Trying to Influence Moscow

By Strobe Talbott

A longstanding and often frustrated goal of U.S. policy

The Reagan Administration believes it can influence the orientation, and possibly even the composition, of the leadership that has succeeded Leonid Brezhnev. That belief, whether it proves right or wrong, is a variation on an old theme: a stubbornly recurring but usually frustrated American desire to effect some change for the better in the system that poses the most serious military threat and political challenge facing the West.

Supreme power in the U.S.S.R. has changed hands only four times before. Vladimir Lenin died in 1924 and made way for Joseph Stalin, who died 29 years later, to be replaced briefly by Georgi Malenkov, who was outmaneuvered by Nikita Khrushchev, who in turn was ousted by Brezhnev in 1964. The changeovers in Moscow might as well have occurred on another planet. U.S. statesmen of those years had little understanding of what had happened, much less any anticipation of what was going to happen next, and still less any sense of what the U.S. could do about it.

But Ronald Reagan's chief advisers thought they had a unique opportunity to affect the post-Brezhnev transition. They knew that the actuarial tables, combined with the obvious evidence of Brezhnev's declining health, made it quite likely that he would be replaced during their own term of office. Furthermore, there was good reason to suspect that the economic and demographic problems besetting the Soviet empire had touched off a debate behind the Kremlin walls over the best course to follow in the future.

Reagan and company hoped that their reputation as hard-liners would nudge the Soviets toward more cautious, pragmatic and inward-looking leaders than those who have ruled the U.S.S.R. until now. Richard Pipes, a Harvard historian who has served as the Administration's senior Kremlinologist, is convinced that a struggle has been going on for some time between young Turks who advocate domestic economic reform and an old guard that wants to continue the traditional pattern of compensating for internal failures by pursuing foreign successes, often in the form of military adventures.

The Reagan Administration's tough rhetoric, its attempt to consolidate anti-Soviet alliances and its program of across-the-board rearmament have all been intended to impress on the Soviets that they have a choice. They can moderate their conduct--which, by implication, means choosing more moderate rulers--and thereby earn a respite from conflict abroad that may be their last chance to tend to their home front. Or, if the succession struggle is resolved in favor of ideologues and expansionists, they can continue pursuing an aggressive course and thereby risk an almost inevitable, potentially cataclysmic confrontation with the U.S. On top of that, the stagnation and deterioration of their economy will accelerate as more resources are wasted in an arms race that the U.S.S.R. can neither afford nor, in the long run, win.

Whether that stark view is an accurate reading of how things really do work inside the Politburo or a wise prescription for U.S. policy toward the U.S.S.R. is debatable. "Pipes' theory is based on two faulty premises," maintains Robert Legvoid at the New York City-based Council on Foreign Relations. "First, it's a mistake to think that the primary impulse of Soviet foreign policy is to distract the population from its own woes. Rather, the Soviet Union's behavior in the world is motivated by a combination of historical insecurity and a more recent ambition to exercise all the rights it thinks go with being a superpower. Neither of those factors would change much if things were going better on the home front. Second, Pipes is wrong in assuming that there is a clear-cut division between two camps. Any U.S. policy designed to assure that some nonexistent group of 'moderates' will come to power is a chimera." Even if there actually were such moderates lurking in the wings, it is conceivable that vigorous, sometimes bellicose anti-Soviet policies on the part of U.S. authorities could vindicate and strengthen their hard-line rivals.

That is precisely what some Soviets hint might happen. Says Radomir Bogdanov, a senior "Americanologist" in Moscow: "What's going on right now in Soviet-American relations has a potential impact on the correlation of forces [inside the Soviet Establishment]. These people in the White House are unpredictable ideologues. They think we are so weak that we can be crushed by economic pressure. They don't understand how this dangerous illusion might play into the hands of some people here."

Leonid Zamyatin, a powerful member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party and for years a close adviser of Brezhnev's, dismisses Pipes as "someone who still lives back in the era of ancient monarchies" and whose theories about the Soviet Union are "mere stupidities."

Be that as it may, for the first time in the history of Soviet-American relations, the men running the U.S. have sought quite consciously to play Kremlin-succession politics. By no means, however, is it the first time that the U.S. has armed to influence internal Soviet policies. That has been going on since the revolution of 1917. Early that year Woodrow Wilson, the paragon of idealism in American foreign policy, hailed as "wonderful and heartening" the overthrow of the Tsar. Russia, he said, "was always known by those who knew it best to have been always in fact democratic at heart." Now that the monarchy had been cast into the dustbin of history, he went on, "the great, generous Russian people have been added in all their naive majesty and might to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the world."

It was, of course, Wilson who was naive. Tsarist autocracy quickly gave way to "the dictatorship of the proletariat," and the U.S. began 65 years of trying, with a great variety of tactics and theories but with a notable lack of success, to find some way of ameliorating the more maddening, sometimes murderous aspects of Soviet tyranny.

The U.S. withheld diplomatic recognition from the Bolsheviks throughout the 1920s. Part of the reason was a hope in Washington that by turning its back on these upstarts in Moscow, the West could make them change their revolutionary ways. Soviet Communism was an epidemic to be quarantined.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt finally extended recognition in 1933, he justified the decision partly on the ground that a dozen years of nonrecognition had failed to alter either the internal or the foreign policies of the Soviet Union. Hostility having failed, the U.S. was ready to try a dose of friendship. The new American embassy was to be modeled on Monticello. "I like the idea of planting Thomas Jefferson in Moscow," said F.D.R. The first U.S. Ambassador, William Bullitt, told the President, "Our representatives in the Soviet Union today can have a really immense influence."

