The Sociology of New Thinking Elites, Identity Change, and the End of the Cold War

Home , Abel Aganbegyan, Andrei Gromyko, Andrei Kozyrev, Dinmukhamed Kunaev, Nikolai Ryzhkov, Nikolai Tikhonov

EnglishThe Sociology of New Thinking

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In this article I show that ideas inºuenced Soviet behavior during the ªnal years of the Cold War in a much broader, more complex, and more fundamental manner than is generally understood. It was more fundamental because the “new thinking” did not merely signal a reconsideration of policy efªcacy or recalculation of ends and means, but reºected instead a long-term and wholesale revision of beliefs, values, and identity. It was broader because these new ideas were adopted not just by a small group of foreign affairs experts but by a large section of the critical intelligentsia. It was more complex because the process by which ideas were born, developed, mobilized, and ultimately transformed into policy was prolonged and variegated—shaped by intellectual, social, and material forces—and consequently resists capture in any single theoretical framework. The implications of this analysis go considerably beyond the now familiar argument that “materialist” explanations of the end of the Cold War founder on the central causal role of ideas. Much more importantly, I demonstrate that most approaches to the study of ideas in international relations, including neoliberal models of ideas and policy change, cognitive learning theory, and even some formulations of constructivist social theory, fail to capture the full effect of ideas in this case. No doubt, the explanation set forth below has elements in common with various learning-based approaches to Soviet change. It is, in part, a constructivist argument about the constitutive power of major ideational-identity change. Nonetheless, it differs in key respects. It does not single out a particular cohort of new thinkers (e.g., arms control experts) or a single aspect of the new thinking (e.g., regarding the use of force in international relations) precisely because such narrow speciªcation necessarily misses a broader intellec-

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tual-social change. Similarly, it does not break a continuous, decades-long process into discrete cases for comparative examination; doing so may help focus on a single causal mechanism, but it again risks missing the forest for the trees. In tracing the story of new thinking from its origins through implementation, I must perforce consider a succession of dependent variables from the social to the political, from intellectual change to policy outcomes. This apparent sacriªce of analytical “rigor” for empirical “richness” ºows from a conscious methodological choice, an unabashedly inductive approach that offers a valuable corrective to the distorting effects of conceptual single-mindedness in studies of the end of the Cold War. I begin by recounting some early insights into the social-intellectual character of the new thinkers that led to this methodological choice. I then exam- ine the development and mobilization of the new thinking, with particular attention to the means by which not only a set of policy alternatives, but an alternative worldview or identity, captured a reform-minded leadership. In so doing I also suggest the more conservative paths that would likely have prevailed in the absence of such coherent new thinking (and such a committed cohort of its exponents). Finally, I discuss the nature of identity change more generally, highlighting broad similarities between the Soviet case and other such instances of social-intellectual-political change. I conclude that insisting on deductively driven, rigorous theory testing at the expense of inductively driven, creative theory building signiªcantly impairs our ability to understand such complex and important episodes of change.

The Origins of New Ideas: A Holistic Approach

When I embarked on research into the origins of new thinking, two things soon became clear. One was the impossibility of separating reform initiatives in domestic politics from those in foreign affairs. The two were obviously linked in policy terms. For example, economic reformers faced a centralized system geared toward military production, just as proponents of domestic intellectual and cultural change faced an entrenched ideology of global confrontation. Further, these links extended to the agents promoting change as well as to the structures resisting it. Many reformist economists and sociologists were also leading supporters of a conciliatory foreign policy. Prominent scientists emerged as arms control advocates, and historians and philosophers were among the foremost proponents of cultural and even economic integration with the liberal democratic West.

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Importantly, many of the new thinkers, despite their diverse occupations, also shared extensive personal, educational, and professional ties. Having studied in the same lecture halls and think tanks, and having experienced the exhilaration of de-Stalinization on the same editorial boards and consultant groups, they also fought parallel Brezhnev-era battles to save reformist gains and had helped each other endure a conservative backlash. Thus, as suggested even by cursory investigation into the background of those who emerged as the most inºuential supporters of perestroika and new thinking, the reformers’ evolution could be grasped only in broader social-intellectual terms. They could no more be understood in separate categories (philosophers and historians, economists and sociologists, foreign policy analysts and diplomats, etc.) than could the reforms they sought to advance. Thus, a second initial challenge was more conceptual. Could the views of Soviet physicists be understood through their attendance at disarmament conferences abroad, while overlooking their earlier efforts at home in the ªght to de-Stalinize and “globalize” the social sciences? Could the beliefs of foreign affairs experts be grasped via their role in détente-era exchanges while ignor- ing their patronage of Moscow’s avant-garde theater or reading of samizdat historical and cultural works? Could economists who sought global integration be viewed as students of the capitalist West without attention to their study of East European reforms, of the market experience of the Soviet 1920s, and of pioneering pre-revolutionary Russian economists? Could the motives and underlying identity of these and other diverse reformers be understood absent appreciation of their strong professional and personal ties, their shared hopes during the thaw of the 1950s and 1960s, and their common anguish over the crushing of the Prague Spring? In short, what my early examination of the roots of new thinking suggested was the need for an approach of greater depth as well as breadth. Important as it was to appreciate the new thinkers as a diverse intellectual elite, it was equally vital to trace their development back much further than was usually done. Recognition of this required no unique insight, only common sense. If one is truly interested in exploring the ideational factor in political change, and if one is able to identify the most inºuential proponents of new ideas, what could be more natural than studying what these individuals read, wrote, argued, and experienced? And not just on the eve of perestroika, when many were already quite senior, but ten, twenty, or thirty years earlier? For not only common sense but also a large body of research on learning and cognitive change agreed on at least one thing—namely the tenacity of beliefs and values imbibed early in one’s intellectual development.

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The Production of Ideas: Innovation in the Face of Adversity

In the history of new thinking, that tenacity concerned ªrst of all the persis- tence of old thinking. Recent research has shown that ideology had far greater inºuence on Soviet foreign policy than was generally understood. Certainly during the thaw the paranoid extremes of Josif Stalin’s “hostile capitalist encir- clement” ebbed considerably. During the Brezhnev years, the Krushchev-era conªdence that socialism would rapidly overtake capitalism was supplanted by a cynicism in which the preservation of Communist Party rule at home, the empire abroad, and the powerful interests vested therein was upper- most. But numerous sources also stress the enduring inºuence of the “hostile- isolationist” worldview—belief in a world split into irreconcilable camps, fear of capitalism’s innate hostility, and residual faith in socialism’s continued ex- pansion and ultimate triumph over the West.1 For leaders born in revolution and war, and raised in Stalinism’s battle with “external and internal enemies”—from the terrorized 1930s through the Cold War of the early 1950s—such beliefs were axiomatic. Of course, this cohort ruled the USSR until Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1985. But even for a younger generation of elites, who came of political age in the Khrushchev era and thus presumably were shaped by the relative calm and liberalization of the late 1950s and early 1960s, belief in hostile-isolationist precepts remained strong. This was so not only because the crises in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 seemingly conªrmed capitalism’s hostility. The old thinking was also reinforced by a highly ideologized system—an “ideocracy,” in one observer’s description—that systematically distorted information about the West, rewarded fealty to Leninist-Stalinist dogmas, and punished heresy in all areas of political, academic, and cultural life.2 Time and again, in venues from Cuba in 1962 to Afghanistan in 1979, the hostile- isolationist reºexes stymied opportunities to improve East-West relations and encouraged impulses that ultimately doomed them. But if Stalin’s successors could not break decisively with the old thinking, they could and did create the conditions that encouraged a radically new out-

1. For detailed analysis of a similar “revolutionary-imperial paradigm,” see Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 2. Georgii Shakhnazarov, Tsena Svobody: Reformatsiya Gorbacheva glazami ego pomoshchnika (Moscow: Rossika-Zevs, 1993), p. 10. See also Andrei Grachev, Kremlevskaya khronika (Moscow: EKSMO, 1994); and Odd Arne Westad, “Secrets of the Second World: The Russian Archives and the Reinter- pretation of Cold War History,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 21, No. 2 (April 1997), pp. 259–271.

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look among a particular subset of the post-Stalin generation—a young policy- academic elite. Most came of age in the emancipatory atmosphere of the thaw, which found many studying in Moscow or other urban centers where openness and diversity were greatest. They listened to unsanctioned poets and read unpublished manuscripts, discussed George Orwell and Antonio Gramsci, and debated issues from the Communist Party’s past complicity in the terror to its current policies toward Hungary and Yugoslavia. When new foreign affairs institutes were established, exchanges with the West begun, and opportunities for working abroad (or in Moscow’s corridors of power) created—all with unprecedented access to ideas and information—they were prominent among the beneªciaries.3 The “secret speech” delivered by Nikita Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, usually seen as the signal event in thaw-era domestic change, was similarly consequential for Soviet international relations. This was so because in exposing the lies that had justiªed Stalin’s terror—that a multi- tude had joined plots engineered by foreign enemies and their domestic hire- lings—it simultaneously challenged the Stalinist precepts of a divided world and hostile West. (If the condemned were really innocent, then had such plots ever existed?) Now writers, historians, and philosophers began a serious debate about Russia’s place in world civilization. Similarly, although “peaceful coexistence” preserved much of the old Leninist-Stalinist outlook (save the inevitability of an apocalyptic clash with capitalism), it also began a modest but extremely important cultural-academic opening to the outside world. Together with international ªlm and youth festivals, foreign literature and broadcasts, conferences, and other scholarly exchanges abroad came the establishment (or revival) of research institutes devoted to the study of foreign affairs. The Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO) and the Institute for the USA and Canada (ISKAN) were the best known. Others that would become key loci of reformist thought range from the Institute of Concrete Social Research and the Central Economic- Mathematical Institute (TsEMI) to various regional centers in Tbilisi, Tartu, and Novosibirsk. Researchers at these institutes pored over newly available foreign publications and once-secret domestic political, economic, and socio- logical data. Even greater access was to be had in a few non-academic centers such as the Prague-based editorial board of the new journal Problems of Peace and Socialism and the new “consultant groups” that brought in young specialists to advise the CPSU Central Committee on foreign policy.4

3. This is the focus of chs. 2 and 3 in Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, In- tellectuals and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), chs. 2–3. 4. Sources on this matter include Fedor Burlatskii, Vozhdi i sovetniki: O Khrushcheve, Andropove, i ne tol’ko o nikh (Moscow: Politizdat, 1990); Anatolii Chernyaev, Moya zhizn’ i moe vremya (Moscow:

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Veterans of this thaw-era experience—from sociologists and physicists to the mezhdunarokniki, or foreign policy experts—dominated the ranks of perestroika-era reformers. Even though their public positions remained highly circumscribed in the mid- to late 1960s, their private debates and analyses broached increasingly liberal, anti-isolationist views on everything from eco- nomics and the arms race to the environment. By this time many had already come to an essentially social-democratic outlook that sought their country’s integration with the liberal international community. Critically, what the early new thinkers also shared—despite their divergent paths in the humani- ties or social sciences, from academia to the party apparat—was a social identity as members of a reformist, “Westernizing” domestic community.5 The ties binding this community, forged in shared thaw-era experience, were demonstrated when liberals rallied in defense of reform—and of one another—when reaction surged in the late 1960s. Historians and philosophers, ousted from university posts for faulting ofªcial dogmas, found refuge at academic institutes with the help of former classmates. Critics of cultural chauvinism were shielded by their apparatchik allies from the harshest punitive blows. Interna- tional affairs analysts, scientists, and even some military ofªcers defended those who were under siege for questioning Stalin’s foreign or economic policies. This diverse community openly united in protest against attempts to re- habilitate Stalin himself. The aftermath of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia has usually been viewed as a retreat or, at best, a hiatus in the rise of new thinking. In fact, it is better seen as a time of consolidation and advance. The hardline turn abroad and at home, while pushing many into silence or cynicism, was a turning point for others. For the Prague Spring had encouraged and united reformist intellectuals more than anything else since Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in 1956. Its defeat now prompted a more radical rethinking of the USSR’s problems and potential solutions. It was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before the brief ºowering of détente, that some of the most important new ideas emerged: on security and relations with the United States; on policy toward Europe and Asia; on the economy, technology, and the environment; and on cultural freedom and concern over rising Russian nationalism. Détente was clearly a powerful boost to such innovation, but many of the conceptual breakthroughs usually traced to this period were in fact nearly a

Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 1995); and Georgii Arbatov, Zatyanuvsheesya vyzdorovlenie, 1953– 1985 gg.: Svidetel’stvo sovremennika (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 1991). The last of these three books is published in revised English translation as The System: An Insider’s Life in Soviet Politics (New York: Times Books, 1992). 5. They were “a social group...ofgreatintellectual and practical strength...unorganized but numerous and fairly united in spirit.” Aleksandr Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism in Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 111.

