Speeches, etc.

Margaret Thatcher

Speech receiving honorary degree from the Mendeleyev Institute

Document type: Speeches, interviews, etc.
Venue: Mendeleyev Institute, Moscow
Source: Thatcher Archive: press release
Editorial comments:
Importance ranking: Major
Word count: 3814
Themes: Autobiographical comments, Autobiography (childhood), Economic policy - theory and process, Trade, European Union (general), Foreign policy (Central & Eastern Europe), Foreign policy (USSR & successor states), Science & technology

Chancellor, Members of Faculty, Students Ladies and Gentlemen Fellow Scientists

It is a particular pleasure for me to be in Moscow again and a great privilege to receive an honorary degree from the Mendeleyev Institute of Chemical Technology. I am deeply honoured. In my country it is comparatively rare for scientists or engineers to go into politics. From my experience of politics it would be better if we had had more.

The name Mendeleyev conjures up many early memories for me. He had the inspiration to see that there was some order in the elements as a whole, and to arrange them in the famous Periodic table which made it so much easier for us to learn about them. He even predicted that three more elements would be found to fill the gaps in his table—and soon they were discovered. His experience demonstrates that pure science is about more than arid logic: it requires inspired hypothesis, experiment and observation, rigorous evidence and a readiness to revise yesterday's conclusions in the light of new evidence. Such are the building stones of truth and authentic knowledge.

In my home town of Grantham our local historic science hero was Isaac Newton who, as you know, discovered gravitational force and did a great deal of work on optics and the telescope.

These matters were all essentially pure science. But Mendeleyev also applied his knowledge to agriculture, the Chemical Industry and the Petroleum Industry, and he was chosen to organise the Russian Pavilion at the Paris Exposition of 1867. At an early stage he saw the need for Russia to compete in the world and to have the enterprise and technology with which to do so.

By the time I came to choose my career the world was full of new exciting technology and materials. The new synthetic fabrics were produced, radios were coming into every home though not yet television, communications were being revolutionised and computers were heralding the new age of automation. The atom was no longer the smallest particle of matter. It had been smashed and a nuclear age had begun. To my generation science was the future and so it has been in this remarkable century.

It should have been a generation of peace and prosperity. But it has been disfigured by the two worst tyrannies the world has ever spawned—Nazi-ism and Communism. The integrity of science was perverted by the evil of dictators who spilt the blood of humanity.

Your achievements in the history of the exact sciences are well known and honoured the world over. Less is known about the morality of Russian science.

Under the despotism of the old Communist system, many Russians of outstanding ability defied the Communist state and its ideology by deploying their talents in the less easily-controlled realms of pure thought and research. These were relatively safe havens from [end p1] which a culture of disinterested enquiry and independence could be pursued.

In time, your dissent produced results, although it exacted immense human sacrifice.

Reading through the autobiography of that great man Academician Sakharov, and also the life of Piotr Kapitsa who came to Cambridge for a time, I was struck by the sheer vigour of the old scientific training, and of the courage which motivated both men.

Today science and the pursuit of knowledge are given high priority by successful countries not because they are a luxury which the prosperous can afford but because experience has taught us that knowledge and its effective use are vital to national prosperity and international standing. A nation which does not value young people with trained intelligence is doomed.

It is mainly by unlocking nature's most basic secrets, whether it be about the structure of matter and the fundamental forces or about the nature of life itself, that we have been able to build the modern world. This is a world which is able to sustain far more people with a decent standard of life than the forecasters of a few decades ago would have believed possible.

It is not only material welfare. It is about access to music and the arts, no longer the preserve of the very few, which radio, television, colour photography and satellites have already brought to us all.

So pervasive is the culture of science that it provides a common vocabulary of understanding with other countries. And as each country can only carry out a small proportion of all research, it is important to encourage people to be aware of the work that is going on overseas and to return here with their broadened outlook and new knowledge. Likewise, others would enjoy and profit from working with you.

Science is the fruit of an enquiring mind.

Its integrity is an answer to lies.

Its research institutes a haven for discussion and dissent.

Its applications are the way to a healthier environment and a fuller life.

THE TWO POLITICAL SYSTEMS

My interests in my early years were not confined to science. In my home, reading and discussion (as well as music) were part of the fabric of life. And very soon I was learning about Communism under Stalin. This was in the late 1930s, and the world was soon to be at war against Hitler.

Russia has always been an important country. I wanted to know more about it. In the 1940's when the truth about Stalin 's terror was filtering through to the West, the books about it were thought to be too awful for me to read and were kept away from me. I confess that when my parents were out—my father was very active in the local community as an elected councillor—I managed to find them and read and read—transfixed and horrified.

