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events, rather than setting the international agenda, as he had done, to a great
extent, in his earliest years in office. One of the features that distinguished
Gorbachev from his predecessors as Soviet leader was a strong aversion to
violence. This is, on the whole, recognised both by those who think well of
Gorbachev and by his severe critics in post-Communist Russia. In the words
of Vladislav Zubok: ‘The principle of non-violence was not only Gorbachev’s
sincere belief, and the foundation of his domestic and foreign policies, but it
also matched his personal “codes” . . . The critics claim that Gorbachev “had
no guts for blood”, even when it was dictated by raison d’
´
etat.’
35
There was,
moreover, as Anatolii Cherniaev has affirmed, ‘a total lack in Gorbachev of
undue respect for the military or any kind of special fascination with military
parades and demonstrations of military power’.
36
By bringing in a new foreign-policy team early on, consisting of Eduard
Shevardnadze as foreign minister, Cherniaev as main foreign policy adviser,
Anatolii Dobrynin as head of the International Department of the Central
Committee, and Vadim Medvedev in charge of the Socialist Countries Depart-
ment of that body, Gorbachevopened the way for both new thinking on foreign
policy and new behaviour. From the outset Aleksandr Yakovlev was also an
influential adviser and from 1988 he was the overseer of international affairs
within the Central Committee. While Gorbachev pursued what George Bres-
lauer has characterised as a ‘concessionary foreign policy’, the Soviet Union
was not forced into this.
37
It was, rather, a price that a minority of the Soviet
elite – including, however, the principal power-holder – was prepared to pay for
what they (perhaps, in retrospect, naively) believed would be a more peaceful
and self-consciously interdependent world. The policy was intimately bound
up with the changes that the same people wished to make at home. Liberalisa-
tion, followed by democratisation, within the country was linked to abandon-
ing imperial pretensions abroad. Ronald Reagan, contrary to the belief of most
of the Soviet experts on American politics, turned out to be a valuable partner
for Gorbachev in international negotiations. His anti-Communist credentials
were sufficiently strong to offer him protection at home, and although there
were important inter-agency tensions within the American administration,
35 Vladislav M. Zubok, ‘Gorbachev and the End of the Cold War: Perspectives on History
and Personality’, Cold War History 2, 2 (Jan. (2002): 61–100,atp.82.
36 Anatolii Cherniaev, ‘Forging a New Relationship’, in William C. Wohlforth (ed.), Cold
War Endgame: Oral History, Analysis, Debates (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2003), p. 21.
37 On Gorbachev’s way of justifying his change of Soviet foreign policy, see George W. Bres-
lauer, Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), esp. pp. 70–8.
338