Transcript 20 Years On: Perspectives on the Fall of the

Sir Rodric Braithwaite, GCMG

British Ambassador to the Soviet Union and subsequently to the Russian Federation (1988- 92) and Chairman, UK Joint Intelligence Committee (1992-93)

Ambassador Jack Matlock

US Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1987-91) and Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (1983-86)

Chair: John Lloyd

Contributing Editor, Financial Times and Director of Journalism, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford

3 November 2011

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Transcript: 20 Years On: Perspectives on the Fall of the Soviet Union

John Lloyd: Good evening, and welcome to this session. My name is John Lloyd, I’m a contributing editor to the Financial Times; more to the point, twenty years ago I was the bureau chief for the Financial Times in .

This has been something of a sell-out event, and no wonder, because we have two of the savviest political operators in the western world, who were the right men, at the right time, in the right place. They were in the Soviet Union in Moscow as ambassadors at the time when, a little more than twenty years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev went on television and told his fellow countrymen and women that the more than seventy years of a mixture of idealism and nightmare has come to an end. They were, both of them, well prepared for the posts they held; they had had a lifetime, really, of preparing to be – which was the summit of their diplomatic careers – ambassadors to Moscow.

Jack Matlock, on my right, had many posts in Africa and elsewhere. He was ambassador in the Czech Republic; but, he was in Moscow many times, first as a third secretary, then as a minister, as a temporary ambassador, and then, finally, in 1987, he became appointed by President [Ronald] Reagan. He was Ambassador for four years, leaving just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he is retired. After that, he wrote a wonderful memoir called Autopsy of an Empire in 1995, and he is still a fairly frequent journalist and intervenes in public debates, not just about .

Sir Rodric Braithwaite also had many posts – , , – but he too went time and again to Moscow. He, like Ambassador Matlock, was captivated by the country as well as horrified by it. Like Ambassador Matlock – annoying to those of us who make our life by the keyboard – he is a tremendous writer, he’s written books like Afghantsy, on the Afghan war, which is the most recent one; Moscow 1941 – self-explanatory – a tremendous evocation of the city under siege, or about to be under siege; and World Upside Down (sic) [actual title: Across the Moscow River: The World Turned Upside Down (2003)].

So, this is quite an occasion. These two men were both very close to Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom they could talk fluent (sic) in his language. Ambassador Matlock was American ambassador was top dog, since he was the other superpower; and, Sir Rodric – who may disagree with that [laughter] – did what ambassadors for Britain are told to do by, or were told to do by Lord [Douglas] Hurd – who might he here tonight – that is to ‘punch above their weight,’ and he certainly did, helped, not a little bit, by the ‘Iron Lady’ – so called by the Soviet Red Army’s newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star)

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– and her relationship between the right wing conservative and the man who used [Vladimir] Lenin to justify his actions; one of the more extraordinary relationships in the modern world.

So, there are no set speeches. We’ll go for an hour: the first half an hour, conversation here; the second half hour, conversation with the hall. And, so let me start with Ambassador Matlock. You famously had wind of the coup against Gorbachev before it happened, I think in June – the coup was in August – what did you do with that information, and did you then think ‘this is the end’?

Jack Matlock: Actually, I began to see the possibility of the end well before that. I sent my first message to Washington in July 1990, eighteen months before it happened, recommending that we make contingency plans for a break up of the Soviet Union. But the incident that you mentioned happened in June 1991 when [Boris] Yeltsin, who had just been elected president of Russia, was visiting Washington. And, the mayor of Moscow came to me and during a conversation on other things wrote a note saying a coup was being organized against Gorbachev, and that he wanted to get word to Yeltsin, who was actually meeting with our president that day in Washington. And I, simply, I wrote, also, ‘Well, who’s behind it?’ And he gave me four names. We sent that, obviously, immediately to Washington, and when President [George H.W.] Bush presented it to Yeltsin, he said, ‘We must warn Gorbachev.’ So, I received a classified telephone call from Washington asking me to warn Gorbachev; but, I pointed out, we could not confirm these names, it included the prime minister, the minister of defence, the chairman of the KGB, and the chairman of parliament.

John Lloyd: Oh, all of them correct.

