Domestic Dilemmas and Foreign Policy

...The second broad dilemma the Party faces is closely related and does not require elaboration...

...A domestic return to "Stalinism" would be no salvation, for it would have to be accompanied by a renewed reliance on terror and secret police violence which would immediately threaten the newly won monistic position of the Party...

...By March and April 1960, however, the Soviet leadership began to sense that perhaps there had been a miscalculation of American intentions, or that the Kremlin had been duped by skillful U.S...

...Furthermore, the conflict between Party and society strengthened the conviction of the Party that its rule was essential to the fulfillment of its social objectives...

...The promotion of rapid industrialization, the policy of forced collectivization and the efforts to eliminate most forms of private property put the Party in the position of waging war against the society that it was ruling...

...Indeed, in many respects, the regime is seeking in the external victories a new rationalization for the continued domestic monopoly of power it has enjoyed over the last four decades...

...It senses that external successes or spectacular scientific demonstrations can give validity to its domestic power, a validity which is eroding domestically with the gradual obliteration of the sharp differences in purpose between Party and society...

...In brief, there is no alternative except to pursue what Khrushchev has been trying to pursue over the last several years: peace with victories...

...Here, he thought, was at last an incident which he could use to gain concessions at Paris...

...At the other end of the bloc is East Germany, quietly but persistingly indicating its uneasiness over the disconcerting presence of the West in its capital city...

...Today Soviet society has reached a stage of development whereby it could by itself achieve continued progress and through its own efforts seek material well being...

...If the standard of living is to rise, other priorities must be sacrificed, at least partially...

...An external success at such a key point would not only go a long way toward satisfying some of the more impatient bloc partners, but would also serve to buttress the domestic power of the Party...

...On one extreme, there is China, increasingly willing to articulate openly its disagreements with the Soviet Union on the means to be used in the pursuit of common aims...

...As a consequence, the several Communist regimes are more and more able to entertain alternative conceptions of purposes and are even willing to articulate them...

...negotiators into believing that concessions would be made which, in fact, were not being planned...

...For the time being Khrushchev can postpone the Berlin crisis, since no alternative is open short of a major international collision...

...For the time being he can rely on greater domestic indoctrination made easier by aggrieved hostility toward the United States...

...To deal with the latter Khrushchev has invented an explanation for American behavior which is intellectually as subtle and factually as correct as the Western accounts which see the Soviet leader acting as the little puppet of a stony-faced Soviet marshal (One of the amusing ironies is that Khrushchev brought Malinovsky to Paris to intimidate the West...

...What he could not have predicted was the unpredictable nature of the American response...

...But Khrushchev's power rests not only on his personal standing with the masses...

...Having too little to gain by the policy of war advocated by the Chinese, and too much to lose by a policy of real peace with the West, the Party has little choice but to follow Khrushchev's daring policy of a delicate balance of terror between peace and war...

...Instead of being intimidated, the West concluded Malinovsky was there to intimidate Khrushchev...

...There was no room in the Party for those who merely dreamed of buying a Moskvitch and of traveling abroad, nor for those like Vladimir Dudintsev who engaged in soul-searching musings...

...The unprecedented admissions made by the State Department and the eventual assumption of responsibility by the President himself were something which the Kremlin could not have expected and which necessarily limited Premier Khrushchev's freedom of action...

...With respect to the bloc, the policy of the Khrushchev leadership can best be described as that of peace with victories, which is meant to satisfy the more extreme demands of the Chinese and the East Germans without, however, interfering with the domestic policies the Khrushchev regime feels it must pursue...

...His leadership unquestionably enjoys a measure of mass appeal, abetted by an organized campaign to glorify him personally...

...However, also because of these moves, the Party no longer relies on terror to the same extent as under Stalin and divisive splits within its top ranks could easily provoke dangerous consequences for its power position...

...Probably the most important domestic dilemma the Soviet leadership faces is the danger inherent in the progressive obliteration of the sharp distinction between the Russian society at large and the ruling Communist party which had existed throughout the history of the Soviet state...

