(Washington) When Mikhail Gorbachev began shaking hands in the streets of Washington in 1990, he displayed an unusual showmanship worthy of his friend Ronald Reagan.
Posted at 12:12 p.m.
Updated at 1:23 p.m.
Ana Maria Guzman was taking her lunch break in a park when she saw the Soviet leader arrive, who died Tuesday at the age of 91.
“We knew he was there, but we saw his motorcade coming. He got out of his car and started shaking hands,” she said. “It was striking. It was as if he was close to people. Unbelievable ! »
This personal touch was the specialty of Ronald Reagan, the former Hollywood actor who became the darling of the American right.
Reagan and Gorbachev ended decades of tension between their two countries to form one of the most unlikely personal relationships of the 20e century, born of their common desire to reduce nuclear tensions and which ended up changing the world.
Decades of mistrust
The former apparatchik originally had nothing in common with his American counterpart, and both came from countries that had been mutually suspicious of each other for decades.
But when Reagan came to power in 1981, one of his first — and most secret — goals was to reduce nuclear tensions with Moscow.
He tried unsuccessfully to approach three Soviet leaders – Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko – but they were opposed to any change and none survived long enough to establish a relationship.
When Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985 after Chernenko’s death, the White House saw an opportunity, recalls Jack Matlock, who was then America’s top negotiator with the USSR, before becoming US ambassador United in Moscow.
“At the start of his term, Reagan spoke of the USSR as the evil empire,” Mr. Matlock told AFP. “But from the very beginning he spoke of negotiations and the possibility of establishing peaceful relations if the Soviet leadership agreed to come to terms with the free world.”
“There were few reactions, until Gorbachev. With Gorbachev, they finally established communications and two or three years later they were almost on the same line,” he adds.
Gorbachev was not naive, notes John Lenczowski, Ronald Reagan’s top adviser on relations with the USSR. But the White House had understood that the new Soviet leader inherited a weakened economy, an army feeling overwhelmed and threatened by the Pentagon and a communist party eaten away from within.
Gorbachev needed to improve relations with the United States to reform his country and preserve the Soviet Union, Lenczowski said.
Reagan, on the other hand, saw the Kremlin’s paranoia as dangerous for both countries.
“Reagan started to think that it was really necessary to lower the tone and to try to manage the relations with Moscow a little more gently”, recalls the former adviser of the White House. He realized that “we were in a strong position to negotiate with Moscow and that we had to explore different paths”.
Step by step
At Chernenko’s funeral, Reagan extended an invitation to Gorbachev to come to Washington, but nothing happened for months. Still, the White House noted a change in tone when the two countries discussed nuclear disarmament negotiations.
“Basically, they were two men of peace,” notes Mr. Matlock. “Gorbachev quickly understood that the system had to change, but that he couldn’t really change it while there was the Cold War and the arms race”.
“I think Reagan understood that. And Reagan’s goal was not to dismantle the USSR. »
It was during a summit in November 1985 in Geneva that the ice was broken. The discussions were tense and the results limited, but the two leaders had several one-on-one meetings, creating the beginnings of trust.
A year later, they met in Reykjavik for new negotiations, without much result there too. The press then spoke of failure, but Jack Matlock remembers that the two parties had found common ground.
When Gorbachev came to Washington in 1987, he and Reagan were able to sign a historic intermediate-range nuclear weapons treaty.
At first, Gorbachev “thought Reagan was very conservative,” says the former ambassador. “But over time, as they agreed more and more often, they became friends.”
Long after leaving politics, Mikhail Gorbachev returned to the United States in 2004 to attend Ronald Reagan’s funeral.