* Madame Mao was reprieved, then, diagnosed with cancer, released. Before she hanged herself at the hospital in 1991, she wrote: ‘Today the revolution’s been stolen by Deng’s revisionist clique … Chairman Mao exterminated Liu Shaoqi, but not Deng, unleashing endless evils … Chairman, your student and fighter is coming to see you!’
* At the same time Deng approved another way to make China richer by reducing the population: in 1980, he enforced a One-Child Policy banning families from having more than one child and forcing an astonishing 108 million women to be sterilized and 324 million to have intrauterine devices installed. But Chinese families wanted sons more than daughters, and they used abortion and infanticide to tip the gender balance, so that by 2009, there were thirty million more boys than girls. By the time the law was abolished in 2016, the Party believed it had reduced the population by 600 million people.
* Deng was just as suspicious of Russian perfidy as Mao, telling the Americans, ‘We believe the Soviets will launch a war.’ In Cambodia, the genocidal Pol Pot, the Chinese proxy who had been groomed by Deng, clashed with the Soviet ally, Vietnam, reflecting traditional nationalist rivalries. In December 1978, when Pol Pot expelled ethnic Vietnamese and probed his neighbours, the Vietnamese drove him back into the jungles, where he survived as an isolated warlord until 1998. Deng decided to teach Vietnam (and the USSR) ‘a lesson’: in February 1979, China attacked Vietnam, but its forces were humiliated. As for Cambodia, the Vietnamese later installed a former Khmer Rouge commander, Hun Sen, who became premier. In 1991, Sihanouk returned as ‘constitutional king’, abdicating in 2004 for his son Norodom Sihamoni; but Hun Sen’s harsh autocracy would endure for almost forty years. In 2022, Hun declared that his successor was to be his son.
* Its insurgents were themselves divided between tribal allegiances and superpower backers: the mainly Matabele ZAPU led by Joshua Nkomo was backed by Russia and Cuba; the ZANU – overwhelmingly Shona – led by Robert Mugabe, was backed by China. In 1980, Rhodesia became independent under a British-negotiated deal. Mugabe was elected prime minister and, aided by his secret-police chief Emmerson Mnangagwa, slaughtered 30,000 Nbedeles in massacres known as the Gukurahundi between 1983 and 1987. The killings won Mnangagwa the nickname Ngwena – Crocodile – and established Mugabe’s dictatorship, which ruinously endured until his overthrow in 2017. His successor was the Crocodile.
* Modern spies, part old-fashioned killers, part covert bureaucrats, symbolized the mystical power of surveillance and violence controlled by the modern bureaucratic states, celebrated in the genre of spy thrillers and movies. The British version was James Bond, a debonair and sadistic killer-seducer, created by a former British banking scion and security agent, Ian Fleming, whose creation dovetailed with his own aristocratic and sado-masochistic tastes. The most successful James Bond movie, Thunderball, released in 1965, appeared at the height of the Cold War.
* The Kurds’ leader was Mustafa Barzani, the latest of the dynasty to lead their struggle. The Barzanis were Sufi sheikhs and landowners from Sulaymaniyah (Iraq). After the disappointed promise of an independent Kurdistan, Sheikh Mahmud Barzani rebelled against the British and Hashemites in Iraq and in 1923 declared himself king of Kurdistan. He was captured in 1932, and the struggle was continued by young kinsmen, Sheikh Ahmed and his brother Mustafa. During the Second World War, Barzani was backed by Stalin to carve a Kurdish republic out of western Iran, but one of the terms of Yalta was Soviet withdrawal. The republic collapsed and Barzani escaped to the Soviet Union, returning to Iraq after the fall of the monarchy. In 1971, Saddam tried to kill him, so now aged seventy he launched a new insurgency. Once again, it looked as if Kurdistan was about to be born.
* One of these, a Pashtun mullah named Jalaluddin Haqqani, created a terrorist dynasty that would play a special role over the next forty years. Haqqani was the son of a chieftain. He had studied at the Haqqania seminary in Pakistan in the 1960s, funded by the ISI, and on his return adopted the named Haqqani.
* His son, Muhammad bin Salman – future ruler of Arabia – was born in 1985 in the middle of this campaign.
* But there was a dark side to Reagan’s sunlit America: in 1981, doctors started to treat a cluster of pneumonia and skin cancer cases among gay men and drug users. Initially fear and ignorance led to wild rumours about a ‘Gay Plague’, but doctors soon realized they were facing a new disease, AIDS, passed mainly by unprotected sex, particularly anal, by contaminated syringes and also from mother to child in pregnancy. In the next forty years, it killed thirty-six million people. Initially AIDS cut a swathe through the US and European gay communities, defining the 1980s as a time of desperate suffering. In southern Africa, it spread through the entire population, exacerbated by a stigma against using condoms, and even presidents encouraged irresponsible conspiracy theories and false cures that hugely increased the death tolclass="underline" over fifteen million Africans died. Although preventative education is lowering infection rates and patients now usually survive thanks to retroviral drugs, in 2011 there were 23 million people living with AIDS in Africa, where each year 1.2 million die and 1.8 million are infected. Those rates are now improving.
* Sinatra, an old friend, now a Republican, sang at his Inaugural Gala. It was now too that the FBI finally broke the power of the Mafia’s Five Families, using new legislation, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, to link the bosses of the criminal conspiracies to their soldiers. The godfathers were sentenced to over 100 years in prison.
* After the interview by this author, Mrs Thatcher decided that the interview had been ‘cheeky’ and resolved to do no more schoolboy interviews.
* When this author visited Albania, the then premier Sali Berisha, who lived in Shehu’s old house in the Block, showed him the room where Shehu was shot. ‘We still don’t know,’ he said, ‘exactly what happened.’ Soon afterwards, on 11 April 1985, Hoxha died, succeeded by a chosen disciple. His original patron and later rival Marshal Tito had died in 1980 aged eighty-seven. Even in eastern Europe the guard was changing.
ACT TWENTY-TWO
4.4 BILLION
Yeltsins and Xis, Nehruvians and Assads, Bin Ladens, Kims and Obamas
THE IDIOT AND THE CANNON: GORBACHEV, DENG AND THE UNIPOWER
As hundreds of thousands were endangered and finally evacuated from the environs of Chernobyl, Gorbachev tried to suppress the news, only announcing it almost a month later. The costs placed more pressure on the economy and on Gorbachev, who now pivoted to plan his own radical explosion. His first reforms to free the economy from Party supervision did not immediately solve his problems. In January 1987, going further than Andropov, he took an astonishing decision that was almost romantically delusionaclass="underline" he would not only reform the economy but set up a sort of one-party demokratizatsiya through a real election to produce a Congress of 2,250 people’s deputies that would outrank the Politburo and government. He was misunderstanding Lenin, who always asked, ‘Who controls whom?’ Lenin had commandeered, then neutered, the Soviets in order to concentrate awesome power in his own hands. Gorbachev was trying to withdraw from the empire, and reform the economy simultaneously with political liberalization, a move bound to stimulate nationalism among the many peoples in the USSR, and political disintegration in Moscow. To try all three was so ambitious as to be either naive or hubristic, almost suicidal.