The Dead Hand

authority.⁸ But his style spoke volumes. He seemed to promise a more flexible approach, a sharp contrast with the rigidity of the past.

Gorbachev felt the conversation with Thatcher was a personal turning point.⁹ He recalled vividly the diagram he presented at Chequers. He said he told Thatcher that all the weapons in one box on that page would “suffice to blow up the foundation of life on Earth. And it turns out that it can be done another 999 times—and what’s after that? What, blow it up one million times? That is absurd. We were possessed by the absurd.”

“It had been accumulated already, stored already—including inside of me—that something needed to be done,” he said of the threat of nuclear war. “To describe it in one word, or one sentence: that something needs to be done.” But Gorbachev acknowledged it was difficult for him, back then, to imagine what that would be. Even as he unfolded the paper with all the squares and dots in front of Thatcher, he had no idea how to reduce the nuclear arsenals. He wondered, “How could all of it be stopped?”

Thatcher wasn’t impressed with the Gorbachev diagram, but remembered he carried off the presentation with “a touch of theatre.” Gorbachev also warned of the dangers of a “nuclear winter” that would follow a war with atomic bombs.¹⁰ But Thatcher said, “I was not much moved by all this.” She responded with a heartfelt lecture on the virtues of nuclear deterrence: the weapons, she said, had kept the peace. This was one of her core beliefs. Thatcher was “eloquent and emotional,” Gorbachev remembered.

Thatcher also knew Gorbachev might give her a message for Reagan. She listened closely when he spoke about Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Privately, Thatcher had little confidence in Reagan’s dream of making nuclear weapons obsolete, but kept her counsel. What caught her ear at Chequers was the urgency in Gorbachev’s voice. The Soviets, she concluded, “wanted it stopped at almost any price.” She told Gorbachev there was no way Britain would be split from the United States. Gorbachev was supposed to leave at 4:30 P.M., but remained until 5:50 P.M. As his car pulled away, Thatcher recalled, “I hoped that I had been talking to the next Soviet leader.”

Officially, Gorbachev came to London as head of a Supreme Soviet delegation, but his reception and performance were anything but low-key. He charmed his hosts and captured the imagination of Britain. Television had never looked kindly on any Soviet leader, but Gorbachev thrived on the attention. “Red Star is born,” the Daily Mail said of Raisa. The Gorbachevs stopped in the cavernous reading room of the British Museum to see the place where Karl Marx had written Das Kapital, and they toured Westminster Abbey, seeing the graves of medieval kings, memorials to national poets, taking interest in the stained glass windows and the architecture.

On Monday, Thatcher gave an interview to the BBC. In her first answer to a question, she declared:

“I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together.”¹¹

Gorbachev’s visit was interrupted by news of the sudden death in Moscow of Dmitri Ustinov, the defense minister. Gorbachev flew home. Without Ustinov, there would be a new leadership vacuum. Chernenko was so ill he could not attend Ustinov’s funeral, and Gorbachev faced still more uncertainty in the Kremlin. “The leadership of the country was in a deplorable state,” he said.

Thatcher visited Reagan at Camp David on December 22, 1984. In preparation for the visit, the president had in his pocket seven note cards of talking points. The second card said, “Understand Gorbachev was impressive.” And, “What are your impressions?”¹² Thatcher delivered a detailed report on the lunch at Chequers: human rights, economics, arms control. Thatcher said Gorbachev was more charming and more open to discussion and debate than his predecessors. She recounted how Gorbachev had zeroed in on the Strategic Defense Initiative. In response, Reagan opened up with a fulsome description of his great dream as both a technological quest and a moral imperative, with an ultimate goal of eliminating nuclear weapons. It was the first time Thatcher had heard Reagan talk about it directly, and she later confessed she was “horrified.” But she listened.

