Saturday, September 12, 2009

Two-faced Thatcher?

I always thought that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were meant to have achieved the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

It is quite a surprise, then, to read this in the Times:

Two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Margaret Thatcher told President Gorbachev that neither Britain nor Western Europe wanted the reunification of Germany and made clear that she wanted the Soviet leader to do what he could to stop it.
In an extraordinary frank meeting with Mr Gorbachev in Moscow in 1989 — never before fully reported — Mrs Thatcher said the destabilisation of Eastern Europe and the breakdown of the Warsaw Pact were also not in the West’s interests. She noted the huge changes happening across Eastern Europe, but she insisted that the West would not push for its decommunisation. Nor would it do anything to risk the security of the Soviet Union.

No comments:

Post a Comment