Georgi Arbatov, the eminent grise of the Soviet foreign policy apparatus, was waiting for me at the bus stop an hour out of Moscow. A little bowed at 84 he grabbed me by one arm and leaned on his homemade walking stick cut from a nearby birch and led me through the wood to a clearing in which stood a small, shabby block of flats, paint peeling in the entrance, a year’s dust and leaves on the staircase. Like his mentor, Yuri Andropov, the former KGB chief and later head of the Soviet Union, Arbatov has always shunned many of the perks of the apparatchiks, content with a modest flat in the city and this “dacha” in the countryside.
We talked as we did 30 years ago, at great length, over coffee, cucumber and beetroot. The adviser to every Soviet president from Brezhnev to Gorbachev remains as lucid as he was when he told me in November 1978 that if the West pursued its relationship of growing closer to China on “an anti-Soviet basis,” turning China “into some sort of military ally to the West” ... “then there is no place for détente. ...What sense would it make for us to agree to reduce armaments in Europe if armaments are simply to be channeled by the West to the Eastern front?”
The full-page interview, which ran first in the International Herald Tribune and later in many other papers, caused an enormous stir. It was the first time a senior Soviet official had talked at length to a Western journalist on the record, without notes and answering every question put to him and did so in an easy, conversational manner. Edward Crankshaw, the distinguished Sovietologist, writing in the Observer, described it as “the most interesting thing to come out of official Moscow since the fall of Khruschev 14 years ago.” The Economist made it its cover story.
This time, if he was less threatening, he seemed equally preoccupied about the way Western-Russian relations were going. “We have not yet returned to the Cold War. But we can get into one,” he said quietly. “The danger looms over us. Two years ago it was impossible to think of this. Now it is possible.”
We began our talk with Stalin. Like Arbatov, I am convinced the inbuilt hostility of much of the Western foreign policy elite toward the Soviet Union and later Russia has its foundations in a false reading of Moscow’s post World War II territorial ambitions. To understand today’s deteriorating relationship we have no choice but to begin there.
Question: If you had died when you were 55 years old would you have been as at peace with yourself as you obviously are now?
Answer: I was very critical of many aspects of our way of life but of course you couldn’t speak about it. It was like a death sentence. But I don’t feel I compromised. Maybe I was fooled by these ideological stupid things that we were saying all the time. But I felt the initiators of the Cold War were the Americans. I think that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were in reality the start of the Cold War. In his memoirs, the American secretary of war, Henry Stimson, says honestly that it was done to teach the Russians to play according to the new rules of the game.
Q: You don’t think Stalin was planning a confrontation with the West after his victory in the Second World War?
A: No. When Stalin met the French and Italian Communist leaders, Maurice Thorez and Palmiro Togliatti, they were asking for his advice. They said they had revolutionary situations in their countries and wasn’t the moment to make a revolution. But Stalin replied, “Under no circumstances. It will not be tolerated by the West.”
Stalin was an awful figure but he was a realist. He understood that his country was on the edge of a terrible future. People couldn’t tolerate much more hunger. There had been the awful losses of the war in every family.
Q: But he was committed to an expansionist Marxist ideology.
A: Yes, but he thought that it is inevitable, the victory of revolution. But after the terrible war we had had he was afraid to start something new and dangerous. He preferred to wait and allow persuasion, the contradictions of the capitalist system and new economic crises to play their course.
He was naïve and ignorant. The state of our social sciences was very bad at this time. Not because there were no clever people but because there was really such a narrow room for creative thinking.
Q: In your book, referring to the Soviet intervention in Angola and Afghanistan, you wrote: “Why did we in the eyes of the world become an aggressive expansionist power in the second half of the 1970s?” But you didn’t really answer the question.
A: My guess is that the military-industrial complex had grown to such proportions that it escaped political control. The leaders depended on the military-industrial complex to stay in power. It was their main instrument of power. So they didn’t want to estrange their relations with it. Not everything was controlled by one man. The whole system was infiltrated by the military-industrial complex.
