A History of the World (85 page)

But after the Cuban crisis, both Washington and Moscow accepted that they had to edge back from a situation in which a tiny miscalculation could end human history. The Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty was
followed by a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, then the first strategic arms-limitation talks, or SALT 1, in 1972, limiting the number of ballistic missiles. Another treaty, banning defence against nuclear missiles, showed that the doctrine of ‘mutually assured destruction’, or MAD – what Oppenheimer had hoped for in his less grim moments – was official policy. The period of agreed coexistence, named ‘détente’, arrived, during which both systems attempted to live with each other, in a divided world. At the time it seemed an endless stasis, the Cold War now, finally, a Frozen Peace; or, to change the metaphor, it was as if two heavy-weight wrestlers had ended in an exhausted clinch, bear-hugging one another, unable either to break free or to topple the opponent.

Though apparently safer than the earlier phase of aggressive competition, the Frozen Peace proved an illusion too, but more because of what happened inside the two camps than between them. No political systems are really static. Behind the Iron Curtain, though the Soviet system did match – indeed, heavily outspent – NATO in armaments, the Soviet economy was failing to produce the growth in wealth that could have persuaded its people that it was truly a better society, and that the political repression and sheer dreariness of life were worth while. Khrushchev had been blamed, and paid the price, for Cuba as well as for domestic failings, when he was removed from power in 1964; but the new regime of old men, led by Leonid Brezhnev, lolled over a society beginning visibly to stagnate. The crushing of the Czechoslovak uprising of 1968, which had been greeted as the ‘Prague Spring’, showed the world just how popular Communism really was among its own people.

But it was first in the West that the new mood of mutiny and rebellion against old leaders shook things up. America’s bloody Vietnam War, which required a draft of young men into the army, provoked increasing protests at home. Both the Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson and the Republican Richard Nixon struggled to figure out how to combine their military strategy with the demands of a younger nation, swollen by the ‘baby boomers’, products of a postwar rise in the birth rate. An historian of the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis, points out that enrolments in US colleges and universities had risen threefold between 1955 and 1970: ‘What governments had failed to foresee was that more young people plus more education, when
combined with a stalemated Cold War, could be a prescription for insurrection . . . This was something never before seen: a revolution transcending nationality, directed against establishments whatever their ideology.’
⁴²

Anti-Vietnam protests rocked Berlin, Paris and London, but it was in the United States itself that the political prestige of the Cold Warriors was most badly damaged. At around this time, more damning evidence was coming into the public arena of the covert operations of the CIA, in Guatemala and in Chile, where they helped topple a freely elected leftist government. Its leader, Salvador Allende, along with thousands of others, died, and many were horribly tortured. This seemed entirely counter to the vaunted moral superiority of the democracies. Young radicals adopted as icons and heroes the enemies their leaders were fighting – Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Mao – and a wave of leftism swept through the campuses. Nowhere did this radicalism break through to change Western leadership – not even in France, where the ‘events’ of 1968 were at their most spectacular. But it showed that ‘détente’ did not mean stability.

In the end, it would be the Soviet side that collapsed, far more quickly and dramatically than Western analysts had expected. Under Nixon, before his illegal wire-tapping and his lies brought down his presidency, the United States had ended its old enmity with Mao’s China, thus adding to the sense of paranoia and encirclement in Moscow. An ever-older leadership, ever clearer evidence of economic failure and ever more embarrassing evidence of Western plenty stirred discontent. Russian agreement to a world declaration on human rights encouraged dissidents at home, who spread news to the rest of the world about the repression and brutality of the Soviet system; Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s writing was particularly influential. In Poland, shipyard workers protested, and the election of a Pole, Karol Wojtyla, as Pope John Paul II, in 1978, was followed by scenes of mass enthusiasm when he visited his homeland, to the horror of its atheist rulers. When the USSR invaded Afghanistan the following year, to protect a client Marxist ruler, it became embroiled in a costly, bloody war. The US responded cleverly by backing Islamist guerrillas; or at least, it seemed clever at the time.

