INTRODUCTION 9reformers and prodded forward by Reagan and Bush, chose to travel
in the opposite direction – and, step by step, the Cold War came to a
peaceful end.
America won its struggle with the USSR, which fell into the ash-
heap of history. Gorbachëv contended that the Soviet reformers were
also victors since they had actively promoted conciliation between the
superpowers and political democratization in the Soviet Union. Here a
riddle awaits its answer. The American leadership made no attempt to
disguise how it continued to pressurize the Kremlin. Reagan and Bush
stipulated that if the USSR desired a rapprochement with America, it
would not be enough to get out of Afghanistan and slacken the grip on
Eastern Europe: Gorbachëv would also have to change the way that he
treated his own people. The Americans made demands about radio
jamming, exit visas, Baltic freedom, political prisoners and defamatory
propaganda. The pressures were relentless before 1985 and lasted
through all the years while Gorbachëv was in power.^15 But as the
USSR’s economic woes deepened from 1989, Gorbachëv found it ever
harder to say no to Washington. What has yet to be established is how
much of his willingness to compromise resulted from the stress
applied by the Americans and how much from the Soviet economy’s
current and long-term troubles.
This agenda for enquiry encompasses one of the cardinal episodes
of recent world history. Time was when accounts of the closing years of
the Cold War depended overwhelmingly on reminiscences by leaders
and officials. From the Washington and Moscow vaults there subse-
quently emerged documentary collections that threw light on decisions
at the highest level. Now it is possible to go to the archives and examine
the original records of what Reagan, Gorbachëv and Bush said and
wrote at the time. Copious holdings exist, scattered across Russia, the
rest of Europe and America as well as on the World Wide Web. These
are extraordinary enough in themselves. But there are also exceptional
sources in the unpublished diaries and papers of Soviet and Western
officials who were close to the seats of supreme power – those of
Anatoli Adamishin, Rodric Braithwaite, Anatoli Chernyaev, Charles
Hill, Vitali Kataev, Jack Matlock and Teimuraz Stepanov-Mamaladze.
The personal records that they kept at the time give an unmatched
sense of the exciting, important events they were witnessing.
The final justification for yet another account of the end of the
Cold War is the idea of giving equal attention to the Soviet Union and
America and their interaction in a churning world of transformation,