Thatcher Told Gorbachev she Opposed Germany Reunification

Copies of official Kremlin documents from 1989, smuggled out of Russia by a young writer, reveal that then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that she opposed a reunified Germany.

In sharp contrast to the official line adopted by the West at the time, the London Times reports that Mrs Thatcher explained to Mr Gorbachev , during a meeting which took place a mere two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact was not on the West's agenda, adding that such an event would lead to a reunified Germany and increase international instability. The documents from 1989, copied by Pavel Stroilov when he was working at Mr Gorbachev's personal foundation in Moscow and taken to Britain by Mr Stroilov when he moved to London to continue his research, also reveal that Mrs Thatcher told the Soviet leader that his U.S. counterpart, George H. W. Bush, shared her view that nothing should be done to threaten the security of the Soviet Union. President Bush apparently repeated that assurance when he met with Mr Gorbachev at a conference in Malta. Despite Mrs Thatcher requesting that her comments about Germany remain off the record, to which Mr Gorbachev, who served as President until December 1991, supposedly agreed, they were nevertheless included within the transcript of the leaders' meeting and in a rather circuitous manner have now come to the attention of the public. And the Kremlin documents disclose more facts about the thoughts and opinions of the Soviet leadership as they watched riots taking place in Eastern Europe and thousands of East Germans seeking refuge in Hungary and Czechoslovakia from the regime of Erich Honecker. The East German leader was seemingly a man viewed with particular disdain by Mr Gorbachev, who was heard referring to Honecker as an "arsehole". Amazingly the Soviet leadership even considered removing the Berlin Wall themselves, but as those discussions only took place days before a new administration in East Germany announced that restrictions on travel to the West were being eased considerably, an announcement which was effectively the beginning of the end of the Wall, it is perhaps not entirely certain how serious Moscow might have been. In addition the Kremlin documents, now under seal and no longer available for scrutiny, show that France too made its unease at German reunification clear to Moscow. A fact which takes on possibly more significance when secret papers now released by the British Foreign Office are also taken in to consideration. The Daily Mail reports on how Mrs Thatcher and Francois Mitterrand, President of France from 1981 to 1995, shared a lunch at the Elysee Palace, the official residence of the French President, in 1990. During the lunch President Mitterrand is said to have told the British Prime Minister that a reunified Germany could well "make even more ground than Hitler had", going on to express fears that what he called "bad Germans", Neo-Nazis in other words, would re-emerge. A situation that did indeed occur to some extent in Germany, with other parts of the former Soviet sphere of influence witnessing a similar increase in extreme right-wing activity. For her part Mrs Thatcher, then in the last year of her time in office, although she may not have realized it, spoke of her discomfort at reports that the West German parliament in Bonn, the Bundestag, celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall by singing Deutschland uber alles, a song whose actual title is Das Deutschlandlied. Adopted as the German national anthem prior to the Nazis, it is nevertheless widely associated with the Nazis' attempt to instill a feeling of racial superiority within the population of Germany. Helmut Kohl, West German Chancellor between 1982 and 1990 and Chancellor of the reunified Germany from 1990 to 1998, appears to have caused some concern for the French and British leaders as well, seen as he was as a man who was whipping up "German national feeling". The irony of the information that has come to light in Britain and Russia is that France and Germany arguably now share a closer relationship than do Britain and France. Then, as the Daily Mail reports, there is the fate that befell Nicholas Ridley, a member of Mrs Thatcher's Cabinet who was forced to resign over comments he made which suggested that the European Union was for all intents and purposes a ruse by Germany to dominate the continent. It now transpires that the views of Mr Ridley, who invoked the name of Adolf Hitler to reinforce his point about Germany, may not have been so far removed from those of his leader after all.