She also relayed to Reagan what Gorbachev had said to her: “Tell your friend President Reagan not to go ahead with space weapons.”¹³

To understand the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, who, with Reagan, would change the world in the years ahead, we must first reach back a half century into the tumultuous events that confronted his people and his country, from Stalin’s terror and the unimaginable losses of World War II, through the hardships, thaws, triumphs and stagnation of the postwar years. All of these directly touched Gorbachev. In his early life, there are few clues he would later become a catalyst of immense change. He was a child of the Soviet system, hardly a radical. But one thread is visible through it all. Gorbachev, over a long period of time, saw a reality that was strikingly different from the artificial world portrayed by the party and the leadership. As he rose through the ranks, he accumulated insights and revelations about the huge chasm between how people actually lived and the stuffy slogans of those who ruled. Raisa, too, grasped the depth of this chasm, and reinforced Gorbachev’s determination to change it.

Gorbachev’s doubts were sown incrementally, over a generation, and for many years kept to himself. His first reaction to a disappointment or failure was always to strive to improve the system. He was never in a frame of mind to tear it down. By the time he became Soviet leader, he had fully absorbed the abysmal reality, but had limited understanding of how to fix it. His greatest skill was in political maneuvering to achieve his goals. He tried to rescue the system by unleashing forces of openness and political pluralism, hoping that these would heal the other maladies. They could not.

Gorbachev’s achievements in ending the Cold War—braking what he called the speeding locomotive of the nuclear arms race, allowing a revolution in Europe to unfold peacefully, ending the confrontation in the Third World—were not his first objectives. They grew out of his desire for radical change at home, rooted in his experience as a peasant son, a young witness to war, a university student during the thaw, a party official in the stagnation years and, most importantly, out of his own deep impressions about what had gone wrong.

Gorbachev did not set out to change the world, but rather to save his country. In the end, he did not save the country but may have saved the world.

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born March 2, 1931, in the small village of Privolnoye, in the black earth region of Stavropol in southern Russia. His parents, Sergei and Maria, worked the land; life in his village was little changed over centuries. From childhood, Gorbachev remembered “adobe huts with an earthen floor, and no beds at all”—people slept near the oven for warmth.¹⁴ Gorbachev spent much of his childhood as the favorite of his mother’s parents; he often lived with them. They kept books of Marx, Engels and Lenin on a shelf, but also a Russian Orthodox religious icon. His maternal grandfather, Pantelei, was remembered by Gorbachev as a tolerant man, and immensely respected in the village. In those years, Gorbachev was the only son; a brother was born after the war, when he was seventeen years old. He seems to have had a happy childhood. “I enjoyed absolute freedom,” he recalled. “My grandparents made me feel like the most important member of the family.”

The country was soon plunged into suffering and tragedy. Famine struck the Stavropol region in 1933, when Gorbachev was just two years old. Stalin had launched the mass collectivization of agriculture, a brutal process of forcing the peasants into collective farms and punishing those known as kulaks, who were somewhat better off. A third to half of the population of Privolnoye died of hunger. “Entire families were dying, and the half-ruined ownerless huts would remain deserted for years,” Gorbachev remembered. Stalin’s purges took millions of lives among the peasantry in the 1930s.

Gorbachev’s family was touched by the purges, too. His grandfather on his father’s side, Andrei, rejected collectivization and tried to make it on his own. In the spring of 1934, Andrei was arrested and accused of failing to fulfill the sowing plan set by the government for individual peasants. “But no seeds were available to fulfill the plan,” Gorbachev recalled of the absurdity of the charge. Andrei was declared a “saboteur” and sent to a prison camp for two years, but released early, in 1935. On his return, he became a leader of the collective farm.

Two years later, grandfather Pantelei was also arrested. The charges were similarly absurd, that he had been a member of a counterrevolutionary organization and sabotaged the collective farm’s work. The arrest was “my first real trauma,” Gorbachev recalled. “They took him away in the middle of the night.” His grandfather was treated badly. Pantelei was finally released one winter evening in 1938, and returned to Privolnoye. Sitting at a hand-planed rustic table, he told the family how he had been beaten and tortured. Pantelei said he was convinced that Stalin did not know of the misdeeds of the secret police, and he did not blame the Soviet regime for his