Presswatch / When the Soviets come to Washington
Ledeen, Michael
PRESSWATCH WHEN THE SOVIETS COME TO WASHINGTON rr he coverage of the summit is probably best left to the drama critics and the psychoanalysts, but a few points are appropriate. First, the West...
...Yet almost all of our people—from the White House to the newsrooms—were eager to usher in the "new era" of East-West relations, and didn't press the issue (at least in public—I am told that at the meetings with "intellectuals, academics, and journalists" at the Soviet Embassy there were some tough questions, to which Gorbachev responded quite huffily...
...Thus, the highly positive treatment of Gorbachev is not new...
...even Khomeini got the "kid gloves" treatment when he was living in the suburbs of Paris, and Qaddafi's memorable NBC interview was remarkable for its gentleness...
...And what could possibly provide the basis for the tripartite division of Soviet public opinion...
...Gorbachev has put it off to the year 2000 . . . Furthermore, Gillette found Soviet officials who confirmed that the Kremlin "now devotes a much larger proportion of its gross national product to military spending than does the United States, as Western intelligence agencies have long contended...
...Now unless I am totally mistaken, there are no Soviet "journalists" in our sense of the word...
...One would think that intense skepticism would have set in long since...
...You see, the current generation of Soviet disinformers have adopted anice, symmetrical approach to life: public opinion divides into neat thirds, and on serious empirical questions, disputes are resolved by "splitting the difference...
...rr he Times series also goes into con-1 siderable detail about the new "reforms," and shows us that while there are some showcase operations of the "new era," like private farming, there is very little rush to join the Gorbachev movement...
...There are many articles in the mass media, but I never come across any other manifestation of restructuring...
...On the other hand, the Times series provides a first-class examination of daily life in the Soviet Union, ranging from rock stars whose records circulate, samizdat-style, among the young, but who do not perform publicly (and who receive royalties so small you need a computer to calculate their tininess), to patients in hospitals who need transfusions only to find that there is no blood bank, and get some blood from the anesthesiologist...
...The Bottom Line The last word on Gorbachev comes from L'Express in Paris, written by Jean-Claude Casanova...
...It is because American diplomacy is so weak now...
...I'm rather afraid because there are no solid facts," says one intellectual...
...First, the West has been enthusiastic about every new Soviet dictator, and cheered every announcement of the "liberalization" of the Soviet economic system...
...Does the KGB now conduct polls...
...And that, dear friends, is all we can reasonably demand of our journalists...
...To their credit, Fisher and Eaton then continued with the crucial point, one which is often overlooked: "[The new image] is vital in order to ease international tensions and gain the breathing space and Western technology he needs to carry through his reforms...
...And a painter who talked to Stanley Meisler "still felt nervous enough to ask that his last name not be used in any American newspaper story about him" (although the description of the man and his work will suffice for the KGB to track him down if it comes to that...
...Thus, as Dan Fisher put it, while there are many changes apparently under way, they are very fragile indeed...
...Gorbachev didn't like the question, and gave the journalists short shrift...
...The Times sent a bevy of correspondents to produce the series: Dan Fisher, William J. Eaton, Robert Gillette, Stanley Meisler...
...Why was this not a failure...
...Since he came to power three years ago, the Kremlin leader has managed to substantially alter the traditionally forbidding image of his country abroad...
...He gives us the bottom line on Gorbachev's reforms: These reforms, pushed to their limits, upset the workers because they impose mobility upon them, discontent the consumers because of the price increases, dispossess the bureaucrats of their privileges, and, finally, make the Party cadres nervous...
...Thus, Fisher tells us quite presciently, there are many intellectuals who are afraid of what is going on...
...Meisler has some wonderful lines, like: "Everyone agrees that a cafe like this could not have existed before Gorbachev...
...there are only writers who serve the Communist Party of the Soviet Union...
...Third, in many ways Gorbachev received a gentler treatment from our journalists than Reagan did, and this is also traditional...
...The wretchedness of human existence is well described, as is the continued failure of the economy...
...Meisler quotes a brilliant French foreign policy expert, Dominique Moisi: "For the first time that I can remember, American diplomats in Paris are not as bright and sophisticated as Soviet diplomats in Paris...
...To be sure, there are many weaknesses in the articles (Sovietology is a modern form of metaphysics, and it's a tough act to perform), such as the opening salvo by Fisher and Eaton on October 25: "Gorbachev is off to an impressive start...
...Finally, there are some good thoughts about the new generation of Soviet diplomats which should give us all pause...
