trotsky. he discovered america in the year 2004. ever since then he has been delving in the records held by the hoover institution. all of their research that robert service has done is done in the archives. he took part in the annual hoover institution totalitarian regimes directed by hoover fellow gregory. the scholarly audience presentations on the keynote events of the workshop program. robert service plan now join us on "the end of the cold war." [applause] c thank you very much mark for that very generous introduction. what i want to talk about today is the subject of my new book, which is about a war that never became a war. it's about the cold war rather than a hot war. although it was a cold war in a sense that there was a threat that military conflict throughout its existence, it was a single non-war, the third world war which could have a liberated human and animal life on the entire planet all around the earth. it really was a truly dangerous phenomenon, the cold war. there have been many cold wars in history. the british and the french were in cold war most of the centuries back to the norman conquest. they had many hot wars with each other but the cold war, the war that we know as the cold war, that was the most dangerous war of all and thank god it never became. a hot war. there were wars between the principle allies of the principle agents of the cold war, mainly the soviet union and the united states of america. there were wars in many states of africa between allies on one side and allies on the other side of america and the ussr never went to war with each other. even though it came very close to that at times, for example in 1962 and again in 1983. the accounts at the end of the cold war tend to be one-sided, tend to concentrate either predominantly on the american side or predominantly on the soviet side and the reason i thought it was worth writing a new book about the end of the cold war was that it seemed to me that very few people had looked at the end of the cold war as a two-sided process, as a bilateral process and looked properly at the interaction between the two superpowers. that's extremely important because the cold war didn't end with a peace treaty because there was no hot war. it didn't and in the wake that wars normally and. as the cold war was going to end as a cold war it was always going to and with a fundamental process of interaction, and so i concentrated on looking at a number of materials principally here. i did look at materials in moscow. we do have some very good gorbachev administration materials in oxford. there are some marvelous materials in simi valley and the reagan presidential library but above all it was the materials inside the institution over there, the hoover institution archives that i used more than anything else and they are so rich in showing us, to look at the end of the cold war, this very very dangerous period and world history not just through memoirs because as we know politicians write memoirs so as to look good to posterity and anyway there are bound to be somewhat one-sided. interviews are very very helpful i did have a disastrous interview with mikail gorbachev in the mid-90s before even thought of this book and i remember him saying at a point in the conversation, what are you interested in and i said well i'm writing a lacquer feel lenin at the moment and he said, very interesting and then he quickly cut the conversation short because to him soviet ideology and particularly the figure of lenin remained it remains a sensitive topic. i have to say i got much more out of secretary shultz in my interviews with him over the years. he didn't have the same sensitivity to marxism and leninism that gorbachev did. it's possible here to look at diaries from the ministry of foreign affairs, the soviet ministry of foreign affairs, quite extraordinary diaries by aides to foreign minister -- particularly a man named stephanos malabo's and the diaries of the deputy minister in the soviet administration but also the party defense official the tally could tie f. two the captain mats and copies of discussions that the military industrial complex had brought the years of the late 1980s. if you add those materials to the materials of the american side we can now have marvelous access to the papers of ronald reagan to some extent george shultz bill casey and then we can get a way forward to understand how this terrible threat of a third world war was avoided by that particular generation of leaders and i picked out for leaders as being cardinal figures in the process of ending the cold war. on the american side ronald reagan and george shultz. on the soviet side because gorbachev and his foreign minister shevardnadze and. one of the questions that one has to ask about the process of ending the cold war is what was it that made the ussr jump? why did they resist western pressure particularly the american pressure for so many years in the 14th, 15, 60s and 70s and yet they started to make massive concessions in the second half of the 1980s. what i found was contrary to what mikail gorbachev bikes to suggest. the change of attitude to the problems of the soviet internal crisis did not occur only when he came to power in 1985. the materials showed the politburo repeatedly looked at the fundamental economic, social, religious and indeed imperial problems with relation to eastern europe that it confronted, problems that it couldn't afford to