The Russia Conundrum

Russians who have struggled for freedom and democracy have traditionally looked to the West for inspiration. The values of Western liberal democracy, and the prosperity associated with it, inspired generations with the knowledge that the repressive autocracy imposed on their homeland was not inevitable, and that there was a better way of doing things. In the years of Bolshevik rule, the Kremlin recognised the danger of such aspirations and strove to prevent the Russian people from learning about the advantages of life in the West. The communist state exercised a monopoly on the sources of mass information, bringing the media under its control, preventing access to foreign news outlets and banning travel abroad. The Kremlin’s censors decreed what could be written in the press and dictated how the media should describe life outside of the Soviet Union. Much was made of the defects of capitalist society – the inequality, the poverty, colonial exploitation, crime and racial discrimination – and only very limited reporting was permitted of its achievements. Many Soviet citizens – me included – grew up believing what the Kremlin told them. It took independence of mind and assiduous curiosity to discover that the reality was different from the official portrayal. We did catch glimpses of the good things in the West, however, amplifying them through word-of-mouth and samizdat publications that were consumed with great eagerness, largely because they contrasted so sharply with the unpleasantness of day-to-day life in the USSR.

Matters changed in the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev permitted a cautious easing of the secrecy practised by his predecessors. There were several reasons for Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (openness), including his need to circumvent the old-style orthodox communists in the Kremlin who were opposed to his liberalising reforms. Because the hardliners controlled many of the official levers of power, Gorbachev took the bold decision to appeal directly to the Soviet people, over the heads of the apparat, the hidebound politicians and officials who ran the system. In order to encourage a groundswell of support for his perestroika policies, he actively encouraged people to think for themselves – something that had long been frowned upon – by allowing them access to much greater information than in the past, including greater truth about life in the West.

When UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher came on an official visit to the USSR in March 1987, Gorbachev took it as an opportunity to expand his glasnost initiative. Not since Richard Nixon in 1959 had a Western politician been permitted to speak openly on Soviet television, and on that occasion things had ended badly, when Nikita Khrushchev was widely seen to have come off worse in an ill-tempered exchange with the then US vice-president. Gorbachev knew it was a gamble to accept Mrs Thatcher’s demand that any interview with her should be broadcast unedited, but he did so.

Margaret Thatcher greets the crowds in Moscow during her official visit in 1987

Many Russians who saw her realised for the first time that the West was different from what they had been told.

Three of the Soviet Union’s top journalists were assigned to grill the zheleznaya leidi – the iron lady – whom the Kremlin had long portrayed as an enemy of the USSR, a capitalist ogre who had described Moscow as ‘bent on world dominance’ and Soviet communism as ‘synonymous with getting one’s way by violence’. Boris Kalyagin, political editor of Soviet Television and Radio, Tomas Kolesnichenko, international editor of Pravda, and Vladimir Simonov, a political commentator from the Novosti Press Agency, agreed that the interview would last 45 minutes and that all of Mrs Thatcher’s answers would be broadcast in full. Speaking many years later, Kalyagin said the three of them were confident they could run rings round any capitalist.

It didn’t work out that way. The journalists pressed Mrs Thatcher on why Britain insisted on maintaining nuclear weapons and, at first, the iron lady was studiously polite. When the interviewers tried to cast doubt on her answers, however, she showed her steely character, saying things that the Soviet people had never heard before.