anti-Fulton declaration

Origin

The headline label 'anti-Fulton declaration' renders Gorbachev's own phrase; it was not a title he used. On October 31, 1988, Gorbachev met Eduard Shevardnadze, Alexander Yakovlev, Anatoly Dobrynin, Valentin Falin, and Anatoly Chernyaev on the question 'What are we going to take to the United Nations?' He laid the speech out in parts (new thinking, domestic perestroika, the UN's Cold War history, and the USSR's contribution to a new world) and then said (Gorbachev Foundation Archive, Fond 2, Opis 1, translated by Svetlana Savranskaya):

"In general, this speech should be anti-Fulton, a Fulton in reverse. And we can already lean on some of our experience with work we have done according to the new thinking... But they will believe us only when they see that we are making clearly evident, real steps."

The phrase targeted Churchill's speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, in which he declared that "an iron curtain has descended across the Continent" from Stettin to Trieste, widely treated as the rhetorical inauguration of the Cold War. The two speeches did not share a venue or a date: Churchill spoke in Fulton, Gorbachev at UN headquarters in New York, 42 years and 9 months later.

The UN address (December 7, 1988)

The address to the 43rd UN General Assembly was where the conception was executed. It announced a reduction of 500,000 personnel over two years, made on a unilateral basis, unconnected with the negotiations on the mandate for the Vienna meeting; the withdrawal and disbanding of six tank divisions from the GDR, Czechoslovakia and Hungary by 1991, with cuts of 50,000 personnel and 5,000 tanks from forces there; and totals of 10,000 tanks, 8,500 artillery systems and 800 combat aircraft in the European part of the USSR and allied territory. Gorbachev called freedom of choice "a universal principle and there should be no exceptions", and stated that "force and the threat of force can no longer and should not be instruments of foreign policy". He also argued that the UN had found itself under the onslaught of the Cold War, becoming a field for propaganda battles and political confrontation, and tied the rebirth of the UN's role to an improvement in the international climate.

Reception and assessment

The source's editorial framing records that Western reaction ranged from disbelief to astonishment. U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called the speech "the most astounding statement of surrender in the history of ideological struggle", and retired General Andrew Goodpaster called the unilateral troop cuts "the most significant step since NATO was founded". These are characterizations by named contemporaries as carried by the source, not settled findings about the speech's historical meaning. The participating Gorbachev Foundation frames the Cold War between Churchill's Fulton speech and the Malta summit in its volume From Fulton to Malta: How the Cold War Began and Ended (Moscow, 2008), whose introductory remarks are Gorbachev's own; that is a participant foundation's perspective, not a neutral scholarly consensus. The announced measures were to be carried out over the following two years, with the six tank divisions withdrawn by 1991, so 1988 marks the declaration, not completion.

References

• Gorbachev Foundation Archive, Fond 2, Opis 1: Gorbachev's conference with advisers on drafting the UN speech, October 31, 1988 (translated by Svetlana Savranskaya)
• Full text of Gorbachev's address to the 43rd UN General Assembly, December 7, 1988
• The Gorbachev Foundation, From Fulton to Malta: How the Cold War Began and Ended (Moscow, 2008)