solve than the old way of as the soviet economy was going through the plughole. it was draining away resources particularly after the invasion of afghanistan at the end of 1979. so repeatedly in the first half of the 1980s the politburo was looking at matters that it had edged away from an earlier decades. but what it did was look at the symptoms. didn't face up to the possible realistic options or the cure so it had a crisis on its hands. it knew things were very very bad but it turned its face away from options that might have led it to a realistic internal cure to all of those problems. now if you look at the national history of recent years, the french claimed to have spotted gorbachev early. the british repeatedly make the same claim. the canadians have a very good case for being the first to predict that if gorbachev came to power he would be the one who would make the big transformation. it doesn't really matter who spotted him first. perhaps margaret thatcher have the most influence in recommending gorbachev to ronald reagan but a number of countries new that this was a man who was waiting in the wings and was an important man to befriend and to enable. the crucial electorate go of this great changer of soviet history was the politburo itself and it was the politburo that on balance decided after half a decade of crisis in the early 1980s to make gorbachev the general secretary and then the reforms began and then the process of fundamental reform began under his general secretaryship which began in march 1985. so the second question to answer is why did he get away with it? my answer to this is partly that the problems had piled up so vividly that practically everyone in the politburo knew that something drastic had to be done. it wasn't just this magician in the kremlin, mikail gorbachev who alone could sense the movement of history. the entire politburo was becoming demoralized. he got away with this program really in foreign policy i think it's fair to say the documents do suggest that he got away with what he wanted to do in foreign and security policy as late as 1989. there was practically no dispute in the politburo about the general orientation towards a rapproachment with america. he wasn't dragging the politburo by its head of hair. the politburo went along with him. they went along with him because they confidently said that he was a communist believer, that he would conserve communist rule it so happened that he destroyed the ussr in and but that wasn't how he presented himself or was thought of in their early years of his rule. .. >> for some of them it was a mocial matter but for most of economic matter. the ussr is looking more and more dead on its feet. something drastic needs to be done. to politburo went forward with this change for advance reasons. one of the cardinal features of the negotiations between the americans and the soviets was that strategic defense initiative. we can now see if we look at the party defense department discussions, but a lot of soviet officials thought that it was a sham. actually, a lot of american officials even inside the reagan administration thought that it would never work. but they tended to endorse the strategic defense initiative because it did seem to scare the soviets. and it did seem to be provoking fundamental change in attitudes to international negotiations. this soviets most of them, among those people didn't really believe that the strategic defense initiative would work. thought what that he would build a much cheaper version of it and not rack the soviet economy, he literally defined it would wreck the soviet economy. but the point is that the soviet leadership couldn't take a risk if they thought that the fbi was a sham. they couldn't take the risk of acting on the basis that it was not going to work. it was always a possibility, however, outlandish that it would work. an from that point of view, the reagan administration really did place an additional, crucial pressure on the soviet union. most of the big, public institutions went along with the reconciliation of america for the reasons that are just described. and this was really quite striking to me that that included the general start. when there are problems with the arms negotiations, the general staff is octave, he handled them really brilliantly. he nursed them along, he made the chief of the general staffing to his own military advisor. he did a lot of things to nurse them along. but even the general staff recognized that if the ussr was beginning to remain a world military power, there had to be a change in the soviet economy that had to mean also that confessions had to be made from the old principle what the general staff wants, it has to get. even the general staff was less objective than it might have been. he got into problems when eastern europe broke away in 1989, and 1990. it was then that elements in the public bureau and ruling elite started to question whether the reconciliation with america was really worth continuing with. and one does have to say that the records show that he retreated into a kind of sofa government. he took decisions on german reunification in the summer of 1990, mainly on the basis of discussions with his own close aids and involved rather than ventilating in advance what he was going to agree with how much coal, regarding german reunification, and germany's future, nato membership. so things went well for him because he had a good