works.
Regardless of whether this was Reagan’s intention, a variety of sources, including former Soviet officials and even certain members of the American left, including the academy, claim that Ronald Reagan helped to “create” Mikhail Gorbachev by generating policies that led to a decisive need for change in Moscow’s inner circle, and that demanded a new leader like Gorbachev.
While this argument has some credence, it is impossible for Reagan’s policies to take all the credit for Gorbachev’s appointment, since Gorbachev began his rapid ascension through the Soviet ranks before Ronald Reagan became president. It was October 21, 1980, two weeks before Reagan was elected in the United States, that Gorbachev had been promoted to full membership in the Politburo; he thus joined a small group of Soviet politicians who were both full members of the Politburo and of the Central Committee, and was by far the youngest member of that select group. He had become a senior secretary of the Central Committee two years earlier in November 1978.5
Archie Brown, the insightful biographer of Gorbachev, who is inclined to little sympathy for Ronald Reagan, maintains that there is “not a shred of evidence” to support the argument that Reagan’s policies played a role in bringing Gorbachev to power. There may indeed be an absence of evidence, since, as Richard Pipes points out, the Communists always cloaked the elections of their leaders in deepest secrecy.6 Still, says Brown, the two were “totally unconnected.” He says that if not for the rapid deterioration in the health of Andropov and Chernenko, Gorbachev would not have come to power at all while Reagan was in the White House.7
Put that way, Brown is no doubt correct. However, while Gorbachev was already on a path to power, Reagan’s policies dramatically worsened the Soviet crisis—economically, militarily, politically—and added a sense of urgency for a dynamic, energetic leader like Gorbachev. Andropov badly wanted Gorbachev as general secretary, particularly over Chernenko and advanced Gorbachev’s career more so than any Soviet official.8 Andropov was extremely worried about how to respond to Ronald Reagan, a man he compared to Hitler. The Soviet fear of Reagan was so intense that KGB officer Boris Yuzhin later claimed that there was talk of assassinating the president; at the least, it was abundantly clear that they desperately wanted Reagan gone.9
More than ever, Andropov saw Gorbachev as a future Soviet leader10—a situation made critical because of the Reagan factor. Richard Pipes remembers that Soviet trepidation over Reagan was so acute that Western academic Sovietologists incessantly warned that Reagan’s anti-Communism would produce another Stalin.11 Quite the contrary: Andropov undoubtedly saw Gorbachev as the best response to the incursions by America.
Gorbachev and the Central Committee that supported his general secretaryship were gravely concerned with the international situation and the threat posed from Washington. Though the full import of Reagan’s policies remains unclear, it is unreasonable to presume that the then perilous U.S.–USSR relationship was not a significant factor in considering the next Soviet leader. Archie Brown acknowledged that Gorbachev was selected by the Central Committee “as a moderator who would give dynamism to Soviet policy,” a moderator whose mediation may have been necessary because of Reagan. Surely, such dynamism was needed because of the radically new circumstances now alarming the USSR from the Oval Office. It was no coincidence that, as Brown said, “during the first phase of Gorbachev’s leadership” the Soviet Union was “preoccupied with the relationship with the United States” more than any other country.12
For instance, one cannot ignore the influence of a Reagan statement like the following, issued only weeks before the Politburo sat down to pick Chernenko’s successor: “There is one boundary which Yalta symbolizes that can never be made legitimate, and that is the dividing line between freedom and repression. I do not hesitate to say we wish to undo this boundary…. Our forty-year pledge is to the goal of a restored community of free European nations. To this work we recommit ourselves today.”13
In other words, on the fortieth anniversary of Yalta, Reagan made clear his desire and intent to undo Europe’s division. It would be naive to think that such statements did not influence Soviet decision-making in choosing the next leader.
