Letters from the Kremlin

By George Russell

Moscow keeps up the pressure, even as its own allies worry

Having failed to prevent the NATO alliance from deploying new nuclear missiles in Western Europe, Moscow has wasted no time in showing that it will not concede diplomatic defeat. On the heels of the Soviet walkout from the Geneva talks on Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF), Soviet envoys fanned out in West European capitals with letters bearing the signature of Leader Yuri Andropov. The messages were the first salvos in a renewed campaign to persuade the West Europeans to change their minds. Their central theme: "The Soviet Union does not wish to regard the existing situation as irreversible."

The new gambit emerged as the Soviet leadership was setting a deadline for dealing with a major internal issue: the fact that Andropov, 69, has not been seen in public since Aug. 18. Last week, the official news agency TASS announced that the country's rubber-stamp parliament, the Supreme Soviet, would hold its semi-annual meeting on Dec. 28. The Communist Party's Central Committee will probably hold a closed-door session one or two days earlier. Both are gatherings that Andropov would normally chair. Deepening the mystery, the Kremlin disclosed that Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, 75, would visit Bulgaria this month, a trip that Andropov had postponed last October. The news was bound to increase speculation that if Andropov is unable to continue in office, Ustinov might replace him either as Communist Party leader or as President.

There was little mystery, however, to the Andropov correspondence. It was essentially a restatement of Moscow's longstanding refusal to accept a single new U.S. missile in Western Europe to counter the 243 Soviet SS-20 missiles targeted on Western Europe. While offering no new concessions, the letters pointedly referred to the missile issue as affecting "our continent." Equally pointed was Moscow's failure to include Washington in the letter-writing campaign, even though the U.S. was the Soviet Union's partner at the ruptured talks. The exclusion was consistent with earlier Soviet attempts to sow division between the U.S. and its European allies.

Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi fired back a missive to the Kremlin stating that his government's aim was "a suitable peace for all in a context of security for everyone." It was the Soviets, said Craxi, who had created "a [missile] disequilibrium which we find unacceptable." Danish Prime Minister Poul Schlueter, whose country has declined to accept nuclear missiles on its soil, responded that the Soviet leader's letter "gave me cause for disappointment and concern." British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared that she was "not greatly impressed."

The most optimistic gloss on the letter's words came from West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. The Soviet message, he said, included an "expression in principle of a preparedness to reconsider and revise the one-sided breaking off' of the negotiations. As proof, Kohl cited the continuation last week in Geneva of U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START), which deal not with European-based weapons but with the intercontinental arsenals that the superpowers have trained on each other.

Kohl's upbeat attitude echoed the hopes of many West Europeans that the Soviets might eventually return to the bargaining table through a possible merger of the INF talks with the START negotiations. At week's end, the Soviet party daily Pravda labeled that interpretation a 'shameless deception." If the NATO countries wanted the resumption of the INF talks, the newspaper added, they "should restore the old state of things, when there were no American missiles in Europe."

Moscow's rejoinder was unnecessary. After considerable White House debate, the Reagan Administration has decided to oppose the idea of an INF-START merger. Keeping the two sets of talks separate is seen in Washington as a way to pressure the Soviets into modifying their position. West Europeans, however, hope that U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz will attend a Jan. 17 meeting in Stockholm of the 35-nation Conference on Confidence and Security-Building Measures and Disarmament in Europe. If Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko also shows up, the meeting could offer an opportunity to renew the superpower dialogue on European-based missiles.

Even as NATO closed ranks over the Andropov correspondence, small but increasing ripples of nuclear unease were visible in Eastern Europe. In East Germany, the official party newspaper Neues Deutschland published an open letter to Party Leader Erich Honecker last October, deploring both the NATO deployment and the threatened "retaliatory" deployment of new Soviet short-range missiles in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. In the letter, Lutheran clergy and parishioners from a suburb of Dresden declared themselves "horrified by the very thought" of the dual deployment, and urged Honecker to support a Scandinavian call for a European nuclear-free zone. Open criticism of both sides in the missile dispute has become a regular feature of local and district meetings of Protestant churches in East Germany, provoking fitful government repression.

In Czechoslovakia, the official newspaper Rude Pravo has also published letters expressing anxiety over the missile deployments, and local Communist Party groups have staged meetings to quell some of the fears. Church groups, however, have remained securely muzzled, as have the country's few remaining political dissidents. Last month a document from Czechoslovakia's Charter 77 underground dissident group emerged in the West, noting that about 20 members of the tiny organization had been picked up by police and warned to watch their words on the missile issue. Any expressions of opinion about the impending Soviet missile deployment, the dissident were told, would result in prosecution for "undermining national defense capability." --By George Russell. Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof/Moscow and Roland Flamini/Bonn, with other bureaus

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof/Moscow, Roland Flamini/Bonn This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.