...The two best assessments of the summit that I found were a charming op-ed piece by David Aaron in the New York Times, in which he marveled at the media's compulsion to fill the airwaves with summit-related material, even when that required them to interview each other, and an upbeat article by Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Wall Street Journal, which proclaimed Reagan the winner 3 to 1. He's right, but the victory may be pyrrhic...
...it is a continuation of a 70-year old pattern of Western response to events in Moscow...
...If there are any awards for newspapers that make an honest effort to cover a major international story at the length it deserves, they should go this year to the Los Angeles Times...
...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988...
...And these have paid too much to be satisfied with words...
...The very fact that Western pollsters now consider it routine to compare the popularity ratings of Gorbachev with those of Reagan indicates that there are many people who put them on the same political plane...
...GNP devoted to military spending and the CIA's 15% estimate for the Soviet Union...
...It is only at the end of the experience, if it succeeds, that one will be able to rally these categories...
...Fair enough, but they should have pointed out that this always happens...
...The toughest questions at the marathon Gorby press conference in Washington came not from the lambs of our press corps, but rather from British correspondents (and, surprisingly, from Mary McGrory, the sole American exception) who reminded the Soviet dictator that he had said a summit which consisted solely in signing an already agreed-upon INF treaty, and which did Michael Ledeen is senior fellow in international affairs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.0 not make concrete progress in regional and other matters, would be a failure...
...True, and well said...
...From here to that point, it is not the Westerners who have to be convinced (they applauded every reform, beginning with Lenin's NEP), but the Soviet citizens...
...Second, the summit marked a new high (or low) in the Kremlin's efforts to achieve "moral equivalence" with the United States...
...he needs the technology from us in order to survive...
...This sort of quotation deserves some warning flags for the unwary reader...
...Thus, Lenin's New Economic Policy was greeted with hosannas back in the 1920s, Stalin was hailed as a moderate, Khrushchev's thaw was considered a new era, Andropov was the consummate liberal, and even the colorless Chernenko was given high marks for his open-mindedness (for the few months when people believed he was actually alive...
...Mainstreet Soviet citizen tell the truth to pollsters...
...And of all the changes, the call for glasnost—openness—is the most fragile and easily reversible of all...
...But Gillette does not point out that it is still THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 31 illegal for Soviet citizens to provide accurate economic data to foreigners, and quotes without comment a claim that "a fair estimate of the real Soviet military commitment could be obtained by splitting the difference between the 7% of the U.S...
...any President who believes that a new era is at hand, and that Gorbachev doesn'tbelieve in the eventual triumph of Communism, might make some serious mistakes down the road a bit...
...Beautiful...
...But it is not clear why...
...As Robert Gillette put it, Nearly three years after Gorbachev's rise to power, the supply of meat and butter still falls far short of demand, as evidenced by continued rationing in a number of provincial cities, where adults are limited to as little as a kilogram . . . of meat and sausage and 200 grams . . . of butter a month .. . The late Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev postponed resolution of the housing shortage from 1980 to 1990...
...To which we can only add, "reforms are beside the point...
...There is a certain innocence that seems inevitably to attach itself to American coverage of the Soby Michael Ledeen viet Union, such as when we hear: Fyodor Buriatsky, a journalist and consultant to the party's Central Committee, estimated in an interview that one-third of the people actively support the Soviet leader's program, another one-third are against it, and the balance are taking a wait-andsee position...
...It is as if everyone believes that the simple act of having a good time with style and grace is a political statement that can only be made in an era of reform...
...But that is not because American diplomats believe that is the wisest thing to do...
...Fourth, although the Soviet promise to withdraw from Afghanistan is now seven years old (so far as I know, the first time it came up was during the first Haig-Gromyko talks way back in 1981—and Gromyko raised it all by himself with no prompting from the American side), it is often taken seriously, both by American diplomats and by American journalists...
...M eanwhile, it behooves us all to pay tribute to the Los Angeles Times which between October 25 and November 7 ran an eight-part series (in which only seven, oddly, were identified as part of the series) on the Soviet Union under Gorbachev...
...While the Times journalists don't think too deeply about the data-they receive, they at least provide us with sufficient information so that we can make some intelligent deductions of our own...
...To be sure, a lot of this is due to the dreadful decline in the quality of our diplomats, but the Russians have improved dramatically, and Moisi puts his finger on a major problem: "The United States is doing no more than react to the initiatives of Gorbachev...
...And would Mr...
...Fisher doesn't tell us one crucial element of this fear—that the Kremlin has often deceived its own people in the past...
Vol. 21 • February 1988 • No. 2