...The latter consideration is all the more important because of the growing nuclear sophistication in Moscow which results in a more realistic appreciation of the overwhelming destructiveness of modern weapons...

...The only alternative was to blow up the summit and return home with pantomime substituting for victory...

...One of these involves the military establishment...

...It is precisely because the Party is no longer the absolute prerequisite for achieving its own domestic policies that it must seek some other justification for its continued monopoly of power and some other source of revolutionary dedication among its membership...

...A peaceful, prosperous Soviet Union does not need a disciplined, militant Communist party...

...Nonetheless, at the May 11 press conference in Moscow, amid the wreckage of the U-2, Khrushchev still intimated that the matter of the (light would not be raised at Paris and on May 14, the day of his departure for the summit, the lead editorial in Pravda gave every indication that the Soviet Union would go through with the meeting...

...According to Khrushchev, there is a war-mongering clique in the United States, supported by the military and some other influential groups, dedicated to the subversion of better relations with the USSR and independently engaging in diversionary activities...

...Since the domestic requirements of a relatively mature Soviet society, even as perceived by the Party itself, no longer seem to require continued rule by a militant minority, it is on the external plane that an alert and dedicated Communist leader must seek substitutes for the domestic loss of revolutionary momentum...

...Quite incidentally, in my judgment the developing Soviet appreciation of the implications of nuclear weapons, which came only with the possession of such weapons both by the USSR and the U.S., is a cogent argument against unilateral nuclear disarmament by the U.S...

...Under Khrushchev the Party has risen to unprecedented heights and today the Soviet totalitarian structure is essentially monistic...

...The Zhukov mission to the United States and the Baku speech by Khrushchev are indications that apprehension had developed within the Kremlin...

...Confident that the scales of history have already been tipped in favor of Communism, Khrushchev believes that the West will eventually adjust to the notion that concessions have to be made, even if piecemeal at first, and that war can therefore be avoided...

...It was in Paris that Khrushchev realized that he would have to return home with not just a defeat—on the Berlin issue—but also with the humiliation of the U-2 flights added to it...

...the proper attitude toward the capitalist world and the neutralist states...

...In the long run, what makes Khrushchev's dilemmas all the more difficult is that he cannot afford excessive pacificism without running the risk of undermining the sources of his internal power, without running the risk of allowing the transformation of the Party from a militant type of organization into a Communist version of a chamber of commerce...

...As a result, the Party has been faced with a crisis of morale among many of the dismissed Army officers and also presumably with the argument that its policy is endangering national security...

...One of the rising stars in the Party leadership, Leonid Brezhnev, has been put in charge of Army-Party affairs...

...In order to respond effectively to these various pulls and pressures, Soviet leadership must be centralized and purposeful...

...There is ample evidence to suggest that, after Khrushchev's visit to the United States, the Soviet leadership concluded that it had found in the Berlin issue a most promising lever for undermining the Western alliance...

...other, higher priorities...

...At the same time, the emphasis on rockets is meant to compensate for any decline in the relative numerical strength of the military establishment...

...The recent changes in the Soviet leadership have been designed to eliminate any personal interlocking in the various institutions at the apex of the Soviet political pyramid, leaving Khrushchev alone as the link between such bodies (all of which he heads) as the Party Presidium, the Party Secretariat, the Council of Ministers and the Party Bureau for the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic...

...This diversity has developed since Stalin's death and still persists, in spite of a measure of consolidation over the last two years...

...or as the tool of a combined Chinese-Stalinist cabal...

...Some of these dilemmas provide a much better key to recent Soviet behavior than "eavesdropping" on the Moscow-Peiping dialogue or on secret Presidium deliberations...

...In recent months the campaign has risen to new heights...

...The blurring of the dividing line is the outcome of an entirely new situation in Soviet history in which the ruling Party and the ruled society at long last share the same domestic objective: the attainment of material well-being...

...it did, however, have ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI is Associate Professor of Public Law and Government at the Russian Institute of Columbia University and author of The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict...

...Khrushchev combines both qualities...

