Europe — Mutual Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) — and to respect the human rights of their subject peoples. But what did the Soviets want? This was by far the most interesting question, since even if, as the sceptics suggested, they would not honour their agreements anyway, they still would not have taken this trouble unless something important for them would result. Respectability could be the only answer. If the Soviet Union and its satellites — particularly the more potentially fragile regimes in Eastern Europe — could receive the international seal of approval they would feel more secure.
But did we want them to feel more secure? Arguably, one of the most exploitable weaknesses of totalitarian dictatorships is the paranoid insecurity which flows from the lack of consent to the regime itself and which results in inefficiency and even paralysis of decision-taking. If the Soviets felt more secure, if their new- found respectability gave them greater access to credit and technology, if they were treated with tolerant respect rather than suspicious hostility, how would they use these advantages?
That led, of course, to the further question: what was the fundamental impulse of the Soviet Union? If the Soviet leaders were reasonable people, a little hidebound perhaps but open to persuasion, not so very different from the political elites of our countries, the lessening of tension with the West would indeed lead to a more peaceful and stable world. The trouble was that no one with real knowledge of the Soviet system believed that this was so. That system was founded upon an ideology which moulded every person and institution within it according to techniques of varying sophistication and crudity. The evidence for this was the ruthlessness with which it dealt with the tiny minority who dared to challenge it. The fate of the dissidents was not just something to evoke Western compassion or outrage: it was a statement about the nature and objectives of the system which regarded them as such a threat to its existence.
But it was not necessary to listen to Alexander Solzhenitsyn to learn the truth about the Soviet Union — though, as I shall describe, his words had a powerful effect on me. One need only turn to the leaden prose of
Peaceful coexistence does not signify the end of the struggle between the two world social systems. The struggle will continue… until the complete and final victory of communism on a world scale. [
In other words, there would be no letting-up in the promotion of Soviet power and communist revolution worldwide. If such statements were a true reflection of Soviet intentions — and there was a great deal of evidence to show that they were — any weakening of external pressure on the Soviets would simply result in their having more resources and opportunities to ‘bury us’.
If I was to challenge the accepted wisdom on these matters I needed expert help. But most of the experts had jumped aboard the Sovietology gravy train which ran on official patronage, conferences with ‘approved’ Soviet academics, visa journalism and a large dose of professional complacency. I had, however, through John O’Sullivan of the
I began by setting the large military imbalance between the West and the Soviet Union against the background of the retreat of Western power. I drew particular attention to the Soviet naval build-up, describing the Soviet navy as a global force with more nuclear submarines than the rest of the world’s navies put together and more surface ships than could possibly be needed to protect the USSR’s coast and merchant shipping. I argued that nothing was more important to our security than the American commitment to Europe, adding that an isolationist Britain would encourage an isolationist America.
I then dealt with the imminent Helsinki Summit. I did not attack
I also drew attention to the importance of human rights as a further measure of the nature of the regime with which we were dealing:
When the Soviet leaders gaol a writer, or a priest, or a doctor or a worker for the crime of speaking freely, it is not only for humanitarian reasons that we should be concerned. For these acts reveal a country that is afraid of truth and liberty; it dare not allow its people to enjoy the freedoms we take for granted, and a nation that denies those freedoms to its own people will have few scruples in denying them to others.
Human rights would, we already knew, be the subject of far reaching verbal undertakings in the so-called ‘Basket Three’ of the Helsinki package — ‘Cooperation in humanitarian and other fields’. But I placed no trust in the Soviets’ good faith: indeed, since their whole system depended upon repression, it was difficult to see how they could comply. I suspected that for many of those present at Helsinki — and not just on the communist side — the undertakings about human rights would be regarded as uplifting rhetoric rather than clear conditions to be rigorously monitored. So I noted:
We must work for a real relaxation of tension, but in our negotiations with the Eastern bloc we must not accept words or gestures as a substitute for genuine
That is why we so strongly support all those European and American spokesmen, who have insisted that no serious advance towards a stable peace can be made unless some progress at least is seen in the free movement of people and of ideas.
The reaction to this speech confirmed that I was the odd woman out. The Helsinki Agreement was widely welcomed. I could imagine the shaking of wise heads at my impulsive imprudence. Reggie Maudling came round at once to see me in Flood Street to express both his anger at my delivering such a speech without consulting him and his disagreement with its content. I gave no ground. Indeed, Mr Brezhnev’s evident satisfaction at what Helsinki achieved helped convince me that I must return to the subject: he described it as ‘a necessary summing up of the political outcome of the Second World War’. In other words he regarded it — not least perhaps the commitment not to alter European borders except ‘by peaceful means and by agreement’ — as recognizing and legitimizing the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe which they had obtained by force and fraud at the end of the war.
The Helsinki Summit of 1975 is now viewed in a favourable light because the dissidents in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe used its provisions as a programme for which to fight in their long struggle with the communist State. And indeed by making human rights a matter of treaty obligations rather than domestic law it gave the dissidents leverage which they employed to the full. Their bravery would have been of little account, however, without the subsequent Western, particularly American, renewal of resolve and defence build-up. These halted the expansion that had given Soviet communism the psychological prestige of historical inevitability, exerted an external pressure on communist regimes that diverted them from domestic repression, and gave heart to the burgeoning resistance movements against communism. This pincer movement — the revived West and the dissidents — more than countered the advantages that the Soviets received from Helsinki in the form of increased legitimacy and Western recognition. Without that, Helsinki would have been just one more step on the road to defeat.
Not surprisingly after the Helsinki speech, I was not invited to the Soviet Union, as perhaps a different Leader of the Opposition would have been. But I felt it important to deepen my knowledge of the communist system in practice. Consequently, when an invitation arrived for me to visit Romania I accepted. I already had some knowledge of that country, gained when I was Education Secretary. Improbable as it may seem, there had
