Kinnock and the Kremlin

In the second part of our investigation into Labour’s dealings with the USSR, Pavel Stroilov reveals the secret Soviet diplomacy behind one leader’s most famous victory

Labour leaders, past and present, will be wishing this week that Anatoly Chernyaev had not been such an assiduous diarist. Along with thousands of documents left in the archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the diplomat’s personal writings had lain forgotten for more than 20 years. Last week, extracts in The Spectator cast light on Labour’s ‘special relationship’ with the Kremlin and the various officials who begged for its help to fight the Conservatives.

This week, we reveal more documents from Soviet archives which show that relations between Britain’s Labour party and the USSR went even further — with Moscow playing a critical role in the finessing of the party’s policies on international affairs and defence. It was Chernyaev himself who instigated the duplication of archive documents when Gorbachev left office but, officially, they remain top secret. Digital copies were made, which were taken from the Gorbachev Foundation and smuggled, by me, to the West.

KINNOCK’S NUCLEAR TALKS

Neil Kinnock’s success in persuading Labour to change party policy from unilateral to multilateral nuclear disarmament in 1989 is often seen as his most celebrated achievement as party leader. Unilateralism, where Britain would scrap its nuclear weapons regardless of other nations’ arsenals, was an electoral millstone: voters just couldn’t understand why any country would do such a thing.

So Kinnock won much praise for his policy change and was applauded for rebuilding the party’s credibility with the voters. It was called Kinnock’s finest hour, the greatest victory in his long fight with the hard left to modernise the party.

It was the left he needed to convince in a packed meeting of Labour’s National Executive Committee in May 1989, when he got his way by telling them: ‘I have gone to the Kremlin… and argued down the line for unilateral nuclear disarmament.