#1 - JRL 8156 - JRL Home
From: "Archie Brown" <archie.brown@st-antonys.oxford.ac.uk>
Subject: Reply to Sergei Roy/ 8155
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2004

I am not sure why "Moscow News" finds it worthwhile to publish Sergei Roy's conjectural and impressionistic history of the last decades of the Soviet Union. His latest contribution displays lack of familiarity with the relevant literature, whether the memoirs of the key Russian and British political actors or the main academic books. As a result it contains factual errors and some seriously misleading statements.

Sergei Roy's first mistake is to accuse Gorbachev, in effect, of lying when he said that he had read Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks" in the pre-perestroika period since the book containing these writings was not published in the Soviet Union. I am astonished that Roy seems to be unaware that books that were unobtainable for him were published in very small editions and available only to people on the highest echelons of the nomenklatura. These could be ordered by Central Committee members, but not many regional party secretaries took advance of the opportunity. Gorbachev - in Stavropol in the 1970s - was one of the few who did. He read not only Gramsci but the works of some of the contemporary Eurocommunists and the translated writings of Western politicians. They included Giuseppe Boffa's three-volume history of the USSR as well as articles by Brandt and Mitterrand.

From the Olympian heights of a Moscow intellectual, Roy chooses to "doubt that a man of Gorbachev's intellectual caliber could have understood much of those texts, even if he had read them". It is a pity that Sergei Roy has not read the book, "Conversations with Gorbachev: On Perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism" (Columbia University Press, New York, 2002; paperback, 2003). In those recorded discussions with his close friend, the late Zdenek Mlynar, Gorbachev mentions the "white books" translated by Progress Publishers, such as those of Gramsci and Boffa. Moreover, reviewers of "Conversations with Gorbachev" have commented on the high intellectual level of the discussion. Gorbachev fully holds his own with Mlynar who was the leading theoretician of the "Prague Spring" and acknowledged, even by his enemies, to be a man of exceptional intelligence. In my Introduction to that book, I quote Mlynar (whom I first met in Prague in 1965) describing Gorbachev to me in 1979 as "open-minded, intelligent, and anti-Stalinist". These discussions between Gorbachev and Mlynar were recorded in the mid-1990s and have been published in Czech as well as English. It is unfortunate that they have not yet appeared in book form in Russia, even though the recorded conversations were conducted in Russian.

Unfortunately, some Moscow intellectuals - Sergei Roy evidently, among them - are incapable of distinguishing accent and pronunciation, on the one hand, from intelligence and erudition, on the other. We find traces of such a Muscovite snobbery in Roy's reference to Gorbachev's "heavy South Russian accent". (There are, of course, many Moscow intellectuals whose values are less debased, but one tires of coming across all too many references to Gorbachev's accent and pronunciation of certain words, which he has carried with him from his childhood, as if that were any guide to the quality of his mind or character.) Gorbachev was, as everyone knows, born into a peasant family in southern Russia and his early schooling was seriously disrupted by the war, during which he spent more time, as a boy, working in the fields than at school. He was well behind his age cohort when he arrived at Moscow University in 1950, but it did not take him long to catch up, and people who later worked alongside him, such as Andrei Grachev, have commented on Gorbachev's extremely wide reading in Russian creative literature and remarkable memory (even by Russia's high standards) for poetry.

Other highly intelligent people who were not always in agreement with Gorbachev but worked with him at close quarters - among them, Alexander Yakovlev, Anatoliy Chernyaev and the late Georgiy Shakhnazarov - have also (both in conversations with me and in their own writings) acknowledged Gorbachev's intellectual grasp. Yakovlev has also, incidentally, in his latest book fully confirmed one thing that Roy says - but which he prefaces with the partial disclaimer of "According to Gorbachev"- namely, that Gorbachev stood up to Chernenko very firmly when the General Secretary tried to cancel the December 1984 ideology conference on the eve of the event. Yakovlev was in Gorbachev's room when he took Chernenko's call and he has recorded his surprise at the "tough tone" in which Gorbachev flatly refused to go along with Chernenko's wishes.

