Macmillan and the Soviet Union

Abstract

The global contest of ideology and power between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies set the tone for the conduct of international relations during a large part of the twentieth century. For successive British Prime Ministers it did much to establish the context within which their foreign policy had to be constructed and implemented. Many of them alternated between policies of confrontation and co-operation as they struggled to contain the twin threats of Soviet power and Communist ideology, while maintaining a working relationship with the Soviet government. David Lloyd George is identified with the abandonment of armed intervention and the first unsuccessful attempt to draw the new Soviet state into the international community. Churchill, his imagination fired throughout much of his political career by the threat and the challenge of Russia, moved from the anti-Bolshevik tirades of the twenties and thirties to the wartime military alliance, the nuclear confrontation of the Cold War years and the final attempt to forge some new understanding after the death of Stalin. Harold Wilson, to his final, sad years, never failed to recall his early trade negotiations with Mikoyan. Margaret Thatcher, coming to office after thirty-four years of Cold War, confronted almost immediately with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and as harsh as Ronald Reagan in her denunciation of the ‘evil empire’, could claim, as British Prime Minister, to have been among the first of the Western leaders to sense that with the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev the time had come to end the decades of sterile confrontation. Yet so sterile had the relationship been that for most of those who occupied 10 Downing Street between 1917 and 1991 there had been little room for positive moves in the field of British-Soviet relations and of those initiatives which were undertaken few were fruitful. It is against this background that Macmillan’s handling of the relationship has to be judged.