Q: Why did Gorbachev fail? Why didn’t he use his immense power to push things forward faster?
A: Gorbachev was frightened to go forward because he wasn’t sure that the country, public opinion, was ripe to understand and accept it. It was a pity. I consider him the best leader we ever had, even better than Andropov.
Q: Yet in your book you are very critical of him.
A: It is because he didn’t use his opportunities. And he allowed the Soviet Union to disintegrate. Three drunken men plotted in the forest — Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk from the Ukraine and Stanislav Shushkevich from Byelorussia met in the Bialowieza Forest. This meeting is well known, but that they were very drunk is not so well known.
Q: How do you know that?
A: I heard this from one of those present.
Q: Are you prepared to say who this was?
A: No.
Q: And the influence of the military-industrial complex in today’s Russia? Has it been brought under control?
A: The economic difficulties of post-Soviet Russia made military expenditures much more modest than they were to the detriment of our military security, but we have a new thing, our new leader, Putin — he is in the hands of this military-industrial complex, and a lot of his appointments go to these people. I don’t know how much control he has over them. In general they have to worry about their survival in the military-industrial complex, not about enhancing peace.
I said once to an American interviewer — and it was very popular at the time — we will do something very bad to you! We will deprive you of your enemy, and we did. Many people in Washington find that hard. But it is the same here. It is very difficult to justify big military expenditures when the country is in so much need. It is a problem. Putin maybe — I don’t know him and people around him — but looking from the outside, maybe he is afraid of being blamed for neglecting the needs of the military. The Communists would blame him, Zhironovsky would blame him. You have a lot of adventurers now. Putin is powerful, he has big popular support but nobody know what will happen after him. This is important. Especially the bureaucrats want to plan their future.
Q: Has the West missed its chance of engaging Russia?
A: Was the end of the Cold War really used by both sides? No. The US was infatuated by being the only superpower and started some adventures. Not all of them were bad. Kuwait was OK — it had to be done. But Iraq was just not well prepared, the intelligence agencies didn’t do a good job, and it was not well executed. So now they are engaged in a bad war with a very doubtful outcome. Iraq can make America so tired that it will go away as happened in Vietnam.
We also, because we have a lot of internal problems, haven’t used the end of the Cold War well. Our leaders were satisfied by being accepted as a member of the Big Eight. I don’t think another Cold War is imminent but we have entered into a period of multilateral international relations with many centers of power. We had this before World War I. It is not easy politics. It demands a very big effort and a lot of brainwork. I’m not sure that both sides have prepared for this. We can slip into worse and worse situations, step by step.
Q: So why has it become so bad? The decisions being made on arms control and troop control. The tense situation with the UK. Why is it getting so bad so fast?
A: The main thing is that real negotiations have stopped. They loose interest in each other. Both sides are at fault.
Q: If you were president of Russia today what would you do to stop this situation?
A: I would start serious negotiations — two or three summits to discuss the new international situation, possible lines of behavior and the responsibilities of big countries. And then work out an agenda of negotiations. We need negotiations all the time. If you do this you have to prepare all the time. You are interested in the other country. You negotiate. You meet your adversary regularly and you get to know him and then it is easier to negotiate. This meeting in Kennebunkport wasn’t a negotiation. I know how the old summit meetings were. All organizations, including mine, were busy up to the ears. The whole political and military establishment. We had to work, work and work. Now they have lost interest. In my country the government has lost interest in consulting the academic community about what they think. I fear it is similar in the US. Now it just theater, just to show. They shake hands, a couple of photos but serious negotiations, no.
Now nobody is interested in anything. I have no idea where they get their information and ideas. Putin’s is the least transparent governmental system in my memory. Even in Stalin’s time we knew Malenkov meant this and this, and after it became much more visible.
I don’t know the people around Putin. What do they think? What can you say about Medvedev? I can say nothing. I have seen his photos. I can recognize him. He’s not a public figure. He doesn’t express himself.
