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Article Excerpt
Ronald Reagan's rhetoric and policies toward the Soviet Union in his first administration delayed the reconfiguration of the Soviet outlook toward the Cold War that came to define the Gorbachev era. His words and deeds gave credence to hard-liners within the Kremlin at the expense of voices that would reduce nuclear arsenals and retard the tempo of ideological competition. This process played out in three stages: the cautious optimism with which Soviet leaders and advisors foresaw the prospect of a Reagan presidency in the election year of 1980; the time of frustration from 1981 to 1982; and the period of intense fear from 1983 to 1984.
Recent evidence, drawn from oral history projects, memoir literature, and newly declassified correspondence and minutes of selected Politburo meetings, reveals that Soviet leaders wanted to negotiate with the new American president. This evidence coincides with the release of Reagan's diaries and his correspondence with Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, in which one finds the fiercely anticommunist American president determined from the very start to negotiate with his adversaries in the hope of transcending the Cold War.
On the American side, political allegiances have both shaped and limited our understanding of this crucial period in time. Especially in the post-9/11 era, Republicans are enamored with what they see as the legacy of Reagan's foreign policy (Arquilla 2006). They contend that Reagan's bold and decisive leadership forced the Soviet Union to its knees and compelled it to negotiate. Some go so far as to say that Reagan's rhetoric and policies hastened the Soviet Union's collapse. Reagan's "talk of democracy and good versus-evil," asserts Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense during George W. Bush's first administration, "[was] widely criticized, even ridiculed, as unsophisticated and destabilizing. But it's now widely understood as having contributed importantly to the greatest victory in world history: the collapse of Soviet communism and the liberation of the peoples of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe without a war" (Leffler 2005, 410). Democrats, for their part, tend to avoid having to address the end of the Cold War. If pressed, they shift the conversation to perestroika and glasnost and to Gorbachev's unilateral reduction of Soviet troop levels, his withdrawal from Afghanistan, and his willingness to allow for the relatively peaceful disintegration of the Eastern bloc.
U.S. and British scholars have tended to reflect this political divide. Aptly titled works such as Paul Kengor's The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (2006), Peter Schweizer's Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph over Communism (2002), and John Lewis Gaddis's recent Cold War: A New History (2005) praise Reagan as a visionary who helped foster the peaceful withering away of communism--just as George Kennan had predicted would one day occur. These interpretations mean to counter earlier works such as Raymond Garthoff's The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (1994), which emphasizes the bureaucratic disarray within the Reagan White House as well as the conflicted impulses on the part of Reagan himself, and Edmund Morris's unconventional "official" biography, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (2000), which reduces Reagan to an intellectual blank slate. Thus far, memoirs of policy makers from this Republican administration have--with the exception of excellent contributions by George Shultz (1993) and Jack Matlock (2004)--offered more in the way of political bromides than genuine insights.
By contrast, the literature that has emerged from the former Soviet Union is less ideologically charged. The Soviet Union has collapsed, and communism has, for all intents and purposes, disappeared. Its stewards in the waning days of the Soviet Union therefore have no ideological legatees to protect. Scholars of history and international relations should take these figures seriously. Their testimony, along with the limited amount of material from the time that has been made public, casts doubt on the narrative Reagan once crafted to explain the confrontation that characterized his first administration. "So, once again," he wrote in his memoirs, following the death of General Secretary Chernenko in March 1985, "there was a new man in the Kremlin. 'How am I supposed to get anyplace with the Russians,' I asked Nancy, 'if they keep dying on me?'" (1990, 611). Indeed, leaders and key advisors within the Kremlin wanted to get someplace with the Americans, just as Reagan wanted to get someplace with them, but Reagan's harsh rhetoric and inconsistent policies thwarted their efforts as well as his own.
Cautious Optimism
The narrative of how the Soviets responded to Ronald Reagan begins in the last year of Jimmy Carter's single term. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979, President Carter rang in a cold new year. He withdrew from Senate consideration the SALT II Treaty to curb the arms race; he imposed an embargo on U.S. grain exports to the Soviet Union; he vowed to boycott the Summer Olympics in Moscow if the Soviets did not withdraw from Afghanistan within a month; and he sent legislation to Capitol Hill outlining the terms of a huge military buildup. By the start of the 1980 presidential campaign, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, which seemed to have improved since the ominous days of the Cuban missile crisis, culminating in the signing of the historic 1975 Helsinki Accords, had reached a new low. From the perspective of both Democrats and Republicans, the Cold War had shifted from detente to outright confrontation.