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decade old. Although reform ideas continued to develop, what stands out even more from the mid- to late 1970s were new initiatives to put them into practice. On the economy, for example, the pioneering work of ªgures such as Abel Aganbegyan and Tat’yana Zaslavskaya of the Novosibirsk Institute is well known. Less visible were the efforts of Stanislav Shatalin and others at TsEMI, which by the 1970s was a “breeding ground of marketeers and anti- Marxists.”6 Still more radical proposals came from an even less prominent economist, Nikolai Shmelev. In several semi-classiªed studies Shmelev argued for marketizing the Soviet economy by opening it to the West. Foreign trade, he wrote, should not be a central monopoly; it should be the right of each self-managing, self-ªnancing enterprise. He called for the promotion of foreign investment, joint ventures, and currency convertibility, followed by membership in the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Shmelev also warned about the squandering of the opportunities afforded by détente; instead of opening the economy to spur competition, innovation, and exports, the USSR was simply selling oil to import grain. The result, he wrote, was a growing trade deªcit and dangerous dependency on oil earnings, which were “not likely to last beyond the 1980s.”7 Space does not permit similar detail on every new thinker, but a few illustrations are enough to show that their writings posed challenges to orthodoxy in nearly every area of foreign policy. For example, IMEMO and ISKAN analysts criticized the class-based approach to Third World countries, faulted the development strategies foisted on those countries by the USSR, and contrasted Soviet military-industrial priorities in the Third World with U.S. support of multilateral aid, private investment, and a general emphasis on “basic human needs.”8 In a proposal to limit the international weapons trade, a junior analyst at the Foreign Ministry, Andrei Kozyrev, openly admitted that the Soviet Union was the Third World’s leading arms supplier.9

6. Stanislav Shatalin, “‘500 dnei’ i drugie dni moei zhizni,” Nezavisimaya gazeta (Moscow), 31 March 1992, p. 3. 7. Nikolai P. Shmelev, Problemy i perspektivy ekonomicheskikh svyazei Sovetskogo soyuza so stranami zapada (Moscow: IEMSS, 1975). See also Nikolai Shmelev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi vostok-zapad: Problemy i vozmozhnosti (Moscow: Mysl’, 1976); and Nikolai Shmelev and V. P.Karavaev, Osobennosti podkhoda evropeiskikh stran SEV k problemam ekonomicheskikh otnoshenii s zapadom (Moscow: IEMSS, 1975). 8. A. Nikiforov, Sovremennyi podkhod SShA k problemam razvitiya osvobozhdivshikhsya gosudarstv (Moscow: IMEMO, 1980). See also V. L. Sheinis, Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskaya differentsiatsiya razvivayushikhsya stran: Tendentsii i perspektivy (Moscow: Nauka, 1981); and E. A. Bragina, Mel’koe promyshlennoe proizvodstvo v strategii osvobozhdivshikhsya stran (Moscow: Mysl’, 1982). 9. A. V. Kozyrev, “Limitation of the Arms Trade,” in V. S. Shaposhnikov, ed., Problems of Common Security (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1984), pp. 140–156.

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In 1976, focusing on Asia, ISKAN analyst Vladimir Lukin broke with the ofªcial denunciatory line on Sino-American rapprochement by noting its “objective foundation” in Soviet behavior. The United States, he argued, had drastically reduced its Asian military presence, and China threatened no one, but Soviet deployments in the region continued to grow.10 A similar rethinking of the Soviet threat was seen in works on U.S.-Soviet relations, such as a review of American strategic forces that emphasized their role not as ªrst- strike weapons but as a response to the huge Soviet missile force.11 Analysts of Western Europe admired the progress of integration while dismissing the ofªcially trumpeted threat of German “revanchism.”12 Some also praised East- ern Europe’s trade ties to the West and speculated that these could help draw the Soviet Union into closer relations with Western Europe.13 As détente waned, they faulted the Soviet Union’s hard line in Eastern Europe and warned that “ruthless centralization” was leading to “economic and social deg- radation and crisis.”14 The latter document was not just another academic study but a policy memorandum to the top leadership. Nor was it the only such initiative. Right after the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, Oleg Bogomolov, the director of the Institute of the Economy of the World Socialist System (IEMSS), sent a memorandum to the CPSU Central Committee blaming Soviet aggression around the globe for détente’s demise. With Afghanistan, he said, Soviet policy “went beyond permissible bounds,” and the USSR was now internationally isolated, with dissent and crisis even looming in the socialist camp.15 In mid-1980, analyzing the Solidarity crisis, the IEMSS blamed Soviet- sponsored policies for Poland’s woes, including “bribe-taking and corruption,” a “swollen party-state apparatus,” and the “hypertrophy of the role of the First Secretary and his entourage.”16

10. V. P. Lukin, Evolyutsiya politiki SShA v otnoshenii KNR na rubezhe 70kh godov (Moscow: ISKAN, 1973). 11. A. G. Arbatov, Novye programmy strategicheskikh vooruzhennykh sil SShA (Moscow: IMEMO, 1977). 12. B. S. Orlov, Sotsial’no-politicheskie korni zapadnogermanskogo neofashizma (Moscow: Politizdat, 1970); and B. S. Orlov, Osnovnye cherty zapadnoevropeiskoi politicheskoi integratsii na sovremennom etape (Moscow: IMEMO 1976). 13. V. I. Dashichev, ed., Problemy vneshnei politiki sotsialisticheskikh stran (Moscow: IEMSS, 1980). 14. From a memorandum of the Institute of the Economy of the World Socialist System (IEMSS) of April 1979, cited in L. G. Belyaeva et al., eds., Istoriya i stalinizm (Moscow: Politizdat, 1991), pp. 237–240. 15. “Nekotorye soobrazheniya o vneshnepoliticheskikh itogakh 70-kh godov,” 20 January 1980, reproduced in “Afganistan: Vzglyad iz 1980-go goda,” Moskovskie novosti (Moscow), No. 30 (23 July 1989), pp. 8–9. 16. Nikolai I. Bukharin et al., O prichinakh i sushchnosti krizisa 1980 g. v PNR (Moscow: IEMSS, June 1981).

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At the beginning of the 1980s, the ills of the “stagnation era” were rapidly mounting as a leadership transition loomed in Moscow. Powerful hardliners lashed out against the advocates of reform, particularly as the Cold War began heating up with the challenge of a newly assertive West. Outspoken liberals were reprimanded by (or expelled from) the CPSU, publicly denounced, and dismissed from their posts. In other cases, the offender retained his or her job but was barred from publishing, banned from foreign travel, and otherwise blocked from pursuit of serious analytical work. Party reactionaries set up various “investigatory commissions” that launched attacks against entire research centers. Those best known for a reformist-Westernizing orientation—including Georgii Arbatov’s ISKAN, Nikolai Inozemtsev’s IMEMO, and Abel Aganbegyan’s Novosibirsk Institute of Economic and Industrial Organization—were singled out for “misleading the country’s leadership,” for “harboring Zionist elements,” and for alleged security breaches.17

The Transmission and Reception of Ideas: New Leadership for New Thinking

The new thinkers’ prospects appeared truly bleak by the early 1980s, and their only hope lay in the rise of a small group of change-minded ofªcials within the CPSU, a group whose emergent leader was Gorbachev. He had met many of the reformers in the late 1970s, and over the next few years he forged close ties with some of the most prominent ones: economists Aganbegyan and Vladimir Tikhonov, sociologist Tat’yana Zaslavskaya, physicist Evgenii Velikhov, and foreign affairs analysts Inozemtsev and Arbatov. Inºuential in their own right, these individuals in another sense were the “ambassadors” to Gorbachev representing a larger liberal policy-academic elite. By the early 1980s Gorbachev was also consulting, directly or indirectly, with such experts as the foreign policy specialist Evgenii Primakov, the scientist and arms control advocate Roald Sagdeev, and—most inºuential of all— the apparatchik-scholar-diplomat Aleksandr Yakovlev.18

17. For further evidence on the personal and professional perils of early new-thinking advocacy, see English, Russia and the Idea of the West, chs. 3–4. 18. Examples of these ties abound in Arbatov, Zatyanuvsheesya vyzdorovlenie; Burlatskii, Vozhdi i sovetniki; and Grachev, Kremlevskaya khronika. Additional sources of insight include Evgenii Primakov, Gody v bol’shoi politike (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 1999); Roald Z. Sagdeev, The Making of a Soviet Scientist: My Adventures in Nuclear Fusion and Space from Stalin to Star Wars (New York: Wiley, 1994); Aleksandr Yakovlev, Gor’kaya chasha: Bol’shevizm i reformatsiya Rossii (Yaroslavl’, Russia: Verkhne-Volzhskoe, 1994); and Egor Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed (Moscow: Vagrius, 1996). There is a large memoir literature, to which many shorter articles and interviews must be added as well. Important examples are found in sources as varied as Andrei Karaulov, Vokrug Kremlya:

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In a number of ofªcial “seminars,” in many more informal meetings, and through numerous memoranda and reports, Gorbachev studied their advice. Such a practice—particularly as it involved ties to some individuals who only recently had been denounced by CPSA ideologues for their “heresy”—was unprecedented for a member of the top leadership, and it would later compli- cate his rise to the post of general secretary. Why did Gorbachev do it? Even a largely instrumental interpretation—that a looming crisis forced leaders to consider new alternatives, thus creating opportunities for ambitious “policy entrepreneurs”—necessarily draws attention to the speciªc origins of reformist ideas.19 For without much prior development, the purveyors of these ideas simply would not have been available when the need arose. Nor, it appears, did any other Politburo members see any use in consulting these “entrepreneurs.” Close examination of how such entrepreneurship actually tran- spired highlights the normative, not merely instrumental, role of ideas. Above all, analysis of reformist ideas’ difªcult but ultimately successful swim against a tide of reaction in the early 1980s (which hardly made their advocacy a rational, self-interested choice at the time) directs attention back to the beliefs and values of the man who would become their chief sponsor. Gorbachev, despite the still-prevalent image of him as a fairly typical (if particularly cunning and ambitious) party functionary, was anything but. There is no denying that his intelligence and ambition were unusual, but from the outset of his career he also showed a strong innovative and idealistic bent. He also stood apart from other high party ofªcials by virtue of his broad exposure—through a relatively diverse legal-humanitarian education, through considerable Western travel, and through extensive private study—to unorthodox, social-democratic ideas about international relations.20 Gorbachev’s worldview in the early 1980s resists simple classiªcation, particularly because it was undergoing rapid change. From the accounts of close observers, several aspects of his international outlook appear most notable: a strong desire to end the nuclear arms race and East-West confrontation; a belief in the possibility of socialism’s liberal-humanistic revival and its prospects for broad cooperation with capitalism (particularly social-democratic Europe); and scorn for the West’s exploitation of the Third World (together with the same for Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe). There is no doubt that

