Correspondents' Correspondence

...And these developments in the ongoing power struggle between Kremlin hawks and doves suggest that the hardline military lobby has been forced to retreat somewhat, with possible positive effects for the currently strained East-West detente...

...Grechko was awarded the ministry...

...The seat of the European Economic Community (EEC), for example, is not limited to Brussels, the self-proclaimed "Capital of Europe...

...Besides necessitating a good deal of travel, covering the workings of the EEC is a unique experience, for the organization is a cross between a smaller version of the UN and a medium-sized national government...

...Albert L. Weeks United Bureaucracy Brussels—A visitor to this city —especially if he intends to use it as a base while he serves for a year as a roving correspondent—is immediately confronted with evidence of the European penchant for bureaucracy...

...His successor, Marshal Mal-inovsky, who succeeded Zhukov, did as he was told during the Khrushchev years, but seems to have played a role in dumping the Premier...

...True, some of this is a form of Leninist dialectic that maintains peaceful coexistence somehow helps world revolution...

...But like detente, Brezhnev's coexistence with the Armed Forces establishment has been based on painful compromise...

...More significantly, Red Star, the Defense Ministry daily, ran two articles strongly qualifying the principle of "one-man leadership" (yedinonacha-liye) of the Armed Forces by a military commander...

...increasing the powers of commanders in the military districts to the point where they encroached upon civilian authority...

...Similarly, a front-page "Statement" addressing the German problem, published by all Soviet newspapers in mid-May, implied that the joint East-West "watch on the Reich" still concerned Moscow, that cooperation in this area should not be impeded and that German-Soviet trade and political rapprochement have a bright future...

...and the Soviet Union...

...Procedures here, although less labyrinthine now than I remember from my youth, are still rather bewildering for someone accustomed to the more easy-going arrangements of Israeli, British or American officialdom...

...In its breadth and solidarity, the Community offers a hint of what the United Nations might have been without the deep ideological chasm between the democratic founding majority and the Communist minority, and between the industrialized nations and the Third World...

...Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko's visits to Britain and France in April and May (the London stop came just before the Grechko and Shtemenko deaths) were accompanied by a major article in the Party press explicitly calling for broadening detente...

...Speaking on Lenin's birthday, April 22, he frankly stated that the first Soviet leader had always referred to coexistence as "cohabitation...

...It also led to the occupation of Czechoslovakia and the further militarization of Soviet society (lowering the age for starting paramilitary training in the public schools...

...It plods on with an enormous load of paperwork, trying to glue and staple together the links of a free and more united Europe.—Eliahu Salpeter...

...Meanwhile, the notion of coexistence was given a boost by, of all people, KGB chief Yuri Andropov...

...Then the head of the Secret Police sounded a positive note for detente: "The catastrophic consequences of war today creates real possibilities on the one hand, dire necessity on the other, to lessen and eventually rule out altogether the danger of a new war...

...It is definitely international in scope: Different members confront and sometimes oppose each other over ideological issues and hard, specific economic interests...

...The latter term (sozhitel'stvo) may sound like common-law marriage, but it is a good deal less chummy than "coexistence" (sosushchestvovaniye), a longer word suggesting a more durable relationship...

...The need for passport photos is particularly alarming: The newcomer must attach three to five shots to each of the numerous forms he fills out in triplicate...

...This inclination to complicate matters works on an international scale as well...

...Yet beyond this "double-speak," Soviet civilian and military spokesmen have noticeably disagreed on such sensitive matters as the recently adopted Tenth Five-Year Plan, the "further strengthening of the country's defenses," the relaxation of tension as long as "imperialism exists anywhere in the world," etc., requiring the civilians to proceed cautiously...

...The principle of total control of the military by professional officers prevailed from 1955 until now under the guidance of Defense Ministers Georgi K. Zhukov, Rodion Y. Mal-inovsky and Grechko, who were all career soldiers...

...Soviet Civilianization New York—The deaths last April of Soviet Minister of Defense Marshal Andrei A. Grechko and Warsaw Pact Chief of Staff General Sergei M. Shtemenko created a convenient opening for Party Chief Leonid I. Brezhnev's Politburo faction to strengthen civilian control over the military establishment...