[Laughter]

Jack Matlock: Yes, yes. So, I said I really can’t go in without confirmation and name them. They said, ‘Well, of course not.’ I said, ‘Of course, my source must not be named, and ‘Of course not.’ So, I did get an immediate appointment, and I www.chathamhouse.org 3 Transcript: 20 Years On: Perspectives on the Fall of the Soviet Union told Gorbachev we had information which was more than a rumour, but we could not confirm it, that a conspiracy was developing which could unfold at any time. I tried to steer him away from the idea that this was an intelligence report, though I learned later [Anatoly] Chernyaev put in his notes that I said we had intelligence, which was not correct.

The next day, when Bush was talking to Gorbachev on the telephone, he mentioned we got the information from [Gavriil] Popov, the Moscow Mayor. Now, obviously, this meant that when the coup did occur, Popov was on the list of those to be arrested. Later, I must say, when I talked to Popov about all this, after it was all over, asking if I could write and speak about it, he agreed, and he said maybe it was a good thing, because [Vladimir] Kryuchkov saw that he had a leak, he had to stop his planning, and that could have contributed to the failure of the coup. When you speak of ‘unexpected developments’ that was certainly one of them.

John Lloyd: Ambassador Braithwaite, you were hugely supportive of Gorbachev. Your late wife, Gill, was on the barricades, when it was dangerous to be so, when the White House, the Russian parliament – and Yeltsin inside it – was surrounded by tanks, an attack expected. Did you also at that time, the latter part of the year, did you also think ‘this is crumbling now, it’s gone beyond saving’?

Sir Rodric Braithwaite: Well, I don’t want to go too far into history, but I was in Moscow in 1964, and at that time it was clear the system wasn’t working. And that is, it was clear to [Nikita] Khrushchev, which is he tried to reform it, it wasn’t only clear to me. And, the subsequent history of the next whatever it is years – twenty years, twenty-five years – there was one piece of evidence after another that the thing wasn’t working. It wasn’t working because of star wars and [Ronald] Reagan, it wasn’t working because the system didn’t work; so, that’s the first thing. The second thing: throughout the time I was there, there was (sic) talk of coups, and the sort of people named were actually the sort of people Jack’s mentioned, they were the obvious sort of candidates, you know, the usual suspects.

So, there was a piece of intelligence – very secret – in the beginning of 1989 that Marshal [Dmitry] Yazov, the defence minister who did run the coup, had tried to shoot Gorbachev. And, when he was observed casting his vote in the

www.chathamhouse.org 4 Transcript: 20 Years On: Perspectives on the Fall of the Soviet Union election which then took place, he was asked by a western journalist—one of your colleagues—whether he tried to shoot Gorbachev or not, and he said, ‘No.’

So, there was a continual fear – and a perfectly justified fear – that these hard men would do to Gorbachev what they had, after all, done to Khrushchev. It wasn’t… Gorbachev was afraid of it, and we were afraid of it. What we didn’t expect: we didn’t expect two things. We didn’t expect that the coup would fail; and it did fail, and it was those hard men that actually were the immediate cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union, you could say, rather ironic. And, of course, we didn’t expect that it would take place on 18 August; we thought it might take place, but August is the month that nothing happens, everybody goes on holiday, nothing happens.

John Lloyd: Like me!

Sir Rodric Braithwaite: Well, I hadn’t, rather luckily. I don’t know whether he’s in the audience, but my number two said he wanted to go away in August, so I happened to be there, by accident. And I certainly didn’t predict it; the day before it happened, I went off on holiday with my wife to northern Russia, telling the mayor of Cardiff, who was there for lunch that day, that nothing was going to happen. [Laughter] So, the only people who actually predicted the date, as far as I know, Jack, were some analysts in the CIA, who made the perfectly justified deduction that the ‘hard men’ would not allow the signature of the union treaty – which Gorbachev had been negotiating with other republics, other republican leaders – they wouldn’t allow it to take place because it would mark the break up of the Soviet Union, and that was due on 19 August. So, when the CIA said… some bright spark in the CIA said, it will happen on 19 August, of course, as usually happens to intelligent analysts, most people either didn’t hear him or didn’t listen to him. So, I think we were all caught unawares, including Washington, by the actual event.

John Lloyd: The amassed ranks of diplomacy and journalism nearly all didn’t know what was happening, or, at least, didn’t know what was happening in time, which is, rather a large question over Sovietology (sic). Here, after all, was an www.chathamhouse.org 5 Transcript: 20 Years On: Perspectives on the Fall of the Soviet Union extremely well staffed branch of intelligence and of the academy, which failed to see, or seemed to fail to see, that the Soviet Union was on its way out. But, let me ask you, you knew Gorbachev as well as any ambassador, probably more than most...

