Events continued to confirm my analysis. In March the Labour Government’s Defence White Paper announced sharp cuts in the defence budget, £4,700 million over the next ten years. In the same month Alexander Shelepin, previously head of the KGB and now in charge of the Soviet Union’s ‘trade unions’, arrived in Britain as a guest of the TUC. The following month saw the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese communists amid scenes of chaos, adding to America’s woes. Cuban ‘advisers’ were beginning to arrive to support the communist MPLA faction in Angola. It was, however, what I heard and read about the preparations for the Helsinki Summit that triggered my decision to speak.
The idea for Helsinki had come from the Soviets, was warmly welcomed by Chancellor Brandt’s West Germany as a contribution to Ostpolitik, and was then accepted on to the Nixon Administration’s agenda. The West wanted the Soviets to enter into talks to reduce their military superiority in Europe — Mutual Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) — and to respect the human rights of their subject peoples. But what did the Soviets want? This was by far the most interesting question, since even if, as the sceptics suggested, they would not honour their agreements anyway, they still would not have taken this trouble unless something important for them would result. Respectability could be the only answer. If the Soviet Union and its satellites — particularly the more potentially fragile regimes in Eastern Europe — could receive the international seal of approval they would feel more secure.
But did we want them to feel more secure? Arguably, one of the most exploitable weaknesses of totalitarian dictatorships is the paranoid insecurity which flows from the lack of consent to the regime itself and which results in inefficiency and even paralysis of decision-taking. If the Soviets felt more secure, if their new-found respectability gave them greater access to credit and technology, if they were treated with tolerant respect rather than suspicious hostility, how would they use these advantages?
That led, of course, to the further question: what was the fundamental impulse of the Soviet Union? If the Soviet leaders were reasonable people, a little hidebound perhaps but open to persuasion, not so very different from the political elites of our countries, the lessening of tension with the West would indeed lead to a more peaceful and stable world. The trouble was that no one with real knowledge of the Soviet system believed that this was so. That system was founded upon an ideology which moulded every person and institution within it according to techniques of varying sophistication and crudity. The evidence for this was the ruthlessness with which it dealt with the tiny minority who dared to challenge it. The fate of the dissidents was not just something to evoke Western compassion or outrage: it was a statement about the nature and objectives of the system which regarded them as such a threat to its existence.
But it was not necessary to listen to Alexander Solzhenitsyn to learn the truth about the Soviet Union — though, as I shall describe, his words had a powerful effect on me. One need only turn to the leaden prose of Pravda to establish how the Soviet leaders perceived détente and the Helsinki initiative which flowed from it:
Peaceful coexistence does not signify the end of the struggle between the two world social systems. The struggle will continue… until the complete and final victory of communism on a world scale. [Pravda, 22 August 1973.]
In other words, there would be no letting-up in the promotion of Soviet power and communist revolution worldwide. If such statements were a true reflection of Soviet intentions — and there was a great deal of evidence to show that they were — any weakening of external pressure on the Soviets would simply result in their having more resources and opportunities to ‘bury us’.
If I was to challenge the accepted wisdom on these matters I needed expert help. But most of the experts had jumped aboard the Sovietology gravy train which ran on official patronage, conferences with ‘approved’ Soviet academics, visa journalism and a large dose of professional complacency. I had, however, through John O’Sullivan of the Daily Telegraph, heard about Robert Conquest, a British historian and fearless critic of the USSR. I asked him to help me and together we wrote the speech which I delivered on Saturday 26 July 1975 in Chelsea. The occasion itself was only arranged a few days in advance. I did not speak to Reggie Maudling or anyone else in the Shadow Cabinet about it beforehand, because I knew that all I would receive were obstruction and warnings, which would doubtless be leaked afterwards — particularly if things went wrong.
I began by setting the large military imbalance between the West and the Soviet Union against the background of the retreat of Western power. I drew particular attention to the Soviet naval build-up, describing the Soviet navy as a global force with more nuclear submarines than the rest of the world’s navies put together and more surface ships than could possibly be needed to protect the USSR’s coast and merchant shipping. I argued that nothing was more important to our security than the American commitment to Europe, adding that an isolationist Britain would encourage an isolationist America.
I then dealt with the imminent Helsinki Summit. I did not attack détente directly, indeed I called for a ‘real’ détente. But I quoted Leonid Brezhnev speaking in June 1972 to illustrate the Soviets’ true intentions. Brezhnev had affirmed that peaceful coexistence ‘in no way implies the possibility of relaxing the ideological struggle. On the contrary we must be prepared for this struggle to be intensified and become an even sharper form of confrontation between the systems.’
I also drew attention to the importance of human rights as a further measure of the nature of the regime with which we were dealing:
When the Soviet leaders gaol a writer, or a priest, or a doctor or a worker for the crime of speaking freely, it is not only for humanitarian reasons that we should be concerned. For these acts reveal a country that is afraid of truth and liberty; it dare not allow its people to enjoy the freedoms we take for granted, and a nation that denies those freedoms to its own people will have few scruples in denying them to others.
Human rights would, we already knew, be the subject of far reaching verbal undertakings in the so-called ‘Basket Three’ of the Helsinki package — ‘Cooperation in humanitarian and other fields’. But I placed no trust in the Soviets’ good faith: indeed, since their whole system depended upon repression, it was difficult to see how they could comply. I suspected that for many of those present at Helsinki — and not just on the communist side — the undertakings about human rights would be regarded as uplifting rhetoric rather than clear conditions to be rigorously monitored. So I noted:
We must work for a real relaxation of tension, but in our negotiations with the Eastern bloc we must not accept words or gestures as a substitute for genuine détente. No flood of words emanating from a summit conference will mean anything unless it is accompanied by some positive action by which the Soviet leaders show that their ingrained attitudes are really beginning to change.