start. he was wished well by the public bureau, and when he ran into difficulties, he was acor from weak ruler. he made lots of errors, his management was economy was catastrophic. the ruin nation of the soviet economy was dramatic. i remember going to moscow in 1990 into a gigantic dairy supermarket where nothing was sold but butter, milk, yogurt and associated products. there were about 20 dairy assistance in that supermarket, and there was absolutely no milk. not a single belittle bottle, or can or tub of milk in the supermarket it was an absolutely catastrophic period of management of the economy. but on the side of international relations, he got his way right, right towards the end. of the soviet union's entire existence. now i said that i wanted to focus on interaction. as a much as possible. where do americans come into, into all of the this? >> well the strategic defense initiative did make a difference. what also made a difference was a succession of american presidents have maintained more or less in its entirety the technological transfer embargo on the ussr. this didn't have an a immediate impact. but it had an impact that meant that the soviet union was cut off from really new technological innovations that were then spreading through the western economies. the i.t. revolution more or less left the ussr gasping, and the only way that the ussr could have acquired this new technology was to steal it. through industrial espionage. so that the ussr was left gasping by the embargo, and then in addition to that along comes reagan. he certainly sells some grain. but he won't sell them apple computers. he won't sell them microsoft. and the -- the leadership recognizes that it is being left behind, and it is being called by secretary schultz you are being left behind. you're a background power now. he's really -- he's really direct with them in negotiations with him and don't you realize that you're being left in the economic dust bin of history? the american demands are tied not just to the need for disarmorment. but also to the demands for disengagement from military intervention in africa. disengage from the the alliance with cuba, and probably the most important demand was for the internal reform of the ussr. reagan administration was very, very firm about this. that it had to have a reliable partner in these negotiations, and a totaltarian system that one state was even to some intent on him. that wouldn't make for reliable negotiations. so time and again the debate was put on the hook to the fish. the big fish. if you want it to ease your economic problems, you have to do something about the internal, political situation in the ussr, and there's no confessions on the americans from the american side on this. so the americans were very, very crucial in moving this process forward. there were crucial in another way that they would limit their economic assistance. this didn't crop up too often in the negotiations when reagan would not par. it cropped up often under george bush. and bush and his secretary of state baker were frequently asked by the soviet's side to bail out the soviet economy, and they reare fused baker was direct with him and with the fact that until they reformed their economy, this would be money wasted which indeed i think personally, i think it wouldn't have been wasted. he really did know how to waste money. it was a great tiring, a great political figure in history. he reformed the ussr. he destroyed the ussr. in the process of reforming it in a economic manager he was quite appallingly inept. european leaders didn't help the process as long as as they might have done. having welcomed accession then started to regard under the dangerous enemy. it was only in the middle of 1987 that thatcher had any time for garbatroff at all. in the early period between america and ussr, the preeminent leadership was in washington. this was very striking to me when looking at the french records and the to the extent that they played a cardinal role, it was mainly as now can see because they were being very closely with washington. about practically all of the steps that they took in 1989 and 1990 towards german reyou rereunification so europes have intended to overplay their role when they vote their memoirs. alas generously opening their archives as the americans are over here. now, george bush was very slow to continue the front policy line of ronald reagan. he engaged in what the soviets dubbed a pouser appall which was a euphemism for the reinception of a very frosty relations between what washington and moscow in the first half of 1989. but once it became clear that he was willing to have the independence of east european states, and even decommunization, then george bush changed his stance. sharpened a bit and basically became a reaganite, and the summit of december 1989, he pushed a line that ronald reagan would have pushed if he had still been president. now, you have therefore, the -- the soviet leadership responding to pressure. responding to its own internal crisis. you have the americans piling on the pressure, continuing to pile on the pressure. but making friendly enough gestures for reconciliation to take place. the interaction, however, was very, very far from being a smooth process. gorbachev was insisted in the way that he made announcements without prior consultation with reagan. he, in the first year or two, delighted in embarrassing reagan. in the january 