Brought up in a Christian family, nurtured in liberty, believing in the sanctity and dignity [end p2] of the individual, and that each of us is responsible for his own actions—how could it be, I thought, that a few Communists under the pretence of freedom for all men had seized power for themselves, only to extinguish the freedom of all others. The people over whom they ruled so brutally, were composed of men and women, who were their equals in human rights, in intelligence and who had been born with the ability to plan, think and judge for themselves. They were made of the same flesh and blood as the new despots. This was the new tyranny of the century into which I was born.

Since 1917, when Lenin took power by force from the fledgling democracy of Alexander Kerensky, a large part of the world has undergone a great and sometimes terrible human experiment. Two fundamentally different and opposed political systems were matched against each other in mortal contest. The Western system—so-called not because it was inherently suited only to America and Western Europe but because those were the only lands in which it could still be practised—confronted Communism.

In the West the basic political conditions were liberty and free elections between two or more different parties. In the East the Communist Party extinguished the liberties of the people until it virtually became the State.

In the West the legal framework was of limited state power, independent courts and laws made by Parliament which applied equally to all. In the East the laws were whatever the State commanded, their scope was almost unlimited and the courts existed to enforce their diktat not justice.

In the West the economy was driven by customer choice, characterised by private ownership of property and competition. In the East production targets and the ever-revised, fudged and fiddled Plan prevailed, and all private property was confiscated by the State.

In the West, the creative enterprise of the individual was the dyamo of progress in a system where State power was both strictly limited and widely dispersed. In the East it was the State whose omnipotence and decisions determined all future development.

These two systems were tested at every level—economically, militarily, socially and morally. And in every case freedom and enterprise triumphed and socialism failed. Free enterprise generated the wealth to advance living standards and even to provide loans and technology for some socialist states, burdened with outdated machinery and unmotivated workforces.

The Communists sought to substitute political doctrine for the natural and human loyalties which are the texture of a free society. They persecuted believers for their faith. The supreme moral degradation which Communism perpetrated was to fill the minds of millions with their lies—lies about Soviet achievements and the West's intentions, lies [end p3] about those they extolled as heroes or vilified as traitors, lies in science, in history, in literature; lies until the mind, recoiling before it all, believes everything and nothing—and no longer distinguishes between the two.

This great contest was between the Western system conforming to the needs and habits of ordinary human beings, freely competing and cooperating in markets, and Communism in which a false ideology directed every aspect of social and economic life towards self-destructive ends. The collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union was not, therefore, the victory of the Western system alone. It was not even just the victory of the brave dissidents who spoke out against the Communist system. No: in the deepest sense this victory was that of the human spirit itself against those who sought to subjugate mankind to their own evil ends.

It has always seemed somewhat ironical to me that Marx wrote “Das Kapital” in the comfort and atmosphere of a free society—the Reading Room of the British Museum Library. It is reported that his wife, who often had difficulty meeting the household expenses, said “I do wish Karl would concentrate on making a little capital rather than writing about it” .

There should be no nostalgia for the old political system. The scarred landscapes, unsafe power stations, the poisoned water supplies demonstrate how the Communists had failed to invest sensibly in your country's future. Factories situated in unsuitable locations, grain and agricultural produce rotting in the fields for lack of proper storage facilities show how little regard the Communist leaders had for human beings and economic realities. Russia today, under the vigorous leadership of President Yeltsin, is trying to re-establish a healthy economy amid the ruins which collectivism left behind.

LESSONS FROM THE PAST

Your present task is one the world has never tackled before. No-one else has had to rescue a nation from a dictatorship over deeds and minds and suddenly bring it to a successful, free and enterprising democracy, with all the dislocation and hardships the change entails. And this is not in the simpler world of previous centuries, but in an era when industries are sophisticated in their products and in their structure. China has a similar task but is tackling it differently.

For advice, look first to your own history. Look to the closing decades of the last century and the beginning of this when Russian enterprise flourished and industry was growing fast. So much of the truth of that time has been suppressed—Trotsky used to refer dismissively to ‘the Russia of icons and cockroaches’. Some people used to accept the Stalinist lie that everything in the old Russia had been backward. Not so. They forgot that many of Russia's greatest figures of music and literature contributed their best works during the time of the later Tsars. It is true most of them were opposed to the serfdom and autocracy under the Tsars, as were the freedom loving peoples of the West, but at least they were more or less free to express their views. The Stalinists also suppressed the truth that in the period between the end of serfdom and the seizure of power by Lenin, Russian enterprise was growing fast.

