Glasnost merely confirmed Russia’s deep-seated suspicion of democracy

Thirty years ago the Soviet Union was guttering to its close. Those of us who were there remember the exhilarating hope, the apprehension, the illusion. For everyone else it is a distant echo.

Russia was always likely to lose the Cold War competition with America. It was unmanageably large, too poor and too reliant on too few products. Stalin’s bloody grip had enabled the Soviet Union to defeat the Germans at a terrible cost to his people. When he died in 1953 his system entered a protracted agony.

Over the next decade Nikita Khrushchev tinkered with half-baked solutions. They misfired, and he was overthrown by the hard men in the party, the KGB, and the army. His more cautious successors managed to equal America’s military might. They had successes among the uncommitted nations. But the concessions they made to their consumers could not compete with the ideas, the music, the films and the jeans that carried American influence throughout the world. Soviet teenagers and intellectuals looked to the West, convinced that its streets were paved with gold and freedom. Doubts grew even among the bureaucrats and the generals. In March 1985 the old men of the Politburo — conservative, but not stupid — chose Mikhail Gorbachev to put things right.

Gorbachev was open, optimistic and more charming than any previous Soviet leader. At first he was wildly popular abroad and, though they now forget it, among his own people too. He believed that the system could be saved by cutting the crippling burden of defence expenditure, reaching out to the Americans to wind down the Cold War, reforming the economy and introducing a degree of democracy. He had some bittersweet successes and some devastating failures.

He and President Reagan did begin to get the nuclear confrontation under control: but on every issue he faced America’s superior negotiating clout.