1986 declaration on nuclear disarmorment he promised global nuclear disarmorment by total disarmorment around the world by the year 2000. and the americans naturally said, what is he really intending to do? an they found that he had front loaded the stages of disarm aerment in such a way as to initially benefit only ussr at the expense of the nsa and that is a insisting way of going on. >> sometimes the american side overdid it. as we can see from the soviet records of conversations, ronald reagan could make jokes on inappropriate occasions. he liked making irish jokes when he thought were offensive but they were extremely offensive my father was irish soy liked jokes but they were not funny for the foreign minister they were not at all funny to him because he was a georgia national, and he didn't like the little peoples of the world being mocked. so he didn't -- he didn't look at these jokes with a same spectacles that westerners looked at irish jokes he actually said this to reagan. i really wish you would stop these irish jokes and george schultz mildly rebuked his own president about this way of going on. so he wasn't the perfect negotiator. engaging hagueogfy he was an old trade unionist. he really did know how to hang out for a deal. well, if reagan sometimes overdid it,wine burger and casey always overdid it. always said to reagan, you shouldn't be dealing with these people. let's just keep to the old -- the old way that we had in the early 1980s. just piling on the pressure. there is no deal yet. that is acceptable to u.s. and nato interests. and this made it extraordinarily hard for the state department to go on conducting the different disarmorment agreements, and schultz really had to fight very, very hard to keep the show on the road. the summit of october 1986 was a failure in the sense that a comprehensive nuclear disarmorment deal which was within -- reaching distance slipped away at the very last because of his formulation about the strategic defense initiative. this interaction, though, was still a positive process when george schultz got back, he went around the country. sang that although no deal had been fineable, no deal should have ever been signed on the terms that he fin -- insisted on so many confessions has been made by the soviet's side that they emphasis ought to be on keeping the soviets to those confessions in the near future. and here we come to -- a part of the process that is really impressive. the point therefore including that terrible old warrior andré -- [inaudible] press the case for altering the soviet negotiating package on him himself. he usually think of him as a man who is always leading the charge for sense sensible negotiations. in the winter of '8 into '87 it was people even like gramica old foreign minister of the post four years and shavon who pressed this case on him, and in february 1987, he cracked, and he gave way to his own polybower row, and he does seem that he was pretty -- reluctant to do this. that this wasn't just some sort of show of false politics. if you read the record of the plitt bureau in february 1987 you'll see what i mean. people said some pretty strong things, force gorbachev. this process then was becoming a positive process of reconciliation, and it had many broad aspects, for example, not all of reagan's jokes were in a zite they were about the nature of the soviet system and life of the ussr as compared to the way of life in -- america. and they hit home. because he started his commune ist believers they started people they thought they could save the communist system of rule. gradually, they became demoralized in their philosophical principles. and reagan's jokes have their impact. so to did george schultz's economic charts. on one occasion he went over the atlantic with a load of pie charts and bar charts to prove to gorbachev that if the ussr didn't reform, the fraction, the portion of the world economy that the ussr was going to occupy would shrink steady through to the year 2000. now, this kind of friendly acquaintanceship, this instructional, educational aspect of the interaction was very, very important in altering the balance of opinion inside what had i call the big fall, reagan, schultz, gorbachev and americanss are very, very subtle in the way that they did this. and the way that they achieved this. it was always, though, a bruising contest. it wae bruising on both sides. the bureau was a hard institution to control. the reagan administration was notoriously internally divided. and the state department had real problems with the cia and -- the defense department. so that these four men and let's give george bush his due after he put an end to the polls. in the middle of 1989, he more or less acted constructively to bring this terrible, just terrible phenomenon, the cold war to an end. i think we live in a generation now, where we think of the ussr as being a pack of cards that was just waiting to be blown over. and we forget just how consolidated it was, and how easy it would have been for soviet leaders to turn back to a more repressive internal pals and more dangerous international policy. it really was important that the first nuclear reduction agreement took place in the second half of the 1980s. no longer arm limitation agreements but arms reduction agreements. in 1989, eastern europe was freed from the grasp of the ussr. that was a stupendous changing in world history. the world communist movement