In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

99 Dialogue: The Musgrove Conference, May 1–3, 1998 Transcribed and translated by Svetlana Savranskaya, edited by Thomas Blanton PARTICIPANTS: Former Officials: Anatoly Chernyaev Douglas MacEachin Jack Matlock georgy Shakhnazarov Sergei Tarasenko Scholars: Csaba Békés Thomas Blanton Malcolm Byrne Chen Jian Karen Dawisha Ilya gaiduk Richard Hermann James Hershberg Jacques Levesque Pawel Machcewicz Andrzej Paczkowski Vilém Prečan János Rainer Svetlana Savranskaya Oleg Skvortsov William Wohlforth David Wolff Vladislav Zubok CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Thomas Blanton (moderator): Welcome. We have three goals for this conference. The first is simply to enjoy this place. Musgrove was built by Nancy Reynolds Bagley as a vacation retreat and a nature preserve for a beautiful section of St. Simons Island. This is where President Carter first gathered his Cabinet after the election of 1976 and before the inauguration. Thanks to the generosity of Smith Bagley, the Brenn Foundation, and the Arca Foundation, we are meeting like presidents. I have found that the biggest challenge at Musgrove is to bring to the table the conversations that take place away from the table as people do, shall we say, conferencing with a human face. The second goal is to contribute to the ongoing multinational effort to grapple with the history of those revolutionary events of the late 1980s, and the way the world changed, and the Cold War ended, in 1989. Next year, in 1999, our partners in East and Central Europe will recreate some of that history, bringing veterans and witnesses to the table, with their own documents, from Politburos, from oppositions, from U.S. and Soviet sources, so that they can relive and learn from their own histories. So the point of these three days is to put on the table the key questions that you really want answered in this larger process. What are the mysteries that remain to you, as experts, as veterans, as researchers? What are the mysteries that need to be answered? What would you tell us to do if you were commissioning our research? Melyakova book.indb 99 2010.04.12. 16:20 100 The third goal is to grapple with some remarkable new evidence. This thick briefing book of documents exists in very large part because of the generosity of Anatoly Chernyaev, and the gorbachev Foundation, which is committed to the process of scholarly enquiry and has set, I believe, a new standard for openness in these matters. Included here are multiple selections from Anatoly’s daily diaries from his tenure as gorbachev’s personal aide for foreign policy from 1986 through 1991, including notes of Politburo sessions and meetings with foreign leaders. I plan to use these materials as a crowbar to help wedge open the American files on these subjects. So thanks to Anatoly and to georgy Shakhnazarov, and everyone who contributed to this documentary encyclopedia. Now I will ask Vlad Zubok to give you what we Americans would call the “greatest hits,” the highlights of this new evidence, the likes of which many of us, as students of these events, hardly expected to see in our lifetimes. Vlad has carried so much of the research load for this project and for the documents in front of you, that I would like to give him the first word on the documentary findings . Vladislav Zubok: Now the pressure is on me to be really brief in describing this briefing book. The word “brief” fails, I guess, to describe what is inside there. Now, I believe, when you deal with documents, each of them was remarkable by itself, but when you put them together, you create a quality in itself, because the combination is amazing. Putting them together, the documents became more and more revealing to me. Several things I would like to mention. The majority of the documents are from the gorbachev Archive, Russian documents, although there are some amazing American documents. In particular, I would like to mention the CIA reports, and Jack Matlock’s cables from Moscow in February 1989, which sort of correlate nicely with Kennan’s “long telegram” that marked the beginning of the Cold War, as Jack’s cables mark the end of the Cold War in Europe. To me, one highlight of this briefing book is how much was spoken within the narrow inside circle of gorbachev’s about the possibility of collapse in Eastern Europe. We find in the documents that it was discussed in georgy Shakhnazarov’s memorandum to gorbachev—what would happen if there was...

Share