How Thatcher's 'friendship' with Gorbachev became a catalyst for tearing down the Iron Curtain
msn.comMikhail Gorbachev in 1984, when he led a Russian parliamentary delegation to Britain. She hosted him at Chequers, and the tense atmosphere led Gorbachev to tell Thatcher he had no intentions of trying to recruit her to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
She broke into a fit of laughter, in Gorbachev's retelling, and the pair soon found that they could engage in "real political dialogue" despite their opposing views.
It was following this meeting, months before Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as Soviet leader, that Thatcher was to make her pronouncement.
Gorbachev would later describe the pair's friendship as a catalyst for the tearing down of the Iron Curtain. “We gradually developed personal relations that became increasingly friendly,” he said following her death in 2013. “In the end, we were able to achieve mutual understanding, and this contributed to a change in the atmosphere between our country and the West and to the end of the Cold War. ”It was Thatcher's "we can do business together" comment, he said, that helped him forge a "mutual understanding" with President Ronald Reagan and other world leaders.
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