Kniga politicheskikh dialogov, Vols. 1 and 2 (Moscow: Novosti, 1990, 1992); and William C. Wohlforth, ed., Witnesses to the End of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 19. For this approach, see Jeffrey T. Checkel, Ideas and International Political Change: Soviet/Russian Behavior and the End of the Cold War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 20. English, Russia and the Idea of the West, pp. 180–196. See also Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

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one of his top priorities was to halt the sapping U.S.-Soviet military rivalry. But it is also evident that his concern about global, humanitarian problems was genuine and deep. Despite certain contradictions and dogmas, it is quite clear that by early 1985 his ambitions for foreign policy change went far beyond the various hints—principally, that of “a common European home”— that he had so far publicly voiced.21 By this time, the Soviet Union had stumbled through the brief reigns of Brezhnev’s immediate successors. Yurii Andropov, who took ofªce after Brezhnev’s death in November 1982, brieºy shook up the country before suc- cumbing to terminal illness himself in February 1984. During his approxi- mately nine months of active command, Andropov decried corruption, waste, and inefªciency while initiating a series of “experiments” in economic decen- tralization. He also stumbled into a series of foreign policy crises—the downing of a Korean Airlines passenger jet, the breakdown of talks on inter- mediate-range nuclear forces (INF) in Europe, and a growing confrontation over space-based weapons—that were only partly of his own making. Perhaps Andropov’s most important step was the promotion of a group of ofªcials in the senior leadership—Gorbachev, Egor Ligachev, Nikolai Ryzhkov, and several others—whose relative youth, energy, and freedom from the taint of corruption distinguished them from the majority of Brezhnev-era functionaries. But Andropov’s untimely death interrupted any long-range plans he may have had, and under his successor, the emphysemic Brezhnev crony Konstantin Chernenko, the country fell back into the rut of the Brezh- nev era. Meanwhile, hardliners took advantage of this leadership vacuum to advance their agenda, including plans for a sharp increase in military spending and the ouster of outspoken reformist academics and policy advisers. Still, Andropov’s personnel legacy continued in the preparation of his protégés for yet another near-term leadership transition. Ligachev oversaw turnover in the Central Committee, and Ryzhkov helped manage the analysis of proposals for economic change. Gorbachev became the Politburo’s “second secretary” and unofªcial heir- apparent, though his rise was strongly resisted by some hardliners, particularly Prime Minister Nikolai Tikhonov and the CPSU secretary overseeing the military-industrial complex, Grigorii Romanov. Negative, too, though less actively so, was the attitude of such Brezhnev-era Politburo members as the republican party bosses Vladimir Shcherbitskii and Dinmukhamed Kunaev. As one longtime apparat ofªcial

21. A prescient early analysis of Gorbachev’s evolving worldview is Janice Gross Stein, “Political Learning by Doing: Gorbachev as Uncommitted Thinker and Motivated Learner,” International Or- ganization, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Spring 1994), pp. 155–183.

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observed, Gorbachev was generally “feared and distrusted by the old guard,” who regarded him as “a mysterious, alien, even hostile ªgure.”22 The stance of Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Defense Minister Dmitrii Ustinov toward Gorbachev was more ambiguous. Gromyko was no new thinker, but was distressed by rampant corruption and was instrumental in Gorbachev’s “temporary” appointment as second secretary after Chernenko’s accession—a move that greatly strengthened Gorbachev’s hand when Chernenko died just over a year later.23 It was Gromyko who formally nominated Gorbachev for the post of general secretary in March 1985.24 Ustinov’s attitude was, by some accounts, considerably more skeptical but ultimately less important as a result of his own death in December 1984 (a few months before Chernenko’s demise, meaning that Ustinov played no part in the last-minute maneuvering that ªnally settled on Gorbachev).25 The CPSU Politburo “unanimously” recommended that the Central Committee elect Gorbachev as general secretary in March 1985, but, as even the brief summary above is sufªcient to show, this was unanimity only in the most formal, procedural sense. (For decades, almost every decision taken by the Politburo was ofªcially described as unanimous. As various insider accounts reveal, Gorbachev’s triumph was more of a touch-and-go affair with only a slight Politburo majority (thanks also to the timely absence of Shcherbitskii and Kunaev) grudgingly in favor of taking a chance on the young leader for lack of a better alternative.26 Why was there such ambiva- lence? Why the hesitation to elect the candidate who was far and away the most intelligent and energetic among them, and who in any case had been “anointed” by Andropov for the post more than a year earlier? Several factors complicated Gorbachev’s rise, including an international atmosphere of heightened confrontation that strengthened the hardliners and made Politburo members loath to gamble on their youngest and least- experienced colleague. There was also the fear—raised by various of his state- ments as well as his association with liberal analysts and academics—that Gorbachev might move too far too fast. Such concerns were well-founded, and many of Gorbachev’s erstwhile colleagues would later bitterly complain

22. Valerii Boldin, Ten Years That Shook the World: The Gorbachev Era as Witnessed by His Chief of Staff (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p. 53. 23. On Gromyko’s motives see A. S. Chernyaev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym: Po dnevnikovym zapisyam (Moscow: Progress-Kul’tura, 1993), pp. 30–31. 24. Vadim Pechenev, Gorbachev: K vershinam vlasti: Iz teoretiko-memuarnykh razmyshlenii (Moscow: Gospodin narod, 1991), pp. 109–110. 25. Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, pp. 69–71. 26. Other sources here include Nikolai Ryzhkov, Perestroika: Istoriya predatel’stv (Moscow: Novosti, 1992); and Egor Ligachev, Inside Gorbachev’s Kremlin: The Memoirs of Yegor Ligachev (New York: Pan- theon, 1993).

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of a “betrayal.” In the words of one of the Politburo’s centrist “swing” voters in 1985: “Nobody thought that he’d be a reformer....Hedidn’t turn out to be the man we’d voted for.”27 So who was the man they had voted for, and what sort of policies had they expected? Although much remains unclear, the alternatives under consideration (as discussed below) seem to have ranged from minimal to modest reforms at home and from essentially status quo to a harder line abroad.28 It appears that resumption of an Andropov-style course ultimately won out. That is what the Politburo elected Gorbachev to enact, and what he gave them good reason to expect.29 But his private ambitions already went considerably further, and the radical changes that ensued—nowhere among the options considered by the Politburo in early 1985, yet ones that began soon after Gorbachev’s assumption of power—had as much to do with the catalyst of ideas as with a crisis of power.

The Adoption of Ideas: Gorbachev’s Conversion

Signs of dramatic change appeared at once. At the receptions for foreign dig- nitaries that accompanied Chernenko’s funeral—in other words, only days after taking ofªce—Gorbachev warmly greeted some West European social democratic leaders (and also the head of the Italian Communist Party, which had long been condemned in Moscow as a “renegade” organization for its criticism of Soviet foreign policy and pioneering of the Eurocommunist heresy) and snubbed most of the East European party bosses. When he met privately with the East European leaders, he warned them that they must under- take long-overdue reforms and henceforth they would sink or swim on their own.30 Shortly thereafter he ordered the beginning of preparations for a withdrawal from Afghanistan.31 Less than a month later, at the now-famous “April Plenum” of the Central Committee, Gorbachev decried economic in-

27. See the interview with Geidar Aliev in Karaulov, Vokrug kremlya, Vol. 1, p. 268. 28. General Makhmut Gareev recalls the proposal advanced by Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, chief of the Soviet General Staff in the early 1980s, to trim the most wasteful political and military expenditures while concentrating resources on the most promising weapons systems and technologies. “If the arms race had been conducted in a more sensible manner, we could have sustained it and still maintained strategic parity....Butourleadership was feeble; it was not prepared to make tough, willful decisions, to act decisively like Stalin.” Cited in Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich, eds., The Destruc- tion of the Soviet Economic System: An Insiders’ History (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 61–63. 29. Ryzhkov, Istoriya predatel’stv, p. 79; and Pechenev, Gorbachev, pp. 90, 92. 30. An aide recalls that Gorbachev said “We’re all equals now. The Brezhnev Doctrine is dead.” Anatolii Chernyaev, seminar, Princeton University, 24 February 1993. Other sources dispute this rec- ollection. 31. Chernyaev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym, p. 41.

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efªciency, waste, and corruption in terms considerably bolder than anything heard under Andropov. In the summer of 1985 Gorbachev met with the highest-ranking military commanders and warned them to prepare for cuts in their once-sacred bud- gets. He also reiterated his call, ªrst voiced at the April plenum, for a new defense doctrine based on criteria of “sufªciency.”32 In public, on the anniversary of the U.S. nuclear bombing of Japan in World War II, he announced a unilateral moratorium on the testing of nuclear weapons. Because these initiatives had bypassed traditional ministry and Central Committee channels, distressed conservatives wondered: “Just how is he deciding defense issues?”33 The answer is that Gorbachev was relying on the same informal advisers, the same “brain trust,” that he had assembled in the early 1980s. These reformers were further strengthened with Yakovlev’s appointment as the CPSU secretary responsible for ideology and propaganda. From this post, Yakovlev promoted the spread of glasnost in all areas, including foreign policy. Also crucial was the appointment of Eduard Shevardnadze in July 1985 to replace Gromyko as foreign minister. Had Gorbachev merely sought to “put his personal stamp” on foreign policy, as many believed at the time, then any of several deputy ministers could have been promoted. Instead, by selecting the Georgian party boss (and the most innovative of republican leaders), Gorbachev not only chose a long-time conªdant of proven reformist creden- tials, he also chose a man whose apparent weakness—a lack of international experience—was actually a strength for a leader seeking to encourage new ideas and break the grip of a hidebound, “Gromykoite” foreign policy apparat.34 Gorbachev’s next major step was his November 1985 meeting with U.S. President Ronald Reagan in Geneva, the ªrst such summit in six years and a move strongly opposed by Soviet hardliners. When the meeting failed to

32. Dale R. Herspring, “The Military Factor in East German Soviet Policy,” Slavic Review, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Spring 1988), pp. 89–107; and Raymond L. Garthoff, The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994), p. 214. On Gorbachev and his generals, see also William Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 33. S. F. Akhromeev and G. K. Kornienko, Glazami marshala i diplomata: Kriticheskii vzglyad na vneshnyuyu politiku SSSR do i posle 1985 goda (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye othosheniya, 1992), pp. 65–66, 91. 34. The two had established close ties during Gorbachev’s tenure as party boss of the Stavropol’ krai (region) near Shevardnadze’s Georgian republic. This cooperation ranged from various local economic innovations to discussion of the folly of Afghanistan. The Afghan conºict weighed rather more heavily on them than it did on most other republican ofªcials because the Caucasus served as a transit point for equipment and troops to—and dead and wounded from—Afghanistan. See Eduard Shevardnadze, Moi vybor: V zashchitu demokratii i svobody (Moscow: Novosti, 1991); and Carolyn McGiffert Ekendahl and Melvin A. Goodman, The Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1997).

