From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

27. The Soviet Union: An Empire Implodes
I was in Jesselton (now Kota Kinabalu) near the jungles of British North Borneo
for a court case when news broke in October 1957 that the Russians had sent a
sputnik into space. It was a spectacular demonstration of the superiority of
Soviet technology. I took the challenge of the communist system seriously. The
Soviets were aggressive everywhere in Asia, and together with communist China
were fuelling guerrilla insurrections. They loomed even larger in my mind after
they sent the first man into space in April 1961. It lent credence to their claim
that history was on their side.
I was curious to know what they were like as a people and took the
opportunity to visit Moscow in September 1962 after a Commonwealth
conference in London. I was given the standard official tour of Moscow
including a night at the Bolshoi, where I watched Stravinsky on his first return to
Russia conducting the orchestra for the ballet 
Petrushka
. The officials insulated
me from people in the streets, shops and hotels and I met no one other than
themselves.
My lasting impression of Moscow and its officials is one of drabness and
dourness. There was a 
bábushka
, exactly as I had read in books – a big, fat lady
sitting outside the lift on my floor of the National Hotel (their best, where
Stravinsky was also staying), doing little else. They served me an enormous
breakfast – caviar, smoked sturgeon, slabs of ham and meat, an assortment of
bread, butter, coffee, tea, vodka and cognac – on a table covered with a dark
velvet tablecloth. When I returned that night from the ballet, the food was still
uncleared. And as I had been warned, the bathtub and washbasin had no
stoppers. I had brought a solid rubber ball expressly for this purpose. It did not
work for the washbasin but fortunately did for the bathtub. The Chaika car (a
medium-size saloon) was dreadful. The officer who took me around was from
the ministry of culture in charge of Southeast Asia, and the highest official I got
to see was deputy foreign minister Kuznetsov. In Moscow I had the impression
of menace in the air, but that was perhaps my imagination.

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That the Soviets were a great power was a reality. I therefore encouraged my
elder son Loong to study Russian, reasoning that since he was keen on
mathematics, he could then read the publications of many excellent Russian
mathematicians. I thought Russia was going to be a powerful influence in the
lives of my children. Loong spent five years studying the language with a Czech
émigré professor teaching at our Nanyang University, followed by a Tass
correspondent and then a succession of young Russians who were studying
Chinese there. Finally a British diplomat taught him Russian for the O level
examination, for which he got a distinction.
Singapore established full diplomatic relations with Russia in 1968 but
contacts were minimal. They had nothing we wanted to buy except the catch of
their fishing fleet that trawled the Indian and Pacific Oceans. They formed a
joint venture with one of our companies to can their fish, and also repaired their
vessels in our dockyards and took on provisions. The Soviets, however, were
interested in Singapore because of its strategic location. This point was brought
home to me during an enforced stopover in Moscow in January 1969.
Choo and I were on our way to London, flying on Scandinavian Airlines
System via Bangkok, Tashkent and Copenhagen, when the pilot announced that
the plane was unable to land at Tashkent because of weather conditions and had
to land instead in Moscow. The weather looked fair as we flew over Tashkent.
Waiting on the tarmac of Moscow airport were their foreign ministry officials
with Ilia Ivanovich Safronov, the Russian ambassador-designate to Singapore. It
was a freezing night. Choo slipped and nearly fell on the icy tarmac, quite
unprepared for these conditions. My secretary shivered with the cold but warmed
up in the VIP room with cognac. What they wanted from this elaborate exercise
was for me to meet the man coming to Singapore as their first ambassador. It
was also a simple way to impress upon me their size, their might and their reach.
Safronov, who spoke Mandarin, had served in China and his duty obviously was
to make a close study of the potential influence that China could muster in
Singapore. Soon after he arrived in Singapore, he brought me an invitation from
Prime Minister Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin to visit the Soviet Union.
In September 1970 I arrived in Moscow past midnight on an Aeroflot flight
from Cairo, to be welcomed by a guard of honour of tall Russian guardsmen
under floodlights. They moved like robots and shouted back in unison when I
was prompted to say “Hello” to them in Russian. The inspection of the guard of
honour ended with the men marching past close to me in an intimidating show of
aggressiveness and strength. It was designed to impress, and I was impressed.

