A question of intentions
Powers, Thomas
Of several minds: Thomas Powers A QUESTION OF INTENTIONS INTERPRETING SOVIET BEHAVIOR THE DAY AFTER the sixty-third anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, celebrated in the traditional...
...Doubtless that is too absolute a word...
...Americans trying to figure it out have come up with two quite distinct explanations of Russian behavior since the Second World War...
...Brezhnev does not betray himself as a man...
...The half-closed eyes and enigmatic smile arenot evidence enough to tell us what he is thinking...
...If that's the case, we're in the dark...
...One reason the argument receives so much attention is that it provides a model for trying to predict Russian behavior— referred to in the intelligence business as "intentions...
...Russian intentions are no mystery, the second theory says...
...Inept Western intervention which prolonged a bloody civil war got things off to a bad start and the unrelenting hostility of Fascist regimes between the wars only made matters worse...
...The new generation coming to power in Washington did not really win the argument...
...Their memoirs tend to the proper and the wooden, and their theoretical work is opaque with Marxist-Leninist pieties...
...What Russia does and says are consistent with either of the two theories, and most people probably make a choice between them on the basis of temperament...
...In the first instance, then, an intention is a document which may be locked up in a well-guarded room...
...Now they are strong and are beginning to flex their military muscle...
...It may be that nations do not really have intentions...
...No one in the West really knows what any of the Russian leaders are thinking...
...It was impossible to look at Brezhnev's picture—a kind of facial echo of the goosestepping Russian army units, the tanks which roared through Red Square at twenty or thirty miles an hour—and not wonder: what is this man thinking...
...But then we're in the dark anyway...
...Thus Russian national history, Communist ideology which defines Capitalism as a mortal enemy, and the horrors of World War II, followed by a kind of worldwide anti-Communist crusade led by the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, have all combined to maintain a climate of paranoia in Moscow...
...They have uncovered no dramatic new facts...
...But this they will not do...
...The men now leaving power in Washington never denied the Russian ship-building or ICBM upgrading programs (although they tended not to see them quite so soon as, their opponents...
...An Army is large and hard to hide...
...Nothing of that kind can be found to help explain what Brezhnev is up to...
...It may have been the wind, or weariness after standing so long, or simple inwardness, like the dreams of a man who has been carried back inside himself by a piece of music...
...I say nothing...
...In the second instance, then, an intention is a pattern of behavior...
...A cynic might argue it doesn't really make much difference who's in office since the military results are roughly the same—an ever larger American military establishment with a decisive edge in strategic weapons which is only now coming into question...
...Communist theory holds there can be no permanent peace between Socialism and Capitalism, and the Russians have been building an army to back up their ambitions, which are global...
...The Russians do not betray themselves as a nation...
...But American intelligence officials never (or very rarely) obtain the critical documents of the Soviet government...
...Twice burned, thrice shy...
...Russian military building has been extraordinarily energetic, but that might be explained just as well by the depth of their insecurity as by the reach of their appetite...
...His expression was one of confident content, and perhaps a trace of pride...
...Of course every man remains something of a mystery to himself and others but the culture of Russian Communism seems to have suppressed every note of the personal...
...At this point we run head-on into the two basic theories of Soviet behavior, since what they do is not really in contention...
...If man learns by experience, the theory goes, then the Russians have learned caution from theirs...
...If the Russians themselves were more forthcoming—if they wrote more, answered more questions, submitted to more interviews, routinely published their memoirs, cultivated the note of personal authenticity—it might not be so difficult to determine which is the real Russia, if either...
...Oneisa long history of being treated as not quite civilized, a crude and brutal race beneath the notice of Western Europe...
...The consequences, if true, are bound to be unpleasant...
...The Bolsheviks simply glossed this drive with a justifying veneer of Marxism-Leninism and went right on pushing wherever the way was clear, into Mongolia, into Finland and Poland in 1939-40, into Central Europe and the Balkans during the Second World War, and most recently into Afghanistan on a bee-line for the Persian Gulf...
...Even Richard Nixon, perhaps the most enigmatic political personality in American history, has left a rich paper record...
...But wondering is as far as we can go...
...But he did not look sick otherwise...
...Twice in this century Russia has been invaded by the West...
...In geopolitical terms it is what a group of ambitious men are willing to commit to paper about matters with the capacity to wreck both career and country...
...An airfield is long enough for big bombers, or it isn't...
...Perhaps not...
...The reverse is just as true: a low-key, soothing, unthreatening, approach to Moscow would tend to encourage expansionist dreams...
...It's not hard to see why they resisted...
...I have read that Brezhnev is—or used to be—a chain-smoker of cigarettes, and that he is a sucker for fancy cars...