Jack Matlock: Not more than Rodric.

John Lloyd: Both of you, I was going to put the same question to him. But, what did you make of him as a strategist? I mean you, I guess you admired him – you did admire him because you wrote so in your memoir – but how did you see him as a politician?

Jack Matlock: As a politician, of course, he was riding a tiger once he started to change the system. And that was his problem, he was at first using the party to bring about change, and when he saw he couldn’t do that, he had to use his position in the Communist Party to take it out of power.

And, you know, there is – as Machiavelli wrote – there is probably nothing more dangerous or less likely of success than a prince trying to change the order that he inherits. So, I thought he did a brilliant job of destroying the Communist Party control over the Soviet Union, which was a prerequisite to everything else. And, so, in that sense, I think he went much further than anyone else could or would have gone.

John Lloyd: But much further than he thought he was going to go. After all, he didn’t set out to destroy the party.

Jack Matlock: No, he didn’t. Certainly, when he became general secretary he thought that he could use the party. I think around 1988-89 it was clear that he couldn’t, after the whole Nina Andreyeva affair and whatnot, and [Yegor] Ligachev’s opposition to the things he was doing. And, I would say that I believe that up www.chathamhouse.org 6 Transcript: 20 Years On: Perspectives on the Fall of the Soviet Union until the unification of Germany there was a lot more support for his foreign policy, even among the military, but it was his domestic policy that got him into trouble.

John Lloyd: How did you see him? Did you see him as reckless, as somebody who didn’t quite realize that he was ‘riding a tiger’?

Sir Rodric Braithwaite: Err, well, I think, I don’t think anybody knew what they were doing in those years, and that includes us. And I don’t think, in one sense, he knew what he was doing. He famously said that the idea that there could be a blueprint for change in the Soviet Union is ridiculous. He started a process, of course he didn’t – I think it was actually honourable of him, in a way – he did not set out to destroy the system that had nurtured him, he set out to reform it; perfectly reasonable but, as I was saying, it wasn’t a reformable system, in the end. And, I think he is now regarded by his countrymen as being incompetent and uncourageous – I think both of those are unfair, I think it was a very brave thing to do, to start the process. I think he’d understood the problem, and the process, that there was no other way forward than to open up the country – glasnost – and try, which he wasn’t very good at, to change the institutions; he didn’t manage to change the economy. But, it is inconceivable that any one man could have started the process and carried it right through to the end. It’s a… what do you call those races where you pass a baton? You have to pass a baton...

John Lloyd: A relay.

Sir Rodric Braithwaite: That’s it. So, Yeltsin, [Vladimir] Putin – thank you very much – and whoever follows him. And, I mean, I’ve always believed that it’s a secular process, you have to change a whole culture, you’re dealing with a very deeply routed history, you’re talking at least three generations. And, I think, we were absurdly – I mean, understandably, we were emotionally involved – but absurdly over-optimistic. www.chathamhouse.org 7 Transcript: 20 Years On: Perspectives on the Fall of the Soviet Union

John Lloyd: You were serving a president, President Reagan, who also had a very close – and, again, a very surprisingly close – relationship. He was a man, President Reagan, who had called it the ‘evil empire,’ who kept on saying – I remember Gorbachev telling me during an interview – ‘he kept telling me,’ said Gorbachev, ‘doverjaj, no proverjaj,’ – ‘trust, but verify’. Gorbachev said, ‘If he says that one more time, I’m going to smash him.’ [Laughter] But they were so close...

Jack Matlock: Actually, he explained that he was saying that [Caspar] Wineburger, our defence secretary. [Laughter]

John Lloyd: What were they saying to you? What was (sic) Foggy Bottom and the White House saying to you? Were they alarmed by Gorbachev? Did they think this was great? I mean, President Bush, especially, I think, was quite often rather alarmed by the speed of the collapse.

Jack Matlock: Yes, now, what time are we talking about: the Bush time or the Reagan time?

John Lloyd: The Reagan time, and the Bush time.

Jack Matlock: Yes, well, the Reagan White House, until I came, was predominantly made up by those who advised him that you could not trust or get anything from deals with the Soviet Union, you could only bring pressure to bear on them. George Schultz, the Secretary of State, did not think that was the case, and it was at Schultz’s suggestion that I was sent to the White House. And, I must say, Reagan tended to listen more to me because I was the only person there who really knew the Soviet Union, who had spent time there; and, therefore I was able to bring more support to Schultz.

