Glacial confrontation
Powers, Thomas
Of several minds: Thomas Powers GLACIAL CONFRONTATION IS MOSCOW FINALLY CLEARING THE DECKS? (Editors' note: This column was originally sent to the printer two days before Brezhnev's death was...
...But one thing is clear...
...At seventy-five, Brezhnev apparently has only one job left: to dismantle the last remnants of his policy of detente...
...It is hard to say just when it began, or why even harder to suggest what might have halted or deflected it...
...Finally, Brezhnev addressed an unusual gathering of five-hundred Soviet generals in the Kremlin on October 27 and told them the "adventurism, rudeness, and undisguised egoism" of the United States would be met firmly...
...Talk of using nuclear weapons to hunt out Soviet leaders in their underground shelters is insulting, as if Russian leaders but not Americans could be counted on to think first of their own hides...
...Robert McNamara once called this the "action-reaction phenomenon...
...China will patch things up with Russia, or West Germany will drop out of NATO, or Poland and Czechoslovakia will threaten to break away simultaneously, or a born-again Marxist-Leninist true believer will come to power in Moscow...
...Washington is often guilty of this kind of offhand, impertinent, even arrogant generalization about Soviet character...
...Russian officials said the problem was equipment failure...
...And above all, of course, they have brutally violated the one preeminent rule of the postwar world by invading and attempting to subjugate a sovereign neighbor-Afghanistan...
...asked for the biggest peacetime increase in the military budget in American history, and attempted to halt a Soviet natural gas pipeline to Western Europe which had been planned for years...
...We talk about Russian officials as third-rate party hacks only interested in the perks of power...
...He has agreed...
...He firmly rejected the second SALT treaty which had taken years to negotiate...
...Even in the early 1970s the dissident movement was pitifully small...
...Now The Chronicle of Current Events is long gone, the dissidents lucky enough to be famous have all been forced into foreign exile, and most of the others are dead, in prison, in psychiatric hospitals, or so beaten down and depressed they have simply given up...
...The Helsinki Group set up in Moscow in 1976 to support human rights in the Soviet Union has disbanded...
...Where the Russians are concerned, the Reagan administration is cold, hard, and ungiv-ing...
...proposal to spend some $18 billion on the communications and intelligence infrastructure needed to fight a prolonged nuclear war...
...Russia does not abandon its course easily...
...Detente is dead and buried...
...His appearance at public events the color of his skin, the tone of his voice, his need for a helping hand to rise from a chair or descend from a lectern - has long suggested a man in physical decline, but now the end appears to be near...
...Presumably, the Reagan administration harbors no such illusions this time...
...Editors' note: This column was originally sent to the printer two days before Brezhnev's death was announced...
...THOMAS POWERS...
...Brezhnev has been in power since 1964, when Ronald Reagan was getting ready to vote for Barry Goldwater...
...We might say that the 1960s were our years of arrogance, and the 1970s Russia's...
...It is in the scary moments that we really need detente...
...It took the KGB nearly a decade, but they have managed to impose the silence of despair on just about every citizen in a nation of three-hundred million...
...Khrushchev sometimes confessed to Western diplomats and journalists that the greatest weakness of the, Soviet Union was its lack of a settled method of deciding who rules- The Politburo may share power to a degree unknown in Stalin's day, but someone has still got to be the final boss...
...Time, however, has a way of running out...
...But an air of mystery attached to the failure all the same...
...introduced new arms talks with a one-sided American position which many experts think is unnegoti-able...
...Now, at last, the Russians appear to be responding in kind...
...The Soviets have supported the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia...
...When it once adopts a policy it will stick to it year after year, decade after decade...
...He committed the Soviet Union to match the American buildup,, to reach an understanding with China, to grow more grain and solve other economic problems, and finally to "wield weapons in a masterly way, to be able to use in full their combat possibilities" - which I take to be a message to Caspar Weinberger that if he wants to prepare to fight a nuclear war, the Soviet Union will match him warhead for warhead...
...Detente was Brezhnev's policy when Henry Kissinger was still teaching at Harvard, and the fact that Brezhnev has now, finally, at last given up on it is a change which will not easily be reversed...
...They have pushed forward with aggressive arms programs to build large numbers of ICBMs with a threatening combination of accuracy and powerful warheads...
...He accused Washington of "threatening to push the world into the flames of a nuclear war" by "trying to attain military Superiority...
...This list might be much extended...
...Over the last few months Russian policy towards internal dissidents and domestic opposition in Poland has been hardening...
...In October they threatened Dr...
...But something large is going on in Moscow a kind of sea change reflecting the longr steady decline in relations dating from passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment in 1974, which linked trade relations to Jewish emigration...
...They have sponsored Cuban military adventures in Ethiopia and Angola...
...It is incomprehensible...
...The stream of visitors to his apartment has halted...
...The slide began long before Reagan took office...
...and the Soviet Union, we have decided to publish it as written...
