The System (Georgi Arbatov)

...He is not, of course, alone in this failure...

...He can barely conceal his disdain for Brezhnev and associates...

...What he doesn't admit is that he rose to prominence by doing the bidding of this crude and narrow-minded group, and there is no reason to believe that he ever put forward anything less than full effort on the regime's behalf...

...She had been reading Ulysses, which was then appearing in installments in the Little Review...

...When Ted Turner or John Kenneth Galbraith would return from Moscow whining about how Reagan hawks were undermining the doves in the Kremlin, it was safe to assume that the source for this "insight" was Arbatov or a subordinate at his institute...

...Arbatov defended the Afghanistan war in another book, The Soviet Viewpoint, published in the West in the early 1980s...

...System has been awarded generally favorable reviews, not surprising given Arbatov's friendship with some of the reviewers...

...Arbatov, however, pleads guilty only to what he calls "conformism," which seems to mean having to say certain things as a "condition of survival" in the treacherous world of Soviet politics...

...She M. D. Carnegie is a writer living in Rhode Island...

...Designed as a guide to those engaged in ideological work, the volume reminded the aktiv that d¨¦tente, then in full bloom, did not signal the end of the international class struggle...

...Which is precisely as Arbatov would want it...

...After all, it's widely understood that a measure of dishonesty could not be avoided in the Soviet system, and even a stalwart supporter of perestroika like Alexander Yakovlev found it expedient to write things that today he would gratefully consign to the incinerator...

...In The System, Arbatov writes with pride of his institute's role in educating the insular and "semi-educated" Kremlin leadership about realities of life and politics in America and elsewhere...

...Now as the cancerous conflict in former Yugoslavia threatens to spread in Europe's belly, the Germans have already said, if it comes to intervention, history and constitutional prohibition prevents them from sharing physical risk...

...Forty-two percent of Germans say their country has no need for a national defense...

...While maintaining the Soviet tradition of never admitting mistakes, he was a more reassuring presence than, say, Andrei Gromyko, the dour foreign minister whose unsmiling visage summoned up memories of Stalin, Molotov, and Vishinsky (and whom Arbatov now disparages as a coward and a toady...

...found it wanting, and wondered rhetorically if it were not so that "in any effort of such originality it is much easier, for contemporaries especially, to feel what it lacks than to name what it gives...

...Arbatov also blames Andropov, along with Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, as principally responsible for the invasion of Afghanistan...

...Moscow had sent a "military contingent" to its neighbor "to help the government formed after the revolution . . . ward off aggression from the outside," acted only "after repeated requests by the Kabul government," and did nothing in violation of international law...

...He asserts, for instance, that he refused to defend Soviet aggression in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, a claim directly contradicted by Arbatov's previous writings...

...But where does expediency end and career advancement take over...

...War era, and suggest a genuine lack of understanding of the popular basis of anti-Communism...

...CI qualified as the Soviet Union's leading expert on the United States...

...Arbatov claims that behind the scenes he worked for peace, mutual understanding, and common sense...

...One also wishes he had elaborated on his views of America...

...He spoke English well and displayed a certain grasp of the American political psychology...

...Nevertheless she marked what she had seen of it as cause to wax sanguine about the future of the novel, which now had the potential to be a total document of consciousness¡ªto unwind the scroll of memory, to catch the sounds of time's pass...

...Like Vladimir Pozner, Arbatov used to appear frequently on American television, a symbol, of Moscow's embrace of modern public relations...

...To be sure, Arbatov speaks with respect of the man who brought him into the apparatus's higher ranks by naming him to the Central Committee staff during the regime of Nikita Khrushchev...

...Andropov was an enthusiastic supporter of the deployment of the SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe, a measure that had the unforeseen effect of cementing the Atlantic Alliance at a time when dividing Europe from America was a principal goal of Soviet policy...

...Yet his defense of Soviet policies hardly differed in its essentials from the Brezhnev line...

...But there's far more to the story...

...For some reason, he remains extravagantly proud of this work, calling it "exceptional for its great frankness and self-criticism," and for its "higher-thanusual level of skill, professionalism, and argumentation...

...They prefer to see Arbatov as an honest man doing his part in a dishonest system...

...Record the atoms as they fall upon the mind," Woolf exhorted her colleagues...

...For instance, the memoirs of Marshal Zhukov, the World War II hero, were rewritten to delete any reference to Stalin's purge of the Red Army High Command...

...Would that there had been more material of this sort and less typically overblown Soviet rhetoric about peace and the fate of mankind and Arbatov's service on the Palme Commission on nuclear disarmament...

