What Russia Is Reading about Afghanistan

...asks Svetlov They sent their ships, airplanes and a half million soldiers to the other end of the globe to participate m a bloody war They claimed that their aim was to bring peace and security to the region, but now even President Carter admits that vital security interests were not involved When the Soviet Union sends a limited contingent at the repeated urgings of a friendly neighboring government, Svetlov concludes his argument indignantly, the Americans dare to call that intervention Bringing up the Vietnamese parallel, even if implicitly, is fraught with obvious dangers Yet Svetlov and other Soviet journalists have powerful reasons for doing so The makers of Soviet propaganda realize that nowadays talk about "Socialist obligations" and "internationalism" will not do much to help mobilize domestic public opinion In the present ideological vacuum, the Soviet people are more likely to respond positively to the depiction of foreign policy in terms of great power politics, spheres of interest, and national security, than to be moved by appeals to Socialist solidarity This is why the press seeks to frighten the Soviet people with the possibility of American-Chinese collusion to create an anti-Soviet state at their border The journalists tell their readers that the United States is a great power and u fought a war in Vietnam The USSR is now a great power, too, and therefore cannot avoid its responsibility to defend its sphere ot interest...

...MOBILIZING THE PUBLIC What Russia Is Reading about Afghanistan ™kenez It is not easy to wade through Soviet press discussions of Afghanistan The material is voluminous Obviously people in positions of authority decided that foreign criticism must be met head-on Rarely has the Soviet press devoted so much attention to a single country, with major articles every day m the central newspapers Since Soviet propagandists have always created their world out of a few building blocks, though, the same themes appear again and again, the articles lack even stylistic variations The themes, moreover, are all too predictable The readers of Pravda and Izvestia learn about foreign agents threatening the interests of Afghanistan, and the Afghans' gratitude for the USSR's fraternal help They discover that peace has already returned to this happy and optimistic people They find that the negative foreign response to the intervention was orchestrated by the Americans and Chinese, and that "progressive world opinion" is once again on the Soviet side Still, it is worthwhile to persevere in the difficult task of reading the Soviet papers Those of us with a slightly morbid frame of mind continue to be fascinated by the verbal excesses and by watching the propagandists wrestle with some unusually ticklish issues For example, it seems that calling the late President Hafizullah Amin an imperialist agent was an original Afghan contribution first made by his successor, Babrak Karmal, in a speech last January 1 The Soviet press picked up the epithet with some hesitation After all, it was difficult to maintain both that Amin was a CIA agent and that the CIA had gone to extraordinary lengths to bring down his government Everyone has heard that the CIA is not only wicked, it is stupid—but that stupid9 Left to themselves, the Soviets prefer to call Amin a tyrant whose policies greatly contributed to the ills of his country That is a perfectly fair evaluation of the ex-President, yet some problems remain It is a contradiction to say on the one hand that Amin "invited" the Red Army to come to Afghamstan's rescue, and to maintain on the other that his regime was made up of enemies of the people The Soviets deal with this problem by presenting a vague chronology of the events culminating in the invasion Russian readers are unlikely to find out exactly when Karmal arrived in his own country from Eastern Europe to take charge of the revolution Soviet journalists have also had a hard time discussing the overwhelming General Assembly vote that "strongly deplored" the invasion and called for the withdrawal of all "foreign" troops from Afghanistan An article in Izvestia on January 16 gave long quotations Peter Kenez, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is spending the current academic year at the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies from the speeches of the Cuban, Afghan, Ethiopian, and Soviet delegates to the UN, then ended rather anti-climatically "However, not all delegations understood the essence of the events that occurred recently in Afghanistan and connected with them As a result, the initiators of an anti-Afghan campaign in the UN succeeded m dragging through a resolution which, in fact, is directed toward undermining the secunty of the Afghan state, and which represents an evident intervention in the internal matters of a sovereign state, a member of the UN This resolution has no obligatory force, but has the character of a recommendation " Of course, there are more important reasons for reading the Soviet papers than mere fascination with the details of propaganda The press reveals Soviet political strategy, and in the process shows us a great deal about the thinking of the leadership It is clear, for instance, that because the intervention in Afghanistan is militarily immensely more difficult than the occupation of Czechoslovakia, the Kremlin considers winning support and mobilizing public opinion a crucial task This is a war of indefinite duration, apparently raising concern about how the Soviet public will react to such an unprecedented situation To justify their policies, the Soviet leaders have been trying to convey three basic points to their people 1. The current crisis was not caused by Soviet policies American-Soviet relations had been deteriorating for some time because of the Carter Administration 's turn away from detente The arrival of Soviet troops in Afghanistan merely provided a convenient pretext for the U S to openly revive the Cold War A naive person who takes Soviet pronouncements literally might think the Pohtbureau does not make foreign policy at all Since the train of the Soviet state was placed on its present track by Lenin in 1917, the Party has done nothing more than hold the course, the tram has taken no turns, nor has it speeded up or slowed down If the Americans now foolishly choose to stand in the way, that is too bad The responsibility is theirs The journalists eagerly explain that the shifts in American policy are caused by Presidential politics In advancing this argument, the only problem they face is that while they contend Carter is bringing back the Cold War to get re-elected, they repeat ad nauseam that the great majority of the American people object to the President's anti-Soviet actions No matter As is so often the case with Soviet propaganda, logic is the loser 2. The Soviet Union is not alone, or at least does not face a united opposition Alongside the Americans, the Soviet press portrays the Chinese as responsible for the renewed world crisis, with the Egyptians and the British occasionally thrown in when it enumerates the foreign agents working among the Afghan rebels Egypt's outspoken President Anwar Sadat has aroused Moscow's special wrath, and mention of the British m connection with Afghanistan apparently seems sensible, in the light of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's quick support of the U S stand At the same time, the Soviet press points out again and again that the French and the Germans have followed the American lead unwillingly These days, in fact, Pravda and Iz-vestia are full of stories discussing economic deals with Western Europe The Soviet reader is told that Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and President Valery Giscard d'Estaing well understand the benefits of detente and are not about to sacrifice them To encourage the West Europeans in their "prudent course,' it is also repeatedly pointed out that the Americans are unreliable allies who observe their treaty obligations only when it suits them 3 The goal of Soviet foreign policy is to defend national security In a departure from past practices, Soviet writers have been underplaying such slogans as "proletarian internationalism" and "help to a fraternal people in an hour ot need" (though these still appear), and emphasizing instead considerations of realpolitik Party Chief Leonid I Brezhnev,in his statement issued January 12, was remarkably explicit He said that not to intervene "would have meant to watch passively the origination on our Southern border of a serious danger to the security of the Soviet state " By contrast, according to Brezhnev, no American security interests are involved in Afghanistan An interesting article in Pravda, signed by V Svetlov, goes further The author draws an implicit parallel between the American role m Vietnam and Soviet incursion into Afghanistan Who are the Americans to talk...