The first condition for meeting and overcoming that threat was that the Alliance should perceive what was happening; the second and equally important condition was that we should summon up the will to change it. Even in Britain’s parlous economic state we still had the resources to fight back, as part of NATO and under the leadership of the United States. But we could not assume that that would always be so. At some point decline — not just relative but absolute and not just limited to one sphere but in every sphere, economic, military, political and psychological — might become irreversible. Urgent action was required and urgency entails risks. Accordingly, my first major foreign affairs speech was a risk.
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.
That is why we so strongly support all those European and American spokesmen, who have insisted that no serious advance towards a stable peace can be made unless some progress at least is seen in the free movement of people and of ideas.
The reaction to this speech confirmed that I was the odd woman out. The Helsinki Agreement was widely welcomed. I could imagine the shaking of wise heads at my impulsive imprudence. Reggie Maudling came round at once to see me
in Flood Street to express both his anger at my delivering such a speech without consulting him and his disagreement with its content. I gave no ground. Indeed, Mr Brezhnev’s evident satisfaction at what Helsinki achieved helped convince me that I must return to the subject: he described it as ‘a necessary summing up of the political outcome of the Second World War’. In other words he regarded it — not least perhaps the commitment not to alter European borders except ‘by peaceful means and by agreement’ — as recognizing and legitimizing the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe which they had obtained by force and fraud at the end of the war.
The Helsinki Summit of 1975 is now viewed in a favourable light because the dissidents in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe used its provisions as a programme for which to fight in their long struggle with the communist State. And indeed by making human rights a matter of treaty obligations rather than domestic law it gave the dissidents leverage which they employed to the full. Their bravery would have been of little account, however, without the subsequent Western, particularly American, renewal of resolve and defence build-up. These halted the expansion that had given Soviet communism the psychological prestige of historical inevitability, exerted an external pressure on communist regimes that diverted them from domestic repression, and gave heart to the burgeoning resistance movements against communism. This pincer movement — the revived West and the dissidents — more than countered the advantages that the Soviets received from Helsinki in the form of increased legitimacy and Western recognition. Without that, Helsinki would have been just one more step on the road to defeat.
Not surprisingly after the Helsinki speech, I was not invited to the Soviet Union, as perhaps a different Leader of the Opposition would have been. But I felt it important to deepen my knowledge of the communist system in practice. Consequently, when an invitation arrived for me to visit Romania I accepted. I already had some knowledge of that country, gained when I was Education Secretary. Improbable as it may seem, there had grown up a regular Anglo-Romanian seminar on education, held one year in Bucharest and one year in Cambridge. My Romanian opposite number, Mircea Malita, was a distinguished mathematician. Like other ‘cultural’ events under communism, these seminars had a largely political and diplomatic purpose. That said, there was no doubt in my mind about the cultural riches of Romania itself — not only Bucharest, known as ‘the Paris of the Balkans’ (still at that time spared from the later devastation inflicted on it by Ceausescu’s megalomaniac building plans of the 1980s), but also the luminous painted monastery churches of Bukovina, which I visited in September 1971. Not surprisingly, the Romanians were anxious to continue to cultivate me when I became Leader of the Opposition, and for the moment this accorded with my purposes as well.
At the time of my second visit at the beginning of September 1975, Romania occupied a unique position in the communist world. Following in the footsteps of his (already disgraced) predecessor Gheorghe Dej, Nicolae Ceausescu had plotted out an independent path for Romania within the Warsaw Pact. In 1968, for example, he had visited Prague and, apparently sincerely, expressed support for the Polish reform movement and bitterly condemned the Russian suppression of it. The Western view, which I then shared, was that Romania should be accorded discreet support in the hope that its example might lead to further fragmentation in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. In fact, Ceausescu was playing a ruthless game in which ethnic tensions (with Hungary), East-West competition (between NATO and the Warsaw Pact) and rivalry within the communist world (between the Soviet Union and China) were exploited as seemed appropriate at any juncture.
Between the conversations I had with Ceausescu in 1971 and 1975 he had further consolidated his position. Although he had become effective leader in 1965, it was not until 1974 that he united the functions of Party Leader and Head of State and Government. From now on he was freer to indulge his political fantasies. For what we Westerners did not sufficiently grasp was that Ceausescu was a throwback both to Stalinism, whose methods he employed, and indeed to a more traditional Balkan despotism for which the promotion of his family and the flaunting of wealth and power were essential trappings. Ceausescu himself never struck me as anything out of the ordinary, just cold, rather dull, spewing forth streams of statistics and possessing that stilted formal courtesy that communists adopted as a substitute for genuine civilization. We discussed the Soviet threat and he gave me a long account, faithfully mirrored later by guides, diplomats and factory managers, of the astonishing successes of the Romanian economy. He was particularly proud of the level of ‘investment’ which, as a share of the national income, certainly dwarfed that of Western countries. In fact, of course, misdirected investment is a classic feature of the planned economy; it was just that Romania, whose people apart from the ruling élite lived in poverty, misdirected more than the others.