...Brezhnev's health has been the subject of international rumor for years...
...In Moscow, strange noises sometimes mean more than all the official commentary in Pravda...
...Perhaps Brezhnev convinced his colleagues that Reagan the president would be different from Reagan the candidate...
...The uncertainty was so great that the American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, allowed himself to hope that the entire Soviet state might disintegrate...
...Some reporters wondered if the Moscow telephone "-breakdown" in September didn't indicate a succession crisis, a kjnd of battening down of the hatches while the Politburo decided who should replace Leonid Brezhnev...
...Small wonder, then, that a Soviet diplomat in Washington recently said relations with the U.S...
...For one thing, Moscow was in the process of junking international direct-dialing equipment which had been installed only two years earlier...
...The Soviet Union is extraordinarily tenacious in foreign affairs...
...Aleksandr Lerner with prison if he did not stop contacting foreigners...
...Of course the administration has its case, too...
...The Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dob-rynin, have been around just as long...
...It marks the beginning of a bitter new worldwide struggle and another big spiral upward in the arms race...
...Especially in the Defense Department, plans have been going forward at every level which are redolent with hostility...
...blamed them for all the trouble spots in the world...
...accused the Soviets of driving for outright superiority in strategic arms...
...The one aspect of this long process which stands out-to my mind, at least is its fatal, glacial quality...
...the result of decisions-at the very highest level of government, a fact which is bound to trouble an outsider...
...talked loosely of "prevailing" in a nuclear war...
...Since it largely deals with the overall condition of relations between the U.S...
...They have alarmed, angered and frightened much of the world with the nakedest sort of oppression at home and in Poland...
...The last three gave up when one of them - a seventy-five-year-old lawyer - was threatened with arrest...
...In addition, Western reporters in Moscow remembered that a complete halt in normal telephone service preceded the imposition of martial law in Poland a year ago...
...Weinberger's response to Brezhnev's speech was to say it proved the Russians were going all-out to win the arms race and we'd better look to our defenses...
...When Soviet leaders change a kind of political scuffle takes place to settle who has got the most supporters, or the least enemies...
...The Soviet premier is suffering from heart and lung troubles and can only work two hours a day, they said...
...Technical experts at AT&T in New York said this sounded plausible to them...
...But it does not look like we are going to get it again soon...
...American strategic planners assume the Russians value their own skins first, then their party's power, next military strength, and last the welfare of ordinary citizens...
...This was a vain hope...
...Soviet leaders are irritated by this-as who wouldn't be?-and often speak of American "impudence ." But of greater substance at the moment is the U.S...
...There is a lot of evidence that such acts are...
...But it also suggests the seriousness with which the Soviets are "clearing the decks," in the words of one Western diplomat...
...Apparently the KGB didn't like the ease with which Soviet dissidents could talk to supporters outside the country...
...Reagan opened his administration with some extraordinary verbal abuse of the Soviet Union...
...A show of "sincerity" by the new president, a "gesture" toward peace will get things back on the track...
...One of these days something large is going to happen in the world - a major political change in the balance of power...
...What can be the state of mind of the rulers of a great nation solemnly deliberating whether to accuse an elderly woman lawyer of slander, or to send out the goons to steal the memoirs of a grey-haired scientist...
...ONE DAY last September, Moscow's telephone lines to the outside world went on the blink for several hours...
...Perhaps most important of all was Brezhnev's opening remark that the speech - the first clear response to the Reagan administration's hardened attitude, after months of a puzzling silence - had been the idea of the Soviet Defense Minister, Dmitri Ustinov...
...But Americans tend to think it's never too late...
...It is an old law and it is still at work...
...Reagan will be out in '84, or at the very latest in '88, and we can repair the damage then...
...Hard as it is to believe, the police are now redoubling their efforts against the last few score of holdouts...
...Not long ago Soviet diplomats told State Department officials that a meeting between Brezhnev and Reagan would be impossible...
...No government can ignore spending on that level...
...Sixteen of its members are in prison or exiled from Moscow...
...It was all they could do to publish a magazine in typescript...
...In Khrushchev's case the scuffle actually involved drawn guns in the Kremlin and the execution of the chief of the KGB, Lavrenti Beria...
...It strikes an American as bizarre and neurotic that Moscow should feel threatened by the tiny handful of independent voices in the Soviet Union-the Jews who want to emigrate, the writers who want to publish, the evangelical Protestants who want freedom of conscience, the,scientists who want to belong to the great world, the advocates of human rights and disarmament...
...Brezhnev's speech is no joke...
...We like to think all the big things are going to remain just as they are, but it isn't so...
...At the end of October the physicist Andrei Sakharov, in exile in the city of Gorky, was attacked by KGB agents and robbed of a briefcase filled with personal diaries, letters, and a nine-hundred-page manuscript of his memoirs...
...These things can all be explained, but none can be justified...
...were at their lowest point in fifteen years...
Vol. 109 • December 1982 • No. 21
