The Detente Debate in the Kremlin
WEEKS, ALBERT L.
CHOOSING SIDES The Detente Debate in the Kremlin ?otlwk MIKHAIL SUSLOV Not surprisingly, there were no surprises when Soviet citizens obediently voted last February 25 to elect Party-picked...
...To insure this balance of forces, the hard-liners stressed the need for increased military strength...
...The opposing hard-line faction is made up of prominent police, military and Party figures whose stock has been rising steadily over the past year and reached a new peak with the decision to invade Afghanistan...
...Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, known for his acid wit, outdid himself in his address on February 18, showing, some suspect, the nervous strain he is under...
...criticisms of Soviet aggression...
...Their stress was on the threat of "imperialist aggression"??not only against a friendly neighbor but against the Soviet Union itself??and they were given to inflated patriotic language...
...and Andrei Gromyko, foreign minister...
...Turning to the revived fear in U.S...
...Coffins are already being sent back to the Soviet towns...
...The hard-liners did not cite, let alone rebut, U.S...
...The other members of this group are Dmitri Ustinov, defense minister...
...Less noteworthy than the few changes in the order of delivery, however, were the nuances suggesting an internal debate between two distinct factions on such crucial issues as Afghanistan and detente...
...The fact is that the Soviet Union seeks neither warm nor cold waters...
...But the process also included electoral speeches by the 14 members of the Politburo...
...It seeks to restore the two-track foreign policy the Soviet President introduced when he came to power 16 years ago??which calls for the pursuit of detente, while at the same time carrying out an indirect "offensive against the positions held by imperialism...
...imperialist circles" of Russia's old ambition to extend its territory to the Persian Gulf, Gromyko sought to be reassuring through his sarcasm: "American officials and propaganda mills have repeatedly stated, in recent times, that the Soviet Union has decided on nothing less than penetrating some sort of warm seas and oceans...
...as irreparably severed and to assume that further summit negotiations are out of the question...
...This may explain the fuzziness of his statement about withAlbert L. Weeks, Professor of Politics and History at New York University, is the author of The Troubled Detente...
...The moderates further distinguished themselves from the hard-liners by their effusive praise of Brezhnev...
...might take against Iran...
...In the Soviet Union this fantastic idea has long since been destroyed and was, we might add, cooked up in ancient times, going back to the Tsars and Tsarinas...
...In attempting to make the best of a bad situation, Gromyko was obviously grimacing beneath the comic mask...
...Suslov appears to see ties with the U.S...
...At its center is Mikhail Suslov, Party secretary and defender of ideological purity...
...The hard-liners were conspicuously silent on the subject...
...However, to achieve such security is it necessary to convert the region into a powder keg...
...In fact, the consistency of Suslov's electoral speech with his many previous public pronouncements gives strength to the view that he was one of the important voices in favor of the intervention...
...How much the moderates are dependent upon Brezhnev's presence is reflected in one of the several hypotheses put forward by Kremlinologists to explain the Afghan move...
...Brezhnev also offered a chilling assessment of the imperialist dialectic: "The more imperialism's opportunities for ruling over other countries are narrowed, the more bitter is the reaction by the most aggressive and shortsighted representatives of imperialism...
...anxiety for its supply route...
...The moderate faction is made up largely of economic administrators and government bureaucrats loyal to Brezhnev...
...He also condemned any possible retaliatory moves the U.S...
...KONSTANTIN CHERNENKO AND LEONID BREZHNEV drawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan provided neighboring countries and the U.S...
...Nonetheless, Afghanistan may prove to be Suslov's and the other hard-liners' Achilles heel...
...Grigory Romanov, first secretary of Leningrad...
...We must keep to the Leninist general line on peace between peoples and the exclusion of wars from the life of mankind...
...In the case of salt II, where the moderates expressed their hope that it will soon be ratified as it stands, the hard-liners either omitted any mention of the treaty or, as in Suslov's speech on February 20, implicitly wrote it off as an agreement already broken...
...Brezhnev himself, in his speech on February 22, tried to reconcile the policy extremes, like a true chairman of the board, yet he was obviously loath to see the "peace program" that he and his moderate colleagues consider his greatest achievement, entirely destroyed...
...And although generally these consist of boiler-plated ideological formulas, a close reading of the texts reveals that a significant split has developed in the Kremlin...
...guarantee" the end of "all forms of outside interference"??which has left Kremlinologjsts unable to determine whether he was holding out a real bargaining chip...
...The moderates tended to emphasize the production of consumer goods and described Soviet armed strength as satisfactory...
...The President, he said, was the "greatest example" of a "political and state leader," and the author of "peace initiatives" that have created a "whole epoch to which his name is indissolubly linked...
...Vasily Kuz-netsov, deputy to the President...
...Yuri Andropov of the KGB, for example, referred to the Afghan invasion as "a noble act which was true to the principle of proletarian internationalism and was necessary for the defense of the interests of the motherland...
...Members of the pro-Brezhnev group are Aleksei Kosygin, prime minister and head of the economic hierarchy...
