Excerpted from Chapter 6 of The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev’s Adaptability, Reagan’s Engagement, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Cornell University Press, 2014)

When Gorbachev finally met James Baker in Moscow in May 1989, he left the meeting disappointed. Baker brought with him Robert Gates, the deputy national security advisor whose skepticism of Gorbachev’s motives was well known to the Kremlin. “Whatever Baker’s intention was in bringing him to the Kremlin to sit in on the meeting with Gorbachev,” Palazchenko later recalled, “the effect was not good.” Neither was that of Baker’s message: the United States intended to modernize the Lance missile, whose range of just under 500 kilometers excluded it from the INF Treaty. “We believe that a minimum number of nuclear weapons is essential to our strategy of flexible response, which ensures the preservation of peace in Europe,” Baker told the Soviet leader . . . The secretary of state understood the “political appeal” of a “triple zero option.” Yet progress could occur only when the Soviets reevaluated its massive conventional forces and decided, “We are ready to reduce our superiority.”

Gorbachev and his team suspected that the Americans either wanted to see the Soviet Union suffer or did not care. While Washington operated on the time horizon of a presidential administration, Moscow had only urgency. Implementing perestroika and constructing a new world order, in Gorbachev’s mind, could not be postponed. “We probably have no more than two to three years to prove that socialism as formulated by Lenin can work,” Yakovlev warned in a speech in December 1988. The failure of perestroika would likely lead to “a triumphant, aggressive, and avenging conservatism.” Gorbachev reiterated this concern. “We are walking on a razor blade,” he told Vadim Medvedev the day of Kissinger’s visit in January. Later that month, he asked Yakovlev to coordinate with different agencies and think tanks to draft and submit reports on contingencies that might arise in Eastern and Central Europe.

“Crisis symptoms are visible in all spheres of public life inside the countries as well as in relations among them,” read one of the reports. “In the economy the intensity of these symptoms varies from a slowdown of economic growth, a widening social and technological gap with the West, a gradual worsening of shortages in domestic markets and the growth of external debt (GDR, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria) to a real threat of economic collapse (Yugoslavia, Poland).” (Of particular concern were the problem of inflation, the potential for 1920s­-style “hyperinflation,” and the prevalence of a “shadow economy” and accompanying corruption.) Yakovlev prescribed that Moscow coopt the forces of reform in these countries. This was becoming increasingly difficult. The arrest of playwright and dissident Václav Havel had made him “a national hero,” said one of Vadim Zagladin’s friends in the Czech foreign ministry. “This is a priceless gift for the West.” Still, the priority Yakovlev set was to avoid the use of force should Czechoslovakia attempt to exit the Soviet Bloc. “These memoranda preached to the converted,” writes Vladislav Zubok; Yakovlev, Shevardnadze, and Chernyaev were all disinclined to repeat the example of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Gorbachev did not want a repeat of 1968. He sensed fissures in the communist world, from Cuba to North Korea. He was horrified when protestors clashed with Soviet troops on the streets of Tbilisi on April 9, 1989, leaving twenty Georgians dead. From now on, he told the Politburo on May 11, 1989, “use of force is excluded.” It was not acceptable in foreign policy and “even more inadmissible against our own peoples.” The images beamed out of China that June agitated Gorbachev. So did the response of the communist “friends.” Ceaușescu clamored for a Chinese approach in Eastern Europe, Gorbachev told Kohl on June 14, 1989; that was unacceptable. Such behavior did not befit the Soviet leader’s conception of how Europeans should act. “It is certainly strange that this kind of family clan would be established in the center of civilized Europe, in a state with rich historical traditions,” Gorbachev told the West German leader. One “could imagine something like that to emerge somewhere else, like it has in [North] Korea, but here, right next to us ­it is such a primitive phenomenon.” Yet Gorbachev’s own reforms led to unintended and sometimes threatening consequences. In May, an anti­-Semitic group named Pamyat (“Memory”) exploited glasnost to insinuate that perestroika was a Jewish plot; it emerged just as another group, Memorial, organized one hundred thousand people to rally in Moscow, many of whom supported an increasingly popular line of Russian nationalism. Its chief proponent, Boris Yeltsin, demoted in late 1987 after criticizing Gorbachev, won a seat in the Congress of People’s Deputies.

Tensions long kept at bay found their way to the fore. From the Caucasus to the Baltics, ethnic nationalism threatened to engulf Soviet socialist republics in separatism and violence. Nagorno­-Karabakh, an ethnically Armenian enclave landlocked and fully within Azerbaijan, demanded either some form of autonomy or union with Armenia. In neighboring Georgia, the prospect of more violence weighed heavily on the minds of Gorbachev’s team­—Shevardnadze’s above all. Far on the other side of Gorbachev’s Stavropol, nationalists in Estonia and Lithuania began speaking openly about independence from the Soviet Union.