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I called on a corpulent President Nikolai Podgorny at the Kremlin for
discussions and lunch. He spoke of improving cultural and economic relations.
A nondescript character, he left no impression on me. The next day, they flew us
to Sochi then drove us from their guest dacha over two miles of a hilly road by
the Black Sea to a large holiday home in Pitsunda, where a serious-looking but
not unfriendly prime minister greeted us. Kosygin proudly showed us the
facilities of his resort dacha, in particular his heated indoor pool with a large
sliding door which worked at the press of a button. I spent some two hours
talking with him before dinner.
Kosygin showed keen interest in the circumstances under which we had
separated from Malaysia. He asked “whether Singapore had in fact made serious
efforts to live together in the Federation”. I assured him we had tried our best but
that there was a fundamental difference in our political beliefs on communal
issues and policies. He asked if he was right to assume that the idea of federation
with Malaysia had not been abandoned. I referred to ties of geography and
family between the two countries, but after the Kuala Lumpur May 1969 race
riots, I did not think it was productive to talk about rejoining the Federation. The
leaders there were suspicious of Singapore. He then asked about the support
enjoyed by the communists (i.e., Maoists) in Singapore. I said this peaked at
about 33 per cent in 1961–62 and was now probably 15 per cent.
It was clear to me from his body language and his questions on the influence
of Beijing on our Chinese-educated that he did not think an independent
Singapore was in the Soviet interest. He referred pointedly to our military repair
facilities used by US aircraft and ships, and also the rest and recreation visits of
US servicemen from Vietnam. I countered that our repair facilities were open to
all on a commercial basis. He was interested in using our dockyards and, with an
eye to the former British naval facilities, said he hoped to expand bilateral
relations in the political and economic fields. He was prepared to send all types
of vessels, including Soviet warships, for repairs. His deputy minister for foreign
trade would visit Singapore to assess the prospects of enhancing trade.
He struck me as a man of some subtlety and gravitas. He did not raise the
Soviet proposal for an Asian collective security system that President Podgorny
had put to me in Moscow. Since I had shown no enthusiasm, Kosygin simply
said that they were both a European and an Asian country, and naturally
interested in what went on in Southeast Asia, although some chose to deny them
the right to be Asians.
A foreign affairs officer who accompanied me, a China specialist, Mikhail S.

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Kapitsa, did most of the talking and probing throughout my visit. Soviet
hospitality was overwhelming. On the aircraft from Moscow to Sochi, they
served caviar, smoked sturgeon, vodka and cognac soon after breakfast. When I
said that British habits made me drink only tea in the morning, the liquor and
food were removed. Their minister who accompanied us said he was also a tea
drinker and sang its praises.
I was impressed by the huge war memorial at Volgograd (Stalingrad during
World War II) to commemorate their heroic defence of the city under siege. As a
cable editor in Japanese-occupied Singapore, I had read war correspondents’
despatches during that long battle in 1943–44. Magnificent wall bas-reliefs
commemorated the many acts of bravery of Russian troops and civilians during
the siege. Nearly as memorable were their war memorial and cemetery at
Leningrad (now St Petersburg). These were a brave, tough and enduring people
who had absorbed the heavy punishment the German Wehrmacht had inflicted,
turned the tables on their enemy, and finally driven them all the way back to
Berlin.
Friendly and hospitable though they were, Choo and I suspected that our
rooms were bugged. After dinner on our first night in Moscow, she said in our
bedroom at the guest dacha, “Strange, they paid so much attention to me. They
must think I have a great deal of influence over you. They gave very little
attention to Raja.” The next day, Rajaratnam, my foreign minister, received
much more and Choo much less attention from our hosts. It was so obvious that I
wondered if they wanted us to know they were eavesdropping. For the rest of the
trip, even in the toilet, I felt that they were monitoring my thoughts.
After 1970 we had no more high-level contacts except for four visits from
Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister N.P. Firyubin to Singapore between 1974 and
1980. I chided him for not supporting Asean when even mainland China had
voiced its support. They were suspicious of Asean as an anti-Soviet pro-US
organisation. Firyubin was highly intelligent and pleasant to talk to, but had no
power to decide policy. When we met for the last time in April 1980, he tried to
burnish the poor reputation of the Soviets after their support for Vietnam’s
occupation of Cambodia and their own invasion of Afghanistan. He said the
Soviet Union wanted détente with the rest of the world and referred to the recent
visits of Vietnamese leaders to Southeast Asian capitals as an indication of their
new mood for peace. Vietnam was willing to discuss the establishment of a zone
of peace, freedom and prosperity. The Soviet Union supported this and would do
everything to maintain peace, security and mutual trust. I was blunt in