...The [Soviet military contingent invited into Afghanistan] is being used as a pretext for a campaign of blackmail, slander and threats directed against our government by the United States...
...Boris Pon-omarev, Party secretary in charge of the Central Committee International Department...
...By the end of the year, statements emanating from the Suslov-Ponomarev forces??as well as an article by Suslov in January 1980 journal of the Institute of the USA and Canada, which went to press before the Christmas invasion??clearly showed that the hard-liners in the Politburo had given up on the "realists" prevailing...
...Kon-stantin Chernenko, Party secretary and Brezhnev's heir apparent...
...This holds that because Brezhnev's illness resulted in his frequent absence from the Thursday meetings of the Politburo during the past year??and Kosygin also was knocked out of action from mid-October to late February??the hard-liners quickly filled the vacuum...
...Konstantin Cher-nenko, described by Bulgarian Party leader Todor Zhikov as the President's closest "comrade-in-arms" and generally considered his favorite for the succession, was among the least strident on the subject of Afghanistan and detente and the most fawning on the subject of Brezhnev's leadership...
...If the West, in its desire to revive detente, does not abandon its condemnation of the Soviet invasion, the hard-liners may yet be backed into a corner...
...Similarly, where Brezhnev confined himself to the "reaction" of the "more aggressive and short-sighted representatives of imperialism," Andropov spoke ominously of "Long arms [that] are stretching across the ocean to Afghanistan...
...Yuri Andropov, KGB chief...
...This may be understood to an extent...
...Nikolai Tikhonov, Kosygin's first deputy...
...indeed, he invoked it twice...
...Early in 1979, he warned that the "realists" within the U.S...
...and Vkdimir Shcherbitsky, first secretary of the Ukrainian Republic...
...They clearly hope that any transfer of power will be made within the framework of the Congress too...
...Still, unlike Suslov, Brezhnev was careful not to mention Carter by name in a way that might narrow the possibility of further summitry between the heads of state...
...Andrei Kirilenko, Party secretary...
...unlike the "palace revolution" of 1964 engineered by Suslov??and that Brezhnev will be around to give them his strong supporting voice...
...were losing ground to the "hot heads...
...He did not hesitate to attack Carter by name: "President Carter directly violated his promises and assurances...
...CHOOSING SIDES The Detente Debate in the Kremlin ?otlwk MIKHAIL SUSLOV Not surprisingly, there were no surprises when Soviet citizens obediently voted last February 25 to elect Party-picked representatives to the nominal parliaments of the country's 15 republics...
...Over the past year, Suslov has repeatedly cautioned that the American "military-industrial complex" was reasserting itself...
...It is therefore unlikely that he was surprised by the hostile Western response to the Afghan invasion, as the moderates seemed to be...
...Viktor Grishin, first secretary of Moscow...
...The United States has directly violated a number of treaties, intergovernmental agreements and accords...
...The latter were defined as "congressmen, senators and publicists" who recognize "the change in the worldwide balance of forces in favor of Socialism"??a slogan of Brezhnev's that only Suslov used this February...
...There was no mistaking, though, Brezhnev's conciliatory gesture in raising the subject of access to the Mideast oil fields, and his claiming to understand U.S...
...As one of the figures responsible for persuading Western leaders to accept Soviet good faith on detente, he must now pretend that the Brezhnev policy has not been shattered...
...The death toll of Soviet soldiers is now conservatively estimated at 600, with 2,400 wounded, and the Soviet press is finding it increasingly difficult to keep this a secret...
...Meanwhile, the "arithmetic of opprobrium" (in the UN, among Moslem nations, in the European Parliament) is growing, and as many as 50 nations may back out of the summer Olympics Moscow has been so proudly preparing for...
...The theory also points up two other weaknesses of the moderate group: Its leadership, while the more distinguished, is quite old, and the bulk of the lesser members are so closely tied to Brezhnev's patronage that they are unlikely to survive him in positions of power...
...Perhaps most significantly, the moderates' speeches, including Brezhnev's, were punctuated with references to the 26th Party Congress, scheduled for February 1981, when new policies will be aired and the new Five Year Plan announced...
...In Washington, they love to talk about the necessity of providing security for the routes of supply for oil to the U.S...
...The speeches were delivered on successive days preceding the voting, in rising order of official importance and in progressively grander halls, concluding with President Leonid I. Brezhnev's address in the Palace of Congresses...
...With Brezhnev, he referred to the U.S.' pre-election "hysteria": "Candidates for President, pretenders for candidate, and even pretenders for pretenders try to outdo each other in kindling chauvinistic passions...
...But the Party boss and his fellow moderates were inclined to see Washington's present stance as a function of the Presidential election season, and particularly of Carter's seeking renom-ination...
...The moderates in their speeches not only urged a return to detente but in some cases appeared to offer conditions for its resumption...
...Chernenko then directed an obvious warning to his rasher colleagues: "Under the currently complicated situation, it is important to hold to a policy that is cautious as well as cool-headed...
Vol. 63 • March 1980 • No. 5
