The World

On the morning of 31 October, as Indira walked to her office, her bodyguard Sub-Inspector Beant Singh drew his pistol and shot her five times in the stomach before urging his colleague Constable Satwant Singh to join him. Satwant Singh fired twenty-five bullets from his Sten gun into the dying Indira. Sonia Gandhi was in the bath when she heard the shots, and for a moment thought they were Diwali fireworks. Then she ran out in her dressing gown, shouting ‘Mummy!’, and knelt over Indira. Beant and Satwant surrendered. ‘I’ve done what I had to do,’ said Beant. ‘You do what you want.’ The guards killed him and shot Satwant, who survived.

On the plane back from Kolkata, Rajiv was asked to become prime minister. ‘I have no interest,’ he replied. ‘Don’t bother me.’ But he was cooler by the time he joined Sonia at the Delhi hospital. She tried to persuade her husband not to accept the prime ministership. ‘They were hugging each other and he was kissing her forehead,’ telling her, ‘It’s my duty, I have to do it.’ Sonia said he would be killed. Rajiv replied that he ‘would be killed anyway’. Such is the grinding logic of hereditary power. Heir to a family whose leadership went back to his great-grandfather if not to the police chief of the last Mughal, Rajiv was the third generation of the Nehruvians to rule the world’s greatest democracy.

Thatcher flew to Delhi. As Hindu mobs chanted ‘Blood for blood’, Rajiv lit his mother’s pyre. On the night of the murder, Hindu mobs had poured into the streets of Delhi, searching for Sikhs: 8,000 were killed, a pogrom almost justified by Rajiv who, a few days later, reflected, ‘When a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little.’ Thatcher attended the cremation: ‘She looked so small.’

At home, she and Reagan watched Moscow’s cadaverous succession. ‘How am I supposed to get any place with the Russians,’ quipped Reagan, ‘if they keep dying on me?’

On 9 February 1984, Andropov died of kidney failure, encouraging Gorbachev to succeed him. Gorbachev grieved. ‘We owed him everything,’ said Raisa. But the sclerotic cabal instead chose Brezhnev’s waxen sidekick Chernenko the Silent, who spent most of his reign in sepulchral silence in hospital while the Soviet Union itself was on life support. Its flaws – economic failure, global overreach, Afghan defeat, repression and inequality – were grave but not necessarily fatal. No one predicted what was about to happen.

As Chernenko declined, Gorbachev was invited to London by Thatcher, who was studying Russian history. The two admired each other. Thatcher challenged Gorbachev about the Soviet lack of enterprise and freedom and he debated with her. Thatcher was impressed with Gorbachev’s well-cut suit and Raisa’s fashion sense – ‘the sort of thing I might have worn myself’. Afterwards Thatcher flew to Washington to tell Reagan a new era was opening: ‘I like Mr Gorbachev.’

On 10 March 1985, Chernenko succumbed and Gorbachev became general secretary, promising glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). As he wrote in his notes, he also planned to ‘exit Afghanistan’ – slowly. ‘We’ll be out in two or three years,’ he said, ‘but the result mustn’t look like a shameful defeat as if after losing so many young men [13,000 Soviet troops] we just gave up.’ Everything about him was refreshing: charming, optimistic, indefatigable, Gorbachev smiled, his eyes sparkled and he listened to ordinary people. Even the birthmark on his forehead seemed a mark of honesty. But he was a devout Leninist, studying Lenin for lessons on how to reform a modern state in a global economy. The USSR was the world’s biggest oil producer, reaching its height in 1987 just as a glut sent prices falling and the Soviet economy into shock. Abroad, he knew he had to reduce Moscow’s global expenditure and at home attack ‘the dictatorship of the bureaucracy’. To challenge the supremacy of Lenin’s Party or the Soviet state was unthinkable. Yet his confidence was overwhelming: he felt he could do it all.

First he appointed an ally, the Georgian Party secretary, Eduard Shevardnadze, as his foreign minister. ‘But I’m a Georgian,’ replied Shevardnadze, ‘not a diplomat.’ Nonetheless, Gorbachev liked his fierce intelligence and ‘Oriental affability’.