hatred and coercion’. My first engagement on Wednesday morning allowed me to gauge how the President’s fellow countrymen thought. I was to unveil a new statue of Sir Winston Churchill – a life-size copy of that which stands in front of the Palace of Westminster in London. Also due to speak were Vaclav Klaus and Sir Winston’s nephew, Rupert Soames.

It was very cold indeed; a bitter wind cut through me to the quick. I had decided on a black wool suit with fur trim and black hat, but had rejected advice to wear a thick coat and quickly regretted it. Prague’s Churchill Square is quite large, but it was packed. Some seven thousand people stood there and more were hanging out of overlooking windows to get a better view. I made my speech:

Each time I come [to Prague] I seem to enter a world of majestic churches, mighty palaces and evocative sculpture. But I confess that I am very glad that you have found a place for this new statue. It will remind you here, as every generation has to be reminded – and amid all this beauty – that the price of freedom can be high, and that it may indeed require the sacrifice of ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’. This statue of Sir Winston Churchill will also remind you, as it reminds me, of something else – that liberty must never be allowed to perish from the earth, it must endure for ever.

The reception was tremendous. Some applause has a special quality that you remember for a lifetime. This had it. Finally, the Czech national anthem was played by the band and sung with passion by the crowd. I could only imagine what it meant – for the old people who recalled the Nazi invader, for the younger ones who had suffered under communism, for the very young who knew, without having experienced either of these totalitarianisms, what freedom truly was.

By now I had been standing completely still for almost an hour, and I was frozen. As we left the platform a Czech veteran who had served with the British in the last war stood forward to request an autograph. My hands were shaking so much that I could barely write. The almost illegible signature he has is certainly unique and will in future years probably be denounced by the experts as a fake.

It was apparent from the panel discussion that afternoon in Prague Castle’s huge, gilded baroque ball room, that whatever chord I struck with the Czech people evoked less harmony from some of my fellow guests, above all from Mikhail Gorbachev. The discussion was tactfully chaired by the historian Timothy Garton Ash, who had himself played a distinguished role in the events of ten years earlier. To his left sat Mme Mitterrand, George Bush, myself and Helmut Kohl. To his right were Vaclav Havel, Mikhail Gorbachev and Lech Walesa. The theme of the discussion was ‘Ten Years After’.

Interestingly, written down like that, the title looks strangely unfinished. Ten years after … what? The obvious reply, of course, is ‘Prague’s Velvet Revolution’. But it is not the only reply. One might say instead ‘the collapse of communism’, or ‘the triumph of freedom’, or – even more controversial for some – ‘the West’s victory in the Cold War’. It was a fundamental difference about these other possibilities that underlay the disagreement that followed.

All those present (with the exception of Danielle Mitterrand) had played a considerable part in securing the outcome ten years earlier. Lech Walesa’s leadership of the Polish Solidarity trade union was crucial in the fight for Polish freedom (I well remembered my visit to the Gdansk shipyard in November 1988 and my – as it turns out – successful attempts to persuade General Jaruzelski to negotiate with Solidarity*).

Mikhail Gorbachev began the reforms in the Soviet Union that opened the way – albeit unintentionally on his part – for the fall of communism. But perhaps the decision for which he should be given most credit is a decision not to do anything at all – when he allowed the Eastern Bloc countries to break free of Soviet control without sending in the tanks.

Helmut Kohl, for all the criticism that has since been made of him, must be ranked with Bismarck and Adenauer as one of Germany’s most successful statesmen. He showed great political courage in resisting the threats and blandishments of a Moscow that was desperate in the 1980s to drive a wedge between Europe and America. And, though I did not appreciate his tactics at the time, he also showed cunning and bravura in securing his country’s unity and freedom in 1989–90.

George Bush – looking drained from an overlong tour of European cities, but as always supported by Barbara – was also present. We are very different people, from different backgrounds and with different instincts. But I have always warmed to his decency and patriotism. He took over where Ronald Reagan left off, and then finished the job – combining sticks and carrots to induce the Soviets along the path of reform and then negotiating the reunification of Germany within NATO.

I have written elsewhere of my own part in the affairs of that time: without Britain’s wholehearted support for the Reagan administration I am not sure that it would have been able to carry its allies along the right path. I also think that the fact that Ronald Reagan and I spoke the same language (in every sense) helped convince friend and foe alike that we were serious.