practically fell apart. it was just a fantasy of a few apologists for the ussr by the end of the 1980s this was another stupendous achievement and the end of 1981 more or less peacefully the ussr put itself into the biggest dust spin of history. and commune fist rule completely ended. since the turn of our century we've been living living with ad of new pouring in, russia has become more and more assertive and dangerous especially towards its near memoir, and there's talk of a new cold war. at the moment, i feel that this is to belittle the scale of the dangers that face the entire world from the late 1940s through to the mid-1980s. it belittles the astonishing achievement of the u.s. and the ussr in bringing that to an end. and i hope that my book does something to explain why question still should be looking for reflections on our own age in what happened in that moment us era. thank you very much. >> thank you. we have a few moments now for questions, and answers. so the floor is yours. i believe we have a mic. yes, so if you would like to raise your hands an the microphone will come to you. we have a mic that is roved. [laughter] okay, so -- >> no, please. >> put in blackmailing the west with nuclear weapons, and i wonder if you found in gorbachev and approach to blackmail without maybe some ground, but to use this as a negotiation tactic. >> i think that he quickly gave up, and he thought of nuclear blackmail. i think his priority was always to get a deal with the u.s.. the republican dangerous period in the cold war was when they were in part, an they certainly responded to reagan's new pressures by becoming more dangerous. more dangerously empty american, than they were being. so nuclear blackmail i would say wasn't part of i don't think it was part of gorbachev agenda but he is going cap in hand to the western powers. he started off with a brilliant leader, and equal of any american president in his own few. by the end, the london summit of 1991, he was taking off his hat and begging for money. and he didn't get it. >> [inaudible] >> thank you for the excellent discuss of your book. i couldn't help but think about the recent and also extraordinary effort between the u.s. and iran over negotiating an arms limb tigs or rawx agreement in a way. i would like to hear more about both sides, the dynamics of the so-called hard liners, in fact -- in the bureau you had communist who then pushed for him to make more confessions, and in the white house, and other parts of the washington you had people who, of course, they'll never change. we know how their mind works. and push back on reagan and his close states. >> talk a little bit more about the dynamics on both sides that forced through this shift. thank you. >> thanks for that question. i think the answer to that -- it lie it is in looking at what was happening in the political leadership. before gorbachev came to power. whether you look at politics, or religion, or ethnicity, or eastern europe, they knew they wouldn't afford to hold on to eastern europe. but they didn't want to let go. and the article half of the 1980s. so this wasn't a contentious, internal matter for the bower row. so if you're talking about the military leadership or what i think you call the hardliners, there was pragmatic this was a case i'm making. there was a pragmatic acceptance that something was bisquely wrong. what they haven't gotten to -- until he came to power was an idea of a realistic cure. actually, i don't think i personally don't think his cure was realistic. if you start allowing people to say what they think without being arrested if you start letting them listen to radios and televisions from abroad. if you let them go abroad and then come back, if you let the press say openly things about the system that had never been sayable before, you're going to unglue the whole system. so gorbachev got what any old hardliner could have told him qowf happened which was the self-destruction of the ussr. but if it hadn't been for him -- it might have been destruction. it might have been a popular revolt or an interat theethnic. it kowfn all sorts -- it could have been war with the west so we have to count ourself os lucky i think that he cam to power. he was greeted by an american president that understood that he could peace with this man. >>[inaudible] thank you and talk, i have a question about learning. so i'm curious where did he learn his knowledge about international relations, and do you seem on the standing of the history of soviet foreign policies outside of this question because i noted as that, he was first soviet man he was born during 1931 an in the environment of political sociology and they were suppressed, and -- freedom of discussion were suppressed so i don't know how the shape. what do you? >> so really interesting question too. gorbachev was something of a always secret reformer. what the soviets used to call a child of the 20th party congress. so when niki denounced youssef, then people like gorbachev said huha so two more decades they have to face huha behind their -- palms of their hands. and he learned to keep his dependence to himself. he was a brilliant quarter under -- general secretary. i think he like reagan made up his mind on the basis of his on opinions. but he was willing to change his mind. he distrusted the reports that he got from the kgb. he made up his miengtd on the basis of what he saw in the west so he beamed to italy he admired