Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (60 page)

Russians themselves noted the rapidity with which Westerners took up the idea that only authoritarian reform could work in their sort of society. When the farcical coup against Gorbachev took place in August 1991, the Russian deputy, Galina Starovoitova, was in Britain. As she noted, ‘The reaction of Mitterrand and Kohl and of the entire West on the first day was very temporizing. And I was told at the beginning of the coup - but not by Mrs Thatcher - that we should wait and see if the Soviet people accepted this junta.’ Staravoitova got the impression that Western leaders could not imagine a democratised Russia, let alone a disintegrated USSR:

With the exception of Reagan and Thatcher, the Western political establishment was not composed of ideological antiCommunists. Quite the contrary. By 1989, Reagan was out of office. Without Gorbachev’s sympathetic handling of her pre-election visit to Moscow in 1987, perhaps Mrs Thatcher would also not have survived until 1990. She might have given way to Neil Kinnock, who was still anxious to deal ‘secretly if necessary’ with Egon Krenz, Erich Honecker’s successor as Communist leader in East Germany, in November 1989, or some more emollient classic Conservative from the Chamberlainesque wing of the Tory party (as happened later).
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A key component in the Soviet crisis was the collapse in oil prices. Gorbachev’s foreign policy soothed nerves and encouraged a fall in oil prices. In turn, however, the USSR’s oil revenues slumped. This was the opposite policy to what Soviet Great Power interests required - and ignored the possibilities offered by the circumstances of the late 1980s.

Consider the following scenario: What if Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait in 1990 with the tacit consent of a nuclear-armed and still hawkish Kremlin? It was difficult enough to get General Colin Powell to support a conventional war against Iraq when Gorbachev backed UN sanctions against Baghdad. Would Washington have risked nuclear war to save the Al-Sabah dynasty from enforced retirement to its villas in the West?
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Even if the United States had sustained its military spending after Reagan’s second term came to an end in 1988, would Bush (or Dukakis) have risked nuclear holocaust to stop Saddam exercising control over the lion’s share of Mid-Eastern oil reserves? It is highly unlikely. Remember how close was the actual Senate vote to endorse Operation Desert Storm in January 1991. Under less favourable strategic conditions, prophets of doom like Senator Edward Kennedy would surely have carried at least the three more votes necessary to stick with sanctions.
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What would Saddam’s strategic arsenal of nuclear and biochemical weapons have consisted of by now if that had been US policy?

Even this prognosis may understate the implications of such an alternative scenario. What if eight years of trillion-dollar deficits under Reagan had not produced a major shift in Soviet policy towards disarmament? In fact, the Soviet military-industrial complex could have trundled along for the rest of the 1980s wasting resources on tanks and SS-20s - as we have seen, the post-Soviet capital outflows suggest that ample raw materials were still available, which have since been converted into cash in Western bank accounts. It seems hardly credible that the US public would have endorsed Bush or another Republican as the successor to Reagan if both federal and trade deficits were spiralling upwards without any geopolitical gains to offset them in public opinion terms. Perhaps by mid-summer 1990, the US military would have been well into a post-Reagan round of defence cuts. It could not have risked moving large numbers of troops, tanks and aircraft from West Germany to the Gulf (as it did in 1990) because of the continuing Soviet threat. In all probability, the US military would not have had the reserves to fight Saddam and guard NATO simultaneously. The arguments against Israeli involvement would have been at least as powerful as they were in reality in 1991. Who would have wanted to risk a general war against the Arabs too?

The Gulf War could have been spun out. The resulting high energy prices would have stabilised the Soviet economy. Quite probably some Western oil companies would have come cap in hand to the Kremlin to let them set up joint ventures in the Caspian or Kazakhstan to exploit the Soviet Union’s fabled reserves of oil and natural gas. To avoid Saddam’s stranglehold on Middle Eastern oil, the West might have had to pay generous Danegeld to Moscow for its supplies - and even to provide the pipeline technology. After all, despite American protests as a result of the declaration of martial law in Poland in 1981, the Germans had locked themselves into deals to import natural gas from Siberia via Poland along a pipeline laid by Komsomol volunteers and other less willing labour. Why shouldn’t oil have come the same way? Who would have refused such a chance to build cooperation in Europe and sidestep the tensions in the Middle East?
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Naturally, ordinary Soviet citizens would have been badly off, even worse off with life expectancy declining. But reform since 1985 or 1991 has hardly benefited them and they show little sign of revolting. Higher revenues would at least have enabled the Kremlin to satisfy the yearning for Western consumer goods of the elite. The several million members of the
nomenklatura
could have received access to brand-new videos, microwaves and cars from the West. They could even have received a few more stylish clothes. Better brands of alcohol - which the puritanical Gorbachev tried to ban altogether from party receptions - could have graced every state dacha in the Socialist Commonwealth. In fact, a neo-Stalinist regime would have been more viable economically precisely
because
of the increased tension around the world which its existence would have fostered. Oil, gas and gold prices would have soared, bolstering the USSR’s foreign exchange revenues. In turn, economic and technical espionage as well as subsidies to the fraternal states would have been easier to fund.
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Gorbachev’s belief that a relaxation in tension was in the Soviet Union’s interest was profoundly misplaced. Only the ‘two camps’ division of the world provided the kind of global scenario in which such a strange animal as the Soviet economy could function. Once the external pressures - self-generated as they may have been - were removed, the Soviet metabolism was fatally infected.

Gorbachev went further and actually relaxed the pressure on the Western elite at a time in the mid-1980s when unilateralism was rampant among Western opinion-makers and in universities. The next generation of the Western establishment was subject to daily doses of anti-Reaganite and anti-Thatcherite thinking. The long march through the institutions of post-1960s pacifism and fellow travelling combined with nuclear panic was just about to reach its goal. It was only the surprising and total collapse of Communism under the impact of internal changes which brought much of the Western intelligentsia to admit that the Right had been correct in much of its analysis of ‘real existing socialism’. Had the Wall stayed up, much of the Western elite would have remained oblivious to Communism’s failings, moral as much as material, for at least another generation.

The survival of Soviet Communism into the 1990s would have coincided with renewed economic downturn in the West at the end of the 1980s as well as a possible triumph of Saddam Hussein during those years. Western success in reality was predicated on the Soviet system’s sudden impotence and then demise. Had the Soviet Union preserved the façade of power which had so fascinated and beguiled Western policy-makers for so long, what mischief could the Kremlin not have worked in that time - and who can be confident that it would not have succeeded?

The disappearance of a corrupt and brutal system which stultified the lives of hundreds of millions is a cause of rejoicing. But its collapse was not foreordained by the hidden hand which controls history’s economic forces. It was a much closer run thing than the textbooks allow. No doubt it is better that Communism’s hold over much of the world is gone; but had it turned nasty, even as late as in Leipzig in October 1989, at least one group would have rejoiced in the West. If the Soviet system had survived, sundry Sovietologists and historians would have been able to say, for once truthfully: ‘We told you so.’

Niall Ferguson

As we approach the 300th anniversary of the accession of James III in September 1701, it is all too easy to be complacent about the subsequent course of modern history. Viewing the past, as we do, through the distorting lens of hindsight, we are often tempted to assume that there was something inevitable about the Stuarts’ success in withstanding the religious and political storms which caused so much upheaval in the rest of Europe during the seventeenth century. The world we know today may be said to owe much to James III, and perhaps more to his grandfather Charles I. But it is the great error of historical determinisn to imagine that their achievements were in any sense predestined. We should never underestimate the role of contingency, of chance - of what the mathematicians call ‘stochastic behaviour’.

If, for example, we look back further, to the victory of James’s grandfather Charles I over the Scottish Covenanters at the battle of Duns Law in June 1639, we can see clearly the contingent nature of the Stuart triumph. With the benefit of hindsight and historical research, we know that Charles’s army was larger and better funded than the Scottish forces which faced it across the Tweed. And we know that the King’s victory at Duns Law dealt a death blow not only to the Covenanters but to the Scottish Parliament and Kirk. Yet none of this was as clear to Charles’s commanders as it is to us now. The Earl of Holland, as John Adamson points out, was strongly tempted to retreat when first confronted by the Scottish forces under Leslie.

Of course, there are those historians who see no point in asking counterfactual questions. But let us venture to do so. What if Charles
had
backed down at the critical moment and sought some kind of settlement with the Scots? Under these circumstances, it seems clear that he would very quickly have found himself in the most acute political crisis to face the crown in over a century. Not only would he have been at the mercy of a militant kirk and a recalcitrant Edinburgh parliament. He would also have played directly into the hands of his opponents in England and Ireland.

With the benefit of hindsight we know, of course, that most of the old Puritans who had caused so much trouble in the reign of Charles’s father were to die out in the course of the 1640s. We know that the judges who had opposed Charles’s financial policies in the 1630s were also in their seventies. But had Charles returned to England without a victory in 1639 - and had he (as it seems reasonable to assume) demoted those who had been responsible for the expedition - there might yet have been time for one last offensive by that ageing generation. Fears of a ‘Popish plot’ were much exaggerated, as we know, and soon faded as the Thirty Years’ War drew to its close in 1648. But such fears were at their peak in 1639-40 - a time when a Catholic victory on the continent still seemed a real possibility. Moreover, the lawyers who had opposed Charles over his raising of ship money would have seized the opportunity of a retreat from Scotland to reiterate their arguments against the raising of revenue without parliamentary consent. Even if not a single shot had been fired, the expedition to Scotland would still have cost more than the Exchequer had anticipated. True, if Charles had still been able to rely on the City of London to advance him the additional costs of his abortive expedition, there would have been only limited cause for anxiety. Then again, failure in Scotland might also have precipitated a crisis in Charles’s relations with the City. That would have left him with only one option: to recall Parliament and abandon Personal Rule.

For anyone who subscribes to a determinist theory of history, it is almost impossible to imagine what the consequences of such a climb-down might have been. We are so used to the idea of the Stuart victory over the forces of Puritanism and Coke’s legal conservatism that any other outcome seems inconceivable. Yet it was far from being inevitable that Charles would emerge from the Scottish crisis victorious and go on to reign for a further twenty years, presiding over that era of tolerance at home and peace abroad which we have come to associate with his name. On the contrary, failure in Scotland might have precipitated a similar crisis of governance in Ireland. It has even been suggested by some writers that, under those circumstances, a fully fledged parliamentary revolt might have broken out against his rule in the 1640s; and that this might have led Britain into just the kind of bloody civil war which had racked Europe in the preceding decades. Had the opponents of Personal Rule managed to recover a forum for their grievances in the form of a parliament, it is certainly clear which of Charles’s ministers would have been their first targets: Archbishop Laud and the Earl of Strafford. It is even conceivable that the incompatibility of royal and parliamentary objectives could have led to outright rebellion.

The consequences of what has sometimes misleadingly been called ‘Stuart absolutism’ have been debated often enough. Critics of the regime - especially the more backward-looking Puritan settlers in North America - alleged that the relative decline of the Westminster Parliament marked the end of ‘liberty’ in England, just as they never tired of predicting, quite wrongly, that Laud would one day reintroduce ‘Popery’ to the established church. However, it was precisely the decline of the rigid doctrine of the sovereignty of the crown-in-parliament that enabled the Stuarts to deal as effectively as they did with the problems of political ‘overstretch’ which inevitably arose as their territories expanded in the course of the eighteenth century. The Stuart polity - not unlike its Habsburg counterpart - was, in fact, a far less centralised system than that which developed under Louis XIV in France. Indeed, for all the fears of the older generation in the 1640s, Charles’s son was content to see an increased role for the parliaments of London, Edinburgh and Dublin after his accession.