I was also shown around a scientific institute specializing in polymer research. My guide was none other than Elena Ceausescu, who had already begun to indulge a personal fantasy world which matched her husband’s in absurdity, if not in human consequences: she was determined to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry for work on polymers. It subsequently emerged that she could barely have distinguished a polymer from a polygon. But behind the defences of translation and communist long-windedness she put up quite a good show.
In other ways, however, Romania did illustrate more characteristic features of the communist system. I visited a factory and heard from those in charge — I presumed they were the management — a litany of the company’s achievements. ‘That’s very interesting,’ I said, ‘but could I speak to the trade union leaders here? Perhaps they may have something to add?’ A look of astonishment spread across their faces. ‘But that’s us!’ they replied. What the individual workers at the factory — or indeed the neighbours across whose houses it was belching thick brown smoke — might have commented is another matter. For, as in the fully developed socialist state, the trade unions of Romania were political not industrial institutions.
A little later I had dinner with Members of the Romanian ‘Parliament’. It was explained to me that one had to be a member of an approved, i.e. reliably communist, trade union in order to stand in a parliamentary election. They showed me the list of some thirty-five such bodies. Looking down it, the ‘beekeepers’ union’ caught my eye. The opportunity was irresistible. In grave fashion I began to interrogate them. How large was the beekeepers’ bloc in Parliament? Who were its leaders? What were the factions? Was there an anti-beekeepers’ faction? The evening slipped by more quickly.
A final practical lesson for me, which any Western politician or businessman visiting the Eastern bloc was well advised to learn as soon as possible, was to assume that someone was always listening. This was an inconvenience for people like me in the country for just a few days. But for the subjects of a communist state it was a kind of intellectual terror. Depriving human beings of their privacy has the intended psychological effect of making them withdrawn, introverted and incapable of the communication based on mutual trust which permits civil society. Thus communism applied sophisticated techniques in the service of a primitive ideology so as to destroy not just potential centres of opposition but rather the final enemy, human personality.
Ceausescu’s Romania already reflected this in an advanced form, though for me and my party it was a matter of farce, not tragedy. I had already been told at the British Embassy how one of our diplomats, anxious to recruit a nanny for his young children and hazy about how to insert a suitable advertisement in a Romanian newspaper, decided that the simplest and most reliable method was to tell an astonished friend on the Embassy telephone of his urgent requirement. Sure enough, and without a blush, in the course of some discussion of a quite different subject a Romanian official suggested a candidate.
Richard Ryder and I were put up in the State Guest House. Interestingly, the sitting-room ceiling consisted of an open wooden grille, doubtless good for ventilation but possibly for other purposes too. I just cou
ld not make the television work when I wanted to listen to the news. Richard was no more successful. We were still struggling when a knock on the door announced the arrival of a member of the Guest House staff who helpfully put us right.
Even before this visit, I had few illusions about the oppressive nature of the regime. Whatever Western strategic interests might require, I was determined that the pressure should be kept up to improve respect for human rights, particularly when the ink was barely dry on the Helsinki Agreement. An expatriate Romanian group in Britain, knowing of my impending visit, sent me a list of five political prisoners, asking me to urge their release. I immediately agreed to do so. But somehow the Foreign Office got wind of this and sought determinedly to dissuade me on the grounds that it would alienate Ceausescu to no good purpose. A senior civil servant explained in person the deep unwisdom of my intention. I was not impressed. In Bucharest I gave the Romanians the list and said that these people were wrongly imprisoned and must be set free. I was glad to see that they subsequently were.
Undoubtedly, the most important foreign tour I made in 1975 — probably the most significant during my time as Leader of the Opposition — was to the United States in September. I already, of course, knew something of the States; and I liked and admired most of what I knew. This, however, was my first opportunity to meet all the leading political figures, and do so on something approaching equal terms. I was guaranteed plenty of media attention, if largely for the depressing reason that Britain’s stock had rarely fallen lower. American newspapers, magazines and television programmes were concentrating on the precipitous decline of the British economy, the advance of trade union power, the extension of the socialist state and what was perceived to be a collapse of national self-confidence. Aside from the schadenfreude, also evident was a nagging worry that America, itself suffering a deep but different crisis in the wake of the fall of Vietnam and the trauma of Watergate, might suffer the same fate.[47]
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