112 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
he took with him.^64 When asked whether ‘fresh approaches’ in foreign
policy were possible, he made no attempt at caution: ‘Yes, of course.’^65
He also endorsed the call for an anti-alcohol campaign by Party Cen-
tral Committee secretaries Yegor Ligachëv and Mikhail Solomentsev.^66
He was ignoring the etiquette of silence about matters on which the
Politburo had yet to give its ruling.
The conversation between him and Thatcher at Chequers on 16
December 1984 went better than anyone had thought possible. The
British interpreter saw a roguish twinkle in his eye.^67 She had Foreign
Secretary Howe and her aide Charles Powell with her; Gorbachëv
went along with the Party Secretariat’s Leonid Zamyatin and the
former Ottawa Ambassador Alexander Yakovlev.^68 The Prime Minister
shook off her shoes beside the fireplace. Gorbachëv had come with a
list of talking points but asked her: ‘Could we do without such papers?’
‘Gladly!’ she replied. Putting her notes back into her handbag, she crit-
icized Soviet curbs on Jewish emigration.^69 Gorbachëv questioned her
knowledge of the USSR. He was incredulous about her idea that every-
thing was centralized in the Soviet economy.^70 Thatcher objected to the
money that Soviet trade unions were sending to the striking British
coalminers. She threatened retaliation. When Gorbachëv replied that
‘this has nothing to do with us’, Thatcher exclaimed that such finance
could not be reaching the National Union of Mineworkers without the
Kremlin’s knowledge.^71 Turning to Marxism-Leninism, she scoffed at
what she described as the communist credo: ‘Brothers: when you are
free, you will do as you’re told!^72 Though Gorbachëv denied that the
USSR was sending aid to the strikers, he carefully added ‘as far as I am
aware’.^73 He anyway promised that there would be no further subsidy.
(He kept his word: when Soviet trade union leaders asked permission
to send a million rubles to the strikers, the Politburo turned them
down.)^74
He adduced the New York Times to warn that any war with atomic
bombs would create ‘nuclear winter’.^75 He expressed alarm about
people in Washington like Weinberger and Perle.^76 His coup de théâtre
occurred when he took a top-secret General Staff map from his brief-
case with coloured arrows marking the Soviet missile targets in the
United Kingdom. Thatcher did not know whether to take him seri-
ously. After a long pause, Gorbachëv said: ‘Mrs Prime Minister, it’s
necessary to finish with all this, and the sooner the better.’ Thatcher
agreed.^77