...Indeed, despite its cumbersome bureaucracy and the fashionable talk about "a dream dying" in Brussels, the EEC is still very much alive...

...When Malinovsky died in 1967 there evidently was a bitter debate in the Kremlin over whether a civilian or a military man would take over...

...The EEC's various institutions stretch from Luxembourg to Strasbourg, and Common Market officials are always on the road (or in the air), rushing between them...

...Like administrators in any government, they implement the laws of the EEC...

...One of them rebuked an officer for resisting advice from his local representative of the Party-led Main Political Administration of the Soviet Army and Navy...

...France, as usual, required compensation...

...To Lenin at the time] peace, which would be won by means of severe struggle, would be merely the "postponement of war.' a peaceful breathing spell...

...the European Parliament is in Strasbourg...

...Now, with Ustinov as Minister of Defense and Brezhnev sporting his Marshal's uniform (as well as enjoying his new sobriquets of master "military strategist" and "theoretician"), the military press has become less strident...

...The headquarters of the European Steel and Coal Community had been in Luxembourg...

...Although the politruk wears a military uniform, he serves as the party's "eye" on a given unit...

...efforts to "materialize detente an the military sense" through East-West force reductions...

...Andropov made the rare admission that Lenin had never accepted coexistence as permanent: "There could be no talk of excluding wars from people's lives...

...Yet in the huge common machinery of the Commission of the European Communities, citizens of all member countries act jointly...

...It proposed convening "congresses' immediately, as specified in the Helsinki accords, for reaching Pan-European agreement and cooperation in a number of areas, including energy...

...But the swift choice of Ustinov as Defense Minister shows that Brezhnev's civilian cronies were already making their moves when fate, or whatever, intervened...

...Only a short time earlier, of course, the Soviets acknowledged committing a technical violation of salt 1 by not dismantling missile launchers in accordance with the stipulated deadline, and promised to fulfill the terms of the agreement covering this issue...

...The Party has now set the aim of attaining a lasting and just peace on earth and not merely a breathing spell...

...In the days following the civilian's moves, Soviet newspapers stressed the changes, publishing the pictures of Brezhnev and Ustinov (who was made a general) in uniform...

...Some other apparent spinoffs of civilianization point to a softening of the Soviet line, too...

...If Soviet civilianization is indeed going to yield a tangible upgrading —or as Moscow increasingly calls it, "deepening"—of detente, this should soon be reflected in a number of critical areas: salt ii discussions...

...This modification of Lenin the day before the first of the two top military men died may be mere coincidence...

...Zhukov overplayed his hand, however, and had to be sacked...

...Western observers have been struck by the pere-pleteniye (pigtail weave) of peaceful themes and sabre-rattling in Soviet publications...

...The upcoming German elections were apparently not the only motivation for this strong appeal...

...Thus a single speech by the Party chief may contain a proposal for East-West cooperation and preach the virtues of wars of national liberation, or take away with the revolutionary left hand what has been offered in the form of detente with the right...

...The High Court of the Community remains in Luxembourg, however, and meetings of the Council of Ministers (and such less exalted ambassadorial forums as the recent Euro-Arab Dialogue) also occasionally take place there...

...But when that organization evolved into the EEC, the grand duchy sensibly ceded the honor of hosting its organs (and more than 5,000 officials) to Brussels...

...Brezhnev's Politburo majority and the military then entered a period of cooperation that fostered the enormous buildup and modernization of Soviet conventional and strategic weaponry...

...At least this would appear to explain the appointment of Dmitri F. Ustinov—long head of the defense industry but not a professional soldier —as the new Defense Minister, and Brezhnev's being awarded the rank of Marshal of the USSR...

...signs of interest in resuming U.S.Soviet summitry after the Presidential election...

...Should no progress be forthcoming in these areas, the wearing of field-green uniforms by Brezhnev and Ustinov may turn out to be something more than an intra-Krem-Iin charade, but something less than a harbinger of fair weather ahead for East-West relations...

...the reopening of the Geneva Conference on the Middle East, co-chaired by the U.S...