...If Russia, for whatever combination of reasons—ideological, economic, the sheer exuberance of men who find they can have their way—is embarked upon a course of advantagegrabbing backed up by missile-rattling then the result, soon or late, will be war...
...In the center was Leonid Brezhnev, a heavy man made even bulkier by a greatcoat...
...Russia has been preparing to fight—not just to endure—a nuclear war, but that would be a perfectly rational response on the part of men terrified one is coming...
...When they were weak they were cautious...
...Intelligence people like to say you can't use a satellite to photograph a forward plan...
...It may be that they grow confident, overweening, and greedy whenever they sense the pressure easing during those periods when we try to reassure them before panic takes hold...
...Each time perhaps twenty million Russians were killed before the violence ended...
...The Imperial pretensions of Czars rested on a clumsy serf army beaten in the Crimea, by the Japanese in 1905, by the Germans on the Eastern Front in World War I. The diffidence and self-doubt following from such mighty failures have been compounded, according to this theory, by the isolation of the Bolshevik regime which replaced the Czars...
...it is too problematic for that...
...Relent19 December 1980: 709 less imperial expansion to the East into China, to the South into Central Asia, to the West into the Baltic states, Poland, and the Balkans...
...One says the Russians are moved primarily by fear, self-doubt, and anxiety...
...Something more must be going on there than a love of parades...
...They must infer what the Russians are up to by what they do...
...His features are coarse and full—great round cheeks, large nose, dark and bushy eyebrows...
...But an intention is the gossamer stuff of the mind, a potential of the will, an assertion of hope...
...Of several minds: Thomas Powers A QUESTION OF INTENTIONS INTERPRETING SOVIET BEHAVIOR THE DAY AFTER the sixty-third anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, celebrated in the traditional way with a huge military parade through Red Square in Moscow, there appeared an equally traditional photograph on the front pages of the world's newspapers of the leaders of the Soviet Union...
...The result is an argument without end...
...Western political leaders leave a broad trail behind them of speeches, interviews, profiles in newspapers and magazines, the remarks of friends, the reminiscences of old political allies and enemies, the transcripts of press conferences...
...Russian history is important, certainly, but what is that history...
...THOMAS POWERS Commonweal: 710...
...But what...
...It may be that nations have distinctive characters — predispositions towards kinds of behavior—and mat they don't choose how to deal with their neighbors, any more than the lion chooses a taste for fresh meat...
...We have got to figure them out, and that is not at all easy to do...
...It may be that Russians become fearful, anxious, and insecure whenever we toe up to to them pugnaciously, trying to curb dangerous ambitions before they get out of hand...
...Nothing looks like a submarine except a submarine...
...These two interpretations of Soviet behavior, far from being academic exercises, are in effect the party lines of two great circles of like-minded men who have been pushing each other out of power in Washington since 1945...
...The trouble is you can't photograph an important forward plan with an agent either...
...Satellites are awesomely inclusive when it comes to Soviet "capabilities"—what it's got in the way of military hardware—but their intentions are hidden from us...
...It certainly isn't much to go on in trying to plumb the plans of one of the world's two great powers, especially when he and it have spent something over a trillion dollars and fifteen years building a military machine which is arguably the world's biggest...
...The French-speaking Russian aristocracy was taken as something of a joke in the casinos and watering spots of Germany and Austria-Hungary...
...In the first place an intention is not a thing...
...what they resisted was the pessimistic view that the Russians were deliberately building all this hardware in order to push us around...
...His eyes were half closed...
...He is said to be a sick man and his swollen, apoplectic aspect, as if his tie and shirt collar were all but cutting off his windpipe, is said to be the result of his illness...
...A tank gives off heat and leaves tracks...
...The second theory of Russian behavior, currently returning to favor in Washington, treats the first as so much eyewash...
...It may not be easy to say what animated him, ultimately, but there is certainly plenty of evidence to work with...
...This is intended as an argument for traditional agent-running...
...The reason it matters which theory is correct is that a reasonable response to an aggressive and expansionist Russia—the drawing of a firm line, with power to back it up—is the very thing most likely to inflame the fears of a Russia which is anxious, self-doubting and easily spooked...
...Two other factors are said to contribute to Russian fear of the world...
...they are simply too hard to recruit, and Russian security is too efficient...
...Perhaps his love of ostentation in cars can explain that trace note of satisfaction about the mouth as he watched the cream of the Red Army march by...
...He may be patiently laying the groundwork for the triumph of world Communism in the by-and-by, or just dreaming of a warm drink, the taste of a cigarette, the struggles of his youth, the sheer damned difficulty of getting anything done, the smiling men all checking his skin color in the morning, and waiting to take over...
...Th&resulthas been a single-minded drive for security based on military might pure and simple...
...As a nation we respond to what they have got, and a few years down the line they will doubtless respond to what we have got...
Vol. 107 • December 1980 • No. 23
