154 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
industrial complex. American leaders genuinely wished the super-
powers to have stable forces at ‘radically lower levels’, but they would
never abandon the Defense Initiative. The American people would
always object to the USSR’s human rights abuses and demand that
the Kremlin should fulfil its international obligations. If Gorbachëv
wanted an arms control agreement, he would have to adopt a less
militaristic posture around the world.^25
The Soviet leadership wanted to avoid yielding very much in
Geneva. The Gorbachëv team prepared with what Shevardnadze called
‘active, attacking work’. The Politburo as well as the Warsaw Pact’s
Political Consultative Committee gave their mandate for Gorbachëv
to proceed as he wanted. The important thing for both of them was to
bring an end to the confrontation between East and West. Gorbachëv
was pleased about this support, and visits by leading communists from
Vietnam, Laos, Mongolia and Ethiopia had cemented his resolve.
He had also received encouragement from Rajiv Gandhi. On his Paris
trip he had asked François Mitterrand for help and felt that he had
made some progress with him. By the time that he left for Geneva,
he felt hopeful that he could make an impact on Reagan.^26 His
preparations included the unusual move of a wide-ranging interview
with the American President in the pages of Pravda. The New York
Times noted that the Soviet newspaper cut out Reagan’s remarks about
Afghanistan.^27 But the bigger fact was that the interview took place at
all – and Pravda refrained from censoring his other broad points. The
Soviet leadership no longer feared the ventilation of the American
political breeze.
Gorbachëv took a wide spectrum of advisers to Geneva. The scien-
tists Yevgeni Velikhov and Roald Sagdeev as well as arms control talks
specialists joined his group along with academics Fëdor Burlatski and
Yevgeni Primakov. Gorbachëv wanted all the help he could muster.^28
His team of political and diplomatic advisers also included Yakovlev,
Kornienko, Dobrynin and Alexandrov-Agentov: a mixture of the con-
temporary and the antediluvian.^29
They discerned weaknesses in America’s standpoint. Shevardnadze
commented to aides: ‘Abroad [i.e. outside America], Reagan has often
seemed like an ignorant old fool whose simplistic militarism was
entirely capable of resulting in the world being blown to smither-
eens.’^30 He was largely right about the trends in West European
opinion. But American surveys were more nuanced in their results.
Americans recognized that the new General Secretary was different