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produce any real progress, Gorbachev unveiled a sweeping arms reduction proposal in January 1986. Although the proposal was too ambitious to be immediately and practically negotiable, it offered various concessions (deep cuts in strategic weapons, including the heretofore sacrosanct Soviet heavy missile force, as well as reductions in shorter-range weapons) that pointed the way toward precisely the sort of agreements that were later reached.35 Gorbachev’s primary objective during his ªrst year in ofªce was to rein- vigorate the Soviet economy. As Shevardnadze later recalled, he and Gorbachev were acutely aware that reform at home required tranquility abroad, particularly a halt to the arms race that was such an economic burden. But if that had been the only, or even the primary, factor in the evolution of Gorbachev’s foreign policy, then a breakthrough toward new thinking would have been highly unlikely. Hardliners in both the Soviet Union and the United States now dug in their heels, and even though Gorbachev’s steps to date had produced no major policy changes, some high-ranking Soviet ofªcials went so far as to raise doubts, in public, about his efforts. Despite this resistance, a major breakthrough was in the making, one that was propelled less by an economic “push” than by an intellectual “pull.” The most critical year in the evolution of Gorbachev’s foreign policy was 1986. Although policy changes at that point were still modest, this was the year that saw the most important cognitive-conceptual change among Gorbachev and his closest allies—a change that made possible the progress that came so quickly thereafter. This intellectual turn, which had been in the making since the early 1980s, accelerated when preparations got under way for the CPSU’s 27th Congress, scheduled for February–March 1986. Such congresses, held every ªve years since the early 1960s, were the gatherings at which major policy changes were endorsed by the party’s most authoritative conclave (as with Khrushchev’s campaign of de-Stalinization, begun at the 20th Party Congress in 1956). The 27th Congress thus represented a critical opportunity for Gorbachev in the launch of perestroika, particularly because the delegates were supposed to adopt a new party program to replace the outdated, utopian one inherited from the early 1960s. Equally important was the general secretary’s report, a document that in the Brezhnev era had been prepared by the party apparat and served mainly to ratify the status quo. This time the usual apparat-managed committees and conservative- dominated drafting groups were enlivened by an infustion of new blood and fresh ideas. Even more important were the private gatherings of Gorbachev and his inner circle—principally Shevardnadze, Yakovlev, Primakov, and

35. For several participants’ accounts, including the military’s attempts to co-opt the initiative, see “Peregovorshchik—razoruzhenets,” Nezavisimaya gazeta (Moscow), 19 February 1997, pp. 2–3.

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Raisa Gorbacheva, as well as occasional others such as Anatolii Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s newly appointed aide for international affairs. At these sessions, Gorbachev and his closest advisers grappled with the fundamental “philoso- phy of foreign policy.”36 Shevardnadze recalled the “incredible difªculty” with which they embraced the view of an integrated world instead of one divided by social systems. In almost daily sessions he “observed Gorbachev’s ideas heading into dangerous, uncharted waters.”37 Though alien to Leninist thinking, these waters had in fact been well mapped already. As Yakovlev noted, Gorbachev and his advisers were guided by “the leading minds of the century—Einstein, Kapitsa, Russell, and Sakharov”—in “discarding the besieged-fortress [Stalinist] psychology.”38 Gorbachev, too, recalled the days he spent with Yakovlev and Shevardnadze arguing over the rejection of Lenin’s basic precept of a class- divided world: We were at Zavidovo [a government dacha] working on the report, and we really quarreled. For a day and a half we even stopped speaking to each other. What was the argument about? About . . . the fact that we live in an interdependent, contradictory, but ultimately integral world. No, the new thinking wasn’t just some policy shift, it required a major conceptual breakthrough.39 This breakthrough was reºected in the 27th Congress documents. The worst contradictions of the Khrushchev-era program—that peaceful coexistence is a form of class struggle and that nuclear war, though not inevitable, would nevertheless end with the triumph of socialism—were absent from the new program. Gorbachev’s own report to the congress was an even bolder document. He placed even greater emphasis on global problems, interdepen- dence, and an integral world, on political means of ensuring security, and on “reasonable sufªciency” in defense.40 These changes, however, did not come easily. Gorbachev’s report generated ªerce opposition, and the ªnal version retained criticism of “American aggression” and “imperialism.” Elsewhere, a reference to Afghanistan as “a bleeding wound” was deleted by the conservatives in draft and was restored only at the last moment at the insistence of Gorbachev and Shevardnadze.41

36. Shevardnadze, Moi vybor, p. 96. 37. Ibid., pp. 94, 96. 38. Aleksandr Yakovlev, Muki prochteniya bytiya: Perestroika—Nadezhdy i real’nosti (Moscow: Novosti, 1991), pp. 181, 188. 39. “Razgovor s Prezidentom SSSR za chashkoi chaya,” Izvestiya (Moscow), 20 September 1991, p. 1. 40. Mikhail Gorbachev, Political Report of the CPSU Central Committee to the 27th Party Congress (Moscow: Novosti, 1986). 41. Shevardnadze, Moi vybor, pp. 93–94; and Chernyaev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym, p. 60. See also A. G. Kovalev, “Politik poroi obyazan skhodit’ s tribuny pod skrip svoikh botinok,” Novaya gazeta (Mos- cow), 22 April 1996, p. 3.

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The congress preparations had set in motion a process of searching reºection that would continue in its aftermath. Beyond the familiar channels of policy input—now much invigorated, with younger, new-thinking analysts such as Andrei Grachev and Andrei Kozyrev promoted in the Central Com- mittee apparatus and Foreign Ministry—Gorbachev and his allies tapped many other sources of ideas. These included studies produced by the most reform-minded and Western-oriented academic institutes, as well as the works of such original thinkers as the philosopher Aleksandr Tsipko, the economist Stanislav Shatalin, and the foreign affairs analyst Vyacheslav Dashichev.42 Gorbachev’s “insatiable search” for new ideas also led him to private study that ranged from Western political science to the memoirs of Western leaders such as Winston Churchill, works long available to the Soviet elite in classiªed Russian translations.43 On broader philosophical issues, Raisa intro- duced her husband to the integrationist, social democratic–leaning ideas of “semi-dissident” Moscow scholars. On speciªc arms control matters, Arbatov offered the works of the Palme Commission on disarmament and other Euro- pean writings on new approaches to global security.44 Along with Gorbachev’s study came an intensive series of meetings with foreign statesmen, activists, and intellectuals, a process that Chernyaev recalled as “the way he [Gorbachev] came to know the other world.”45 His interlocutors included French President François Mitterrand and former U.S. President Richard Nixon, both of whom encouraged his early new thinking and argued that further steps would be met by a positive Western response. Gorbachev also conferred with writers and cultural ªgures, who fanned his interest in global, humanistic concerns, and with representatives of Western arms control organizations such as the Federation of American Scientists, In- ternational Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and the Natural Re- sources Defense Council. These groups applauded Gorbachev’s early steps but also encouraged bolder ones, such as easing the USSR’s traditional aversion to on-site veriªcation of arms agreements and dropping his demand that the United States halt the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) as a prerequisite for

42. Boldin, Ten Years, p. 73. See also Aleksandr Tsipko, “Gorbachev postavil na ‘sotsialisticheskii vybor’ i proigral,” Nezavisimaya gazeta (Moscow), 17 October 1996, p. 4. 43. See Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdenèk Mlynár, Dialog o perestroike, “Prazhske vesne” i o sotsializme, n.d., pp. 159–164. Such insiders as Chernyaev, Anatolii Dobrynin, and Aleksandr Bessmertnykh have commented on Gorbachev’s “insatiable appetite” for reading about topics ranging from the USSR’s New Economic Policy in the 1920s to European social-democratic ideas for arms control in the early to mid-1980s. 44. Arbatov, The System, p. 324. See also Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), p. 190; Grachev, Kremlevskaya khronika, p. 137; and Pechenev, Gorbachev, p. 27. 45. Chernyaev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym, p. 75. See also Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), pp. 139, 144.

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moving ahead on other nuclear issues. The Western groups also urged him to end the exile of Andrei Sakharov, the renowned physicist and dissident who embodied two liberalizing currents simultaneously—that of conciliation and cooperation abroad, and that of human rights and democratization at home. Similar advice came from Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González, who was perhaps the single most inºuential of Gorbachev’s foreign interlocutors. The two men immediately established a bond of intimacy and trust. Gorbachev paid special heed to the Spanish prime minister not only because he was a “comrade in the socialist movement” but also because Spain under González’s leadership was completing a successful transition away from decades of dictatorship. In talks with Gorbachev, González stressed the importance of genuine democracy and the necessity of a free market (and foreign investment) in order to achieve socialist goals. The Spanish leader also harshly criticized Lenin for sins that included a lack of humanism, suppression of le- gality, and responsibility for the world’s division into antagonistic camps.46 Viewing all this activity in the months after the party congress, conservatives were aghast. It was the beginning of what they would later describe as the “hijacking” of perestroika from its intended Andropovian course. They alleged that Gorbachev, far from emulating Andropov, had entered into a “conspiracy of academicians” and fallen under the incompetent and malevo- lent inºuence of several “highly politicized research organizations of a pro- Western character.”47 There is more than a little truth to the conservatives’ characterization, and their alarm increased rapidly after the spring of 1986. It was during that time, according to Chernyaev, that Gorbachev resolutely “set himself the task” of achieving a decisive breakthrough in foreign policy. This new sense of urgency ºowed directly from another conceptual breakthrough, one triggered by what was probably the single most traumatic event of perestroika.

Catalyst for Implementation: Chornobyl and the Triumph of New Thinking

The event that changed things was the Chornobyl tragedy, the deadly reactor explosion and ªre that ultimately cost dozens of lives and billions of rubles. Many view the impact of the disaster mainly in the latter terms, as yet another economic drain; but even a brief examination reveals that its cogni-

46. Mikhail Gorbachev, “Doveritel’nyi razgovor,” in Mikhail Gorbachev, Gody trudnykh reshenii: Izbrannoe 1985–1992 (Moscow: Fond-Gorbachev, 1993), pp. 235–247. 47. Valerii Legostaev, “God 1987-ii—Peremena logiki,” Den’, No. 14 (1991), p. 2.

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tive impact was still greater. For three months the Politburo was consumed by Chornobyl. A crisis committee, constant meetings and reports, and a sum- moning of all available civilian and military resources put the government almost on a wartime footing. Witnesses recall mobilization of a frantic pace and grave intensity “seen only in the years of the Great Patriotic War.”48 The disaster boosted calls for domestic reforms by dramatically exposing the corruption of the Stalinist system, the failures of central planning with its sloppiness and disregard for human safety. It also, according to Chernyaev, boosted the new thinking: “It was a tremendous shock...that raised our view of security to an entirely new plane of understanding.”49 Even the chief of the Soviet General Staff, Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, recalled that the tragedy touched “minds and souls...thenuclear danger was no longer abstract, but something palpa- ble and concrete.”50 Some have compared the impact of Chornobyl to that of World War II. But if the lesson from June 1941 was the need to build up forces and heighten vigilance, the lesson of Chornobyl was the opposite. Traditional military concepts such as surprise or superiority lost meaning when even a small nuclear accident could wreak such havoc. On a more basic level, appreciation of Eu- rope’s “oneness” was reinforced by the cloud of radiation blowing freely across the Iron Curtain. The concept of an integral, non-class-divided world— something already accepted in theory—took on concrete meaning in the out- pouring of Western aid and sympathy that also brieºy reached a level unseen since World War II. This support—an “unprecedented campaign of solidarity” despite the ill will and protests caused by Moscow’s initial secrecy (and some anti-Soviet parading in the West)—was a vote of conªdence in Gorbachev’s reforms, reinforcing the primacy of global concerns and the cause of openness and East-West cooperation. As Shevardnadze recalled: “It tore the blindfold from our eyes” and “convinced us that morality and politics could not diverge.”51 For Shevardnadze, Gorbachev, and others seeking to improve ties abroad, the shame of having initially misinformed the world about the disaster (as they themselves were misinformed by their own military-industrial complex) and thereby having aided a cover-up was a searing experience. It was, Shevardnadze said, “outright sabotage of the new thinking [and of] the trust we had worked so hard to build.”52 He and Gorbachev felt they had been

48. Akhromeev and Kornienko, Glazami marshala i diplomata, pp. 99, 105. For further detail see Ryzhkov, Perestroika, pp. 133–152. 49. Anatolii Chernyaev, interview, Moscow, 16 December 1993. 50. Akhromeev and Kornienko, Glazami marshala i diplomata, p. 99. 51. Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, Vol. 1, p. 302; and Shevardnadze, Moi vybor, p. 294.

