WAR AND PEACE SOVIET GENERALS SEEKING VOICE IN KREMLIN POLICY

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33933, 28 August 1975, Page 12

WAR AND PEACE SOVIET GENERALS SEEKING VOICE IN KREMLIN POLICY

(By

VICTOR ZORZA

The Soviet General Staff is demanding from the Kremlin a greater ty in matters of war and peace on the ground that thev are too nportant to be left to the politicians. Signs in the Soviet press suggest that Brezhnev has been put on the defensive just as he is preparing for a visit to Washington to sign a new S.A.L.T. agreement.

General Viktor Kulikov, the Chief of the General Staff, has expressed the demands of the military in an article he wrote for the obscure but influential milit a r y-historical journal. Ostensibly concerned with World War Two, the article draws far-reaching conclusions about the "contemporary’’ lessons he derived from the last war, and about their relevance to a “future war." The burden of Kulikov’s argument is that the importance of the General Staff is growing and that “this is showing itself even more emphatically in contemporary conditions, given the new means of armed struggle.” He is speaking, as the context makes clear, of the role of the General Staff in relation to that of the political leadership.

i He argues that the increased role of the strategic [leadership derives from the unprecedented speed of political developments, and he warns the politicians against disregarding the advice of the military. In a "Pravda” article last year he also argued that nuclear weapons enhance the role of the General Staff, but at that time he paid elaborate tribute to the primacy of the political leadership. In the light of his second article, that earlier tribute can be seen as lip service designed to give reassurance to the politicians while the military were busy devising ways to assert their new role. This is evidently to take the form of a command structure that would give them a new political and economic as well as a mili- i tary role — and they want it now. Kulikov insists that “a new system of strategic leadership” should be set up "in every detail” in peace time, because, he argues, World War II showed that it is too late to do so once the fighting starts. He reminds the politicians that strategic planning must be realistic, that it must pay heed “objectively” to the economic and military potential of both sides, and that “any error” in these matters would cost dearly. He stresses, in particular, the importance of adequate strategic reserves and of ensuring “superiority” over an adversary. In other words, he wants more money for defence, and bigger and better weapons, at the very time when Brezhnev is supposed to be negotiating a new arms limitation agreement with President Ford. The Moscow debate has a number of parallels with the controversy now building up in Washington in preparation for Brezhnev’s visit.

September meeting This year’s summit meeting was originally scheduled for the spring, was then postponed until the early summer, and then again until September — although it is now doubtful that it could take place next month. The demands made by the “Hawks” in both capitals have made it difficult for Brezhnev and Ford to reach an agreement that would justify a summit. It is a replay of the debates which preceded the recent summits, when Brezhnev was under attack from such hawks as the Ukrainian Party Secretary, Pyotr Shelest. But Brezhnev cannot now dismiss his critics as easily as when he threw Shelest out of the Politburo on the eve of his summit meeting with Nixon. His health evidently leaves much to be desired, and the party congress next February may see his retirement from the leadership. He is something of a lame duck, and the glories of previous summits are no longer praised as extravagantly in the Soviet press

as they were at the height of his power. The most extravagant praise of all, bestowed on the 1973 Washington summit agreement on the prevention of nuclear war, is now making Brezhnev increasingly vulnerable to his critics. The agreement; which provided for United States-Soviet consultation in the event of a threat of nuclear war. has little political or military significance. Nixon and Brezhnev awarded it to themselves as a consolation prize, because Watergate and other pressures made it difficult for them to make real progress on other fronts at the 1973 summit.

Significance of agreement But in Moscow it was hailed as a “historic" agreement which “quite correctly bars the way to the fearful threat” of nuclear war. The Party’s main journal, "Kommunist,” said that of all the summit documents, this agreement would, by itself, give the Washington summit "a lasting place in outstanding events of international and world wide significance” — and so on and so forth. But no “Pravda” itself, accompanied by a chorus from other Soviet papers, questions the value of the 1973 agreement. It criticises the strategic principles enunciated by the Secretary of Defence, James Schlesinger, providing for the possible use of nuclear weapons in case of a Soviet conventional attack in Europe, as inconsistent with the 1973 agreement. It calls for steps to ensure “that this is not merely a paper agreement," thus conceding that the early "sceptics” were right to question its value, and that Brezhnev’s own claims for it were grossly exaggerated. In the context of the preparations for the Washington summit, and of the reasertion of the military claim for a bigger role vis-a-vis the politicians, this suggests that Brezhnev has suffered a serious setback in the perennial Kremlin infighting between hawks and doves, (c) 1975 Victor Zorza