The Soviet Viewpoint/Inside the Soviet Army/Confiscated Power/USSR in Crisis/Final Judgment:
Fireside, Harvey
Books: FOCUSING ON THE 'FOCUS OF EVIL' THE SOVIET VIEWPOINT Georgi Arbatov Dodd, Mead, $13.95, 219 pp. INSIDE THE SOVIET ARMY Viktor Suvorov Macmillan, $15.95, 269 pp. CONFISCATED POWER Helene...
...CONFISCATED POWER Helene Carrere d'Encausse Harper & Row, $19.95, 401 pp...
...He can point to generations of new weapons added to the American arsenal since the 1960s, which the Soviets have had to catch up with, until they are now at a level of' 'rough parity,'' as even the Pentagon concedes...
...That pseudonymous author, who served fifteen years in command and staff positions before defecting to Britain, pictures the Red Army as the "Striking force of world revolution," whose strategic doctrines are based on attack at all costs...
...The old men at the top preside over a golden ghetto - a ' 'coun-tersociety" - that walls out the youth who prefer romance magazines to political tracts and that oppresses demoralized workers, religious sectarians, and minority nationalities...
...and Canadian Studies...
...Its tales of sadistic sergeants making recruits clean latrines with toothbrushes could be matched by any American GI...
...FINAL JUDGMENT Dina Kaminskaya Simon & Schuster, $18.95, 348 pp...
...Yet there is cogency in his assertions that these issues are peripheral to a basic "right to survive" on both sides...
...weapons being emplaced in Western Europe, setting up a nuclear tripwire...
...The peace-loving, defensive image of the USSR in Arbatov's book is undercut by Viktor Suvorov's Inside the Soviet Army...
...has been advertising to its NATO allies...
...Suvorov's account suffers from the evident bias of an apostate and a lack of documentation...
...The former finds the Kremlin staffed by an elite of septuagenerians whose bureaucratic caution leads to "im-mobilism" at home, while an innovative foreign policy scores victories abroad due to "the impotence of the capitalist world...
...Suvorov's picture of an army riddled by intrigue and deception, while its members juggle conflicting obligations to military, party, and KGB authorities, adds up to a much less potent adversary than the one the U.S...
...Readers may bridle at Arbatov's claims that Soviet dissidents are merely criminals whose fate should be of no concern to the West, that the invasion of Afghanistan was a "purely internal" matter of averting a "right-wing coup," or that the ferment in Poland can simply be blamed on the "misdeeds of certain officials...
...Indeed, free spirits like Kaminskaya and her clients may someday save the system in spite of itself...
...USSR IN CRISIS Marshall Goldman Norton, $15, 210 pp...
...For Goldman, the Soviet industrial colossus rests on clay feet...
...Helene Carrere d'Encausse, a political scientist at the Sorbonne, Marshall Goldman, a economist at Wellesley and the Harvard Russian Research Center, and Dina Kaminskaya, an emigre Moscow attorney...
...Arbatov's The Soviet Viewpoint, the fault is primarily that of an "American power elite" pursuing its nostalgic quest for global hegemony...
...military superiority faded in the postVietnam era, a virtual conspiracy of political "ideologues," captains of a $200 billion arms industry, and "extremist" political leaders created a "cheap Western scenario" of an enemy who had to be beaten to the draw...
...After U.S...
...If U.S.-Soviet relations are "now at the lowest point in perhaps a decade," in Mr...
...They all contribute novel, if sometimes contradictory, insights into the nature of the rivalry...
...Arbatov cites published studies going back to a National Security Council memo of 1950, to show that subversion of the Soviet regime has been a recurrent U.S...
...Arbatov can speak authoritatively, as an adviser to Yuri Andropov, a member of the Central Committee and director of the Institute on U.S...
...With all its strengths and failures, the USSR represents a much more complex reality than the diabolical model of the new Cold Warriors - a reality that Washington will have to engage politically, not militarily, in a common pursuit of survival...
...In d'Encausse's opinion, the system has abandoned personalized for institutionalized power, maintaining a "dictatorship" without "widespread terror," through the party's control of key appointments...
...Although he manipulates his facts to cast the Soviet regime in a totally blameless role for the renewed Cold War, he scores telling points off his interlocutor, Dutch journalist Willem Oltmans...
...The officers, chosen for their bravado and brutality, are attracted to careers as the wardens of a prison-camp society by the lure of a "pleasanter and more varied life" than the diet of "bread or potatoes" offered to workers...
...In Kaminskaya's judgment, the judicial system "does work," with acquittals in nonpolitical cases "by no means infrequent...
...She went on to expose "the illegality of the dissident trials" of Vladimir Bukovsky, Yulii Daniel, Pavel Litvinov, and Yurri Galanskov, until her defense of Tatar activist Ilya Gabai cost her the "access" required for political cases...
...For the relatively tolerable policy of deterrence, says Arbatov, they substituted the "hoax of a Soviet threat'' and a chilling doctrine of "thinkable" nuclear war...
...He supplies mordant details about corrupt officials executed for smuggling caviar, managers who thrive on illegally obtained "favors," and students who doubt that there are any Communists left except "in some remote corner of Siberia...
...Arbatov sqems to reflect a genuine concern of the Soviet leadership at new U.S...
...The latter sees the Soviet economy at "a critical turning point," shackled to the Stalinist legacy of promoting heavy industry at the expense of agriculture and consumer goods...
...Nor is his contention that Soviet missile forces are geared for "a massive preemptive attack" without its Western counterparts...
...goal...
...A materialistic society that can't manage to satisfy either the dreams or the stomachs of its people, the USSR can limp along at best or, more likely, undertake reforms that may unloose an avalanche of open protest and violence...
...Although Dina Kaminskaya was eventually hounded out of her country, Final Judgment betrays no bitterness as it recounts how a courageous attorney could prevail even against cynical judges who mete out predetermined sentences...
...One does not need a Marxist outlook to see United States disarmament efforts as a desultory exercise by negotiators known more for their brinkmanship than their experience or commitment...
...The authors include Georgi Ar-batov, a leading Soviet specialist on the U.S., Viktor Suvorov, a Red Army officer who defected to the West...
...Harvey Fireside AT A TIME of Soviet-American confrontation in which the two nuclear superpowers are squaring off like deadly scorpions, five experts add some depth to our increasingly stereotyped view of the Kremlin as, in President Reagan's metaphor, the "focus of evil" in the world...
...Helene Carrere d'Encausse's Confiscated Power makes a companion piece to Marshall Goldman's USSR in Crisis...
...Her major success was to win a reversal of a conviction in the case of a lad framed for the rape and murder of a young girl...
...The resulting "society of false citizens" marches in obligatory circles, but has no real choices in life...
...One of the most striking is that Washington's approach is based on a conception of the Soviet system as "something illegitimate, created not by God but by the Devil, and that our existence in its present form should be ended somehow...
Vol. 110 • September 1983 • No. 15