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betrayed—but less by the West than by their own, Soviet, hardliners. The end result was the opposite of what the hardliners had hoped for. Evgenii Velikhov observed that Chornobyl pushed Gorbachev toward “a great, instinctive leap”53 to break the deadlock in Soviet-Western relations, something clearly evident in Gorbachev’s bold address to a Foreign Ministry conference in May 1986 (which did not appear in print until a year later and then only in summary form). Although the speech was critical of the United States, its main emphasis was on Soviet shortcomings. These Included the lack of progress on a withdrawal from Afghanistan, ideological opposition to the settlement of other Third World conºicts, “panicked” reporting on the progress of SDI and other threat inºation that supported unnecessary military expenditures, a paternal attitude toward Eastern Europe as if the USSR were “running a kindergarten for little children,” and an approach to China that still viewed relations “through the prism of the 1960s.”54 But the centerpiece of Gorbachev’s broadside was his insistence on a “radical restructuring” of the underlying approach to foreign policy. His new priorities included facilitating economic integration, expanding cultural ties, cooperating in the ªght against terrorism, and, above all, raising the proªle of “humanitarian issues”:

The very words “human rights” are put in quotation marks, and we speak of so- called human rights, as if our own revolution had nothing to do with human rights....Butwould there even have been a revolution if such rights had been observed in the old society? We must decisively reject this outdated approach to the problem. . . . [A]ll this is part of the process of building trust.55 Later that month, over ªerce military objections, Soviet delegates to the Stockholm conventional force talks received instructions to accept unprecedented on-site veriªcation measures, and by July 1986 a treaty was com- pleted. Gorbachev also decided to seek an “interim” summit, before the next scheduled U.S.-Soviet gathering (which would become the Reykjavik conclave of October 1986). As he prepared for this summit, his frustration with the still-timid proposals generated by the apparat increased. He turned for advice to Chernyaev, who assessed the latest such proposal harshly:

It proceeds from the old view: “If there is war, the two sides must have equal abilities to destroy each other.” What we ªnd here is the arithmetic, not the alge-

52. Shevardnadze, Moi vybor, p. 291. See also Sagdeev, The Making of a Soviet Scientist, pp. 286–292; Gorbachev, Perestroika, p. 221; and Gorbachev, “Chtoby pokoleniya ne zabyli ob etom fakte,” Vestnik, No. 5 (1996), pp. 87–103. 53. Evgenii Velikov, interview, Moscow, 30 December 1993. 54. Mikhail Gorbachev, “U perelomnoi cherty,” in Gorbachev, Gody trudnykh reshenii, pp. 46–55. 55. Ibid., p. 53.

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bra, of contemporary world politics. ...Instead, it must begin with the need to eliminate all nuclear weapons. [On strategic forces] it should stress our idea of a 50-percent cut as a ªrst step. In contrast to our earlier positions, such reductions need not hinge on an agreement over SDI. Otherwise it will be another dead end. [On INF] we must not begin with an interim but optimal variant: eliminate all medium-range missiles in Europe. The [ministry’s] proposal again raises a scare over French and English forces. But it is impossible to imagine any cir- cumstances...under which they would push the [nuclear] button against us. Here we are only frightening ourselves and raise anew the obstacle that has blocked European disarmament for a decade.56

Gorbachev accepted all of Chernyaev’s recommendations aside from the proposal to de-link SDI, though he did ease the proposed restrictions on it considerably. Other ofªcials, however, rejected this new approach, and the Reykjavik proposals generated enormous high-level opposition in the fall of 1986. Akhromeev nearly resigned over the issue, and others in the military- industrial complex pushed even harder for a Soviet “Star Wars” program.57 Also at this time, the promulgation of a new defense doctrine of “reasonable sufªciency,” which Gorbachev a year earlier had indicated was coming, provoked a rebellious outcry among some senior ofªcers.58 Meanwhile, high- ranking ofªcials in the State Security Committee (KGB), having earlier warned about the dangers of incipient glasnost, now shrilly argued that openness was facilitating the “subversive designs” of Western spy agencies.59 Conservatives (and moderates too) grew alarmed, and many felt they had been duped. For they were now faced with radical policy changes that they themselves had earlier endorsed in principle, but with the expectation that they were intended solely for propaganda purposes and would never actually be implemented.60 But Gorbachev had different ideas, and the Politburo became an open battleground. The hardliners fought tenaciously, but Gorbachev stood his ground:

He fended off all arguments against [his new proposals] with a critical, rhetorical question: “What are you doing, still preparing to ªght a nuclear war? Well, I’m not, and everything else follows from that....Ifwestill want to conquer the

56. Chernyaev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym, p. 110. 57. Akhromeev and Kornienko, Glazami marshala i diplomata, pp. 109, 126; and Sagdeev, The Making of a Soviet Scientist, pp. 272–273. 58. When the new doctrine was presented to the General Staff Academy in late 1986, it met with “in- comprehension, confusion, fear...andaccusations that it was ºawed, unacceptable, and bordered on treasonous.” Akhromeev and Kornienko, Glazami marshala i diplomata, p. 126. 59. Chernyaev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym, pp. 96–97; and Sagdeev, The Making of a Soviet Scientist, p. 290. 60. Aleksandr G. Savel’yev and Nikolai N. Detinov, The Big Five: Arms Control Decision-Making in the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger, 1995), p. 93; and Shakhnazarov, Tsena svobody, pp. 89–91.

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world, then let’s decide how to arm ourselves further and outdo the Americans. But that will be it, and everything we have been saying about a new policy will have to go on the trash heap.”61 The hardliners’ last stab at derailing Reykjavik was the “Daniloff affair,” the imprisonment on trumped-up charges of an American journalist in what was, at best, an overreaction to the arrest of a low-level Soviet agent in the United States. But the gambit failed and even backªred. Intense eleventh- hour negotiations ªnally resolved the crisis and permitted the summit to go forward. Rather than derailing the drive toward new thinking, this attempted sabotage infuriated Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, who looked again at the hardliners wondered whether they and not the Americans were the real adver- saries. A similar irony attended the Reykjavik meeting itself. Although the bargaining there ultimately failed—agreement on broad nuclear disarmament foundered over the U.S. refusal to brook restrictions on SDI—Gorbachev’s disappointment was tempered by hope and exhilaration over just how close they had come.62 With this optimism, the ªnal months of 1986 saw Gorbachev take further important steps that reºected his near-complete conversion to new thinking. Ideologically, he now embraced a position that went far beyond what had seemed so bold at the Party Congress just eight months earlier; in a speech in October he argued that “universal human values take precedence over the interests of any particular class.”63 Politically, in a move of enormous symbolic and practical signiªcance, he “rehabilitated” one of new thinking’s greatest pioneers; in December, again overruling a skeptical Politburo, Gorbachev ordered the release of Andrei Sakharov from internal exile.

Implementation of Ideas: The Cold War’s Endgame

Upon returning to Moscow, Sakharov immediately resumed public advocacy on the two issues of greatest concern to him: human rights and arms control.

61. Chernyaev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym, p. 112. 62. It was also at this time that conservative-military opposition grew rapidly as the “old thinkers” real- ized just how far Gorbachev was prepared to go, including unilaterally, to achieve disarmament and improved relations with the West. Their resistance was strong—ªerce public criticism of new thinking, foot-dragging on negotiations and “sabotage” of agreements, inºation of the “threat,” and distor- tion of intelligence reporting—but is misunderstood and so downplayed by some materialists. See Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War: Reevaluating a Landmark Case for Ideas,” International Security, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Winter 2000/ 2001), pp. 5–53; and Robert D. English, “Power, Ideas, and New Evidence on the Cold War’s End: A Reply to Brooks and Wohlforth,” International Security, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Winter 2001/2002), pp. 70–92. 63. Mikhail Gorbachev, speech reproduced in Literaturnaya gazeta (Moscow), 5 November 1986, p. 2.

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He called on Gorbachev to release other prisoners of conscience and to free U.S.-Soviet negotiations from the linkage that tied arms cuts to restrictions on SDI. In February 1987, Gorbachev did just that, and the INF Treaty followed soon thereafter, the ªrst agreement that did not just limit weapons but eliminated an entire class of them. Meanwhile, Shevardnadze informed the Americans of Soviet intentions to achieve a near-term settlement in Afghani- stan—with or without U.S. help.64 Publicly, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze still faulted the United States for the stalemated talks; privately, they blamed hardliners in Moscow and Kabul for blocking progress. The stubborn Babrak Karmal was replaced with the more ºexible Najibullah as Shevardnadze railed against regimes that “did not stand for anything” and lacked “any real support among the people.”65 This anger was directed at the East European party bosses as well. Having privately reminded them in late 1986 that Moscow would no longer bail them out (and also having ordered the Soviet military to begin planning for an eventual withdrawal from the region), Gorbachev stepped up the public pressure with such steps as his sensational visit to Czechoslovakia in 1987. Over 1987 and into 1988, the implementation of new thinking accelerated on all fronts. Progress toward an Afghan settlement quickened, as did cooperation on the resolution of other regional conºicts, including those in Cambodia, Namibia, and Nicaragua. Key Soviet concessions in strategic and conventional arms talks, combined with Gorbachev’s landmark speech at the United Nations in December 1988 announcing unilateral force reductions, broke long-standing deadlocks. Glasnost spread from domestic to foreign policy debates. Conservatives fought back, but they could not halt the lightning spread of new thinking from private councils to numerous public forums. Nor could they block such steps as the cessation of jamming of foreign radio broadcasts and the release of remaining political prisoners. It was also in 1987 that Gorbachev secured agreement for the holding of an Extraordinary 19th Party Conference, which was convened in late June and July 1988. At the conference, Gorbachev won approval for a radical restructuring of the Soviet political system through the scaling-back of the central party apparatus and the introduction of multi-candidate elections for a new Congress of People’s Deputies. These initiatives are rarely considered in con- nection with foreign policy and are seen instead as steps motivated by simple economic necessity—a need to shake up party bureaucrats in order to advance economic reforms.66 Once again, as with Chernobyl, such views are only half

64. Don Oberdorfer, The Turn: From the Cold War to a New Era (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991), pp. 235–240. 65. Pavel Palazchenko, Interpreting the Whirlwind, n.d., p. 144. 66. An assessment of Gorbachev’s sweeping political reforms also offers an opportunity to revisit the

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right, for they miss the vital link the new thinkers now understood between democratization at home and trust abroad. The link is evident in Gorbachev’s account of his post-Reykjavik discussions with British Prime Minister Marga- ret Thatcher, who contributed to a “sharp turn” (silnyi povorot) in Gorbachev’s thinking about the domestic nexus of foreign policy. He recalled how Thatcher argued that: “You have no democracy, so there’s no control over the government. It does what it wants. You stress the will of your people, that they don’t want war, but they’re denied the means to express this will. Let’s say we trust you personally, but if you’re gone tomorrow, then what?” ...Wehadtothink long and hard to grasp that human rights are an extraterritorial, universal, all-human value, and to understand that [without democracy] we would never achieve real trust in foreign relations.67 Regarding European security, Gorbachev reported to the Politburo on his discussions with Thatcher as follows: She focused on trust. She said: “The USSR has squandered the West’s faith and we don’t trust you. You take grave actions lightly: Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Af- ghanistan. We couldn’t imagine that you would invade Czechoslovakia, but you did. The same with Afghanistan. We’re afraid of you. If you remove your INF, and the Americans do too, then we [in Western Europe] will be completely defenseless before [your huge armies].” That’s how she sees it. She thinks we haven’t rejected the “Brezhnev Doctrine.” Comrades, we have to think this over. We can’t ignore these arguments.68 Gorbachev’s reºections signaled a critical advance in his embrace of the liberal Weltanschauung, a near-Kantian understanding of the link between genuine democracy and the foundations of international trust. It is true that neither in 1987 nor as late as early 1989 did Gorbachev and his allies foresee that democratization would lead to the rapid collapse of East European socialism. If they had understood this, it is likely that their subsequent liberalizing steps would have been more cautious. Nonetheless, analysts who dwell on these points, as well as those who interpret Moscow’s restraint

problem of how materialist approaches seriously understate the depth of Soviet conservatives’ opposition to the new thinking. Those arguing that conservatives must not have opposed new thinking, because they did not resist more vigorously and openly, would, by this logic, also argue that conservatives did not oppose free elections and the end of the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power. Of course they did, but—as with various foreign-policy initiatives—they went along not only out of party discipline but because they never expected such radical proposals to be effectively implemented. 67. Mikhail Gorbachev, “Doverie: Vektor sovremennoi zhizni,” Svobodnaya mysl’ (Moscow), No. 3 (March 1995), p. 6. 68. Chernyaev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym, p. 139.