Sergei Roy mentions my advice to Margaret Thatcher, but gets the chronology wrong. It was on 8th September 1983 that the British Prime Minister convened a seminar (that lasted from 9 o'clock in the morning until after 3 p.m.) in which she was accompanied by senior ministers on her side of the table and faced by eight British academic specialists who had already written papers which she had read and annotated. In my paper I had written about Gorbachev as a likely future General Secretary and described him as "the most hopeful choice from the point of view both of Soviet citizens and the outside world" . In my 20-minute oral presentation I said a good deal more about him. In the course of the discussion that followed, Margaret Thatcher turned to Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and said: "Should we not invite Mr Gorbachev to Britain?". Howe naturally agreed. That was the origin of the invitation to Gorbachev, but the seminar did not, as Roy suggests, immediately precede Gorbachev's visit. That eventually took place fifteen months later - in December 1984. I was invited to brief Margaret Thatcher on Gorbachev at a meeting in 10 Downing Street on the evening prior to his arrival. Her well-known remark about liking Gorbachev and that they could do business together was, as I noted in my book, "The Gorbachev Factor", "both calculated and genuine". It was calculated inasmuch as both the Prime Minister and the British Foreign Office wanted the visit to be a success for Gorbachev - to do him some good at home - and it was genuine because Margaret Thatcher did, for the first time in her life, find herself liking a Soviet politician, and she was impressed by his intellectual agility in argument and ability to operate without a script.

Contrary to what Sergei Roy suggests, it was not so much the substance of what Gorbachev was arguing at that time that impressed his British hosts. He still stayed largely within the parameters of what was official Soviet foreign policy at the time. It was, rather, his relative openness (he mentioned, for example, in private conversation with Malcolm Rifkind, who at that time was Minister of State at the Foreign Office, the fact that he had been baptised as a child and referred also to the imprisonment in Stalin's time of his grandfathers), his obvious intelligence, and personal charm that pleasantly surprised his interlocutors, including such foreign policy veterans as the Labour Party Shadow Foreign Secretary, Denis Healey.

Sergei Roy fairly remarks that Gorbachev's visit to Britain "made the world sit up and take notice of a new political player of world stature". Unfortunately, he follows that remark with a calumny about both Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa. Up to a point this is excusable, for he is merely following Western journalists. Journalists, after all, reproduce what their colleagues have written. At one time this involved "looking at the cuttings" ; now they consult computer files. But the maxim of "garbage in, garbage out" applies. The story about Raisa Gorbacheva paying in London by credit card has been recycled by journalists around the world, but just because it has appeared in the "New York Times", the "Washington Post", "Time" magazine, or even "Moscow News", does not make it true. The famous "American Express card" which Raisa supposedly used to pay for a set of earrings did not exist. As she later observed, at that time she was blissfully unaware that there were such things as credit cards. Yet, building on the false premise of Raisa Gorbacheva "dexterously using a credit card to spend vast sums of money", Roy quite erroneously goes on to describe Gorbachev as "corrupt".

Since I had been taking a keen interest in Gorbachev ever since he became a Secretary of the Central Committee in 1978, I naturally followed every aspect of his first visit to Britain closely. That included talking immediately afterwards with ministers and officials who had had meetings with him or who had accompanied him or his wife on the various occasions. Raisa Gorbacheva, in fact, spent hardly any time shopping, but on her one shopping expedition she chose earrings, costing several hundred pounds, that were paid for IN CASH by the person accompanying her from the Soviet Embassy. No doubt the Embassy had a fund which could be used to pay for visiting dignitaries and I can readily agree that there would be a scandal if the wife of a British politician had earrings paid for from the public purse. Those, however, were (contrary to what Roy suggests) the norms of the unreformed Soviet system. Even high-ranking party officials did not, as a rule, have much money of their own, but the resources of the state were put at their disposal. (The sum, of course, is a very modest one compared with what a number of self-proclaimed Russian democratic leaders were subsequently to help themselves to from Russia's rich natural resources.) Where Raisa did break with Soviet tradition was by impressing the people she met both by her smart appearance (completely at odds with the Western stereotype of the wife of a high-ranking Soviet official) and by her intellectual liveliness. She got a glowing press in Britain - for the tabloid newspapers she was even more interesting than her husband - and this did not, as she subsequently noted, endear her to the spouses of Politburo members when she got home.

I have tried in the paragraphs above to set a small part of the record straight, but the myths and misinformation that Sergei Roy recycles have taken on a life of their own and I am hardly naïve enough to imagine that I have seen the last of them. Scholars, though, should try to set themselves higher standards.