Would the real Mr Gorbachev please stand up?

Press, 24 January 1986, Page 17

Would the real Mr Gorbachev please stand up?

From

MARTIN WALKER,

the London

“Guardian” correspondent in Moscow.

All of a sudden, the capital of the Soviet Union has started to feel like Washington D.C. The generals make angry noises about not trusting the other side. Russian diplomats make on-the-record denunciations of America’s cheating on formal treaties. Cultural figures condemn America’s “deliberate and provocative distortions of our life.” The press and television start thundering about a new American imperialism that seeks to install bases and throw its weight about the world. Meanwhile, sailing benignly and serenely above it all is Mikhail Gorbachev. He calls in every ambassador in Moscow to tell them that progress has been made at the force reduction talks in Vienna and at the secur-ity-building negotiations in Stockholm. He appears on American television to wish viewers a happy New Year and talks about an increase in trust between the two super-Powers.

And Mr Gorbachev continues to exude the very spirit of Geneva even while the needles were still whirling around the seismic dials, recording the shock waves from the Nevada desert of what Pravda called “America’s malignant New Year’s gift to the world.” The American nuclear test not only mocked Mr Gorbachev’s moratorium on nuclear testing, it also tested a key component of the "star wars" programme that he loathes..

Not only did the Soviet leader fail to react, he continues to refer to the “star wars” project as the Strategic Defence Initiative in deference to a personal request from Presdent Reagan. This is beginning to resemble those conflicting signals we have long heard from Washington, and which have so frustrated Soviet policy-makers. More than that, It is starting to feel like one of those interrogation sessions where the tough guy kicks you off the chair, clips you round the ear, and says you could swing for this one. And then the soft guy comes in and gives you a cup of tea and a clean hanky. The effect is disconcerting. The normal rules of logic seem to have broken down. We know that Mr Gorbachev runs Soviet foreign policy, and we are accustomed to think of the Soviet Union as a monolithic State where nothing is said or published by accident. So will the real Mr Gorbachev please stand up.

The short answer is, probably not, for a number of good reasons. Having spent much of the last year chewing the Kremlin carpets in frustration after trying to interpret the differences between the American, Defence Secretary Mr Weinberger’s Pentagonesque ideology and the blunt pragmatism of the

Secretary of State, Mr George Shultz, the Russians are now in a mood to return some of the same medicine.

While briefly satisfying as retribution, this kind of conflict between officials goes against the Soviet grain. They hate thinking aloud, but there has been a policy debate going on in Moscow, and there are people who feel rather grumpily that they have been on the losing end of it

The debate focused around the crumbling but still imposing edifice of Andrei Gromyko’s foreign policy. Mr Gromyko takes credit for the fact that when he retired as Foreign Minister, the Russians and Americans had at least started talking again. But he left them locked into a negotiating position which said that the three great issues of arms control — space weaponry, strategic missiles and Euro-missiles — must each be discussed simultaneously and that there could be no agreement on one without agreement on them all.

Even before the Geneva summit, Mr Gorbachev signalled that this recipe for endless deadlock had been quietly shelved. He was happy for Euro-missiles to be discussed separately, and for separate agreements to be reached, and he put this in writing at the summit In the Foreign Ministry, the central committee, the Armed Forces, and the Soviet news media there are people unhappy with that decision. They are disgruntled because they spent most of last year producing impeccable arguments saying that Euro-missile should not be put into a separate category, since Russia’s Euro-missiles could not reach the American homeland, while N.A.T.O.’s Euro-missiles could devastate the whole of western Russia. Mr Gorbachev himself also claimed that there had been another area of debate,when he told visiting American congressmen last summer that his decision to announce a unilateral nuclear test ban had been a personal risk, and that his generals remained unconvinced. .

Few Western diplomats know whether they believe this or not The Soviet high command keeps its secrets even better than the Kremlin. Even so, there was nothing secret about Marshal Vasily Petrov’s thunderous accusation that no matter what was said at Geneva, the Americans were still planning to fight and win a nuclear war. It appeared in Pravda on the very day that Mr Gorbachev was taping his New Year greetings to the American people, and it was the first formal statement to come from

the high command since the surprising retirement of the father of the Soviet Navy, the veteran Admiral Sergei Gorshkov.

All this, inevitably, has led to diplomatic speculation about the state of Mr Gorbachev’s relations with his generals. Nor Is the Army entirely happy about the growing indications that Mr Gorbachev's “political settlement" in Afghanistan will lead to major troop withdrawals this year. Some of the recent key appointments in the Soviet Army have been to officers who have done well in the Red Army’s first real combat experience since 1945. There is Yuri Keznetsov, who won a Hero of the Soviet Union medal with the paratroops outside Kabul and now commands the elite Panfilov Guards Motorised Division. There is General Albert Slyusar, who won his hero medal in Afghanistan and has been promoted to run the Paratroop High Command School at Ryazan. Also, there have been a series of promotions among the combat engineers and in the helicopter forces, and of those Air Force officers who have distinguished themselves in organising ground support missions.

With the last of the officers who had combat experience, in the Second World War now retiring, this is the vital “window of opportunity” for new promotions to the ranks of generals and senior colonels. Afghan experience is beginning to look like an essential qualification for advancement. Ambitious officers do not want the fighting to stop. It is tempting to put all of this together with the conflicting signals that are coming out of Moscow and conclude that Mr Gorbachev is not completely master of his own house. Tempting, but I think incorrect, because if there were a power struggle going on, then Mr Gorbachev’s would not be the only voice still talking sweetly of the spirit of Geneva.

The entire Soviet establishment is aware that in Mr Gorbachev they have an unprecedented asset when it comes to charming, to persuading, and above all to convincing Western public opinion. That asset will not be risked in the gutter fighting of day-to-day propaganda.

So, while every other Soviet spokesman continues the guerrilla warfare against “star wars” and against America’s “neoglobalism,” Mr Gorbachev holds himself in benign reserve above the battle, waiting to beam over the Communist world at next month’s party congress, and over America, at next September’s summit.