Putin has done a lot of good work — he has re-established the governmental system. But at the same time he gives not a single speech that gives the prospect. What are we striving for? What do we want to have in internal policy, in foreign policy? This would cement the country much better than his vertical system of government. The average mental weight of people in power is becoming much less. And you don’t get to know them. It started with Yeltsin. On Sunday someone prompted a name. On Monday he named a new prime minister.
Q: Are you worried if things go on the way they are the West will consider Russia a military adversary once again?
A: It depends on what they do. If they act like mad then it is possible. I don’t think we will do it. The whole economic situation forbids it. You have seen on the way here these small towns with big expensive houses. This is what the bureaucracy is interested in. They are not interested in work or war or confrontation or world revolution. You could send the police to any of these houses and ask them where they got the money. It is all dishonest money. There are no such salaries whereby you could buy such places.
Q: Putin thinks the US has taken advantage of Russia when it was weak — the expansion of NATO, expanding influence into the old southern Soviet Union etc. Now Putin is fighting back, abrogating old agreements, threatening to retarget Europe with missiles.
A: I am not worried about it too much. I’m more worried about what happens inside Russia. The new generation. What will it do? What will it think? What is in their heads? They have no knowledge of the past and they seem uninterested in the future. It is just today’s material needs. Tomorrow these young people will become important.
The other is the economic situation. We are so dependent on price of oil — and it will drop — I don’t know how Putin will deal with it. We are like a drug addict, sitting on the needle of high oil prices.
Q: I decided to come and see you today because we now appear to be entering a new dangerous phase — the ghosts of the past, after all, have not been laid.
A: People think about this, talk about this. We were too ideological in the past in the Soviet Union but you can’t live without some ideology. We have to stop this stupid talk about how Russia will go its own way. It’s nonsense. The leadership must think more about where the present situation is leading the country to, how to solve these problems and where exactly do they want to lead the country.
Q: Why has the relationship with Britain soured so badly?
A: In the absence of real problems we have these kind of blown-up problems. The villains are Russian citizens who are here now but at the time were in the UK.
Q: Is there a cover-up to protect the killers of Litvinenko?
A: It’s very far from me and my work so I don’t have the real picture. There may be a cover-up. There might be sheer stupidity — I know the quality of the people around Putin. This kind of thing is what I’m afraid of — small things that just appear, that haven’t been planned before, but that have rather bad consequences. We also don’t have a very good established British-Russian relationship. We used to have.
Q: Are you worried about the Administration’s poor control of Russia’s nuclear arsenal?
A: We have had a lot of technical catastrophes, which makes the mass of weapons a dangerous thing. (Some people don’t like TV because it only reports catastrophes.)
Q: But is the political climate benign enough to consider more cuts in nuclear weapons?
A: Both sides have lost their enemy. They see no imminent danger from the other side. Neither seem to understand that it can quickly reappear. Just the existence of so many weapons makes deteriorating relations more likely and stability less dependable.
If you have so many nuclear weapons you have to say there is plan to get rid of them even if you can’t give the exact date. Otherwise other countries say, if you have them why can’t we? Possession of nuclear weapons is now becoming a sign that this is what makes a great country. What enemies does North Korea have? It has none, but it wants to be great and mighty.
In the Cold War days we were afraid that we would get into serious trouble because something bad was done. Now we must be afraid because neither side does anything good and just hopes things will go on like they do. But they will not simply go on. The situation is constantly changing. We can have new dictators appearing from nowhere who wish to have such weapons.The blame for a lack of nuclear disarmament in the US and Russia must be shared equally.
Being honest, we in Russia are not right in our approach. We have so many weapons we could decrease the numbers unilaterally and show an example. We could dismantle our rockets and take others off alert and the Americans would be obliged to follow us.
Q: Who do you blame most for this on the American side, Bush or Clinton?
A: Bush has to be blamed more — because of his use of military force.
