military's idea. Oleg Grinevsky expressed his surprise at hearing this story for the first time, commenting, "We had a suspicion that Marshal Akhromeev did not personally pen the program of the general non-nuclear world." According to Grinevsky, during a meeting of the "small five" on 6 January 1986, Akhromeev had burst in the door to announce that the proposal to abolish nuclear weapons would replace the less radical arms control proposal the group had been working on. Few in the meeting believed Akhromeev's explanation that the general staff had been working secretly on this. Participants suggested that Georgy Kornienko, First Deputy Head of Foreign Affairs, had likely played a key role in persuading Akhromeev to accept the more radical proposal. Ironically, in contrast to what many outside observers perceived at the time-that the Reagan administration thought this proposal to abolish nuclear weapons was just another piece of Soviet propaganda-top U.S. officials, including Reagan himself, seem to have taken it seriously. Thus what started as propaganda, or at least appeared that way to those Soviet officials assigned to develop it, ended up being taken seriously by top leaders on both sides. Grinevsky also recounted how inspections were finally accepted on the Soviet side in 1986 as part of the treaty on conventional forces in Europe. The military strongly opposed inspections, viewing them as spying. The Politburo decided to accept inspections but had Ahkromeev present the decision at the Geneva talks as if it came from the military, even though Ahkromeev had bitterly opposed it in a key Politburo meeting. In describing how this came about, Grinvesky offered a very interesting account of real disagreements within a Politburo meeting. A more puzzling and unresolved discussion concerned | centerpiece of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. the Soviet decision to finally delink INF from SDI, eliminating a major obstacle to concluding an INF agreement. According to Chernyaev's notes, the proposal to de-link INF seems to have come from—of all people— Andrei Gromyko, with support from Ligachev and Defense Minister Sergei Sokolov, all known for their conservative viewpoints in a Politburo meeting in February 1987. Gorbachev, on the other hand, seemed to hesitate. Chernyaev explained that Gromyko, who by that point was no longer foreign minister and had been "promoted" to a position of little influence, was no longer taken seriously. He could thus argue in favor of positions he had earlier strongly opposed (including withdrawal from Aghanistan). It remained unclear, however, why Ligachev was persistently urging the de-linking while Gorbachev seemingly played devil's advocate, or why Shevardnadze was apparently not part of the discussion. While less new information came out on the American side-not surprising since the major transformations of the end of the Cold War occurred on the Soviet side, and also because we know more about the American decision-making process, thanks in part to many high-quality memoirs-we did learn more about the nature of threat perceptions on both sides in the 1980s, particularly the period 1983-86. McFarlane challenged arguments from the Russians that they had been thinking about reform for a long time, provoking Chernyaev to ask, "Did you really think we were going to attack you?" There was often as much disagreement within the sides as between them, especially on the American side, providing a useful reminder of the complex array of domestic actors involved on each side. An interesting exchange came near the end when CIA Soviet specialist Doug MacEachin raised the issue of the Able Archer of NATO military exercises November 1983, and scholar Raymond Garthoff pointed to the highly provocative movements of U.S. fleets in Soviet waters, explicitly challenging Jack Matlock's depiction of U.S. policy as relatively benign and defensive. Afghanistan remained an area of clear disagreement. Soviet participants clearly believed that the U.S. was trying to tie down the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, while U.S. participants said there was nothing they would have wanted more than an early Soviet withdrawal. They saw little evidence that the Soviets were preparing to leave. In addition to providing new empirical information about specific decisions and events, the discussions provided more general contextual insights that will be valuable in interpreting the large numbers of documents now coming out of the archives. Other issues the sessions illuminated were the importance of personal relationships in building trust between the two sides, and the degree of misperception and miscommunication on each side. A recurring theme was the failure of the other side to perceive what each regarded as major shifts in