...His gleeful gestures over Moscow TV, imitating the smashing of a cat caught in the act of snatching cream, took the place of the expected and needed triumph...

...The need for manpower and the high cost of maintaining a huge land army (increasingly less important in the age of rockets and nuclear weapons) have led Khrushchev to take the drastic step of appreciably cutting the size of the military forces...

...As in the Western case, such an account is useful in warding off criticism of policies based on mistaken assumptions concerning the other side (which seems to be the case with both Moscow and Washington) and still allows a certain room for maneuver...

...the implications of nuclear weapons in the survival of the two competing systems...

...Unity at the top is particularly important in domestic affairs because of the change in character of the Soviet regime since Stalin"s death...

...And though he might have temporarily-satisfied the highly nationalistic Russian masses and buttressed the domestic authority of the Party, the dilemma with which he was faced prior to his departure for Paris has not been resolved...

...Under Stalin, the institutional structure of Soviet totalitarianism was essentially pluralistic: Stalin manipulated the Party, the state administration, the Army and the secret police, while societal compliance was assured by the use of terror...

...Bluffing, brinkmanship, threats, crises and then relaxations, summits and visits—this is the inevitable pattern...

...The managerial know-how, the technical skill, the industrial wherewithal are all there, and the revolutionary zeal, the militant discipline, are not necessary if affluence is the goal...

...The Party has assumed preponderance over the other institutions and for this the Party apparatchiki are deeply in debt to Khrushchev personally...

...The conflict between Party and society produced a profound gulf between them, but in turn consolidated the cohesion of the Party and protected its ideological purity and revolutionary zeal...

...not insignificant in this context was the generous praise which Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, construed by some as Khrushchev's warden, felt compelled to heap on the head of the First Secretary several days after the U-2 incident...

...Insofar as the Army is concerned, the Party leadership has made strenuous efforts to gain popularity by the promotion of younger officers to command posts...

...President...

...The third general dilemma the Party faces is the problem of greater diversity within the Communist bloc...

...The problem of the allocation of resources immediately raises its head if the Party is at all serious about achieving a significant improvement in the popular standard of living...

...The Berlin crisis and Soviet behavior at the summit are good illustrations of the close relationship between the aforementioned Soviet domestic dilemmas and external Soviet behavior...

...For the time being he can attack Eisenhower, thereby clearing himself of the charge made by the Chinese, and perhaps echoed at home, that he had allowed himself to be misled by the U.S...

...The need for a certain measure of social consensus, therefore, requires a leader who has personal popularity and great skill in handling the levers of power...

...This is not to say that in the past the Party had purposely pursued a policy of artificial poverty...

...In the light of these apprehensions, official Soviet reaction to the U-2 plane business becomes more intelligible...

...But there is no evidence that he has either bowed to the Chinese or to anyone else on such crucial issues as Berlin, war, coexistence and, indeed, even on the nature of present American intentions...

...An analysis of Russia's DOMESTIC DILEMMAS AND FOREIGN POLICY By Zbigniew Brzezinski RATHER THAN speculate endlessly about the role allegedly played in the shaping of recent Soviet foreign policy by the Chinese, by an otherwise unidentified "Stalinist" faction in Khrushchev's Party Presidium and by an unnamed Army junta, it might perhaps be more revealing to take a closer look at some of the domestic Soviet dilemmas to see how they affect Soviet foreign conduct...

...The danger of erosion of the Party's authority applies equally within the society at large and within the Party itself, and poses the threat of ideological decay within the ruling elite...

...Khrushchev's initial reaction was unmitigated glee...

...Here at last was an issue on which the United States would have to stand alone...

...For instance, the Chinese leaders in their recent speeches have registered their disagreement with the Soviets on such important matters as: the inevitability of war...

...Soviet leaders are well aware that in the absence of such leadership these dilemmas could give rise to disintegrative splits and divisive disputes within the Soviet Union and the bloc...

...In addition to the consolidation of Khrushchev's personal power, strenuous efforts have been undertaken to revitalize political indoctrination both within the Party and within society at large in order to counteract the gradual erosion of ideological commitment...