Atmosphere of Urgency

U.S.-Soviet pressures build as SALT and a summit near

The old man's eyes are often glazed, almost as if he were in a trance. His face is puffy, possibly a sign of cortisone treatment. He grasps a pen and signs his name only with great difficulty. Still, as Soviet Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev, 72, climbed the long flight of steps to the top of the Lenin mausoleum in Moscow last week, he looked healthier than he has in months. For more than two hours, he stood stolidly in a bleak drizzle, waving occasionally to the thousands of Soviet soldiers, schoolchildren and workers who marched through Red Square in the annual May Day parade.

No one was more relieved at Brezhnev's endurance than Jimmy Carter and his foreign policy advisers in Washington. Only a few days earlier they had learned from French diplomats that during President Valery Giscard d'Estaing's visit to Moscow, Brezhnev had seemed to be deteriorating badly. At the airport welcoming ceremony, he shuffled past the guard of honor, clutching Giscard's arm. He seemed alert during his talks with Giscard, but his speech was badly slurred and he had trouble breathing. At dinner he sometimes did not respond when addressed and he ate his food with a teaspoon.

The question of Brezhnev's health casts a long shadow over the nearly completed Strategic Arms Limitation treaty--and indeed over all of U.S.-Soviet relations. If Brezhnev is unable to see the marathon negotiations through to the end, a settlement and signing might be delayed for months--perhaps indefinitely. The very prospect of the struggle for succession may have been an element in the repeated delays over the Strategic Arms Limitation treaty.

In an effort to resolve the remaining differences as quickly as possible, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin met twice in Washington last week. Their urgency was a shared one; the responses to Washington from Moscow had rarely come faster. Vance and Dobrynin were expected to settle the last issue this week. It was a minor loophole in the proposed freeze on the number of warheads permitted on each missile. Vance and Dobrynin then were expected to plunge immediately into negotiating the time and place for the Carter-Brezhnev summit--probably in June at a neutral capital in Europe, such as Geneva, Stockholm or Vienna.

By now, there is little possibility that a summit can achieve much beyond the formal signing of SALT II. Said a senior Western diplomat in Moscow: "Brezhnev could attend a couple of dinners and read a paper or two, but he is in no shape to engage in real give-and-take with Carter. It will be a pro forma summit, and it would be useless to expect anything more." Though signing a SALT agreement would be very important, Carter is disappointed at the lack of prospects for going further. Said a top White House adviser: "The President really wanted to sit down and have a good exchange with Brezhnev. We might have been able to do that a year ago, when he was stronger. But it does not look like they are going to communicate at all." Accordingly, American policy planners expect a light summit schedule with face-to-face talks only in the mornings and for less than an hour each. After that Brezhnev is apt to weaken, even on his good days.

The current round of SALT negotiations has taken place in an atmosphere of increasing cordiality between the two superpowers. Administration analysts believe that an important policy decision was made in the Kremlin last fall to ease the hard line that it had been following ever since the new President Carter began talking of human rights. The thaw was set back by Washington's sudden normalization of ties with Peking, but the Soviets apparently have recovered from that shock and now seem determined to improve relations with the U.S. The payoff expected by the Soviets is Senate ratification of SALT, an easing of restrictions on trade and a favorable climate for the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.

To meet Moscow's seeming willingness to make concessions, the Carter Administration has lately taken great pains to be conciliatory. Last week it moved quickly to knock down reports of a new Soviet missile, the SS-21, being deployed in Central Europe. Said a senior American official: "It's not all that terribly important." The White House pointedly made only a mild response to Soviet harassment of two Moscow correspondents for U.S. magazines, Robin Knight of U.S. News & World Report and Peter Hann of Business Week. Said a White House aide: "I can just picture some dumb flunky doing something counter to the main thrust of Soviet policy. If we can screw up that way, why can't they?"

After Moscow agreed to trade five dissidents for two KGB spies in U.S. hands, it was the Americans who recommended that the actual swap be quiet and informal. Following a moderate round of embracing and speechmaking, the dissidents went on their separate ways last week without the U.S. Government making much of a fuss over them. Alexander Ginzburg and Georgi Vins moved temporarily to Vermont, Ginzburg to the baronially fenced estate of exiled Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Cavendish and Vins to the home of Olin Robison, a fellow Baptist minister and president of Middlebury College. Mark Dymshits and Eduard Kuznetsov headed for Israel, while the fifth exile, Ukrainian Historian Valentyn Moroz, is considering teaching at Harvard.

On the Soviet side, the release of the dissidents was only part of the Kremlin's effort to appear benign.* The flow of Jewish emigration, which the U.S. Congress has made a precondition of the granting of most-favored-nation trading status to the Soviets, is swelling to record levels. Some Congressmen believe that the tough trade policy forced the Kremlin to ease its emigration policy. That view, however, is disputed by Administration specialists. They argue that by Unking freer trade with freer emigration Congress actually caused Moscow to clamp down on exit visas for about two years to demonstrate that it would not bow to U.S. pressure. The lesson now is over.

The total of Jews permitted to leave the Soviet Union since Jan. 1 is 17,000. The figure is expected to be about 50,000 by the end of the year, compared with 30,000 in 1978 and 16,700 in 1977. Moreover, bureaucratic hassling of Soviet Jews who apply for exit visas has declined dramatically. It may be that the Soviets now would simply be glad to get rid of the problem. By letting some dissidents leave, U.S. officials suggest, the Soviets can eliminate them as focal points for unrest. Similar reasoning may have helped persuade the Kremlin to permit freer emigration by Jews. Said Adam Ulam, a Russian expert at Harvard: "From the Soviet point of view, once you cannot shoot people on a large scale, they might as well be allowed to migrate."

The chief reason for the more relaxed policy, in the view of U.S. analysts, is American public opinion. Said a Carter Administration official: "The Kremlin seems to have decided that it wasn't getting anywhere in taking a tough attitude toward the U.S. They still believe that dissidents are traitors, insane or both. But Moscow apparently came to a greater awareness of the liabilities of confrontation on this issue."

Second only to SALT among Soviet aims is repeal of the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment, which withholds most-favored-nation status from the U.S.S.R. until Moscow permits free emigration. Lifting the amendment would make the U.S.S.R. eligible for generous credits to pay for American goods and reduce tariffs on Soviet goods shipped to the U.S. The U.S. is clearly considering granting most-favored-nation status to Moscow's nemesis: China.

Washington Senator Henry ("Scoop") Jackson insists on explicit Soviet assurances on emigration before the amendment is repealed. Anything less, said an aide, "would be a terrible signal. We would indicate to them that we are willing to bend the law to accommodate them." On the other hand, Ohio Congressman Charles Vanik, who returned last week from a ten-day trip to Moscow and Leningrad, is willing to waive the restrictions without assurances, as long as "this improved climate on emigration is really Soviet policy."

An outright promise by the Soviets to ease emigration rules permanently seems unlikely. Still, the Administration intends to avoid pressure tactics for the time being. Said an Administration official: "It is important that we show them our policy is not designed to undermine them or to rub their noses in the dirt."

Last week's cautious progress on several fronts made it clear that the entire state of U.S.-Soviet relations is at a point of great potentiality for lasting change.

* One pretense that Moscow did not abandon is its claim that the U.S. is the persecutor of dissidents. It awarded the Lenin Peace Prize to Communist Angela Davis, a onetime activist who now lectures at San Francisco State University on ethnic and women's studies. Davis, told reporters that publicity about Soviet dissidents was "a smokescreen to prevent Americans from understanding oppression at home."

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