Arms and the Men in Moscow and Washington
HOPKINS, MARK
AS LEADERS CHANGE Arms and the Men in Moscow and Washington BY MARK HOPKINS Washington Aleadership change in Moscow could come only weeks after Ronald Reagan takes office in Washington next...
...Kosygin was replaced by 75-year-old Nikolai Tikhon-ov, and Andrei Kirilenko, 74, is considered the front-runner to replace Party chief Leonid I. Brezhnev...
...Five years later, the world looks grim from the Kremlin walls...
...Soviet Typhoon class nuclear armed submarines are under construction, as are American Tridents...
...At home the USSR is beleaguered by a sagging economy, wretched food production and relentless dissidents...
...and a quick-strike force of 1,200 American combat troops is currently receiving intensive training...
...But the Soviets, heirs to the traditional Russian yearning for acceptance by the West, are grasping for success with the SS-18 ICBM, 50,000 tanks, and titanium-hull attack submarines...
...This may be a bit of fiction, but the blunt authoritarian nature of Grigory Romanov is not, as better verified examples of his toughness demonstrate...
...And it is selling China military equipment prohibited to the Soviet Union...
...At 57 years old Romanov is young by Soviet Politburo standards, and although he is engagingly cautious about politics outside his turf, he clearly seems destined to rise higher in the Kremlin's ranks...
...His warnings of the Communist threat fall short of doctrinal rigidity...
...Suddenly, his limousine pulls up and there he is, asking for an explanation on the spot...
...The one shining exception to this dismal spectacle is Soviet military might...
...Soviet global influence appeared to be expanding with little resistance from a Vietnam-shocked America, too, as "liberation forces" fulfilled their Marxist destinies...
...In the Middle East, Anwar Sadat has upset Soviet designs by making a historic flight to Israel that led to the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord...
...where people must still stand on long lines for basic consumer items like toilet paper and light bulbs...
...Say there's adis-pute at a collective farm...
...Nor can there be any doubt that he meant it when he said in his first press conference after the election that Moscow's "policies of aggression" would be linked with arms control negotiations...
...The facts of the Soviet arsenal are not disputed by the political Left or Right...
...The Soviet affairs specialists further point out that for the first time in a generation, a new American President is taking office just as the Soviets are about to "elect" their leaders...
...So are such support organizations as the Heritage Foundation, the Committee for Peace Through Strength and the American Enterprise Institute...
...He's typical of the new generation that is about to take over as the old leaders phase out all across the board...
...The Soviets are developing new generations of ICBMs and the U.S...
...It is difficult to imagine him conducting the intricate give-and-take of, say, salt negotiations in his present condition...
...AS LEADERS CHANGE Arms and the Men in Moscow and Washington BY MARK HOPKINS Washington Aleadership change in Moscow could come only weeks after Ronald Reagan takes office in Washington next January 20...
...seven supply ships with equipment for 12,000 Marines are cruising around Diego Garcia...
...Life was made especially miserable for a UP1 correspondent and his wife because the news agency was felt to be giving too much coverage to the relatively short-lived Leningrad dissident movement...
...At the same time, there is no mistaking Reagan's profound distrust of the Soviet Union and Communism...
...Both men, it is noted, are relatively unknown, have small power bases, and their remaining years probably can be counted on one hand...
...The detente experience of the 1970s has left in its wake, discontent, disillusionment and doubts probably on both sides...
...Soviet SS-20 missile sites are multiplying, while American weapons engineers are making final tests of the cruise missile and continuing work on the Pershing II medium range ballistic missile...
...In China, the nation that ultimately most threatens Soviet frontiers, the U.S...
...The military, pride of the Motherland, can scarcely be allowed to return home without first proving itself...
...In any event, the Soviet Union is clearly undergoing its own transition, with conservatives in the ascendancy...
...The Soviets would be hard pressed in a competition of this kind, but they have firmly resisted pressure on military matters...
...Even in the salad days of detente a decade ago, when Western consulates were being opened in Leningrad, he made certain the local KGB ran a tight ship...
...Yard-high letters in white paint declared: "DOWN WITH THE CPSU...
...is pressing ahead with its MX system...
...The dissidents finally confessed to defacing public property (so the state would not have to acknowledge that a political crime had been committed) and were sent to jail...
...Duke University Professor Jerry Hough, in a new Brookings Institution study dissecting Soviet political generations, observes: "A new and younger leadership is likely to be more self-confident in its international actions...
...More important, it can be expected to base the USSR's longer-term posture in critical policy areas —including military outlays, strategies toward a smouldering Eastern Europe and a China growing closer to the United States, and economic relations with the West and Japan—on the assumption that an advantageous detente is unlikely with Ronald Reagan in the White House...
...naval and air facilities are open to American forces in Kenya, Somalia and Oman...