That proved another futile hope. In the next decade, Roosevelt and his advisers came to realize that they were dealing with a political system that was not only deeply repugnant to Western values but virtually impervious to Western attempts to change it. Nevertheless, compared with Nazi Germany, "Uncle Joe" Stalin's Russia seemed by far the lesser of two evils. "I can't take Communism, nor can you," said Roosevelt to Ambassador Joseph Davies in 1941. "But to cross this bridge [i.e., beat Hitler], I would hold hands with the devil."

When World War II ended, so did Soviet-American handholding. At the outset of the cold war in the late '40s, U.S. policy turned once again toward quarantine--or containment--of Soviet power. That power seemed so predatory and implacable that the Western democracies believed their only hope was to band together and deter further Soviet expansionism. The idea of actively coaxing the U.S.S.R. toward a more humane social order seemed out of the question. The author of the containment doctrine, George Kennan, held out the dim hope that if the Soviet aggressive drive were held in check, perhaps the regime might mellow. But that would happen only very gradually. Because of the internal dynamics of the Soviet Union, Kennan argued, American influence on that country's evolution could only be oblique and passive.

The immediate effect of the cold war on life inside the Soviet Union was very much the opposite of mellowing. In a new book, Postwar Soviet Politics, Historian Werner G. Hahn, a former CIA analyst, argues persuasively that some incipient but promising trends toward moderation were wiped out by a further wave of purges. The crackdown was in part a reaction to what was seen in the Kremlin as a new menace of "encirclement" and counterrevolutionary "rollback" emanating from the outside world.

In the mid-'50s, a warming of the international climate touched off a thaw inside the U.S.S.R. Partly because he had attended his first summit meeting with Western leaders the year before in Geneva, Khrushchev felt able to launch his destalinization campaign and begin releasing prisoners from the Gulag Archipelago in 1956. This time American diplomacy had helped to improve conditions within the Soviet Union. But in the absence of clear, consistent ideas about how the Soviet system really works, American efforts to make that system more compatible with U.S. interests and values have been doomed to repeat old errors and commit new ones.

A vivid example is the longstanding effort to ease the plight of Russian Jewry, which predates even the Soviet era. In 1911, American Jewish organizations lobbied hard to abrogate a 79-year-old commercial treaty, largely in retaliation for the tsarist government's discrimination against, and repression of, Jews. The campaign was successful on Capitol Hill, and the Taft Administration reluctantly terminated the treaty. The consequence for Russian Jews was a step-up in official antiSemitism.

Some 60 years later, Henry Kissinger used "quiet diplomacy" with the Kremlin to increase Jewish emigration. It worked. The number of exit permits rose from 400 in 1968 to nearly 35,000 in 1973. Then Congress once again got into the act. Senator Henry Jackson introduced legislation that in effect made increased Jewish emigration a condition for easier Soviet access to the American market. It backfired. The Kremlin objected to "unacceptable interference in our internal affairs," and emigration dropped off sharply. Later it began to climb again, reaching 51,000 in 1979, but by last year it had plummeted to fewer than 10,000.

If trade is an instrument for gaining leverage over Soviet behavior, the U.S. has yet to figure out how to use it. One school says: Trade with the Soviets a lot--get them to drink our soda pop, wear our blue jeans, buy our ball bearings and computers and grain--and they'll become more like us and depend more on us. That view is held by some diehard advocates of detente and prominent American businessmen, such as Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum and Donald Kendall of Pepsico. The other school says: Don't trade with them at all, blockade them, force them to face up to their problems without the help of our credits and technology and consumer goods; that will give them no choice but to concentrate on internal reform rather than external expansion. That is the inclination of the Reagan Administration, as was amply proved when it decided in June to forbid U.S. companies --and to discourage those in allied nations as well--to help the Soviets build a gas pipeline to Western Europe.

Neither approach seems to have worked. The theory of convergence--that, over time, the Soviet economy and its political superstructure would become more decentralized, borrowing more and more from capitalism--has not been borne out. The imperative on which the system operates is still totalitarian control. No matter what they stock in their refrigerators, KGB officers are no where near joining the Pepsi generation in any ideological sense.

Nor is there good reason to think that blockading the Soviet economy will force reforms. As long as there is a buck to be made in East-West trade, the U.S. will probably be unable to sustain tough sanctions. So the Reagan Administration itself has demonstrated when, in deference to the farm lobby, it lifted the grain embargo that Jimmy Carter imposed after the invasion of Afghanistan. Even if trade could be used as a stick, experience of the past 65 years has shown that when the Soviets are hit, they tend to hit back or beat up all the more ferociously on their own people--or both.

Through the decades, about the only times when repression has shown even the most tentative sign of giving way to reform within the U.S.S.R. have been when international tensions in general, and Soviet-American tensions in particular, have abated. That happened after the civil war in the '20s, between World War II and the cold war in the '40s, in the Khrushchev thaw of the late '50s, and in the early '70s, when Kissinger and Richard Nixon pursued their undeservedly maligned detente policies with Brezhnev. During those episodes, all too infrequent and brief, the Soviet regime showed itself slightly more receptive to experimenters or liberalizers in its midst, slightly more tolerant of pluralistic elements in its society and creative impulses in its culture.

Insofar as the Administration thinks that it will be doing the Soviet people a favor by increasing pressure on their new leadership to mend its ways "or else," the U.S. may be defying both history and the very nature of the system it is trying to influence.

--By Strobe Talbott

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