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in Eastern Europe as mainly driven by fear of endangering hoped-for Western aid, underestimate the extent of the new thinkers’ intellectual conversion by early 1987. Far beyond just seeking limits on the arms race or a deeper détente, they wanted their country to “become a normal member of the world community” and to merge with “the common stream of world civilization.”69 Even though Gorbachev and his allies did not anticipate how rapidly Communist party rule in Eastern Europe would collapse, they had already understood and accepted that the region would inevitably move closer to the political-economic orbit of the West.70 They also had sensed the inevitability of German reuniªcation, even though they believed that the process would take decades rather than months.71 The most critical decisions of 1987–1989 were arguably those of Western leaders to withhold large-scale aid to perestroika (and perhaps those of hardline East European leaders not to launch reforms of their own). As for Gorbachev, his decision had already been made: Come what may, there would be no use of force to preserve the socialist bloc or a divided Germany. The top brass did not even dare to raise the question in Gorbachev’s presence at the Politburo “because they knew what the answer would be.”72

The Effects of New Thinking

Eschewing narrow methodological straitjackets reveals the full explanatory force of ideas. Consider ªrst the “timing tests” set forth by Nina Tannenwald in her article in this issue of the journal. Needless to say, the evidence presented thus far shows that new ideas developed long before the events and policy changes under consideration. First came the emergence, over the post- Stalin decades, of an intellectual elite holding strongly unorthodox views of their country’s history, current problems, and proper future place in world

69. Mikhail Gorbachev, “The Crimea Article,” in Mikhail Gorbachev, The August Coup: The Truth and the Lessons (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 119. 70. This is the claim of Georgii Shakhnazarov and other Gorbachev advisers. Chernyaev also asserts that by 1986 Gorbachev had already ordered the preparation of plans for an eventual Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe. According to Chernyaev, Gorbachev upbraided a skeptical Defense Min- ister Dmitrii Yazov: “What are you waiting for? For them to ask you to leave?” Anatolii Chernyaev, seminar, Princeton University, 24 February 1993. 71. Shevardnadze, Moi vybor, p. 223. See also Vyacheslav Dashichev, “On the Road to German Reuniªcation: The View from Moscow,” in Gabriel Gorodetsky, ed., Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1991: A Retrospective (London: Frank Cass, 1994), pp. 170–179. 72. Anatolii Chernyaev, quoted in William C. Wohlforth, ed., Cold War Endgame: Oral History, Anal- ysis, Debates (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), p. 54.

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civilization—in short, the rise through the 1950s and 1960s of beliefs, values, even identity of a “neo-Westernizing” orientation. The new thinkers were social democratic in their domestic outlook, and their international ambitions soon grew resolutely liberal-integrationist. What also stands out in a close examination of the early new thinking is that the cognitive and normative aspects were accompanied by a crucial social dimension. The common personal and professional experiences—from institutes to editorial boards, from the exhilaration of the thaw to the tragedy of the Prague Spring—forged strong ties among philosophers, historians, economists, and numerous others. By the mid- to late 1970s—beginning the second phase in the advent of new thinking, that of its mobilization—the normative and social dimensions came to the fore in helping heretical ideas not only to survive a dark time of ofªcial reaction but also to develop further and ultimately triumph in the mid-1980s. In this respect, new thinking passes one of Tannenwald’s critical “cross-sectional tests,” namely, “whether the ideas expressed by individuals largely corresponded to and reºected their immediate material interests...or whether these ideas more closely reºected their life experiences and the information and ideas to which they were exposed.” Even as détente collapsed and Moscow’s political climate turned sharply hardline, many of the new thinkers swam against this tide. Belying neoliberal arguments about supposed incen- tives for “policy entrepreneurship,” they faced professional and personal ruin for questioning dogmas and advocating radical alternatives. Many indeed suf- fered, but—as in earlier periods of conservative backlash in the 1950s and late 1960s—they were defended by like-minded colleagues. This brings us to a third test proposed by Tannenwald: “whether ideational or material resources better explain why some ideas...wonout over others.” In the end, it was the unity of the advocates of new thinking, together with the strong normative appeal of their ideas, that gave them decisive inºuence with Mikhail Gorbachev and his allies in the early to mid-1980s. Admittedly, growing economic woes also contributed to Gorbachev’s interest in foreign as well as domestic reforms. But contrary to realist assumptions, there were plausible alternatives to rapid “retrenchment.” Close study of the complex processes that led to the triumph of new thinking (including idio- syncratic factors such as Gorbachev’s personality and the trauma of the Chornobyl disaster) underscores the vital role of ideas and their purveyors, a coherent and committed “Westernizing” intellectual elite decades in the making. What were the alternatives in the mid-1980s? Continuation of the Brezh- nev-Chernenko status quo was one option, though the prospect of continued stagnation that prevailed in the late 1970s and early 1980s made this the pre-

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ferred choice of a dwindling number of the old guard.73 Another group, as noted, wanted a harder line. This group, consisting of senior ofªcials in the military-industrial complex, the KGB, and neo-Stalinists in the CPSU, sought increased defense spending (with an emphasis on high-technology weapons), a crackdown on dissent (to include not only open critics but even the reform-minded “loyal opposition”), and a return to pre-détente ideological orthodoxy and societal discipline. Showing their strength, the hardliners issued vitriolic pronouncements about apocalyptic confrontation with the West and pushed for a partial rehabilitation of Stalin (in books and movies, and symbolically in the readmission to the party of Stalin’s longtime hench- man and foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov). Less visible at the time, but perhaps even more portentous, was their assault on liberal academics, their advocacy of a Soviet “Star Wars” system, and their efforts to humiliate and undermine Gorbachev. As noted above, most of the top leaders favored a path lying between the neo-Stalinist and neo-Brezhnevite options, essentially a return to the modest changes Andropov had begun. This is indeed what the members of the Polit- buro thought they were choosing when they selected Gorbachev in 1985. Where might this course have led? Domestically, streamlining and anti- corruption measures could have prolonged the life of the old system well into the twenty-ªrst century. With heightened discipline and “vigilance,” popular dissatisfaction would not have been a signiªcant concern. Internationally, the Soviet Union might have quit Afghanistan and ceded other Third World con- tests—though far more grudgingly than it actually did—and a precarious nuclear confrontation would likely continue.74 From there one can imagine a number of scenarios. In an “Ottoman” variant, a steadily declining USSR might ªnd itself drawn into a cycle of dissent, repression, and eventual rebel- lion in Eastern Europe that might also spread to parts of Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the Caucasus (all fraught with dangerous international implications). In a “Romanian” scenario, a more deªant Soviet regime would use repression to quell unrest, thus delaying the system’s eventual denouement but also ensuring that the end would be more violent and destabilizing (especially if hardliners clung to power by mobilizing against such “threats” as Afghani-

73. The Brezhnevites’ preferred candidate could have been Prime Minister Nikolai Tikhonov or Mos- cow party boss Viktor Grishin, both of whom were over seventy years old at the time. Not far behind might have been military industry secretary Grigorii Romanov, who was still in his sixties and a ªgure of outspoken hardline views. 74. On Gromyko’s subsequent astonishment at Gorbachev’s unwillingness “to use force and pressure to defend state interests”—a revealing observation when considering where alternatives to Gorbachev’s leadership might have led—see Anatolii Gromyko, Andrei Gromyko v labirintakh Kremlya: Vospominaniya i razmyshleniya syna (Moscow: IPO Avtor, 1997), p. 184 and passim.

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stan, Turkey, or China). Of course, Romania possessed neither a foreign empire nor nuclear weapons. Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth forcefully dispute the view out- lined here, but their argument that material weakness forced foreign policy concessions is heavily based on the post-1988 economic downturn.75 Not only do they ignore Gorbachev’s embrace of new thinking nearly two years before this sharp decline, they also fail to consider the extent to which the decline resulted from Gorbachev’s own policies—a budget-busting anti-alcohol campaign, clumsy tampering with the planning mechanism, and other mis- guided steps—rather than just continuing earlier trends. Nowhere do they consider what the alternatives to Gorbachev’s economic policies of 1985– 1988 might have produced, yet these policies clearly triggered a crisis that, they argue, left no real alternatives to Gorbachev’s foreign policies of 1988– 1991. Thus, despite Brooks’s and Wohlforth’s documentation of overall economic woes, their reasoning is marred by a central ºaw that can be corrected only by analysis of the precise sources of those woes as well as of the different economic possibilities (more state-controlled, perhaps “Chinese-style,” reforms) that a different leader could have implemented. The view that economic pressures were paramount, and that ideas were largely endogenous to material forces, is incorrect. The economy was indeed a critical catalyst of change, but the change could have gone in a fundamentally different direction. It is inconceivable that under any leader other than Gorbachev the Cold War would have ended so rapidly and peacefully. But to understand what moved Gorbachev and his allies, the vital intellectual- normative “pull” of new thinking must be given its due alongside the obvious economic “push.” This in turn directs attention to the ideas, and their purveyors, that were decades in the making. To justify doing otherwise, materialists commit several analytical and in- terpretive errors. One is to downplay the hardline opposition to Gorbachev’s foreign policy; in essence, they argue that, absent Gorbachev, quite similar policies would still have been pursued.76 Another is to argue that even if Gorbachev’s role was central, his embrace of new thinking (if indeed it was ever sincere) came only after 1988, when a sharp economic downturn had made retrenchment unavoidable. This ignores a mass of contrary evidence,

75. See Brooks and Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War.” 76. Space does not permit a more detailed counterfactual argument on the alternatives to perestroika and new thinking. Instead I refer readers to the discussion above as well as to Robert English, “The Road(s) Not Taken: Causality and Contingency in Analysis of the Cold War’s End,” in Wohlforth, ed., Cold War Endgame, pp. 243–272; and Vladislav M. Zubok, “Gorbachev and the End of the Cold War: Different Perspectives on the Historical Personality,” in Wohlforth, ed., Cold War Endgame, pp. 207–242.