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But, we were working, in the Reagan administration, with at least the CIA, which thought that Gorbachev was going to be more dangerous than his predecessors. Now, when I say the CIA, I mean the people at the top; Bob [Robert] Gates in particular was careful to tell us there was another opinion and to send them both to the White House; he did not obscure the fact that there were people who thought differently. Now, once Reagan began to deal with Gorbachev, he and Schultz developed their own opinion and they gave not very much attention to the CIA’s analysis, because once they could see that Gorbachev was a different type of leader, then they were willing to go forward. Reagan also, one has to recognize he… one of the things that he felt most strongly was he really wanted to get rid of nuclear weapons; for him, that was a fundamental moral issue, and though he didn’t pay attention to a lot of issues, our relations with the Soviet Union – and particularly negotiations – were central in his focus.

John Lloyd: was still prime minister for most, I think, of your period, though succeeded before you left; how did she feel about it? I mean, she had been influential in the early days – early years – she was a little sidelined, but what was her view?

Sir Rodric Braithwaite: Well, she was sidelined once the Germans and the Americans started to negotiate then there was no role for the British much. But, before that, when Gorbachev came to London in 1984 and they had that famous meeting, the records of the meeting were circulated and we saw them straight away, and anybody who’d ever read the record of a meeting with a Soviet leader, reading those we were completely gobsmacked when we read those things (sic) because he quite clearly was different. And, I think, quite clearly a man you could do business with, he was quite a different kind of leader.

The suspicions that Jack has referred to continued, they continued in the British analytical intelligence community – the CIA, famously, at the beginning of 1989 was predicting that the main threat to America’s security interests for the next twenty years would be the Soviet Union – the British were doing much the same. And, there was an atmosphere inside the CIA… there’s a quote, which I won’t waste your time by reading, when CIA analysts were saying when asked later ‘Why didn’t you see that this country was falling apart?’ They said, ‘Well, it’s not that we didn’t see it, it’s that we couldn’t say www.chathamhouse.org 9 Transcript: 20 Years On: Perspectives on the Fall of the Soviet Union it. We’d have been in real trouble if we had done.’ And, that sounds bad, but actually both capitals – all three capitals – were suffering from one kind of paranoia or another, and we were all exaggerating the problem, and counter- contrary theories were not welcomed in Moscow, London, or Washington.

The thing about Thatcher was that she saw very early on, she saw… I mean, we had a seminar with her in 1980, a meeting about all this stuff and when we said what was going on in the Soviet Union, she said, ‘Well, if it’s like that, it can’t last.’ That was 1980; that was before Gorbachev. So, I think she made a major contribution in a period when the main players – which were Germany and the United States – were not engaging. Once they started to engage, of course, her role diminished.

John Lloyd: Just before we go on out to the audience, let’s look ahead a little to the future, which doesn’t seem to be, I mean, most commentators don’t see a happy future from now on. There’s a book just out by Sir Andrew Wood and Lilia Shevtsova – I think Sir Andrew might be here – called Change or Decay, and it’s pretty clear from reading it – I’ve got about halfway through – it’s pretty clear, unless there is a sudden bout of optimism that takes over, that they think decay is more likely than change. And there’s a piece in Foreign Affairs, the current issue, which is called – even more apocalyptically – ‘The Dying Bear,’ largely because of the demographic crisis which began under Gorbachev, but is now accelerating. It is likely that we will have a President Putin, yet again; do you see – how do you see that? Do you see that he might govern in a different spirit than he did before?

Jack Matlock: I think that is entirely possible. As a matter of fact, his first and second terms – in terms of his relationship with us, at least – were quite different. I think we did not treat him very well during his first term, and that, at least in part – maybe a small part – explains some of the things that happened.

The piece on demographics, by the way, is grossly exaggerated, that you mentioned, a lot of it directly refutable. They reached the depths of their demographic crisis around the year 2000; since then it has actually been improving. Now, maybe not enough to turn things around, but what’s happening in the decrease in population now is proportionally very similar to a number of other countries in Europe. So, I think that that particular piece was

www.chathamhouse.org 10 Transcript: 20 Years On: Perspectives on the Fall of the Soviet Union particularly (sic) contentious. My own feeling – and I, you know, I’ve visited several Russian cities this year, from Vladivostok, Kazan, Moscow, others – I’m really impressed when I see what has happened over the last ten years. Now, one can obviously see there are many political problems, and corruption is an over-riding problem, of course, affecting the economy and everything else. I don’t think we can predict exactly what Putin is going to do, however, and I don’t think it is going to be a straight-line continuation.