When before 1914 a rule of law, rudimentary as it was, extended across Tsarist Russia her economy flourished. When she had a gold standard in place, with a system of [end p4] commercial law and a growth of private property, she did astonishingly well. In fact, she had the highest growth-rates in the world, and if you go to some of the old cities—St Petersburg and Moscow are good examples—you can still quite easily see that these were European cities of energy and promise. The German historian, Professor Heinz-Dietrich Loewe even tells us that the Russian peasants had more calories in their diet in 1900 than the West German population of 1952.

It was the German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg who said in 1914: ‘Russia grows and grows and weighs upon us like a nightmare’. In Bethmann Hollweg 's time this caused panic in Central Europe and an alliance against Russia.

Prime Minister Stolypin said in 1909: ‘Give the State twenty years of internal and external peace, and you will not recognize Russia’. Alas he was assassinated in 1911.

Before the First World War, so successful were the Moscow industrialists—as you know, this was the heart of Russian enterprise—that they became great patrons of the arts. Men such as Polyakoff, Shchukin, Mamontov, Ryabushinsky were great benefactors. Not only did they purchase Matisse and the early Picassos, they encouraged Russian painters as well—those of the Abramtsevo group, for instance.

Before 1914, countries were increasingly investing in one another and trade was booming. Western investment came to Russia, as it went elsewhere, to help develop the vast resources. Just opposite the Bolshoi, there is a huge shopping centre that once upon a time was the British store Muir and Merrilees. There were plenty of equivalents elsewhere in the country, and the descendants of such people very happily became russified. And their capital became russified, too. If ever you doubt the value of foreign investment, remember this; and remember, too, that any growing, promising country attracts healthy foreign capital. The United States attracted a huge amount of British investment, as it continues to do and vice versa. Japan has chosen to invest in Britain in preference to other European countries and has brought us much employment.

So you should look back on your country before 1914 with a great deal of healthy curiosity. Why it was subjected to the events of 1917 is a very good question, but I think that the answer lies partly in Berlin, and partly in Zurich. If it had not been for the First World War, Russia would never have been led into Communism, the greatest blind alley of modern times. Had the old system before 1917 not been snuffed out the Russian people to-day could be a comparatively rich nation.

LESSONS FOR THE PRESENT

What lessons can we learn for the present?

Although in a free economy the role of government is limited, government must be strong to do the things which only government can do.

The first of these is: sound money. Russia will not solve her financial problems with the printing press. Printing money is not a substitute for a proper monetary policy. Inflation destroys the savings of the conscientious, and it is from the conscientious that civil society lives and thrives. Lenin, seeking to destroy civil society, knew this. He [end p5] said, and one cannot quarrel with his thesis, that if you grind the middle classes between the upper millstone of taxation and the nether millstone of inflation, they will be destroyed. Alas they were, and the new Russia with them. Under the leadership of President Yeltsin inflation is now being considerably reduced.

Second: the government must set up a rule of law—not just the diktat of government but laws passed by an elected parliament and administered by independent judges. That creates the framework within which enterprise can flourish. It is necessary for commercial contracts to be honoured—The Bern Convention still awaits Russia's signature.

The law must set standards for the safety of goods and for their accurate description. Crime, fraud, protection rackets, corruption or bribes—these things were wrong under the Communists and they are wrong now. They must be exposed and the perpetrators prosecuted and sentenced. They are unfair to the millions of decent people, including the scholars of this institute, who have a daily struggle to make an honest living.

Third. It is essential that rates of taxation are kept down. If they are too high people are robbed of the incentive to work harder. New employment comes from thousands of small businesses. We need to encourage them if the economy is to grow.

Fourth. You are rightly seeking a wider distribution of private property backed up by legal title. Ownership by individuals and families acts as a check on the overmighty state and those tempted to manipulate its powers. It is a condition of both political and economic liberty. Some politicians allege that free enterprise is a materialistic need. But what is wrong with trying to build a better life for your own family by your own efforts. Isn't that what life is all about, and shouldn't we all enjoy a happier and more independent future if everyone did it? Shouldn't we be then able to help people who genuinely can't afford some of life's necessities? Isn't that true Christian charity?