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some of which is presented above, that Gorbachev’s genuine acceptance of core new-thinking tenets was complete before 1988.77 Both arguments side- step the fact that it was largely as a result of Gorbachev’s own economic policies that the 1988 downturn occurred. The actual complexities of Soviet politics are erased, and nowhere are the real alternatives to Gorbachev and his policies—those that still existed in 1988–1989, much less those of 1985— ever seriously considered. But neither have most attempts to integrate the crucial domestic context of Gorbachev’s foreign policy—mainly of the neoliberal institutionalist school—been markedly more successful in explaining the end of the Cold War. Although ideas are no longer seen as merely endogenous to consider- ations of power, understanding of their origins and impact is still hampered by assumptions of their largely instrumental role. In this view, crisis created “windows” of opportunity through which “entrepreneurs” then leaped, motivated by personal and institutional interests to advance a new policy agenda.78 This approach may capture part of the dynamic of the rapid implementation of new thinking—once its general course had been charted from above—but tells much less about its origins. How was it that Gorbachev chose such a course, given the conservative correlation of forces in the top leadership? Where did the “policy entrepreneurs” and their agendas originate?79 The pre- sumption that new ideas naturally emerged as a result of objective problems and that their advocacy naturally ºowed from pursuit of personal ambition and institutional interests, reºects the pluralistic political systems and attendant rational-actor assumptions on which such theories have been built. Yet both are belied by much evidence of how the new thinking actually emerged in the Soviet system. The anti-isolationist, globalist, social democratic-leaning intellectual current that provided the essential soil for subsequent reforms was fertilized in the optimistic late 1950s and 1960s, not the crisis-ridden late 1970s and early

77. Despite all the evidence presented above that Gorbachev and his inner circle engaged in searching debates over core foreign policy principles from almost the moment he took ofªce, and despite the evidence of the radical turn by Gorbachev and his advisers in mid-1986, Brooks and Wohlforth claim that “only in [1988–1989] did [Gorbachev] begin privately to rely on the more radical intellectual proponents of new thinking.” Of course, given the economic downturn after 1988, this two- to three- year lapse is critical for the materialist argument. See Brooks and Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War,” p. 31. 78. Checkel, Ideas and International Political Change. 79. On the importance of “expert communities” in the implementation of major foreign policy initiatives, see also Sarah Mendelson, Changing Course: Ideas, Politics, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Af- ghanistan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). My point is that far from something neu- tral or objective, the “expertise” of key new thinkers was steeped in a particular, liberal-Westernizing set of beliefs and values. Moreover, it was precisely these beliefs and values that not only united and sustained the new thinkers through periods of conservatism and reaction but gave them particular inºuence in the era of reforms.

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1980s. The pioneers of the new thinking championed liberal ideas, criticized old-thinking policies, and advocated “Westernizing” domestic and foreign policy reforms not only in the heyday of détente, when such advocacy was problematic enough, but also in the post-détente collapse of U.S.-Soviet relations, when such boldness could incur severe punishment. In other words, it was less in the service of—and more often at risk to—their personal, professional, and institutional interests that the early new thinkers took their most important steps within a rigid and highly ideologized academic-policy system. No more in Moscow than in the West was there any reasonable expectation that a bold reformer would soon be running the Politburo. Far more important than the many who subsequently climbed on the bandwagon of new thinking were the few who paved the way for it in the ªrst place. By contrast, approaches that privilege the normative over instrumental aspects of ideas better capture the nature of new thinking as a long-term intellectual phenomenon and illuminate the contingencies of its near-term inºuence over Soviet leaders. Whether focused in depth on the generation- long rise of new ideas about international security among arms control experts, or emphasizing instead the breadth and diversity of a community of liberal humanists, social scientists, and natural scientists, the few such studies to date are distinguished by their empirical as well as analytical insights.80 This is no accident, for the analytical and empirical blinders that have hampered our understanding of the end of the Cold War are closely linked. To illustrate this, it is useful to recall a central claim from one of the most inºuential pre-perestroika studies of Soviet foreign policy: “In no case was the Politburo confronted with advisers who had the treasonous temerity to... challenge the fundamental preconceptions of these old men.”81 As amply demonstrated, this claim was wrong. A key factor in the triumph of new thinking was precisely that many advisers did early and persistently offer critiques and proposals—up to the highest levels—that challenged the “fundamental preconceptions” of old thinking. But aside from the perils of afªrming a negative, the cited claim was based on sound reasoning. So ªrmly was the Leninist-Stalinist confrontational ideology entrenched in the Brezhnevite military-industrial system, and so resolutely was heresy punished, that any

80. See Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); and Robert G. Herman, “Identity, Norms, and National Se- curity: The Soviet Foreign Policy Revolution and the End of the Cold War,” in Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 1996), pp. 271–316. 81. Harry Gelman, The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of Détente (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 26.

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challenge to it could be conceived of only as a limited, essentially dissident affair. Anything larger, particularly among the ranks of the privileged policy- academic elite, was simply ruled out by the logic of rational self-interest. Fealty to this core assumption—regarding the centrality of narrowly con- strued, materially driven interests—is what has hampered understanding the sources of subsequent change. If Gorbachev’s conciliatory steps confounded realists’ expectations as late as 1987–1988, then the explanation must be that Moscow’s military-economic crisis had been far more severe than previously understood. If scores of new-thinking analysts and arguments suddenly emerged, this was, according to the neoliberals, because the deepening crisis had changed the “incentive structure” for ambitious policy advocates. Guided by these theoretical precepts, realists and neoliberals have sought supporting evidence in particular places. The former group explicitly privileges evidence of economic over intellectual forces among the factors that inºuenced Gorbachev, and the latter focuses on the near-term elaboration and implementation of policies at the expense of their longer-term origins.

Elites, Identity, and Comparative Perspectives on Intellectual-Political Change

In searching for an analytical framework that fully explains these origins, I have argued for a redeªnition of both the agents of intellectual change and the substance of their ideas. As noted, the ranks of the new thinkers were not limited to a narrow group of security specialists. Rather, they included a broader cohort of social and natural scientists—students of culture and the humani- ties alongside economists and physicists—whose members ranged from academics to apparatchiks. The new thinking, too, has seen several deªnitions. Early conceptions, which listed such elements as “defense sufªciency” or “mu- tual security,” were soon seen to have enumerated only the policies ºowing from what was indeed a deeper new thinking. Later deªnitions—as a belief system, ideology, or operational code—agreed that the ideas at issue, far from being peripheral, were in fact the most basic “philosophical” beliefs about the nature of world politics.82 With varying emphases, most such deªnitions include the elevation of universal over class values and the rejection of inevitable East-West hostility as central tenets.

82. Stephen Kull, Burying Lenin: The Revolution in Soviet Ideology and Foreign Policy (Boulder: Westview, 1992); and Douglas Blum, “The Soviet Foreign Policy Belief System: Beliefs, Politics, and Foreign Policy Outcomes,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 4 (December 1993), pp. 373– 394.

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The problem lies not in what is included in these deªnitions but in what is left out. For in discarding longtime core tenets, new thinking did not just posit an end to conºict with the West or the desirability of cooperation with the liberal international community. It instead argued that the USSR was, or should be, a member of that community. Thus, the new thinking is best viewed as a watershed in national identity—not in opposition to, but in unity with, the West—and so entailing a sharply different conception of Soviet national interests in world politics. A diverse group of specialist elites, on the basis of their knowledge and experience over the preceding two decades, had by the early 1970s embraced a distinct “Westernizing” set of beliefs, values, and political orientation that would play an indispensable role in shaping Gorbachev’s reforms. By privileging two factors—the paradigmatic and constitutive nature of belief change in reference to international “others,” and the central role of intellectuals in that process—this elites-identity framework offers a promising alternative to materialist and institutional models for analysis of intellectual-political change in the USSR. If the nation is a self-conscious community of people bound by a common culture and understanding of their past and future—a distinct “historical narrative”—then its identity is that which explains “who we are, what... we collectively aspire to...andwhat most distinguishes us from the rest of the world.”83 If a nation is shaped (and a state legitimized) by the symbols, norms, and beliefs that form the “map” of its political culture, then national identity provides the “compass” that guides the nation (state) in world affairs.84 National identity includes a distinct sense of mission or purpose, possi- bly a messianic universalism, leadership of an ethnic bloc, or membership in some other cultural or political grouping of states.85 Identity powerfully inºuences the interplay of fast-changing material forces and deeply rooted cultural factors in deciding how national interests—and so international behavior—are determined.86

83. Samuel S. Kim and Lowell Dittmer, “Whither China’s Quest for National Identity?” in Lowell Dittmer and Samuel Kim, eds., China’s Quest for National Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 279. On historical “narratives,” see Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reºections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 84. On the “map-compass” metaphor for the relationship between culture and identity, see T. K. Fitz- gerald, Metaphors of Identity (Albany: State University of New York, 1993), p. 186. 85. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). 86. “Identities deªne attitudes toward one’s surroundings that operate as important constraints for political decisions” and “powerfully inºuence actual behavior, especially in crisis situations that require existential choices based as much on emotion as reason.” Quoted in Konrad H. Jarausch, “Reshaping German Identities,” in Konrad Jarausch, ed., After Unity: Reconªguring German Identities (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1997), p. 4.

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National identity is not immutable. It can change in a slow, evolutionary process or more rapidly during socioeconomic upheavals such as revolution or industrialization.87 But even when a new identity is “imposed” from abroad— as after military defeat and foreign occupation—a key role in its rise is played by intellectuals, the “secular priesthood” of the nation.88 Whether in response to their personal alienation89 or to their professional insight into the nature of crisis,90 it is intellectuals who lead the assault on a hegemonic identity and are the “storytellers in the invention of [a new] nationality.”91 Their role is even more vital in dictatorial systems where the state controls discourse over history and politics, imposing an identity from above through its monopoly over education, the media, and scholarship. In many cases when intellectuals have been the agents of large-scale belief change, several factors stand out as crucial. First, the prerequisites of change include (1) an opening to foreign ideas and information and (2) the emergence of particular congregations of elites who debate new ideas and form an intellectual “critical mass.” In Spain under Francisco Franco, these two factors were present in several ministries in which the rise of a modern, “European” identity paved the way for democratization. For the de-radicalization of some Latin American Marxists, the conditions were found abroad. Political exile in Italy, wrote one, “affected us as much as the Cuban revolution....Itwasthere [reading Gramsci and cementing close ties to Eurocommunists] that I changed my political perspective.”92 In post- Mao China, the journal World Economic Herald, through articles, seminars, and other ties with Western political and business ªgures, became “an important source of foreign ideas [and] helped set the agenda” for the pro-democ-

87. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). 88. See Thomas U. Berger, “Norms, Identity, and National Security in Germany and Japan,” in Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security, pp. 317–356. 89. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 90. A “crisis of self-deªnition” occurs when intellectuals perceive that the developmental path embodied in a given theory has manifestly failed. See Lowell Dittmer and Samuel S. Kim, “In Search of a Theory of National Identity,” in Dittmer and Kim, eds., China’s Quest for National Identity, p. 29. The formerly “hegemonic” identity then confronts “incurable contradictions” and “gross discrepancies” with reality. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 210, 276. 91. Harold James, A German Identity, 1770–1990 (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 8. See also Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 92. On Spain and Latin America, see Nancy Bermeo, “Democracy and the Lessons of Dictatorship,” Comparative Politics, Vol. 24, No. 3 (April 1992), pp. 273–292; quotation from pp. 284–285, brack- ets in the original.

