Grumpy Soviet bear in hibernation

Press, 25 May 1984, Page 12

Grumpy Soviet bear in hibernation

From ‘The Economist,’ London

What are the Russians up to? Nothing, probably. Where will it get them? Nowhere, in all likelihood. So why are they doing it? Because they are Russians, and in President Konstantin Chernenko they have got their most archetypally Russian leader since the 1917 revolution.

When Russia pulls out of the Los Angeles Olympics on May 8, cancels a Deputy Prime Minister’s visit to China without explanation on May 9, and announces that it is slapping even more nuclear missiles into central Europe on May 14, people in the West tend to assume that these furious actions must be part of a plan. To the Western mind, trained by Greece and Rome and the Reformation to believe in order and clarity, decisions like this are assumed to have a calculation behind them and a goal in view ahead. The Western mind has probably got Russia wrong again.

The likeliest explanation of this series of gestures is that Russia does not know what to do about Mr Reagan's pugnacious America, or about Mr Deng’s prickly China, or about stubborn Thatcher-Kohl-Mitterrand missile-deploying Western Europe. It is therefore retiring into itself for the time being. The bear has gone into hibernation in May.

The Russians do indeed have a problem, and this problem should in theory give them an opportunity. Their problem is that the idea which has been the centrepiece of Soviet foreign policy since Brezhnev’s time — the idea of pinning America down into a nice, costy set of detente-on-Russia’s-defini-tion agreements — is no longer working.

President Reagan is too busy rebuilding America’s armed strength, and is too insistent that any agreements he does sign should be at least as much to

America's advantage as to Russia’s. If the Russians behaved as Westerners expected them to behave, they ought now to be deciding whether they think they can reopen business with America after November’s election, or whether they have to abandon America as the centrepiece of their policy. Either way, so long as things are going badly with Washington, they ought to be trying to prise China and/or Western Europen away from America. That is lesson number one of international politics. Never be on growling terms with all the other big powers at the same time.

Now should be the Russians’ opportunity to start making decisions and choices. The only decision they seem to be taking this May is not to take decisions. This cannot be merely a matter of Mr Chernenko's health. He is clearly feeling no sprightlier than he felt when he took over power in February; but it is almost inconceivable that, after two Kremlin deathbeds within 18 months, the

Politburo failed to run a pretty careful stethoscope over him in February. The tendency to roll up into a ball is just the way Mr Chernenko's sort of Russia responds to an uncomfortable world.

The Russians seem to be doing none of the things self-interest points them towards. They understandably do not want to do anything that would help Mr Reagan get re-elected. But the Olympics boycott is likely to swing more blast-those-Russians voters behind blast-those-Russians Mr Reagan (as well as dismaying some of Russia's allies and many of the world’s sports fans).

If the Russians nevertheless could not resist the temptation to deliver this poke in America’s eye. they might at least have recognised that this was just the time for them to extend a conciliatory finger towards China. Instead the all-bags-packed visit by Mr Arkhipov is suddenly cancelled, and the chance to find out what China meant by censoring Mr Reagan's anti-Soviet ruderies in Peking last month is thereby lost. Even Western Europe, which Russia is at least still talking to. is getting more of a growl than a coo. Mr Chernenko has lately made time to see Spain's King. Italy’s Foreign Minister and Finland’s President, but he seems to have given them all the same set speech of injured Russian innocence, and they all seem to have gone home from Moscow irritated and depressed. This is the politics of grudgebearing. The Russians are in a huff with America for almost everything; with the West Europeans for letting new American missiles be stationed in Europe; with the Chinese for letting Mr Reagan come to Peking. Their response is not a policy, but an omnidirectional grump.

Just possibly, it might have been different if Yuri Andropov were still alive. Of all Russia’s leaders since Lenin, Andropov, though no friend of the West, was the most

Western in his cast of mind. He believed that problems were there to be solved, that choices had to be made, that defining a question was part-way to answering it. With Mr Chernenko, the country has reverted to the other, blurrier. Slavo-centric part of the Russian tradition.

Mr Chernenko may indeed prove to be the blurriest Soviet leader of them all. because he seems to have neither Stalin’s wily ruthlessness. nor Khrushchev’s bouncy inventiveness. nor Brezhnev’s genial persistence. He looks a dull, heavy, decent fellow, running out of puff: the sort who in a pluralist society should be pottering around a House of Lords. Of the two always warring halves of the Russian character, the outward-looking and the in-ward-looking, the inward-looking is for the moment on top. This is not necessarily a bad thing for those with cause to fear Soviet power. A blurry Russia is unlikely to be a risk-taking opportunity-grabbing, worrisome Russia. For Russia itself, it is obviously bad. The Russians have come to a time when they need to be taking clear-cut decisions about their economy, about foreign policy, about what the thing they call “communism" means. It is no time to go into hibernation. Copyright — “The Economist".