The fall of the Soviet Union was not brought about by guns, quite;
but it was by the cost of guns, or rather missiles. A new US president, the sunny-natured and apparently rather simplistic former actor, Ronald Reagan, ordered the beginning of a system of defence against Russian missiles – his ‘strategic defence initiative’, which because it involved satellite-tracking, and in deference to a popular film, was immediately dubbed ‘Star Wars’. The USSR and NATO had been engaged in a new round of nuclear competition since 1977, when the new Russian SS20 missiles threatened Western Europe and the US had responded by basing their own Pershing and Cruise missiles there. For the Russians, trying to match this proposed new system was economically ruinous – impossible. Reagan’s increasingly contemptuous and hawkish rhetoric about ‘the evil empire’ showed the US had a leader who no longer feared the Russian threat. Many thought this foolish, but it coincided with a series of embarrassingly elderly and short-lived leaders of that empire, first the terminally ill Yuri Andropov from 1982 to early 1984, then Konstantin Chernenko, who seemed barely alive to start with.

There were dangerous moments to come, as the Soviet system tottered on its feet. But with the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev the USSR finally had a leader with the vigour and self-confidence to discuss proper disarmament with Reagan. Their three key summits during 1986–7 prepared for a radically new relationship; even Britain’s super-hawkish prime minister Margaret Thatcher warmed to Gorbachev as ‘a man I can do business with’. Internally, though, Gorbachev seems to have had no master-plan. He knew things had to change and that the Soviet system was doomed, but he somehow hoped that freshly moderate Communists could retain power while these vast territories became more politically open and economically liberal. His policies of openness and rebuilding (
glasnost
and
perestroika
) flinched from a real lurch towards market economics and capitalism of the kind the Chinese Communist Party was then embracing. What Gorbachev intended was a move away from global confrontation, perhaps even the end of the Cold War. What he intended for the USSR was less clear.

The momentous year 1989 provided the answer. Beginning in Hungary, which refused to keep its Iron Curtain with Austria in good repair, the Eastern Europeans simply broke away – and Gorbachev would not act to stop them. Poland, where the independent Solidarity
movement led by the former shipyard worker Lech Walesa had led the way for others, now had elections for the lower house – which saw Solidarity swept to power. East Germans began voting with their wheels, packing their belongings into their boxy little Trabant cars and heading through Hungary to Austria, and freedom. After days of confusion in East Berlin, and no backing for any kind of crackdown coming from Moscow, the Wall itself was opened, and ecstatic Germans began to pour through – and then to dance on it, and then to knock it down. The Bulgarian Communists caved in and announced free elections; in Prague, vast demonstrations broke the Czech Communists’ spirit, and a ‘velvet revolution’ installed the former dissident and playwright Vaclav Havel as president. In Romania, one of the cruellest and most idiosyncratic of the Soviet satellites, things did not end so peacefully. Its dictator Nicolae Ceaus¸escu ordered troops to shoot on the crowds, but failed to quash the uprising; he and his wife were quickly caught, tried and shot.

The following year saw the reunification of Germany and the start of the collapse of the USSR itself, as the Baltic republics broke away. Gorbachev was the victim of a coup by outraged hardliners, but they soon found that the collapse he had (by his wise inaction) overseen was impossible to reverse. The army would not support them, and a new leader emerged – the alcoholic showman Boris Yeltsin, who publicly defied the plotters, standing on a tank in front of the Russian parliament building. Yeltsin in effect dissolved the Soviet Union, looking on benignly as vast countries such as the Ukraine announced their independence.

The Cold War ended because one philosophy of government and economics, Marxism as practised by the Soviet Union, had tested itself to destruction. The USSR had – Russia has – great natural resources, including oil, gas, timber and massive expanses of excellent agricultural land. Despite starting late, it once looked an excellent candidate for successful industrialization, of a kind that would have greatly improved the material life of its people, who were by global standards well educated. But its system of monopolistic state enterprises, directed from the centre and caught in the web of fear, corruption and laziness created by Communist rule, resulted in waste, shortages, cynicism and hopelessness.