...In a volume written by Arbatov entitled The War of Ideas in Contemporary International Relations, published in the early 1970s, he crowed that the "imperial bourgeoisie" had been thwarted in its attempt to "wrest Czechoslovakia away from the socialist camp," and he trumpeted the "fraternal internationalist assistance" that the Warsaw Pact troops had rendered in 1968...

...but an architect of a strategy to appeal over the heads of Western governments, and especially the Reagan Administration, to sway potentially sympathetic constituencies: the peace movement, European social democrats, and journalists and academics of a detentist inclination...

...much the same charge could be leveled against the Western politicians and businessmen who served.as Arbatov's informants about life in the real world...

...Arbatov laments Andropov's leading the KGB during the era of re-Stalinization (unfortunately, without providing details), and is particularly critical of Andropov's prominent role in several of the Soviet Union's major foreign policy blunders...

...He provides some useful insights about the functioning of the system and especially about such shadowy Kremlin figures as Yuri Andropov, the late KGB chief and party secretary...

...He was not just a propagandist...

...man of the international left...

...Arbatov chillingly recounts how he himself was humiliated by the Red Army brass for voicing mild criticisms of some of the more blatant falsifications in a history of the Great Patriotic War...

...Clearly, his grasp of the realities of American politics was distorted not simply by the limitations imposed by the Soviet political environment, but also by Arbatov's self-image as a / n 1919, roughly a decade past the month she affixed as the moment the human character changed, Virginia Woolf published her essay "Modern Fiction," in which she averred that fiction writers, long hemmed in by the trivial stuff of the material, now stood before a horizon of limitless possibility: the human mind...

...Arbatov's description of West German neutralist Egon Bahr as "one of the most outstanding political minds of our time" suggests that one reason the Soviets never understood America is that much of their information about America was provided by Westerners harboring strongly anti-American views...

...Only ten percent say they'd be willing to take up arms if their own country were attacked...

...This is still Willy Brandt's country, Wanting to love and be loved, in a make-believe world where negotiations and freshly cut checks will make any problem go away...

...Not only did Arbatov defend both actions, his arguments were indistinguishable from those advanced by Brezhnev, Suslov, Chernenko, and the rest of the Politburo's primitives...

...A lthough describing himself as a partisan of democratic socialism, Arbatov no longer has much good to say about the old domestic order (unlike Mikhail Gorbachev and other prominent "reform Communists...

...Some might think it unsporting to torment self-professed closet reformers like Arbatov by reminding the world of what they said in the bad old days before glasnost...

...y et even today Arbatov can't come entirely clean...

...This is not Germany learning the lessons of the past...

...Furthermore, Arbatov bore the credentials of director of the Institute for the Study of the USA and Canada, and thus Arch Puddington works for Radio Free Europe¨CRadio Liberty in New York...

...His recourse to phrases like "extreme right" and "military-industrial complex" seem out of place in the post¨CCold...

...G eorgi Arbatov is bothered by his reputation as chief propagandist for Soviet global policies during the era of Brezhnevite decline...

...Though it flies in the face of the self-righteous excoriations he directed at Ronald Reagan's policies in the early 1980s, he much prefers the dual image of advocate for world peace and director of a prestigious think tank, something akin to Cyrus Vance as head of the American Enterprise Institute...

...Few have seen fit to puzzle out the breathtaking flexibility Arbatov has exhibited while serving under such diverse leaders as Leonid Brezhnev, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin...

...There are also worthwhile descriptions of the operation of the propagandacum-censorship apparatus...

...His culpability, he adds, is mitigated by the lies higher-ups told him about such issues as the Kremlin's crash civil defense program (which Arbatov implausibly' claims to have known nothing about), and by a personal code of honor that would not allow him to denounce associates fallen from grace or to defend the Soviet Union's more obviously criminal acts...

...Remember during the Gulf crisis, the Germans finally agreed that Saddam had to be stopped¡ªthey just opposed their own involvement in Operation Desert Storm...

...The book was replete with the rankest kind of Commie-speak, phrases like "the expansionist aspirations of the leading imperialist powers," "rule of the monopoly bourgeoisie," and "imperialist vultures...

...Arbatov is the consummate cynic, a man who privately gave out hints that he shared Western democratic values while publicly advancing the cause of a thoroughly loathsome system...

...Yet this champion of detente was also perfectly willing to call America the most malign power on earth, or justify the persecution of dissidents, or defend the arming of Third World thugs, or blame the West for encouraging the movement for Jewish emigration...

...And while he describes Andropov as incorruptible, this portrait does not correspond to the "godfather of perestroika" image that gained widespread circulation in the West...

...It even advanced the notion that "imperialism" encouraged drug use to divert people's attention from the ideological struggle and claimed that nuclear war "remains an intrinsic component of imperialist foreign policy...