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contradicting his views. If they wanted peace, they should get Vietnam to
reverse its aggression in Cambodia, which had alarmed all the other countries in
Southeast Asia. I emphasised that the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in
December 1979 had made all countries in Southeast Asia fearful of Soviet
intentions.
We also discovered around this time that our cypher officer in Moscow had
been compromised by a Russian woman and had handed her the embassy’s
decoded messages. They must have done this routinely for all embassies,
whether friend or foe. What they hoped to learn from reading our
communications with our embassy puzzled me, for all we wanted was to stay out
of trouble with them.
After Vietnam invaded Cambodia, Russian propaganda had turned hostile
against Singapore, speaking of 25 million Chinese who lived outside the
People’s Republic of China as China’s proxies, a dangerous Fifth Column in
their countries of residence. I reminded Firyubin that the Soviet Union had an
embassy in Singapore but China did not, that he knew I disapproved of the
Chinese government’s attempts to appeal to overseas Chinese in the region over
the heads of Southeast Asian governments. However, Vietnam’s aggression and
occupation of Cambodia had succeeded in stifling fears the Thais and others had
of China. The Soviet Union had to make a fundamental decision to change its
policy. The less trouble it created in Southeast Asia, the fewer the opportunities
for China to get closer to these countries.
After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, we joined the boycott of the 1980
Moscow Olympics, froze the cultural exchange programme and deferred all
visits by their economic delegations. We also denied repair facilities and even
bunkering to their naval and auxiliary vessels in our civilian dockyards, and
overflight and technical stopover facilities for Soviet aircraft flying to Indonesia.
Relations remained frozen for nearly a decade until Gorbachev introduced
glasnost and perestroika. When Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov visited
Singapore in February 1990 he represented a different government and country.
He had none of the self-confidence and swagger of a leader of a big power. He
had approached Deputy Prime Minister Ong Teng Cheong for a $50 million loan
to buy Singapore consumer goods. I did not agree and told Ong Teng Cheong
not to respond. By the time the prime minister of the Soviet Union had to
approach tiny Singapore for a $50 million loan, they must have exhausted their
credit with all the big countries. A sovereign debt from the Soviet Union was
worthless.

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He was taken to an NTUC-owned “Fairprice” supermarket. When I gave him
dinner that night at the Istana, he expressed his amazement that our workers
could afford the wide variety he saw of meats, fruits and vegetables imported
from all over the world. That the Soviet Union was suffering from food
shortages at the time brought this subject to the forefront of his thoughts.
Ryzhkov was pleasantly soft-spoken and friendly. He admitted that Stalin’s
imposition of the command economy and the isolation of the Soviet Union under
conditions of autarchy had done damage. His government had since made a
turnaround. They had now seen how closely interrelated the world had become
and had decided to get intensively involved in international economic relations
irrespective of the country’s system.
He invited me to visit the Soviet Union, which I did in September that year.
This time, the welcoming ceremony at Moscow airport was very different. Their
guard of honour was no longer of uniformly tall six-foot-three guardsmen. They
were a mixed lot of the tall, short and medium, and the bandsmen were similarly
an odd mix. The clockwork military precision was missing. They no longer
bothered to create that sense of awe in their visitors.
Ryzhkov was late for his meeting with me and apologised profusely. He had
been held up in the Supreme Soviet trying to find a compromise between two
divergent sets of proposals for a transition of the Soviet economy to an open-
market system. He displayed a total loss of confidence in their system and
bewilderment at how to get into a market system. He said his government had
watched Singapore with great interest because they were now embarking on a
transition to a market economy and were attracted by the remarkable changes in
Singapore. They were also studying the experiences of many countries to extract
the positive elements of how others had managed their economy. I thought how
disastrous it was for a huge country like the Soviet Union to be talking of
learning about the market economy from other countries at this late stage of
disintegration.
My meeting with President Mikhail Gorbachev was postponed several times
because he was caught up in a series of intense discussions on the next step into
a market economy. Soviet protocol officers were apologetic, but I told my
ambassador not to worry. We were witnessing the end of an empire. I had the
advantage of having seen an earlier one, the collapse of the British Empire in
February 1942 as the Japanese captured us. I was taken to his office at the
Kremlin when he broke away from one of the interminable meetings to meet me
for half an hour. All formalities were put aside as we met in a small group, he

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with only his