The four men who averted the Apocalypse

In March 1987, as Professor Robert Service records in his new account of the end of the Cold War, Margaret Thatcher visited Moscow. She had been reluctant to do so, largely out of fear that such a visit would only make it easier for a credulous Reagan — as she saw him — to offer Gorbachev even more concessions. She had also been worried that it would produce nothing for British interests.

Her hesitation to travel to Russia, let alone, as her advisers had urged, solicit an invitation, was perhaps surprising. She and Gorbachev had got on famously — shoes off, in front of a blazing fire — when she had entertained him, then only the Politburo member responsible for agriculture, at Chequers just before Christmas 1984. It was that encounter that had enabled her to tell Reagan — and the world — that Gorbachev was a Soviet leader with whom one could do business.

But when, eventually, an unsolicited invitation did arrive, Thatcher accepted with alacrity, her sense of political theatre as acute as ever. And the five-day visit that followed was a tour de force, as the Iron Lady, clad in fur, took an unsuspecting Russia by storm, visiting a monastery, calling on an ordinary family, meting out to a panel of Soviet television interviewers the kind of treatment usually reserved for ‘Mr [Robin] Day’.

At the Kremlin, Gorbachev tried to re-create for their dinner — just three a side — the kind of atmosphere he had enjoyed in the Chilterns: a log fire, and a specially hung oil painting of a stormy sunset. Sitting in the Foreign Office back in London, I heard an account of that dinner from one of those present. As at Chequers, the two had hit it off, arguing back and forth with real passion about whether capitalism or socialism was better.