All of our contributions were quite sufficiently substantial without needing exaggeration or distortion. But human nature being what it is – and academics, like politicians, being on this score quite especially human – a certain amount of revisionism had set in. In particular, the role of Ronald Reagan had been deliberately diminished; the role of the Europeans, who, with the exception of Helmut Kohl, were often all too keen to undermine America when it mattered, had been sanitised; and the role of Mr Gorbachev, who failed spectacularly in his declared objective of saving communism and the Soviet Union, had been absurdly misunderstood.

I was conscious of all this as I prepared my thoughts for the panel. But I tried to be diplomatic. I declared that ‘everyone on this platform was marvellous’. But I also said that it was America and Britain with their deep, historic commitment to the values of liberty which had been crucial in bringing about freedom. I added that what interested me now was to extend the rule of liberty everywhere:

We’ve got the greatest opportunity we’ve ever known to extend liberty and the rule of law to those countries that have never known them, and that’s what I think we should get on with. I trust I make myself clear!

I certainly had, it seems, to Mr Gorbachev, who became really quite angry and delivered an energetic and lengthy rebuttal. He denied that there had been any victor in the Cold War, accused people like me of having a ‘superiority complex’, asserted that no single ideology – ‘neither the liberal, nor the communist, nor the conservative nor any other’ – had all the answers, and informed us that ‘even the communists wanted to make the world a happier place’.

It followed, of course, that since no side had won (or, doubtless more important to Mr Gorbachev, no side had lost) and no single ideology was sufficient for the needs of the world today, the search for solutions must go on. And, not surprisingly perhaps, it was through resort to all the most fashionable nostrums that this search should be pursued – by turning (as he put it) to ‘new methods, a new philosophy, a new thinking that can help us understand one another and the conditions of the globalising world’.

Mr Gorbachev is lively, engaging and a great talker – a subject on which I am a good judge (on this occasion he spoke for about a third of the conference). But his remarks in Prague seemed to me, to say the least, of doubtful validity.

Yet nor should they be lightly dismissed. They represent the articulation of a strategy, common to the left in many countries, of seeking to escape all blame for communism and then going on to take credit for being more pragmatic, modern and insightful about the world which those who actually fought communism have created. It is a pressing necessity to expose and defeat both distortions.

Revisionism about the Cold War has taken various guises. But underlying them all is the assertion that the policies of Ronald Reagan towards the Soviet Union were, as you prefer, superfluous, dangerous or even counter-productive. It was not just loyalty towards my old friend that irritated me about this. It struck me – and still strikes me – as potentially disastrous, because learning the wrong lessons could still result in adopting the wrong responses.

With all this in mind, on the same evening in Prague I put to good use a short speech of thanks when I and the other distinguished guests received the Czech Order of the White Lion. I said:

Belief in the unique dignity of the human person, in the need for the state to serve and not to dominate, in the right to ownership of property and so independence – these things were what the West upheld, and what we fought for in the long twilight struggle that we call the Cold War. In the ten years that have elapsed since communism fell, much has been written of that great conflict. There has even, at times, been a little revisionism at work. But truth is too precious to become the slave of fashion.

As I receive this award today, I would like to refer to the man who more than any other – and more than me – can claim to have won the Cold War without firing a shot – I mean, of course, President Ronald Reagan. The fact that he cannot be here, for reasons that are well-known,* reminds us also of so many others who can’t be here – because they perished in prisons and by torture.

In the joy we now feel that Europe is whole and free let us not forget the terrible price that was paid to defend and to recover liberty. As the poet Byron wrote of another such prisoner of conscience:

Eternal spirit of the chainless mind!

Brightest in Dungeons, Liberty! thou art,

For there thy habitation is the heart –

The heart which love of thee alone can bind;

And when thy sons to fetters are consigned –

To fetters, and the damp vault’s dayless gloom,

Their country conquers with their martyrdom,

And Freedom’s fame finds wings on every wind.

I wanted to remind the politicians present – the ordinary Czechs needed no reminding, as the reception they gave me had demonstrated – that the Cold War was a war for freedom, truth and justice. And we anti-communists won it.

THE WEST WON

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.