Q: Do you think a new Cold War is starting up?
A: It is not. But we can get into one. It’ll be different — not ideological. It will be more difficult than the last one because we now live in a multi-polar world with small states possessing nuclear weapons. Before, the US and USSR could control everyone; now everybody is becoming uncontrollable. I’m not saying we are, but we could be on the threshold of a more dangerous period than the Cold War. The danger looms over us. Two years ago it was impossible to think of this. Now it is possible. Much will depend on the personalities of the future leaders of the US and Russia.
Q: Who would you like to see become president here?
A: I have no favorite — because I don’t know the candidates.
Q: What about Sergei Ivanov?
A: I know him by name only. But logically he won’t be the best choice as his experience is very narrow. When Brezhnev became the head of the Soviet Union he had behind him a long list of different experiences — in the army, in war and peace, in the republics like in Moldavia and Kazakhstan, in agriculture and in industry, plus he had a lot of common sense. Of course he sat too long in his place and this spoilt his reputation. But now people are saying this was the best time of our lives. I wouldn’t say this. But it was a time of stability and people felt that tomorrow would be a little bit better than today and the day after a little bit better than tomorrow.
Q: And on the American side?
A: Hillary (Clinton) may not be a bad president. Barack Obama, I don’t know him.
Q: Obama said recently, the US “must lead the world once more.”
A: If he has on his mind to become leader, to command the world, then he is a naïve newcomer in politics. Even he thinks about it he shouldn’t say it aloud.
Q: Mitt Romney, a leading Republican candidate, wrote recently that “Radical Islam’s threat is just as real” as that before posed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. “The consequence of ignoring this challenge — such as a radicalized Islamic actor possessing nuclear weapons — are simply unacceptable” he said.
A: They’ve found the lost enemy! Now everything can be explained and justified, military expenditure, military action, everything. A “war of civilizations” is quite artificial.
Q: Will all this continue after Bush?
A: It will, and also here. We have to find a way among various Islamic leaders to negotiate because this is bad for Christianity and for Islam. We need maybe a conference of China, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Egypt and some from the Christian world. We must avoid a whole new generation growing up with this idea of “war of civilizations.” It can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If it goes on for a long time it will become so.
Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Soon Iran will have them. This proliferation is stoppable only in an improved world climate brought on by the big powers reducing their own stocks. We should set the example and then say, why do you need them? Do you fear other countries? If you do let’s discuss it and see if we can help you find a way to negotiate.
Q: Can Russia help push Iran to stop getting the bomb?
A: I think together with America we can stop Iran getting a bomb. Everyone in Moscow says, “Why have we to worry about it? American has reason to worry about it more.” So, it is America that has to lead the negotiation. If things go on like they are at the moment Iran’s bomb is inevitable. But if we negotiate and set a good example with our own reductions it can be avoided. I don’t know the leaders of the Islamic countries personally or their psychology but I do know that possessing nuclear weapons makes a leader more adventurous and demanding.
Q: Are you, like the Pentagon, worrying about a Chinese military buildup?
A: I’m not very at ease with the idea of a Chinese buildup. It’s more of a military threat to Russia than it is to the US. But I don’t see a clear and present danger. China is doing rather well in a peaceful way of entering the world market.
For so long China was deprived a place in the international community. It made an imprint on their psychology. Now they are involved in a real attempt to build their country. At the same time we have no guarantees that some military people won’t come to power. This will be bad for China and for its neighbors. Continuing negotiations with China is important. We have to build a multipolar international system and have to base our common security on this.
Q: Do you think, like Gorbachev, that Russia should be part of the European “house”?
A: Of course. Russia has a lot to contribute to the EU. Why should it be kept outside, as Estonia and Poland want? That bad history is passed. If we only lived in the past no one would shake the hand of a German.
The EU has to help now, even symbolically — to make it clear that it is not against Russia coming into the EU.
If the EU could say that in a decade or two Russia could enter this would help stabilize Russian politics.
