Did Margaret Thatcher say that the economically viable population of Russia is 15 million people?

The former British Prime Minister is often credited with saying that many times fewer people could live in Russia than live in reality now. We checked whether Thatcher claimed this.

On June 15, 2018, official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova during a briefing with journalists reasoned about manifestations of Russophobia on the part of British politicians. In particular, Zakharova said: “1991, Houston, ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher literally said the following: “According to the world community, it is economically feasible for only 15 million people to live in Russia.” If someone can say that there was no such statement, we will only be happy about it. But, unfortunately, documents prove that this statement was made. Fine?" This quote is also found in earlier speeches and texts of Russian politicians and officials: for example, her leads leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Gennady Zyuganov in his 2009 book “Stalin and Modernity” (however, we are talking not about 1991, but about 1982). Some scientists are not far behind: in 2004 this statement attributed to the former British Prime Minister Vladimir Dobrenkov, Dean of the Faculty of Sociology at Moscow State University.

All famous public speeches of the British Prime Minister collected on the Margaret Thatcher Foundation website. This online resource is a publicly accessible collection of tens of thousands of documents related to Thatcher and Great Britain during her lifetime. Almost 8,000 speeches, statements and interviews alone have been collected on the site. In 1991 in Houston, the then former prime minister actually performed at the American Petroleum Institute conference, the full text of her speech has not survived.

In 2018, shortly after that same briefing by Maria Zakharova, with the fund contacted journalist Alexey Kovalev. An employee of the organization, Chris Collins, said that he had already come across this phrase supposedly Thatcher in Chinese sources, but considers the quote “an obvious fake.” Collins suggested that the politician made “some short impromptu speech and said nothing significant,” and found it surprising that none of the journalists present paid attention to such a striking phrase (if she actually said it). It is noteworthy that at first a foundation employee claimed that the performance took place in Chicago, but as journalists sorted out the origins of this story, admittedthat the events actually took place in Houston.

The conference that took place in November 1991 is known from notes in two American newspapers: The Houston Chronicle and The New York Times. The first of them contains the content of Thatcher's speech stated quite fully: she mainly talked about the situation in the Middle East (shortly before ended Gulf War). According to the author of the note, Thatcher did not say anything about the Soviet Union or Russia. In an article by The New York Times about her speech given much less attention, but the journalist notes an interesting detail: many meetings were planned at the conference in Houston with the participation of a Russian delegation of 50 people. It is difficult to imagine a situation in which Thatcher actually said the passage about 15 million people, but no one from this delegation was outraged in the press or left corresponding memories. We were unable to find such evidence. The author of the article in The New York Times, Matthew Wald, who was present at the conference reported Alexey Kovalev that “he definitely doesn’t remember Thatcher saying anything like that.”

Where did this quote come from, and even with a fairly accurate dating and place where Thatcher allegedly said it? The earliest mention of it that we were able to discover was the book by publicist Andrei Parshev “Why Russia is not America,” which was published in 1999. In this text There is such a fragment: “In the late 80s, I heard just one phrase, which, perhaps, led to a revolution in my ideas about the world around me. Then I was studying English, and one day I came across a recording of M. Thatcher’s public speech on foreign policy. <…> So, speaking about the prospects of the USSR, she said something like the following, without explaining it in any way: “It is economically justifiable for 15 million people to live on the territory of the USSR.” I played the recording again, maybe at least fifty? No, exactly fifteen - “fifteen”, I heard correctly.”

It is noticeable how this (apparently the first in Russian) presentation of the quote differs from what Zakharova was talking about. Firstly, Parshev is not talking about Russia, but about the USSR. Secondly, the publicist does not clarify about Houston and 1991. Thirdly, unlike the speaker of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Parshev still casts some doubt on the authenticity of the phrase: not only accompanying the quote heard at least several years ago with the words “stated approximately next", but also adding: “She (Thatcher - editor's note) has never, in my memory, blurted out anything stupid, from which not a single English-speaking politician speaking about Russia is immune - in this regard, they are all a perfect match. It was even more surprising that our press reported neither this nor other similar statements by Western figures. I even called some of the editorial offices of our newspapers - no one could explain to me what Thatcher meant.”

Apparently, the quote given by Parshev in his book in 1999 already caused a mixed reaction. In 2000, in an interview with the Pravoslavie portal, he outlined already a slightly different version of Thatcher’s recording he heard: “This was her speech on foreign policy. I heard it on a recording. It did not directly say that 15 million people should be left in the USSR, but said more subtly: they say, the Soviet economy is completely ineffective, there is only a small effective part, which, in fact, has the right to exist. And only 15 million people of our population are employed in this effective part. This is the meaning of Thatcher’s statement, which has since been interpreted in different ways.”

Simultaneously with the “adaptation” of the quote to modern realities (replacing the USSR with Russia), Houston also mixed in with it. This probably happened in the mid-2000s - in October 2006 on an Internet forum appeared a message from a certain graduate of the Faculty of Chemistry of Moscow State University, whose acquaintance allegedly attended that very conference of oil workers in November 1991. His retelling of Thatcher’s speech is strikingly different from the reports of the American media: supposedly the former British prime minister only talked about the collapse of the Soviet Union. Interestingly, there is nothing about “15 million expedient population” in this retelling.

Thus, the verifiable statement was first attributed to Margaret Thatcher by the publicist Parshev in the late 1990s, who over the years has never provided the source from which he learned about this phrase. Over time, the phrase has acquired details about the 1991 conference in Houston, but journalists who worked there deny that Thatcher, who spoke at the convention, said anything similar. Finally, the life and public activities of the politician are quite well documented. At the same time, experts on her legacy from the Margaret Thatcher Foundation did not find a quote attributed to the former British prime minister in the archives (neither among the speeches and performances of 1991, nor in any other collections of documents), as reported to journalists. However, in 2019, a year after the now famous briefing, Maria Zakharova stated: “We contacted the Margaret Thatcher Foundation. <…> We have a newspaper in which this quote was given, and the foundation did not answer us either yes or no, which would have been quite simple to do.” Over the past year and a half, Zakharova has not presented this newspaper to the public.

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. Margaret Thatcher Foundation
2. Fake | Margaret Thatcher wanted to reduce the world's population by 90% and believed that only 15 million people were justified in Russia
3. Did former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright say that Siberia should not belong to Russia alone?