...An extensive KGB crackdown ensued—swift, rigid, with numerous arrests...
...and where more often than not the abacus has yet to be replaced by the adding machine, let alone the hand calculator...
...Just 17 years ago, it should be recalled, Khruschev retreated from Cuba aware that he could not face down U.S...
...He looks at the world through Soviet glasses...
...Several of the guests got boisterously drunk, though, and the priceless china ended up in many more pieces than before, much to the horror of cultured Leningraders...
...the new Soviet T-80 tank is near field deployment, and the American XM-1, million-dollar-apiece tank is about to roll off the Chrysler assembly lines...
...Yet there is a theory that so many jobs are dependent on him that they prop him up...
...There are medals to be won, prowess to be displayed...
...Everyone is delaying the change as long as possible...
...The Soviet mass media, echoing official policy and of late quoting liberally from U.S...
...nuclear missiles...
...He has a penchant for showing up at trouble spots...
...This is the only incentive for real arms control...
...Worse, the union's refusal to formally accept the "leading role of the Communist Party" threatens the foundation of political control, as the Soviets understand it...
...In addition, as a result of the Iranian crisis and the invasion of Afghanistan, two American aircraft carrier battle groups are permanently stationed in the Indian Ocean...
...On February 23, the 26th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union opens, with the strong possibility that the younger people will gain increased power, if not several top positions...
...But American intelligence analysts have mixed opinions on whether Brezhnev will still be both Party General Secretary and Soviet President after the 26th Congress...
...Salt n was probably dead shortly after Presidents Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev signed the treaty that was seven years in the making in Vienna in the summer of 1978...
...The Leningrad Party First Secretary could not believe that American Congressmen actually could refuse to do the bidding of the White House...
...or it may be more willing to take risks involving military action...
...In a way the Soviets are right to place the blame for the moribund state of salt n on the Carter Administration...
...One American legislator came away from an informal conversation with Romanov quite distressed...
...The younger officials are determined to have the Soviet Union treated as an equal, and they are more secure in taking that equality for granted...
...No wonder Kremlinologists correctly predicted that once having sent divisions across the frontier into Afghanistan, Moscow would not soon withdraw them...
...Stockholm's International Peace Research Institute, the London-based Institute for Strategic Studies, and the Secretary of Defense all agree...
...The Grigory Romanovs may, indeed, turn out to be more adventuresome and no less ideologically orthodox than their predecessors, who at least were tempered by the experience and responsibilities of World War II...
...He's small, feisty and flinty," says an American diplomat who has watched Romanov at close range over long months...
...Since the USSR appears capable of catching up to or overtaking the United States only on military roads, it has been broadcasting the dark side of the war/peace issue...
...The Soviets outnumber the West in Europe, are equal in strategic nuclear power, are pulling abreast in blue ocean naval strength, and are gaining the edge in air power...
...Thus the stage appears to be set for a clash of conservative wills...
...Says Secretary of State-designate Alexander Haig: "I think it is vitally important, given the dilemmas and difficulties of both sides, that the Soviet leadership recognizes that we in the West, and we in America especially, are willing to bear whatever sacrifices are necessary if we are forced to...
...The anecdote can be heard with countless embellishments, but in general outline it goes as follows: When his daughter was about to be married, Romanov requisitioned some pieces that had graced the table of Catherine the Great from Leningrad's Hermitage Museum, to lend a suitably royal touch to the nuptial banquet...
...What is more, the Americans, the Chinese, the Polish workers have to be shown that the Kremlin will never accept defeat or humbling withdrawal, whatever the cost...
...Yet while it hopes to breathe life into salt n, Reagan adviser Allen carefully speaks of early discussions on arms control, possibly leading to negotiations—a formulation that ignores Soviet sentiments...
...By any objective measure, it has been purchased at the cost of enforced sacrifice and low consumption...
...Another Reagan defense adviser has put it more succinctly: "Either the Soviets come down in weapons, or we go up...
...In the meantime, American and Soviet weapons programs will continue without restriction...
...In the history of Soviet-American relations, one leadership has usually provided the continuity while the politics of the other altered .Lyndon Johnson had already been President for a full year when Nikita Khrushchev was toppled in October 1964, and Brezhnev was deeply entrenched by the time Richard Nixon resigned in 1974...
...I would be astonished if he survived," says one analyst...
...Now, Soviet leaders face a rebellious Poland, where a flourishing Catholic Church, backed by a Polish Pope, supports free labor unions affirming then-legal right to strike...
...In short, the previously fashionable hypothesis that young Soviet "liberals" would automatically succeed the old conservatives in the Kremlin seems to be another misjudgment...
...In a recent Washington Post interview, outgoing Secretary of Defense Harold Brown admitted that the Administration-inspired dispute over a Soviet combat brigade in Cuba contributed to a critical delay of the Senate debate and vote on the treaty...
