By bringing in a new foreign-policy team early on, consisting of Eduard Shevardnadze as foreign minister, Cherniaev as main foreign policy adviser, Anatolii Dobrynin as head of the International Department of the Central Committee, and Vadim Medvedev in charge of the Socialist Countries Department ofthat body, Gorbachev opened the way forboth newthinking onforeign policy and new behaviour. From the outset Aleksandr Yakovlev was also an influential adviser and from 1988 he was the overseer of international affairs within the Central Committee. While Gorbachev pursued what George Bres- lauer has characterised as a 'concessionary foreign policy', the Soviet Union was not forced into this.[37] It was, rather, a price that a minority of the Soviet elite - including, however, the principal power-holder - was prepared to pay for what they (perhaps, in retrospect, naively) believed would be a more peaceful and self-consciously interdependent world. The policy was intimately bound up with the changes that the same people wished to make at home. Liberalisation, followed by democratisation, within the country was linked to abandoning imperial pretensions abroad. Ronald Reagan, contrary to the belief of most of the Soviet experts on American politics, turned out to be a valuable partner for Gorbachev in international negotiations. His anti-Communist credentials were sufficiently strong to offer him protection at home, and although there were important inter-agency tensions within the American administration,
Reagan believed that change within the Soviet Union (and of Soviet international conduct) was possible, and, in the words of his ambassador to Moscow, 'always came down ultimately in support of dialogue'.[38]
The coming to power of Gorbachev led to the toppling of ideological orthodoxy in Soviet thinking on international affairs even more quickly than on the economy and the political system. The concept of 'reasonable sufficiency' in military expenditure (rather than fully matching the potential adversary), the idea that 'all-human values' had supremacy over class values and that there were universal interests which took precedence over those of any one country led to an emphasis on interdependence that marked a qualitative step forward from the old Soviet doctrine of'peaceful coexistence'. International relations were no longer seen as a zero-sum game, a deadly struggle between socialism and capitalism, but rather an arena where, through co-operation, all countries could benefit.[39]
The first fruits of the new co-operation were to be seen in arms reduction agreements. There were summit meetings between Gorbachev and Reagan at Geneva (1985), Reykjavik (1986), Washington (1987) and Moscow (1988). The Reykjavik meeting came close to outlawing a wide range of nuclear weapons, but ultimately foundered on disagreement over whether work on SDI should or should not be confined to the laboratory. Although both leaders left that meeting greatly disappointed, it did not sour the Gorbachev-Reagan relationship. The Washington summit in December 1987 ended by eliminating a whole category of nuclear weapons, both Soviet SS-20s and the American cruise and Pershing missiles. This 'zero option' had been Reagan's policy since 1981, and so he could take some pride in the outcome. However, hardline Washington critics, as well as hard-line Moscow ones, were upset, for the former had believed that no Soviet leader would dare admit that installing the SS-20s had been a mistake, and they had counted on the continued presence of American medium-range missiles in Europe.
The improvement in East-West relations was further enhanced by the Soviet Union's decision to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. Gorbachev had been looking for an exit strategy from the beginning of his General
Secretaryship but he had to take account of the reluctance of the Soviet military to depart in a manner which looked like a defeat. He wished, therefore, to encourage reconciliation among the warring parties in Afghanistan and sought American help in doing so. In April 1987 Gorbachev told American Secretary of State George Shultz that the Soviet Union wanted to get out of Afghanistan but the United States was not doing anything to make it easier.[40]In July of the same year Gorbachev stated in a newspaper interview that 'in principle, Soviet troop withdrawal from Afghanistan has been decided upon'.[41]Eduard Shevardnadze repeated the request for American help in September 1987, in order that 'a reactionary fundamentalist Islamic regime' would not take power in Afghanistan. He made it clear, however, that the Soviet Union was committed to withdrawal, in any event.[42] It was April 1988 before an agreement on the Soviet army's withdrawal was actually signed. Soviet troops began leaving in substantial numbers the following month and the process was completed by the agreed date of 15 February 1989. By that time President Reagan had already made his celebrated visit to Moscow. Asked by a reporter inside the grounds of the Kremlin what had happened to the 'evil empire', the term Reagan had applied to the Soviet Union in 1983, the American president responded: 'I was talking about another time, another era.'[43]
Appropriately, since the Cold War had begun with the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, it ended with the Central and East European countries achieving independent statehood. The key shift of Soviet policy which facilitated this occurred, along with so much else of immense future significance, in the summer of 1988. In his major speech to the Nineteenth Conference of the CPSU on 28 June, Gorbachev followed a passage in which he had been speaking about the Communist countries of Eastern Europe with these words:
The concept of freedom of choice holds a key place in the new thinking. We are convinced of the universality of this principle in international relations at a time when the most important general problem has become the very survival of civilisation . . . That is why the policy of force [politika sily] in all its forms and manifestations has become historically obsolete.[44]
Gorbachev could scarcely have been more explicit in opposing military intervention as a policy, even though up until then Western governments had taken it for granted that, in the last resort, the Soviet Union would use force of arms to maintain Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Gorbachev expressed similar sentiments to those in his party conference speech in his address to the United Nations in December 1988, although they were given less publicity than the 'hard news' of substantial Soviet troop withdrawals from Eastern Europe.[45]
In 1989 the Central and East Europeans took Gorbachev at his word. One after another the countries of the region rejected their ruling parties and the Moscow connection and became independent and non-Communist. Except in Romania, where the deposed president, Nicolae Ceau§escu was executed by firing squad, the 'revolutions', if they can be called that, were peaceful. Soviet troops remained in their barracks and not a shot was fired in Eastern Europe by a Russian. The contrast with Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968 could not have been more stark.[46] The final piece of the jigsaw fell into place with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. A summit meeting between Gorbachev and the new American President George Bush in December 1989 in Malta was the first time a Soviet and American top leader gave a joint press conference at the end of it and treated each other as partners. The Soviet Foreign Ministry's adroit press spokesman, Gennadii Gerasimov, was able to announce: 'We buried the Cold War at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.'[47]
37
On Gorbachev's way ofjustifying his change of Soviet foreign policy, see George W Bres- lauer,
38
Jack F. Matlock, Jr.,
39
Robert D. English,
40
GeorgeP. Shultz,
42
43 Don Oberdorfer,
45
Pavel Palazchenko (citing George Shultz),
46
For an excellent study of the events of that year, see Jacques Levesque,
47
Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott,