Gorbachev and the G7 summit - 19 July 1991

Summit meetings have been going on for centuries and at one time, well over 400 years ago, the Florentine political commentator Machiavelli was so irritated by the results of them that he wrote to the effect, there is nothing to be done by a meeting of princes, that could not have been done better by their ministers. That's a sentiment that will be warmly applauded by all career diplomats and by the legions of professional civil servants who sweat away at the several so-called desks of any foreign office – as the Middle Eastern desk, the West European desk, the South Pacific desk – and it will be applauded this week by all the anonymous men and women who bound up and worked up the briefings for the big boys of the Group of Seven, so they could appear to take an intelligent part in the cross talk at Lancaster House.

I've known some of these tutors or coaches – usually assistant or under secretaries of state for political affairs, for economic affairs, and so on – and they had funny, sometimes hair-raising stories to tell about the big man, the secretary of state, the president and the troubles he had just before a summit in being fed the facts and the proper attitudes, so that on the day he sat down with his opposite grandees, he would at least not make a fool of himself.

I don't know if on the Field of the Cloth of Gold or at the Congress of Vienna, it was true then that the ministers, that's to say the professional desk men, would have done better than the monarchs they coached but I doubt it's true today. Now, today, as then, the professional's job, every working day of their lives, was to sort out the facts, to find out the strengths and weaknesses of the likely enemy or ally and to offer to the boss a choice of policies that would be best for his own country. But the responsibility of the choice always rested with the boss, with the president or the prime minister, and while in Machiavelli's day very few people outside the summit meeting, certainly none of the public, knew anything about what went on, until they found, say, they had a war on their hands. In the century of the investigative journalist and the age of television, no secrets can be kept for long from any of us, probably the main reason why the final communiqués have to be so wordy, so vague, so cautious about offering facts and figures.

I've read reports and commentaries from British journalists and Americans and Frenchmen and, a little harder to get at, Moscow commentators, who today are well worth listening to because, after 70 years, they're enjoying the weird, the novel experience of being able to speak their mind. So to begin with them is important, I think, because Mr Gorbachev is such a charmer. The moment he appears on a street in London or Washington, he's seen as at once a mighty man and an adorable pop star. We tend to forget while the fun and the feasts and the fireworks are on, that he himself does not speak any more for the whole of the Soviet Union. It's doubtful if he speaks for Russia and that his own hold on the power he claims is very fragile. A month, six months from now, he may be on his way to, well if not oblivion, retirement.

The first thing the Moscow commentators note and seem to agree on is that Mr Gorbachev was right to stress as the most important outcome, that for the first time in history, the Soviet Union and the industrial West and East have embarked on a new economic relationship. It seems way back in the Middle Ages when Mr Khrushchev promised or threatened that Communist economics would overwhelm and bury the capitalist system. The Muscovites also wonder who among the seven, if anybody, asked Mr Gorbachev when the borders of his republics would be made firm and does he have any idea what the coming, the proposed new constitution will have to say about free trade, a market economy, the transformation of the Soviet bureaucracy. How many political parties are anticipated?

These misgivings, I'm sure, are at the root of this summit's inability to do anything concrete, to make any economic or fiscal or agricultural promises. We're dealing with a country in revolution and if and when it's all over, when it's settled down, if in the next year or two it does, then we may know the big man or the six big men we have to deal with. We'll also know how many countries have emerged from what we still call the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The Muscovites also noticed that Mr Gorbachev's open manner, his public warmth to everybody, was meant to show the leaders of the breakaway republics and the Communist conservatives and the old hard-liners and too, I suppose, all the Yeltsin-ites, that the seven big powers are most at home in dealing with Mr Gorbachev. Yet there have been reminders in the Russian press about the wonderful welcome Mr Boris Yeltsin enjoyed in America in June. One Moscow correspondent ominously concluded, Mr Gorbachev would be well-advised not to play the G7 card too strongly back home.

Below the surface of Russian newspaper comment is the more interesting fact that the man who had and propagated the idea that Mr Gorbachev should go to London, was of course invited to go with him and declined because he says Mr Gorbachev's plan fell far short of what was intended. Now this is as if the American Secretary of State, Mr James Baker, having jetted himself into a daze during the past six months trying to set up a Middle Eastern peace conference, should have achieved it, should see Syria and Israel and Jordan, all the lions and the lambs agreeing to sit down at least together, having achieved this and President Bush having then announced he would open this triumphant conference in such a place, on such a date, Mr Baker then announced that the president's plan, his policy, fell far short of what was needed and he, Mr Baker, would sulk and stay at home.

The Baker of this G7 story is Grigory Yavlinsky, the inspirer, the creator you might say, of this week's unique get-together, rapprochement, what you will. Mr Yavlinsky is only 39 but he's an advocate, probably the most influential and committed advocate in the Soviet Union, of a market economy. He was the principal author of what he calls a radical concrete plan worked out with economists from Harvard. Mr Yavlinsky's view of the results of the summit confirm his judgement in not going to London. Of course, he says, the readiness of the seven to integrate the Soviet Union into the global system is all very positive but I, he says, am dispirited because it could have gone so much further. The situation in the Soviet Union is far more serious, more complex than – he evidently means – Mr Gorbachev made clear.

Mr Yavlinsky, I assume, took into account what one correspondent called the smidgen of technical and economic assistance Mr Gorbachev did get, namely from Canada, the $130 million grain credit, from Mr Major £50 million in the next three years, to help a type of character who is, in any capitalist country, the backbone of the economy, the small businessman, a character the Soviet Union knows very little about.

But then, said an old friend of mine the other evening, practically the whole structure, the whole system and all its parts of a market economy, is something no country Communist for 70 years, is possibly going to learn by next summer or even possibly by the next decade. We do know a lot of things that Mr Gorbachev, who is a very articulate man, a lot of things he didn't articulate – such as how would he de-control prices, how protect property rights, how would he go about privatising whole industries and other enterprises, their relations, the legal relations between the central government and the republics? In fact, how are you going to invent a nation, Mr Gorbachev, and what sort is it to be?

The Soviet Union is facing a task, not less mountainous than that which the victorious British colonies in North America faced, when Britain surrendered. They tried one system, a confederacy and it worked appallingly for seven years. They gave up and, as we all know, they met in Philadelphia to try again and they were men who'd had much experience of governing their own colonies, turned into states and they had a handful of brilliant men with great experience of many types of government. They sat down and created a constitution which invented the nation and the framework of laws it still lives by. If the Soviet Union does likewise in seven and a half years, it will perform a miracle. On how the people of Russia at least feel about Mr Gorbachev's London trip there's an interestingly big gap between what they hope from the trip and what they hope from Mr Gorbachev: 73% think the trip will affect their country's future, only 31% think Mr Gorbachev's presence was a help.

The one question which no journalist I've heard asked Mr Gorbachev and which perhaps only a fly on the wall at Lancaster House could answer, is are you going to remain a Communist or must the reforms you propose mean the end of Communism? It's been put to him before and he always replies smilingly, that a Communist system and a capitalist system can be made to mix. He surely knows they won't but his central personal problem, and that of anyone who succeeds him, is surely that while membership in the Communist Party is steadily declining, 75% of the Russian navy, at least 70% of the army and 95% of the KGB are party members. So he must have left the seven with the unspoken question, if there is a total breakdown and a civil war, who do you think is most likely capable of seizing power and getting their hands on those 30,000 nuclear warheads? The known answer, it seems to me, is Mr Gorbachev's ace up the sleeve.

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