John Lloyd: Rodric, what’s your view? I mean, Jack Matlock is sounding cautiously optimistic, at least, he’s got an open mind; how open is yours?

Sir Rodric Braithwaite: Well, we all love to have open minds; I think I’d like to think mine is open too. I mean, I said already, I think the kind of change that Russia, I think, needs is the sort of change that takes place over generations. And, I can quote myself as saying that in May 1992. Three generations, seventy years, okay, we’ve had twenty so far, and, of course, nobody’s ever going to be able to prove me wrong because I shall be good and dead by then. [Laughter]

But, nevertheless, what you can’t do is say it’s in the genes, you know, that they’re genetically autocratic and so on. There are obvious problems about running Russia; I think the fact that it is too big is perhaps the most important one, and the fact that Siberia is a huge place that nobody wants to live in. I mean there are real, objective difficulties. I don’t see why, Jack is right; Russia today is not like it was twenty years ago, and it is certainly not the Soviet Union, and it’s nowhere near Stalin’s Russia. It is a different kind of country, it’s open, it’s changing all the time. Go on the streets of [inaudible].

So, I don’t think it’s mindlessly optimistic to think that over a reasonable period of time – by which I mean seventy years, from now, fifty years – it will change for the better. Now, that’s bad luck on everybody in this room, and it’s bad luck – almost everybody in this room, perhaps [laughter] – and it’s bad luck on the Russians particularly because, you know, they are not going to see it as the ‘promised land,’ it’s like Moses. But I don’t see that that is mindless optimism, there are lots of things going on, there are lots of nasty things going on, and we have a relentless drip-drip in the press, not from you, but from people, about all the awful things that are going on, and they are, but some of the other things, I think, are under-reported.

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John Lloyd: I knew it was our fault!

Sir Rodric Braithwaite: Of course it was. [Laughter]

John Lloyd: Where is your optimism coming from, or rather, what is it based on? Who is it based on? Shevtsova in her book with Andrew Wood says that… she calls herself an anti-systemic liberal, and she’s saying that an anti-systemic liberal doesn’t expect a ‘good tsar’ as she says systemic liberals do, but they realize that you must work from the bottom-up, from society up, build civil society. Do you see that happening? Is that the major motor of change, or would it be a better tsar – a better tsar than in the past – i.e. Mr Putin?

Jack Matlock: Well, I didn’t want you to interpret from what I said that I’m necessarily optimistic; I said that he may be different, may follow different policies. I think, to solve some of the current problems may be, well, will be very difficult, and it’s partly systemic, but also, you know, Russia is so full of contradictions. I’m reminded of George Kennan’s comment that if you’re confronted with contradictory statements about Russia, the safest assumption is that both are correct. [Laughter] And, as far as predictions is (sic) concerned, I don’t know how this is going to work out. I think it will be easy to explain why it was inevitable once it happens. [Laughter]

Sir Rodric Braithwaite: That’s what we’re here for.

John Lloyd: Last question before we go out to the audience, to you, [inaudible], where do you locate the signs of change, the hopes for change?

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Sir Rodric Braithwaite: Well, I think I go back to Mr Gorbachev. I mean, Mr Gorbachev, the basis of his proposition was that ‘this country will not work unless you release the energies and initiatives of the people,’ that’s what glasnost was about. And, I think he was right, I think that Lilia Shevtsova and Andrew [Wood] are right, that the top-down solution has been tried time and again in Russia, and one day it may work, but, on the whole, the record is not good. And, the whole society must be changed, and that can’t be done by decree, it has to be done by the bottom-up. My point is, however, that there is more bottom-up going on now – it may not be nearly enough – than has previously in Russian history. That would be my grounds for optimism.

John Lloyd: That, then, is what the liberals – people like [Yegor] Gaidar and others – tried to create, indeed, what the party did succeed in creating, which was an active middle class. Is it there that change is coming from? That people with property, who want to protect it, who want laws, and who themselves have become more liberal in their views?

Sir Rodric Braithwaite: Up until now, that has proved an over-optimistic assumption, that it’s the people with property who are actually breaking the law, mostly.

John Lloyd: Right, so, over to you.

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