the dmiewnist party that was steady becoming noncommunist party. he learned from face-to-face constitutions from all of the reagan jokes from the economic charts. he learned to love for them. there was a -- there was a moment when james baker in the bush administration was flying on the same plane as -- [inaudible] and baker secretary of state turned and said, could you tell us what the -- military budget is in the ussr. because this should be really helpful for negotiations. and she said, look we don't know what the marl budget is. you know that much better than we do. what do you think? so learning from counterparts and diplomacy really mattered. so i think that the particular individuals who ruled to great superpows at the time made a difference who were long-term, chronic, underlying features, factors that pushed towards reconciliation. but it required leaders who recognized the opportunities and i do think that that was to the world's great and lasting benefit that such leaders were in existence. >> i'm going to take two more questions i'm gong to call on ellen -- [inaudible] archive director at the time of the first workshop a few years ago, and after -- [inaudible] >> how would you calibrate the influence of the movement of all of this mix of influences, was it irrelevant. a side show? or was it central? how would you evaluate it now that question of some perpghtive? perspective. >> that's a tricky question to answer. i think the distance as a practical threat to >> soviet pr had been beaten, however, their ideas making their way into the soviet, political elite into the heads of the soviet, political elite so that gorbachev himself had ideas that were not so very different from difference in the 1970s in many positive ways. so that i think, i personally think that distance were important in helping the process of making the ussr begin to rot from the inside. i don't think that the kgb had all of the that problem you know arresting people. even in the army -- early 1980s. but what they couldn't do was stop the process of social modernization that meant soviet people say why do we put up with this? why do we have this system? we're not going to revolt against it because we're too scared but when you're not going to say we love it anymore. and so i think that distance did have that a major part in that indirect way. >> last question -- >> give up my mic. >> thanks very much. i just wanted to ask about the final two years of the period you're corp.ing in your book. you talked about the western european leaders i'm curious the transitional or new leadership of the eastern european countries that came to power in '89 affected by lateral ussr relations in your statements, thanks. >> these are wonderfully interesting questions, that's something that i -- deal with to some extent in the book because when when the ussr started to allow oorn europe to break away, the idea which was the first thing he does after te fall of the berlin wall and the execution of the group in romaine ya is to fly to romania because foreign policy was not totally dead yet, and the desire was to track something out of this and for the ussr to remain the tall of international security in eastern europe so that for a year or two after the fall of the berlin wall soviet diplomacy still was -- one entirely the rest of optimism. it was realism except that the polls, the polls were of the germans. so that one something to work with there. the polls thought to themselves will the new germany accept the old borders? or will they want a bit of poland back? now that -- now that they're becoming a reunified country, so it wasn't totally unrealistic so it was a dynamic process right to the end of the ussr. [inaudible] thank you for showing us the end of the cold war from both sides. [applause] >> thanks for coming along. [laughter] [inaudible] after talking about his book robert service joined by former secretary of state joe schultz to discuss the book further. >> my name is paul, i'm a research fellow here at the hoover institution, i'm pleased to welcome you to the discussion between a historian and a history maker, our historian is robert, senior fellow hoover institution and professor amaratu oxford known for his biography and trustee latest book is end of cold war which is the subject of today's conversation. >> down it was too heavy for me. okay. >> anyway you can see the cover. our history makers george schultz distinguished fellow, hoover institution secretary schultz is a distinguished public servant having served as budget director, today's discussion focuses on his years as secretary of state under ronald reagan. a professor service will begin with some short remarks after which he and secretary schultz will engage in a conversationing the end of the cold war. this event is being filmed for later broadcast so we should finish up around 1:10.

Related Keywords

Moscow , Moskva , Russia , Canada , Germany , Iran , Malabo , Provincia De Bioko Norte , Equatorial Guinea , Afghanistan , Georgia , United States , Kremlin , Washington , District Of Columbia , London , City Of , United Kingdom , Ireland , Cuba , Poland , France , Berlin , Italy , Romania , Britain , Americans , America , Canadians , French , Soviet , British , German , Soviets , Germans , Irish , American , Margaret Thatcher , George Shultz , Ronald Reagan , Reagan Schultz Gorbachev , Mikail Gorbachev , Joe Schultz , George Bush , George Schultz , James Baker ,