The Dead Hand

Perestroika in Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 46. Also, The Observer, London, Dec. 23, 1984, p. 4; “The Westminster Hour,” BBC series Power Eating, by Anne Perkins, May 2005.

6 Geoffrey Howe, Conflict of Loyalty (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), pp. 358– 360.

7 The ad appeared Feb. 22, 1984. On the first page, which Gorbachev used for his prop, were the boxes and dots. On the second page, in bold headline, the advertisement asked “COULD THIS BE EARTH’S LAST CHART?” It was sponsored by a businessman, Harold Willens, who had spelled out his hopes to stop the arms race in a book, The Trimtab Factor: How Business Executives Can Help Solve the Nuclear Weapons Crisis (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1984). Willens, chairman of the California bilateral nuclear freeze initiative campaign of 1982, attributed his antinuclear views to his experiences in the Pacific as a marine. He visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki weeks after the World War II bombing and was horrified at what he saw. Willens had fled the Soviet Union with his parents when he was eight years old and settled in Los Angeles, where he became a successful businessman.

8 See “Memorandum of Conversation,” meeting with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Dec. 22, 1984, Camp David. http://www.margaretthatcher.org.

9 Gorbachev, interview, June 30, 2006.

10 In the Dec. 23, 1983, issue of Science, two articles by teams of scientists argued that a nuclear war would have devastating environmental and ecological effects on the globe. In January 1984, a Vatican working group issued a report describing nuclear winter. “Nuclear Winter: A Warning,” Pontificiae Academiae Scientiarvm Docvmenta, 11, Jan. 23–25, 1984. Among the scientists who participated was Yevgeny Velikhov, who became a key adviser to Gorbachev.

11 Thatcher interview with John Cole, BBC, Dec. 17, 1984.

12 See www.margaretthatcher.org.

13 Memorandum of conversation, Dec. 22, 1984.

14 Gorbachev’s maternal grandfather had become a supporter of the Bolsheviks because the family was given the land they worked on after the revolution. “In the oral history of our family, it was constantly repeated: the revolution gave our family land,” he said. Conversations, p. 14.

15 David Remnick, “Young Gorbachev,” Washington Post, p. B1, Dec. 1, 1989.

16 The Soviet Union was not a rule-of-law state in the Western sense. But the law faculties were often used to groom future recruits for service in diplomacy, security services and party work.

17 Gorbachev and MlynaaY, Conversations, p. 18.

18 The full title was History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course, 1939.

19 Brown, p. 39.

20 In the Soviet system, the procuracy was more than just a prosecutor. The office also had an accountant’s auditing function and served as a watchdog for the party.

21 Ever since the Bolshevik revolution, the Communist Party leadership strove to keep the restiveness of youth in check through Komsomol. See Steven L. Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

22 Raisa Gorbachev, pp. 93–99.

23 Gorbachev, Conversations, p. 38.

24 Robert G. Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened: His Triumphs and His Failure (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 41.

25 Time magazine editors, Mikhail S. Gorbachev: An Intimate Biography (New York: Time Inc., 1998), p. 98.

26 Brown, p. 45.

27 Gorbachev, Conversations, p. 47.

28 Gorbachev, Conversations, pp. 42–43.

29 Gorbachev succeeded Fedor Kulakov, who died July 17, 1978. Kulakov, who was previously first secretary in Stavropol, had been a mentor. Gorbachev delivered a eulogy for him in Red Square. However, the delay between his death in July and Gorbachev’s elevation in November may have meant internal wrangling over the appointment.

30 Volkogonov, p. 446, notes that Gorbachev’s assignment was doomed; decrees were never going to solve agricultural problems that dated back to Stalin’s disastrous campaign against the peasants.

31 The most significant source of unorthodox thinking was in Novosibirsk, Siberia, where an outspoken reform economist, Abel Aganbegyan, had come up with a candid and devastating critique of the Soviet economy. A colleague, Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a sociologist, prepared a landmark internal paper challenging the entire structure of the Soviet economy, which was debated at a 1983 conference in Novosibirsk. See Tatyana Zaslavskaya, The Second Socialist Revolution: An Alternative Soviet Strategy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

32 Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 172–173.

33 Narodnoye Khozyaistvo SSSR v 1983 g. [Agriculture in the USSR in 1983] (Moscow: Finances and Statistics, 1984), p. 269.

34 Henry Kreisler, “Conversation with Alexander Yakovlev,” Nov. 21, 1996, Conversations with History, Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Also, English, p. 184.

35 English, p. 190.

36 Eduard Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom (New York: Free Press, 1991), pp. 23, 37.

37 Yegor Ligachev, Inside Gorbachev’s Kremlin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), p. 58.

38 Chernyaev diary, Feb. 26 and March 2, 1985.

39 Alexander Yakovlev, Sumerki (Moscow: Materik, 2003), pp. 459–461.

40 Brown, Seven Years That Changed the World, p. 32.

41 March 11 comments from minutes of the Politburo meeting, the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Volkogonov Collection, Reel 17, Container 25.

42 Georgi Shakhnazarov, Tsena Svobody: Reformatsiya Gorbacheva Glazami yevo Pomoshnika (Moscow: Rossika-Zevs, 1993), pp. 35–36.

CHAPTER 9: YEAR OF THE SPY

1 Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 329.

2 Reagan diary, April 19, 1985. Reagan acknowledged in his memoir, “I can’t claim that I believed from the start that Mikhail Gorbachev was going to be a different sort of Soviet leader.” Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 614.

3 Reagan, An American Life, pp. 615–616.

4 Reagan diary, March 20, 1985. In his memoir, Reagan said he told aides “we’d have to be as tough as ever in dealing with the Soviets” but “we should work hard to establish channels directly” between himself and Gorbachev, p. 615.

5 According to Matlock, Nicholson had strayed into a restricted area. The United States “was given a version that mixed fact with fiction to place the responsibility on Nicholson, not on the Soviet sentry. The official Soviet explanation was that Nicholson had entered a clearly marked prohibited area, was illegally photographing a Soviet military installation, and when spotted refused the sentry’s order to halt. Instead, he tried to escape and was