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racy movement.93 In the case of Soviet new thinking, a handful of research centers and editorial boards constituted strikingly similar “networks...where the diffusion of foreign ideas” was greatly encouraged.94 Second, the process of identity change combines learning on two levels: comparative-interactive learning, whereby foreign ties facilitate a shift in intellectuals’ essential “self-categorization” of the nation among allies and adversar- ies; and social learning, in which growing numbers of intellectuals from diverse professions are drawn into an informal domestic community. Interna- tional links thus serve not only as conduits for ideas but also as “reference groups” vital to realignment of identity vis-à-vis other nations.95 Simulta- neously, rethinking of “external” identity prompts reappraisal of fundamental internal issues as well, further widening the circle of those involved.96 Again, the Chinese case illustrates this two-level process. Writers and journalists who began with a tentative opening to foreign ideas soon embarked on a searching critique of their own society. Economists and scientists who ªrst sought ex- panded ties abroad later pushed for broader domestic liberalization. They were the “ideological entrepreneurs” who constructed a new “global” Chinese identity.97 Thus, foreign “transaction ºows”—the ties that “link people across space so as to form a new community”98—foster similar ties at home by “building bridges” among diverse actors and interests. Common aspirations

93. Li Cheng and Lynn T. White, “China’s Technocratic Movement and the World Economic Herald,” Modern China, Vol. 17, No. 2 (April 1991), pp. 342–389. 94. Bermeo, “Democracy and the Lessons of Dictatorship,” pp. 283–284. Kathryn Sikkink’s study of how international norms shaped liberalization in some Latin American states via “principled issue networks” reveals a strong parallel to the manner in which ideas and intellectuals inºuenced perestroika in the USSR. See Kathryn Sikkink, “Human Rights, Principled Issue Networks, and Sovereignty in Latin America,” International Organization, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 411–441. 95. On the way foreign “reference groups” affected identity, see Daniel Druckman, “Nationalism, Pa- triotism, and Group Loyalty: A Social Psychological Perspective,” Mershon International Studies Re- view, Vol. 38, No. 1 (April 1994), pp. 60–62. On competing socialist, Third World, and global identities in China, see Merle Goldman, Perry Link, and Su Wei, “China’s Intellectuals in the Deng Era: Loss of Identity with the State,” in Dittmer and Kim, eds., China’s Quest for National Identity, pp. 125–153. 96. On the link between “external” identity and domestic politics, see Michael Barnett, “Identity and Alliances in the Middle East,” in Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security, pp. 412–413. 97. Lynn White and Li Cheng, “China Coast Identities: Regional, National, and Global,” in Dittmer and Kim, eds., China’s Quest for National Identity, p. 170. On the emergence of currents from Marxist humanism to liberalism—“virtually the whole range of modern Western thought found a receptive audience in China’s institutes of higher learning”—in the early 1980s, see Tu Wei-ming, “Intellectual Effervescence in China,” Daedalus, Vol. 121, No. 2 (Spring 1992), p. 259. 98. John Hall, “Ideas and the Social Sciences,” in Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 51. On “transaction ºows,” see Emanuel Adler and Michael N. Barnett, “Governing Anarchy: A Research Agenda for the Study of Security Communities,” Ethics and International Affairs, Vol. 10 (1996), pp. 66–71.

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for a reformed domestic society, and shared beliefs about the place of that society in the international community, “create the basis of a new identity” among critically thinking intellectuals.99 The transformation of national identity, particularly in a closed dictatorial system, is rarely a linear process. Periods of gradual change are punctuated by intervals of rapid intellectual upheaval.100 These intervals can result from external shocks such as economic collapse or military defeat. Or the regime itself can unwittingly encourage rethinking of core beliefs by granting permis- sion for landmark cultural events such as the 1988 televising of The Yellow River Elegy with its indictment of Chinese isolation, or the 1962 publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and other explosive critiques of the Stalinist legacy. The crackdowns that followed—the Tiananmen Square mas- sacre and subsequent repressions in China or the crushing of the Prague Spring and stiºing of dissent in the USSR—provided still more powerful “cognitive punches” by revealing the limits of reform and exposing the brutal essence of the existing system.101 But even as the reactionary backlash sup- presses open debate, it only heightens the importance of informal intellectual congregations and catalyzes the development of a new identity.

Conclusion: New Thinking about Old Concepts

To show that beliefs and identity ultimately matter, we must demonstrate their impact on policy. For Soviet new thinking, this means that the ideas of an intellectual elite inºuenced leaders in ways that were not just epi- phenomenal to steps necessitated by the crises of the mid-1980s. That is what I have already argued, and I will not tax readers’ patience with another reprise of the alternatives that were available in the mid-1980s. Nor need I recapitu- late the steps by which Gorbachev and his allies came to an early embrace of the new thinking’s core liberal, global, “Westernizing” precepts, except to em- phasize again the crucial yet underappreciated impact of perhaps the most powerful “cognitive punch”—the Chornobyl catastrophe.

99. Mark Blyth, “Any More Bright Ideas? The Ideational Turn of Comparative Political Economy,” Comparative Politics, Vol. 29, No. 2 (January 1997), p. 264. 100. On alternation between incremental and “punctuated” learning, see Peter A. Hall, “Policy Para- digms, Social Learning, and the State: The Case of Economic Policymaking in Britain,” Comparative Politics, Vol. 25, No. 3 (April 1993), p. 277. See also Emanuel Adler, “Cognitive Evolution: A Dy- namic Approach for the Study of International Relations and Their Progress,” in Emanuel Adler and Beverly Crawford, eds., Progress in Postwar International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). pp. 43–88. 101. A “cognitive punch” is a crisis or event that accelerates “reevaluation and change from one set of collective understandings or ‘paradigms’ to another.” Adler, “Cognitive Evolution,” p. 55.

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The importance of Chornobyl suggests a basic weakness in prevailing perspectives on the end of the Cold War. The problem is not only that the focused application of deductively derived models—no matter how valuable in illuminating key aspects of Soviet policy change—necessarily misses a broader social-intellectual process that only an empirically richer, inductive approach can reveal. It is as if a larger yet unacknowledged “narrative” of events has taken hold in much scholarship on Gorbachev-era politics, one that subtly but powerfully pervades the literature in determining which processes were most important, what episodes were most critical, and which research ques- tions are most deserving of attention. This narrative’s assumption include a view of Gorbachev as a mediocre leader overwhelmingly driven by material pressures (and subsequently by events over which he had simply lost control), despite much evidence to the contrary. They include judging the peaceful collapse of East European socialism in 1989 (or the reuniªcation of Germany in 1990) as the decisive turning point in the end of the Cold War, even though the most important political and ideological decisions that permitted these changes were adopted over two years earlier. They also include a curious ne- glect of the 1986 Chornobyl disaster (and the attendant searching reappraisal of the fundamentals of Soviet international relations), despite much evidence that this was when Gorbachev and his allies crossed their new-thinking Rubicon. Entire articles and books are still written on the end of the Cold War with little or no mention of this watershed event. Similarly problematic is a general inattention to the possibilities of a course other than that of perestroika and new thinking. Among the plausible alternatives were the path chosen in 1985–1986 as well as the path rejected in 1988–1989. Despite ample evidence of the closeness of Gorbachev’s accession, the ferocity of opposition to new thinking, and even the arguably “near miss” of the hardline coup of 1991, counterfactuals about the alternatives to Gorbachev are rarely seriously considered.102 Once again, recent Chinese experience is instructive in reºecting on a Soviet process that, no matter how de- monstrably tenuous and reversible at the time, has become all but inevitable in hindsight. Such evidence is found in the published deliberations of the Chinese leadership on the eve of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.103 In the spring of that year, Beijing faced a situation similar in many respects to what would soon confront Moscow. Party-led reforms had provoked

102. A notable recent exception is George W. Breslauer and Richard Ned Lebow, “Leadership and the End of the Cold War: A Counterfactual Thought Experiment” in Richard K. Herrmann and Richard Ned Lebow, eds., Ending the Cold War: Interpretations, Causation, and the Study of International Rela- tions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) pp. 161–188. 103. Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link, eds., “The Tiananmen Papers,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 80, No. 1 (January/February 2001), pp. 1–23.

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broad criticism of corruption and inequality, denunciation of old-guard conservatives, and demands for broader liberalization. The Chinese Communist Party was riven by a serious split in which the conservatives—like their Soviet counterparts—bewailed the “chaos,” “turmoil,” and “anarchy” of strikes and protests. Further, in language that would be repeated verbatim by Soviet hardliners in similar leadership gatherings, their Chinese counterpart decried Western interference and the subversion of “CIA agents,” warned of “a coali- tion of foreign and domestic reactionaries [whose goal was] to end communist party rule and bring down the socialist system,” and called for the imposi- tion of martial law.104 The hardliners in Beijing prevailed, of course, with a broad crackdown and the subsequent ouster of the embattled moderate General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, who was replaced by the conservative Jiang Zemin. Here the parallel ends, for Soviet hardliners failed in their bid in 1990 to replace Gorbachev with the conservative Ligachev. But perhaps more important was that the “Chinese Andropov,” Deng Xiaoping, still lived and exercised decisive au- thority, whereas the “Chinese Gorbachev,” Hu Yaobang, had died a month before. It was not a healthier economy that freed the Chinese from fear of the economic repercussions of a crackdown. Indeed, anxiety about the economic fallout was perhaps even more pronounced in China than in similar Soviet debates. Moreover, the Chinese leaders were, as seen in their private remarks, just as doctrinaire in their Leninism as the Soviet hardliners were (and were also, as in the Soviet case, fed distorted intelligence and inºated threat assess- ments). The critical difference lay instead in the values and beliefs—about the West, about democracy, and about the admissibility of force—held by the top leaders. The predominance of what I consider a problematic narrative of key trends, events, and turning points in Soviet politics leading to the end of the Cold War most likely has multiple causes, including a theoretically and meth- odologically driven “premature closing of the mind.”105 The familiar bias of hindsight and attendant reluctance to consider counterfactual scenarios and their implications also play key roles. In addition, the lack of distance from the events in question, the sheer volume of new evidence, and the lack of time, as yet, to absorb it and to ponder alternative explanations all compound analytical difªculties. Perhaps paradoxically, I conclude by defending some whose earlier, pessi- mistic predictions turned out to be wrong. The majority of Cold-War

104. Ibid. 105. Albert O. Hirschmann, “The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding,” World Politics, Vol. 22, No. 3 (April 1970), pp. 329–343.

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Sovietologists who discounted the possibility of a radical reform movement coming from within the system, or who doubted that Moscow would volun- tarily disarm or peacefully yield its core security zone in Eastern Europe, were properly skeptical. All of these were highly unlikely. Realist scholars who fore- saw the likelihood of a conºictual resolution to the dilemma of Soviet international decline in fact assessed the odds correctly. Their failing lay instead in a rather more understandable inability to foresee how ideas and leadership could combine to overcome such difªcult odds. Accordingly, serious counterfactual thinking and greater attention to the element of contingency are necessary ªrst steps toward a better understanding of the role that ideas actually played in the Cold War endgame. Another step, looking back to the critical process of the origins and development of those ideas, is to consider more broadly and comparatively the domestic social aspects of intellectual change. The potential beneªts, both for insight into the case of new thinking and for its contribution to understanding other instances of major intellectual (and international) change, are great. Finally, practitioners of all schools—realist, neoliberal, and constructivist—need to approach more openly and energetically a still-growing empirical bonanza. As Richard Herrmann has persuasively argued: “Logic will not substitute for evidence. Rigorous data analysis cannot replace careful data collection, which requires both area expertise and attention to contextual assumptions.”106 At least a temporary step back from theoretical and methodological single- mindedness—in recognition of the unique challenges of such a complex, recent, and unprecedented case as the end of the Cold War—should ultimately pay rich dividends.

106. Richard K. Herrmann, “Policy-Relevant Theory and the Challenge of Diagnosis: The End of the Cold War as a Case Study,” Political Psychology, Vol. 15, No. 1 (March 1994), p. 137.

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