A New Threat to the Det

IT was one of the year's stranger diplomatic episodes. Leaving the latest dollar crisis to subordinates for a while, U.S. Treasury Secretary George P. Shultz last week flew off on an urgent three-day trip to Moscow. He got Kissinger-like treatment: a minimum of protocol, a box at the Bolshoi for Giselle, and a three-hour meeting with Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev. Shultz came to talk trade in general, but he also had an unusual mission: to lobby for the Kremlin's help in a tough struggle that the White House faces with a testy U.S. Congress.

This concerns the trade agreement on which Nixon and Brezhnev shook hands in Moscow last May. That agreement promised a vast expansion of the two nations' meager level of trade ($200 million in 1971) through tariff reductions and long-term credits. What the Russians regard as the key element of the deal--treatment of Russian imports on a "most-favored-nation" basis* --requires congressional approval.

Much to the Administration's dismay, Congress seems determined to make the trade bill that the White House plans to introduce some time in the next few weeks a major test of wills between Legislative and Executive Branches. The battle could cause some dangerous zigzags in the entire East-West detente.

U.S. negotiators warned the Soviets last May that the preferred tariff treatment they sought would need approval by a finicky Congress. But in August, Moscow began levying its now celebrated "education tax" on would-be emigrants. It is a tough measure; a younger Russian who has benefited from training at a state university might be required to pay an exit fee of as much as $30,000. The tax is not discriminatory per se, because--the fact is often overlooked--it applies to all Russians. But it falls heavily on Jews, a large percentage of whom are university-trained.

Jewish organizations in the U.S. immediately mounted a massive protest against the Kremlin effort to "ransom" Soviet Jewry, and Capitol Hill responded. Washington Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson announced that he would use most-favored-nation treatment as a legislative weapon against the Soviet exit tax, and the stampede was on. The anti-M.F.N. forces drew broad support that ranges from conservative old cold warriors to liberals who apparently are trying to cater to a supposed "Jewish vote."

Struggle. For a while, to the Administration's relief, Soviet officials suggested that the tax might soon be simply forgotten. Then, in late January, the Soviets for some reason formally promulgated the tax, and the congressional struggle resumed.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills, a leader of the exit-tax foes, bluntly told visiting Soviet Deputy Foreign Trade Minister V.S. Alkhimov in Washington last week that Moscow would not get M.F.N. until the exit tax was dropped. In the Senate, Jackson now has lined up 73 co-sponsors for his amendment. It was not just a Jewish issue, he said in a Senate speech, but "an American issue in this nation of immigrants. I would not be in this chamber today," he continued, "if Norway, the country of my parents' birth, had practiced the sort of emigration policy that the Soviet Union has today."

It was Shultz's mission, therefore, not only to explore such specific trade possibilities as Siberian gas and U.S. grain but to warn that passage of the trade bill might require some modification, if not elimination of the exit tax. Will the Soviets agree? "That is a question they will have to answer," Shultz told reporters after his session with Brezhnev last week. The word is that the Soviets told Shultz they would not drop the tax, although they might consider some further modifications (the tax was recently reduced for graduates who have worked for the state for a long period). Said one annoyed Soviet official to TIME Moscow Correspondent John Shaw last week: "What would you say if we said we could not have strategic arms agreements with you because of segregation in some of your schools? You would say we were crazy."

What if Nixon, in the end, fails to get the trade bill approved? U.S.-Soviet relations would not necessarily revert to Pleistocene-era hostility, as some Administration officials darkly suggest. But the damage would be heavy in a number of areas--troop reductions in Europe, the second phase of the SALT negotiations, which began in Geneva last week--that are linked to Moscow's overriding need for trade with the West.

Moscow's need is also Brezhnev's. He has staked much of his personal prestige and power on his strategy of limited accommodation with the West --a strategy that has had important opposition from hard-liners in the Politburo. A collapse of the trade deal might ruin much of what Brezhnev hopes to achieve--and to climax with a triumphant visit to Washington this year.

* At present, the U.S. extends most-favored-nation treatment--which simply means that a country's goods can be imported at the lowest tariff rates in effect--to all of its non-Communist trading partners, as well as to Poland and Yugoslavia. M.F.N. status would make Moscow's imports much more competitive; the U.S. tariff on Russian vodka, for example, would drop from $5 a gallon to $1.25.

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