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Margaret Thatcher blocked Soviet aid for striking miners, files reveal

She was the prime minister at the height of her powers, using every arm of the state to crush the striking miners. He was the Soviet heir apparent who had authorised a large donation to help striking comrades in the UK.

Now newly released Downing Street documents have shed fresh light on the relationship between Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev, exposing how Thatcher exerted intense diplomatic pressure on the future leader to successfully block a Soviet donation of much-needed cash to the strikers.

The documents, released to the Guardian after a five-year freedom of information battle, show how the pair clashed during the titanic miners' strike that convulsed Britain in 1984-85.

In October 1984, six months into the dispute, the National Union of Mineworkers was desperate for cash to fund the strike, because a judge had ordered the confiscation of the union's entire assets. The NUM leader, Arthur Scargill, had stepped up efforts to raise cash from the USSR; Soviet miners had responded by donating more than $1m from their wages.

To avoid the cash being seized by the court-appointed official who had been put in charge of the NUM's finances, it had to be transferred clandestinely to the union. The Soviets attempted to transfer the cash to an NUM bank account in Zurich, but it, like other accounts, was frozen.

The money bounced back, but Thatcher soon learnt of the manoeuvre and became worried. The proposed donation threatened to derail a planned visit by Gorbachev to Britain to foster better relations between east and west.

Gorbachev was at that time second-in-command of the Soviet Union and tipped to take over when the ailing leader, Konstantin Chernenko, died. The relationship between Thatcher and Gorbachev was beginning to blossom; she would later famously declare him someone with whom she could "do business".

drive from www.guardian.co.uk