Observations on diaries

Margaret Thatcher "fawned on" and "charmed" Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s because, newly published private diaries suggest, she hoped with his help to "surpass all kinds of Kohls and Mitterrands, and maybe even Reagans". At the same time there was alarm in Moscow that Soviet financial support for striking British miners might become public knowledge in the west, because if that happened "Maggie" would not hesitate to turn on Gorbachev and drag him "through the mud".

These titbits were recorded in 1985 by Anatoly Chernyaev, a top foreign-policy adviser to the Soviet president intimately involved in the diplomacy of the last years of the cold war, who proves to have had, once alone with his journal at night, a taste for mischief and gossip and a sharp way with words.

Published this week on the website of the National Security Archive, part of the George Washington University, the first instalment of his diaries contains, among other things, the record of Chernyaev's visit to Britain that year. About Margaret Thatcher, he noted that she was "devilishly smart" and "a great actress" who played "the role of a great political figure" from "morning to night". Such a performance, he thought, might be hard to sustain: "She is not on stage, where regular actresses sometimes manage to live long."

He also spent time with people in the Labour Party, then in opposition. Neil Kinnock, the party leader, is recorded as calling Thatcher "a little fool", but more space is devoted to an assistant of Kinnock's, one Charles Clarke.

Clarke is said to have told a colleague of Chernyaev that he saw little prospect of Labour displacing Thatcher. "No one will bring her down and she is not inclined to turn the power over. Her only possible downfall is that she might not be able to endure it herself," the diaries record. By this, Clarke apparently meant that Thatcher might succumb to eyesight problems or to "psychological stress".

The Soviet Union's financial support for the striking miners is already a matter of record, but Chernyaev's diaries show that it did not command universal support in Moscow. He recorded in January 1985 that the all-union Central Labour Union council insisted "on the resumption of the million-rouble transfer to English miners, even though Gorbachev told Thatcher: we have not and will not transfer".

Chernyaev was against the donations, arguing that they were "a drop in the bucket" of what the miners needed, and that because it had to happen in secret, "it does nothing for internationalism". He also warned: "If it comes to the surface, Maggie will drag the person, with whom she talked and whom she liked so much [Gorbachev], through the mud."

For Britain's home-grown communists, Chernyaev had little regard. The leaders of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) were "indifferent" and "occupied with their little affairs", he wrote, and when they voted in 1985 to end their ideological adherence to Moscow he called it an act of "self-liquidation". "Either they are fools, or the [intelligence] agents really made an impact, or they are such vehement anti-Soviets that they have lost common sense."

The first instalment of the Chernyaev diaries is published on 8 June at www.nsarchive.org

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website