256 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
audience in America. Gorbachëv took the criticism in good part,
laughing and pumping Shultz’s hand.^59
This reflected Gorbachëv’s recognition of the importance of Shultz
for the pursuit of agreements. He spoke appreciatively about him at
the Politburo in April 1986, mentioning him as a ‘special figure’ who
knew ‘where politics begins – in the mud’. He and Shultz had plenty of
difficult discussions. But Gorbachëv had learned that it was more
effective to persuade him than browbeat him.^60
Shultz bargained hard but he also engaged in fundamental in -
tellectual debate. For one of his early meetings with Shevardnadze, he
and Charles Hill prepared a statement of the arguments against closed
societies as they flew across the Atlantic.^61 For talks with Gorbachëv in
April 1987 he brought along charts illustrating how trends in the
world economy were working against the USSR.^62 In March 1988 he
explained to him how the economies of their two countries were pro-
jected to develop through to the end of the twentieth century. Pointing
to his diagram, Shultz indicated that both America and the Soviet
Union would soon have a decreased share of global production. The
implications for the Kremlin were dire.^63 Shultz had been talking for
many years about the Age of Information; he argued that communist
rulers faced a choice between their fear of the subversive potential of
information technology and their need to keep pace with economic
change.^64 Apparently Gorbachëv made no attempt to dismiss this ana-
lysis. He recognized the need to keep abreast of what was happening
around the world; and he apparently accepted that if Shultz was right
in his forecasts, cooperation between the superpowers could be in
their common interest.^65
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs too studied what Shultz said about
‘the information revolution’.^66 But practical change was minimal.
Soviet leaders might nod approvingly in conversation, but they failed
to follow up with action. Shultz refused to give up on them, as he was
to recall:
They were intrigued. We set up a little working group and I had a
person—Dick [Sollen] was my policy-planning person—they had
a separate person. So they tried to develop this kind of material
and I think it had an impact in the end. For example, their attitude
toward immigration, because I basically said, ‘Here, in the infor-
mation age, if you run a closed compartmental society, you’re
going to fall behind, because everybody else is interchanging ideas
and it moves like lightning all the time. So you’ve got to open up.’^67