From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

chef de cabinet
and one interpreter, and I with only my deputy
prime minister, Goh Chok Tong, and my foreign minister, Wong Kan Seng.
He was uncertain what his next steps should be to solve almost insoluble
problems. I thought to myself that he had made a fatal mistake going for glasnost
(openness) before perestroika (restructuring), that Deng Xiaoping had been wiser
doing it the other way around. Gorbachev looked composed, calm and sincere
when he said that each nation was unique and no country must dominate another
militarily. He said the Soviet Union was engaged in perestroika, grappling with
the question of choice, the choice of political and economic reform, and how it
should proceed. The Soviet Union had begun its perestroika in 1917 but that had
not worked out the way it was supposed to. Now he was trying all over again. He
understood that Singapore’s perestroika had started many years ago. He valued
the development of bilateral relations.
It was a miracle, I said, that the transformation of the Soviet Union was so
peaceful. If he could get through the next three to five years without violence, he
would have scored a great triumph. I complimented him for not using military
might to solve his problems since otherwise it would have been disastrous for
the world. He replied that no matter what stage of economic or cultural
development a country was in, no one could say which was first-rate and which
was second-rate because each nation was unique in its own way.
As we walked out of the Kremlin, I marvelled that such a decent man could
reach the top of so evil a system. A lesser leader would have sought to resolve
the problems of the Soviet Union by using its huge military capabilities, which
would have caused untold damage to the rest of the world. It was a stroke of
good fortune for the United States and indeed the world.
In my discussions with China’s leaders I discovered their totally different
view of Gorbachev as a superpower leader who had listened to the siren calls of
his enemies. He should have been on guard when his enemies’ media praised
him. Instead, he followed their exhortations and by glasnost (openness) brought
about the disintegration of his country, exactly what his foes wanted. Therefore,
when the American media referred to Vice-Premier Zhu Rongji as China’s
Gorbachev, Zhu quickly distanced himself from anything that might be seen to
be like Gorbachev. The accolade he or any Chinese leader preferred was to be
seen as a Deng Xiaoping with his socialist realism, that cats of whatever colour
all caught mice. Few Chinese, leaders or ordinary people, commiserated with
Gorbachev when he was repudiated by his own people with less than one per
cent voting for him in the 1996 Russian presidential election. They saw him as

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having dismantled the Soviet empire in a way the CIA would have been proud to
have done.
The Soviet Union’s disintegration did not affect Singapore as we had few
economic links with it. The first sign of its system breaking down was when the
visits of its fishing fleet became irregular. Ships’ captains were selling their fish
elsewhere, sometimes on the high seas, to pay their crew and the dockyards that
repaired their vessels cheaper than we could. Central control from Moscow had
broken down. Aeroflot, the Soviet airline, was in similar difficulties. It did not
have the hard currency to pay for aviation fuel and had to beg for petty cash
from Moscow Narodny Bank’s branch in Singapore to pay for fuel to fly back to
Moscow.
Despite this growing chaos Aeroflot brought in plane-loads of Russian
tourists who shopped for electronic goods they could sell at several times their
cost once past Moscow customs. They were profitable excursions for these
freelance traders. Soon more Russian women than men arrived. Word had got
around that all they needed was their air ticket and taxi fare to our hotels where
male clients would provide them with the resources to pay for the electronic
goods to take home at the end of their short stay. Our ambassador in Moscow
was a moral man who disapproved of this and approached the Soviet interior
ministry to get them not to issue passports to such women. But the flow of these
enterprising young Russian women amateurs continued.
When I visited the Soviet Union that September of 1970 and met Premier
Kosygin at his holiday dacha on the Black Sea, the Soviet leaders were
expansive and assertive, confident that the future belonged to them. To watch
this massive, tightly controlled empire shudder, become ungovernable and then
break up was an awesome spectacle. Something like this must have happened to
China in the last decades of the Qing dynasty. The difference is that Russia still
has nuclear capability, an ultimate deterrent against any predator out to
dismember it. And anyone who believes that the Russians are finished as a
powerful people should remember the nuclear and space scientists, chess
grandmasters and Olympic champions they nurtured despite a crippling centrally
planned economy. Unlike their communist system, the Russians are not a people
to be consigned to the dustbin of history.

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