Just before Gorbachev’s trip to the FRG, a railway accident in Bashkiria, caused by an explosion of a ruptured natural gas pipeline, killed hundreds and galvanized the nation. The next month, a miners’ strike broke out in West Siberia, further compounding economic difficulties. Demoralization set in. “Inside me, depression and alarm are growing [about] the sense of crisis of the Gorbachevian idea,” Chernyaev confided in his diary. “He has no concept of where we are going. His declaration about socialist values, the ideals of October, as he begins to tick them off, sound like irony . . . behind them—emptiness.”

Amidst these setbacks, Gorbachev reiterated his theme of a common European home. The idea of a united Europe renewed his confidence and buoyed his spirits. On July 6, 1989, he delivered an impassioned speech to the Parliament of Europe in Strasbourg, France. “Victor Hugo said that the day would come when you, France, you, Russia, you, Italy, you, England, you, Germany—­all of you, all the nations of the continent­ will, without losing your distinguished features and your splendid distinctiveness, merge inseparably into some high society and form a European brotherhood.” That day beckoned. Talk of European integration sounded a lot like a “common European home,” his own idea “born out of the realization of new realities, of our realization of the fact that the linear continuation of the path, along which inter-European relations have developed until the last quarter of the twentieth century, is no longer consonant with these realities.”

“Differences between states cannot be eliminated,” Gorbachev acknowledged. But competition needed to be relegated to each side’s attempts to create “better material and spiritual conditions of life for people.” Because perestroika was ultimately bound to succeed, Gorbachev proclaimed, “the Soviet Union will be in a position to take full part in such an honest, equal and constructive competition.” Notwithstanding his country’s shortcomings, “we know full well the strong points ofour social system which follow from its essential characteristics.”

Gorbachev’s litany of promises struck many as naive. Cautious members of the Bush administration had heard similar things from Leonid Brezhnev, Andrei Gromyko, and others who pledged peaceful coexistence. Scowcroft did not think Gorbachev was another Brezhnev, but he considered the timing of Gorbachev’s disarmament proposals to be suspect. When Gorbachev announced after meeting with Baker that he would unilaterally reduce shortrange nuclear weapons, Scowcroft did not take him seriously. Nor did he think that Gorbachev would ever allow East Germany to leave the Soviet Bloc peacefully. Even Pavel Palazchenko, Gorbachev’s interpreter and confidante, remained skeptical. “I had friends in Eastern Europe,” he later recalled, “and I knew that culturally and psychologically they did not belong in the quasi­-Soviet system. But even many people my age were doubtful that Eastern Europe could just be allowed to go its own way. What about our security? And, some said, we won the war and there were millions of our soldiers buried in the soil of Eastern Europe. Had that been in vain?”

Immediately after the Strasbourg speech, Gorbachev traveled to Bucharest to meet with military leaders of the Warsaw Pact. Western politicians were speaking about the Cold War being over, Gorbachev told them. Perhaps they were correct; perhaps “we are talking about the end of a period that has lasted over forty years, [and] about the beginning of a transition to a new international order.” Relaxation of tensions proceeded “in the favorable political atmosphere that was created by the process of the renewal of socialism.” Cold War institutions needed to be reconfigured to reflect new realities. The time had come for the Warsaw Pact to transform itself “from a military­-political alliance into a politico-­military one.”

Warsaw Pact leaders absorbed the message. Gorbachev “confirmed the readiness of the USSR to coordinate the size of the Soviet contingents and the order of their withdrawal from Eastern Europe with the leadership of the allied countries,” Bulgaria’s foreign minister wrote the Politburo in Sofia. Countries in the Eastern bloc needed to pay careful attention to the integration of Western Europe and to consider establishing joint programs in areas such as transport, technology, and nuclear power safety. The host of the conference, Nicolae Ceaușescu, ridiculed talk of a “pan­-European home,” the Bulgarian foreign minister recounted. To everyone else, Gorbachev’s message rang clear: renew socialism, look to the West.

This message held true as Gorbachev met with the Hungarian communist leadership on July 24, 1989. Asked about plans to withdraw Soviet troops from Hungary, Gorbachev read a press release that stated: “In the course of negotiations, the issues of Soviet troops stationed in Hungary was brought up, and the parties decided that steps will be made to further reduce the number of Soviet troops, in accordance with the European disarmament process and with the continuation of the Vienna talks.”

By the end of July, Gorbachev’s spirits were picking up. Chernyaev wrote him on July 26, 1989, to report Akhromeyev’s successful visit to the Norfolk Naval Base. Given how well the Soviet Marshal had been treated, Chernyaev surmised that a “shift” was under way in Washington. “I take advantage of this opportunity to express satisfaction over the development of Soviet­-U.S. dialogue,” Gorbachev wrote Bush on July 29, 1989, “particularly on the key problems of strengthening security and reducing military confrontation.”

Read the rest of Chapter 6 of The Triumph of Improvisation:

http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-Improvisation-Gorbachevs-Adaptability-Engagement-ebook/dp/B00I03L3DM/