...It may be willing to take risks for diplomatic gains...
...And Kremlin watchers here whose business it is to assay the implications of such a meshing for the future of U.S.-Soviet relations are telling a possibly apocryphal story about Grigory Vasilyevich Romanov...
...Nary a dove's coo is to be heard either among members of the Presidentelect's transition team...
...He is the short, ambitious Politburo member who runs Leningrad, a major military and naval region as well as the USSR's second largest city (population: 4 million...
...The candidate who last summer told a Wall Street Journal reporter, "Let's not delude ourselves, the Soviet Union underlies all the unrest that is going on," is the same man who moved adroitly from the Republican platform pledge of "military superiority" over the USSR to the benign sounding "margin of safety...
...Romanov is remarkably ignorant of the United States and the outside world," confirms a State Department analyst who has studied his career...
...Potential National Security Affairs Adviser Richard V. Allen, former Undersecretary of State Eugene Rostow, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Senators John Tower and Henry Jackson, possible State Department resident Sovietologist Richard Pipes of Harvard, and Georgetown University's Edward Luttwak are some examples...
...statements, has similarly been insisting that the equality of Soviet and American forces is a fact of life, never to be changed...
...The handful of American diplomats and Congressmen who have met Romanov describe him as nimble-witted, well informed in his areas of authority, articulate, and good humored (although Mark Hopkins is a specialist in Soviet and East European affairs...
...The evidence is that the salt process will take months to restart, and years could pass before a new agreeement is reached...
...They are therefore viewed as interim figures who will give way to the postwar generation—a Romanov or a Mikhail Gorbachev, the newest and youngest Politburo member...
...Indeed, as the Brezhnev leadership begins to wane after 16 years, the one thing it can boast of without reservation is the Soviet military machine...
...American diplomats were routinely subjected to harassment, surveillance and bugging...
...Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, exhorting the troops in Red Square last November 7 at the annual display of military hardware commem-ating the 63rd anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, typically called for strengthened armed forces "to frustrate attempts by imperialism to achieve military superiority...
...Brezhnev, speaking in India this month during one of his rare foreign trips, adamantly declared that Western military superiority was past history...
...The Reagan Administration will probably offer the Soviets a choice between a nuclear arms control package within the American definitions of equality and verifiability, or a staggering arms race against the vast industrial power of the U.S...
...has established full diplomatic relations...
...The invasion and occupation are, it must be remembered, the first authentic combat for Soviet forces since victory in World War II...
...Brezhnev, 74 years old this month, has for some time been going through fluctuating periods of stable and worsening health, on a declining scale...
...Consequently, at the start of the '80s Soviet-American relations seem destined to deteriorate once more into a sharp competition, waged in terms that each side regards as supreme—military forces...
...The frightening experience persuaded UPI to close the bureau...
...Reagan's view of the Soviet Union as the enemy is reminiscent of Nixon's...
...Hough, in his Brookings Institution study, counsels "With the Soviet Union facing critical choices in the early 1980s—choices that will probably only be made by a new leadership—it is vital that we offer some hope that it can pursue a policy of economic reform, liberalization, and reduction of military expenditures without national humiliation...
...A test for Romanov came the night two dissidents vandalized the red stone walls of historic Peter and Paul Fortress, in the center of the city...
...He is hard of hearing and his attention span is limited...
...As for the mechanics of the changeover, many American Sovietologists see the resignation last October of 76-year-old Prime Minister Aleksei Kosy-gin, who died on December 18, as marking the beginning of what is likely to be a two-stage succession...
...This from a country where the GNP is half that of the U.S.', where agriculture fails so frequently that last fall, facing the second successive bad crop, even Brezhnev alluded to food stortages...
...Moscow's tactic also is good politics...
...Once, after the wife called a taxi, she found herself seated between two taciturn heavies who drove all over town without explanation before finally delivering her where she wanted to go...
...In this atmosphere, the Party Congress will formulate the standard Five-Year Plan...
...It tends to disconcert people...
...one Leningrader confided: "We've never seen him smile...
...Not since Dwight Eisenhower entered the White House, right before Stalin's death in March 1953, have American and Soviet successions traveled in near unison...
...These new people will have to learn that military power is not the answer to everything, particularly not their domestic problems...
...Nevertheless, the Reagan Administration and the leaders emerging from the 26th Party Congress—even with the Romanovs on the rise—are unlikely to quickly establish the sort of communications necessary for improving the present climate of distrust...
...Today, no one who is knowledgeable about military affairs would deny the awesome (and in several areas not merely equal but superior) military forces of the USSR...
...It was different five years ago, at the 25th Party Congress, when an alert and energetic Brezhnev reviewed a record of accomplishment embracing detente, nuclear arms control, and a widening trade with the West that had garnered huge investments in Russian industry...
Vol. 63 • December 1980 • No. 24