its own position. During a discussion of the causes of the U.S. adoption of the "four-point agenda" in January 1984, which marked a shift by the Reagan administration to a much more accommodating stance toward the Soviet Union, Chernyaev confessed that he had been completely unaware of this agenda. A stunned Matlock expressed amazement that this could be the case, since it formed the Those looking to support or disconfirm arguments about whether "power" or "ideas" mattered more in explaining the end of the Cold War will, alas, find no final answers here. The conference provided evidence for both. Discussions illuminated the perception of domestic decline as the main driving factor for reform on the Soviet side. They also provided insight on the reaction of various Soviet bureaucracies to Reagan's 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), suggesting that SDI did indeed affect Soviet thinking on the need for reform, especially Gorbachev's. At the same time, it was clear from the exchanges that ongoing U.S. and Western diplomatic pressure in favor of human rights and freedoms, exerted both publicly and privately, played a key role in shaping the direction and content of change. Tarasenko emphasized that Shevardnadze's conversations with Shultz on topics other than arms control had an important influence on changing his views. Constant Western pressure on behalf of Sakharov and other dissidents, while irritating initially to the Soviets, eventually fostered a genuine change in thinking. Chernyaev described how Gorbachev and his advisers complied initially with Western requests to improve human rights for purely for instrumental reasons (to promote the arms control process), but then began to think of them as something fundamentally important for the reform of Soviet society. Chernyaev said at the conference, "these kinds of reminders [on human rights] that we got, they really worked, they affected us." Dr. Nina Tannenwald is a Joukowsky Family Assistant COLD WAR INTERNATIONAL HISTORY PROJECT WORKING PAPERS SERIES #1 Chen Jian, "The Sino-Soviet Alliance and China's Entry into the Korean War” #2 P.J. Simmons, “Archival Research on the Cold War Era: A Report from Budapest, Prague and Warsaw" #3 James Richter, "Reexamining Soviet Policy Towards Germany during the Beria Interregnum" #4 Vladislav M. Zubok, “Soviet Intelligence and the Cold War: The 'Small' Committee of Information, 1952-53" #5 Hope M. Harrison, “Ulbricht and the Concrete ‘Rose': New Archival Evidence on the Dynamics of Soviet-East German Relations and the Berlin Crisis, 1958-61” #6 Vladislav M. Zubok, "Khrushchev and the Berlin Crisis (1958-62)" #7 Mark Bradley and Robert K. Brigham, “Vietnamese Archives and Scholarship on the Cold War Period: Two Reports" #8 Kathryn Weathersby, "Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Korean War, 1945-50: New Evidence From Russian Archives" #9 Scott D. Parrish and Mikhail M. Narinsky, “New Evidence on the Soviet Rejection of the Marshall Plan, 1947: Two Reports" #10 Norman M. Naimark, “To Know Everything and To Report Everything Worth Knowing': Building the East German Police State, 1945-49" #11 Christian F. Ostermann, "The United States, the East German Uprising of 1953, and the Limits of Rollback" #12 Brian Murray, “Stalin, the Cold War, and the Division of China: A Multi-Archival Mystery" #13 Vladimir O. Pechatnov, "The Big Three After World War II: New Documents on Soviet Thinking about Post-War Relations with the United States and Great Britain" #14 Ruud van Dijk, “The 1952 Stalin Note Debate: Myth or Missed Opportunity for German Unification?” #15 Natalia I. Yegorova, "The 'Iran Crisis' of 1945-46: A View from the Russian Archives" #16 Csaba Békés, “The 1956 Hungarian Revolution and World Politics" #17 Leszek W. Gluchowski, "The Soviet-Polish Confrontation of October 1956: The Situation in the Polish Internal Security Corps" #18 Qiang Zhai, “Beijing and the Vienam Peace Talks, 1965-68: New Evidence from Chinese Sources" #19 Matthew Evangelista, "Why Keep Such an Army?"" Khrushchev's Troop Reductions" #20 Patricia K. Grimsted, "The Russian Archives Seven Years After: 'Purveyors of Sensations' or 'Shadows Cast to the Past'?" #21 Andrzej Paczkowski and Andrzej Werblan, "On the Decision to Introduce Martial Law in Poland in 1981: Two Historians Report to the Commission on Constitutional Oversight of the SEJM of the Republic of Poland" #22 Odd Arne Westad, Chen Jiang, Stein Tonnesson, Nguyen Vu Tung, and James G. Hershberg ed., “77 Conversations Between Chinese and Foreign Leaders on the Wars in Indochina, 1964-77” #23 Vojtech Mastny, "The Soviet Non-Invasion of Poland in 1980-81 and the End of the Cold War" #24 John P. C. Matthews, "Majales: The Abortive Student Revolt in Czechoslovakia in 1956" To obtain a free copy, contact CWIHP |