For their part, Soviet leaders were baffled by the actions of Carter's Democratic administration and, increasingly so, by the ideological contours of American politics. In his 2005 book The Global Cold War, Odd Arne Westad emphasizes the role of ideology in the globalization of the Cold War, which reached new heights in the 1970s. "[I]deologies inherent in their politics," he writes, "impelled the United States and the Soviet Union to intervene in the Third World following the collapse of European colonial empires. The United States espoused an ideology of liberty, while the Soviet Union purported to advocate social justice" (2006, 1-7). Despite these lines of distinctions, postwar American politics developed independent of global left and right. Labor unions that stood to gain perhaps the least from unrestrained capitalism provided some of the most strident anticommunist rhetoric. The Democratic Party, which pursued social justice through the framework of the New Deal state, nominated Harry Truman and John E Kennedy-arguably the two most hawkish Cold War presidents before 1980. Indeed, throughout the 1970s, much of the clamor against detente originated from neoconservative Democrats such as Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the hard-liner from Washington who spoke out fervently against Soviet treatment of Jewish and Pentecostal dissidents, and whose amendment to the trade bill of 1974 linked internal reforms within the Soviet Union to its broader relationship with the United States.
As the 1980 campaign got under way, Soviets pinned their hopes on the American right. Unlike Democrats, Republican candidates inveighed against the Soviet Union during political campaigns but seemed to moderate their stance once in office. Soviet leaders remembered how Richard Nixon had surprised them by implementing detente after he had made a career of Red-baiting his domestic opponents and vowing to get tough with the Soviet Union. Like that of Nixon, writes longtime Soviet ambassador the United States Anatoly Dobrynin, "Jimmy Carter's presidency [had] also [been] a surprise to Moscow but an unpleasant one. If we had misread him at the beginning, so had the voters of the United States." Carter had entered office vowing to provide more honest and ethical governance, to promote human rights, and to pursue further arms limitations with the Soviet Union. He had cast himself in the American mind as the anti-Nixon firmly committed to relieving the pain of Vietnam and Watergate. He soon became to the Soviets the anti-Nixon who repudiated detente and preached American morals. Brezhnev had taken a personal liking to Carter at Vienna in 1979, placing his arm on the American president's shoulder as he descended the steps from their summit and then embracing him warmly (Leffler 2007, 317), but by the latter's "reelection campaign Moscow so distrusted Carter that it could not bring itself to support him even against Ronald Reagan" (Dobrynin 1995, 455).
Indeed, the Soviet conception of Carter was the complete opposite of how most Americans regarded their president in 1980. While a majority of Americans saw Carter as weak and indecisive, Soviets considered him to be under the spell of his hawkish national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. They found Carter committed to promoting American ideals even at the expense of international stability. They feared that America's first "born-again" president was preparing for war, calling attention to a leaked White House plan for a "new nuclear strategy" in 1980 to survive a massive nuclear exchange and to provide for the recovery of the U.S. economy afterward. "Press reports on these directives, which were never officially made public," Dobrynin writes, "described them as part of the campaign of nuclear deterrence to demonstrate to the Soviet Union that the United States was capable of enduring a protracted nuclear conflict. Special command exercises had been conducted in simulated wartime conditions with President Carter participating" (1995, 456). The Soviet view of Carter was, in short, that he was prepared for a showdown, and that he could not resist the opportunity to exploit Soviet weakness for his own moralistic gains. How else could he have allowed what had seemed to them an act of desperation to restore communist rule in Afghanistan spiral into a new cycle of Cold War tensions?
In contrast, the Soviet view of Ronald Reagan was one partly of resignation. Despite his long pattern of anticommunist statements, the former actor and governor of California, like Nixon, might turn out to be someone with whom Soviets could do business. Alexandr Bessmertnykh, who served as counsel in the Soviet Embassy in the United States and, briefly, as foreign minister during the 1991 coup, recalls that the Soviets had no illusions about Reagan: "We believed we...
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