In the end, there was little to hold people’s loyalty beyond the memory of the heroism of the Great Patriotic War, which young Russians found less impressive than had their parents. Released from the same system, the Eastern European states, which lost no time in applying to join the European Union, showed that after a couple of generations of repression, enterprise and energy can revive remarkably fast.

Russia herself would suffer a worse fate. She had never enjoyed a democratic culture, having moved almost immediately from Czarist autocracy to Marxist dictatorship. As Western consultants were flown in to advocate, for fat fees, the fast privatization of enterprises and free-market shock therapy, as well as to advise on the creation of new parties, Russia experienced a terrible time of rocketing prices, unemployment and asset-stripping by a new class of ‘oligarchs’, some of them no better than robber barons. When the old Communist elite rebranded itself and returned as born-again nationalists, ready to do deals with the swaggering new super-rich of Moscow and (newly renamed) St Petersburg, ordinary Russians found themselves with the worst of both worlds – cynical, autocratic and repressive politics alongside a twisted idea of capitalism at its rawest. Who lost the Cold War? They did.

Deng & Son – Chinese Rebirth

Nations have often been too big, as well as too small. The story of China in the nineteenth century and through the first half of the twentieth is the most obvious case. To a Westerner it can seem an incomprehensible and endless muddle of wars, rebellions, coups and collapses. There were attempts at modernization, including the introduction of railways, telegraph systems and steamships in the last decades of the imperial Qing dynasty, and the establishment of modern constitutions and apparently modern parliaments when that dynasty collapsed shortly before the First World War. China’s modern history presents a series of larger-than-life reformers, trying to drag a vast empire of peasants and landlords into the age of industrial urban mankind. But it seemed too big a job. The land was too large, its constituent parts too disparate and too weakly linked.

Those who struggled include some hugely impressive figures who deserve to be better-known today. One was Li Hongzhang, the great shaker-up of late imperial China, who developed its industry and plotted to return it to independence and real power. Another was Yuan Shikai, a tough farmer’s son who rose up through the army to become a king-maker, and president of the Chinese Republic. Then, of course, there are the more famous figures such as Sun Yat-sen, Yuan’s sometime collaborator and rival and another farmer’s son, who is generally recognized as the founder of modern Chinese Nationalism. Finally there is Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist Kuomintang, reformer of Chinese banking, language, education and communications; but also a corrupt and ultimately ineffective military dictator. Each of these were leaders every bit as potent and ambitious for their countries as a Roosevelt, a Churchill or a Mussolini.

The trouble, however, is that all of them were destroyed by the scale of the job and by the circling wolf-pack of China’s enemies. Li Hongzhang died defeated in 1901, after negotiating a humiliating and ruinous peace treaty with Russia, France, Britain and Japan in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion and the seizure of Beijing. Yuan Shikai became increasingly dictatorial and declared himself emperor in 1912, as the country was once more being humiliated by Japan. Forced out, he left China tearing herself apart under competing warlords. Sun Yatsen, whose reputation remains very high in both China and Taiwan to this day, nevertheless became an increasingly militaristic and dictatorial leader; he died of cancer in 1925 while China was still ravaged by the warlords and his Kuomintang government controlled only the south. Chiang Kai-shek, despite alliances with Russia’s Communists as well as with the United States, was never able to rule mainland China effectively – again during a time of military catastrophe at the hands of the Japanese, and while the Chinese Communist insurgency was becoming unstoppable.

These regimes had all failed to impose effective central authority. What this produced was not a China of quiet, harmonious self-governing villages and towns freed of an arrogant Beijing but a China of lawlessness, fear, terror and insecurity. In the huge rural hinterlands, millions of Chinese continued to plant and eat their rice, tend their animals, worship traditionally, gossip, bicker, live and die without knowing much about the nearest large town, never mind national
politics. The same could be said of peasants everywhere during the first half of the twentieth century, from Corsica to Iceland, Turkey to Chile.