Russia and the other newly free East European countries have developed their own methods of privatising industry. In the West we have watched with admiration the way in which Anatoli Chubais is tackling this vital problem. By the end of the year one third of heavy industry and most small firms will have been privatised. This success will make a tremendous difference not only to the economy as a whole but especially to those of you who are training for business management. You know you will be in a position to make the decisions yourselves. No longer will you have to refer to a remote bureaucracy and lose precious time and then probably receive the wrong decision. Whether in managing production or designing new products the decision can be made on the spot in response to the known needs of the customer.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have watched every move your government and politicians have made. It is tempting to say how much easier it would have been if only the 1978 Brezhnev constitution had been replaced and new parliamentary elections held just after the failed coup. But it wasn't possible, because the Soviet Union was breaking up and other matters required attention. But what splendid support President Yeltsin has had from the referendum and it will now enable him to do the right things.

Of course a transition from communism to a free society cannot be made without dreadful problems. Things will be a bit chaotic sometimes until the new way of life is established. [end p6] But surely no-one would go back to the knock on the door in the middle of the night or the total lack of freedom and creativity. Countries in a period of change like yours have need of strong, purposeful leadership and you have it.

RUSSIA'S ROLE IN THE WORLD

Over the past few years we have seen the collapse of Communism not just in Russia and in Eastern Europe but across the world with the possible exception of China. Millions of people who were held in its grip are now free to develop new systems of government which respect their individual rights. This has had far reaching consequences.

Russia, the United States, Britain, France and sometimes China, now work together as permanent members of the Security Council. It enabled us to stand firm against aggression in the Gulf War—a UN decision of tremendous importance which could not have happened during the Cold War years.

Alas in Bosnia, in spite of all our ideals and new found co-operation we have not had the will to stop the aggression which has lead to the merciless massacre of over one hundred and fifty thousand people and to two million more being driven from their homes by the systematic “ethnic cleansing” of whole communities—something I never expected to see again in my lifetime, let alone within Europe.

The European Community which should have been the first to cry out against such horrors, provided humanitarian aid but failed to take action to stop the killing or to prevent families from being drive from their homes. The consensus of the Community turned out to be the negation of leadership. Leadership should have gone to the aid of the innocent victims and not stood by and watched the guilty aggressor achieve his terrible purpose.

Russia will always be one of the world's great powers. In the Security Council your voice is respected—even more so now you speak as a free nation. You have a vital role to play in shaping the UN's response to future crises and in solving some of the disputes left over from history.

As a nuclear power you know the responsibilities which go with that role. Today there are tyrants in the world who would like to get hold of nuclear weapons for their own evil ends. We must prevent them from doing so or the world will be subject to a new and terrible danger. Likewise, together we must prevent the development and production of biological and chemical weapons some of which have been used by Iraq against her own people and against the Iranians.

It is in the interests of all nations who love peace, freedom and justice to see that never again do we suffer another world conflict.

But conflicts between smaller states are often even more difficult to stop. In 1982 when I was preparing an address to the UN General Assembly I was astonished to discover that since 1945 there had been over one hundred and forty conflicts in the world. Mostly these were between adjacent peoples. They reflect age old feuds or territorial disputes. But for the sake of our children we must find ways to solve such disputes peacefully. Perhaps this [end p7] is particularly relevant for some of the countries of the former Soviet Union where battles are raging which are causing tragic loss of life.

While we are naturally absorbed in these immediate matters tidal waves of change are sweeping over the world. Not only in Russia and the surrounding countries but also in China and the Pacific Rim.

Russia and the United States are both Pacific as well as Atlantic powers.

The economies of the Pacific Rim countries are growing extremely fast. China has chosen to bring about a free enterprise system before she gives her people the full personal and political liberty which Russia is now enjoying.

Before the next half century has passed the world will probably develop into four great economic and trading motors:

North and South America in an Atlantic free trade area;

the European Community, in a wider Europe;

Russia in her own right with close ties and thriving trade with her near neighbours and the world at large;

the Asia Pacific based on China and surrounded by Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Indonesia, with Vietnam joining the enterprise group alongside the already flourishing Singapore, and Malaysia.

These groups should be the first to fulfill their international obligations by encouraging agreement under the GATT as soon as they have all been admitted. Only increased trade across the world will bring prosperity to all countries and all peoples.

CONCLUSION

As we enter the next century may we have learned the lessons of the past so that we are not condemned to repeat its mistakes.

Your country has a fascination for the rest of the world, especially for me personally for whom the ending of the Cold War and the beginning of the new era was the most important event in my political life. I like to think that my grand daughter who is now six months old will, when she is grown up, read different stories about Russia from those I read in my early years and that she too will come to know the real talent, potential and friendship of your people.

Finally, it is my pleasure to announce that the Margaret Thatcher Foundation will be making a financial gift for the purchase of equipment to the Mendeleyev Institute, as a token of my esteem for your excellent work in training young people for the future.