Despite Brown’s contrary opinion, Reagan supporters at the time and today ardently believed that Reagan helped to create Gorbachev. Margaret Thatcher made such a statement, as did William E. Brock, who held many posts under Reagan, including secretary of labor.14 In a talk at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, Brock predicted that future historians “will give a lot of credit to Ronald Reagan for the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev.” “I think Reagan deserves credit for Gorbachev,” said Brock, calling Reagan a “parent” of Gorbachev. “I really don’t believe that Gorbachev would be there or would have survived were it not for Ronald Reagan.”15
Surprisingly, outside of Reagan boosters, the late historian Stephen E. Ambrose, who judged Reagan incompetent and a disaster for America, stated as early as 1988 that “history will remember Reagan as… the American president who helped make it possible for Mikhail Gorbachev to begin the process of restructuring Soviet society.”16 This view is not uncommon, and there are a number of respected Cold War and presidential scholars who agree.17 One such scholar was historian John Lewis Gaddis, who, in his classic 1992 work published by Oxford University Press, pointed to SDI as one among a number of influences that “contributed to the rise of Gorbachev.”18
In its later documentary on Reagan, done as part of its outstanding series on presidents, PBS’s “The American Experience” called Gorbachev “the Soviet system’s best response to the challenge of Ronald Reagan.” In the documentary, Reagan biographer Edmund Morris, who is seen as generally uncharitable toward Reagan, made the same assertion. He maintained that Andropov began grooming Gorbachev in 1983 as, in Morris’s words, “the only and most likely Soviet leader who would be able to handle this formidable, adamantine anti-Communist on the other side of the Atlantic”—a point echoed by Georgetown professor and Harvard fellow Derek Leebaert.19 Morris said that Andropov, aware that he was dying, saw Gorbachev as the only Soviet politician who could deal with the “canny, determined” Reagan.20
An especially observant assessment of Reagan’s influence on Gorbachev’s selection is provided by Peter Schweizer, a fellow with Stanford’s Hoover Institution and author of a number of books on Reagan and the Cold War. Schweizer notes that after Stalin’s death, the Kremlin quietly divided into two camps with competing visions over which direction the USSR should go: hard-liners and reformers. Prior to Reagan, the hard-liners had been ascendant, as their aggressive approach had worked: the Soviets made magnificent gains throughout the 1970s, while the United States declined. As Soviet Ambassador Oleg Grinevsky put it, the Soviet Union was “on the march…had reached the peak of its power.”21
Under Reagan, however, the tables turned completely: The USSR was in its worst crisis since World War II and the United States was suddenly soaring. This opened the door for the reformers, for men like Gorbachev. This was so clearly the case that, as noted, no less than hard-liner Andrei Gromyko championed Gorbachev’s selection by the Central Committee; in so doing, Gromyko, more than any other high-level Soviet official, enabled the choice of Gorbachev.22 And it was Gromyko who constantly complained about Reagan with repeated dire warnings of how Reagan and his aides “want to cause trouble. They want to weaken the Soviet system. They want to bring it down.”23 Schweizer points to Gromyko’s nominating speech for Gorbachev in March 1985: “Perhaps because of my official responsibilities [as a longtime ambassador and foreign minister], it is rather clearer to me than to other comrades that he [Gorbachev] can grasp very well and very quickly the essence of those developments that are building up outside our country in the international arena”—a direct reference to the U.S.–USSR relationship, and perhaps a key fragment of that “shred of evidence” that Archie Brown feels was lacking.
Significantly, Schweizer adds that the three mighty Soviet institutions—the foreign ministry, the KGB, and the military—that forged the coalition which brought Gorbachev to power happened to be the three chiefly concerned with foreign policy and the Cold War struggle, and the three most troubled by Reagan. Schweizer concludes: “In a very real sense, Gorbachev owed his selection to the pressures Reagan was exerting on the Soviet system.”24
There are Soviets who openly endorse this view. Ilya Zaslavsky, later a popular member of the democratically elected Russian parliament, declared: “Ronald Reagan was the father of perestroika.”25 Yevgenny Novikov, who served on the Central Committee senior staff, said that Reagan’s policies “were a major factor in the demise of the Soviet system,” and tied the birth of Gorbachev’s trademark perestroika to
