An Olive Branch of Sorts

By John Nielsen

Brezhnev proposes an "active dialogue" with the U.S

Leonid Brezhnev had been speaking a mere seven minutes--before live television cameras--at the opening session of the 26th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Characteristically, the ailing, 74-year-old leader had limped to the podium, and his diction was slurred. Then the television image suddenly switched from the meeting to a studio announcer, who read the remaining 3 1/2 hours of Brezhnev's text. The unsettling cut appeared to be an attempt to draw attention away from the Soviet leader's infirmities, but it had the opposite effect. For a time, in fact, it obscured the main import of his speech. A quarter of the way through his address, Brezhnev extended an olive branch of sorts to the West, offering to revive the moribund SALT process and even proposing a summit meeting with President Ronald Reagan.

"The state of [superpower] relations, and the acuteness of the international problems, necessitates a dialogue, and an active dialogue, at all levels," declared Brezhnev. "We are prepared to have this dialogue." The initiative was an apparent attempt to lower the temperature of recent East-West relations, and it caught Western analysts by surprise. Secretary of State Alexander Haig said that the U.S. was "very interested" in the summit feeler, but added cautiously that "we need to study this very, very carefully."

By most assessments, Brezhnev's speech was a shrewd blend of propaganda, gamesmanship and tantalizing concessions. The Soviet President and party chief appeared to have given a bit here, stonewalled a bit there, and cast his remarks in conciliatory terms that skillfully placed the onus of response on the West. "We had expected him to be statesmanlike and cautious," said a Kremlin watcher in London, "but he went even further--both in what he said and what he didn't say. Wherever he could, he avoided the abrasive issues in Soviet-American relations. He was consciously turning the other cheek."

Brezhnev chose his forum carefully. For the past 20 years, Soviet party congresses have been held every five years, ostensibly to set goals and elect a new Central Committee. In theory, they are the party's supreme authority; in fact, they are carefully staged rites that ratify decisions already taken by the Soviet leadership. For weeks billboards had gone up all over Moscow exalting the party as THE MIND, HONOR AND CONSCIENCE OF OUR EPOCH and trumpeting GLORY TO THE HEROES OF LABOR. Food supplies in Moscow stores and restaurants improved, red banners waved along the main thoroughfares, and fleets of ZIL and Chaika limousines roared down reserved lanes.

The congress, which ends this week in the Kremlin's modern, glass-fronted Palace of Congresses, attracted 5,002 delegates from around the U.S.S.R., plus representatives from 109 countries. It gave delegates the chance to ogle a host of Communist luminaries on the dais, from Cuban President Fidel Castro to Vietnamese Party Leader Le Duan and Polish Party Chief Stanislaw Kania.

The congress could also not fail to display some of the divisions in the Communist world, such as the enduring conflict between the East bloc parties and the autonomy-minded Eurocommunists. Following a running clash between his party and the Kremlin over Afghanistan and the Polish union issue, for example, Italian Communist Leader Enrico Berlinguer had conspicuously stayed home.

That rebuke went largely unnoticed abroad, however, because international attention was dominated by Brezhnev's speech and its conciliatory tone. Avoiding strident anti-American polemics, Brezhnev called for "normal relations" between the superpowers and for an early get-acquainted meeting with President Reagan. "In many ways, the international situation depends on the policy of the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A.," said Brezhnev. "Experience shows that the crucial link here is meetings at the summit level." The Soviet leader then reversed an established position and announced that he was willing to reopen negotiations on strategic arms limitation, provided that all the "positive elements" of the stalled SALT II treaty could be retained.

Taken together, the two statements were seen by some U.S. analysts as an attempt to forestall a costly upward spiral of the arms race. That is something that Moscow, which has to deal with an expensive war in Afghanistan and a sluggish economy at home, can ill afford. "Having listened to President Reagan's plans for the military budget," speculates U.S. Kremlinologist S. Frederick Starr, "Brezhnev knows that a similar [Soviet defense] effort would be painful and dangerous domestically."

Some of Brezhnev's arms proposals were less than generous. He called for an immediate halt to "all preparations" for the deployment of 572 U.S. cruise and Pershing II missiles in Western Europe, even though the Soviet Union has at least 160 of its own SS-20 launchers in place. Most analysts believed that the statement was aimed less at disarmament than at buttressing public opposition to the U.S. missiles in Western Europe. The West German government rejected the proposal out of hand. "The West cannot accept a status quo that gives permanence to a Soviet advantage, with no NATO counterweight," said an official Bonn statement. "The policy must remain one of parity."

Though the rest of Brezhnev's foreign policy remarks went over familiar rhetorical ground, there were a few tantalizing nuances. Among the topics addressed by Brezhnev:

Afghanistan. He gave no indication that Soviet troops would be withdrawn anytime soon. But he denied any Soviet designs on the Persian Gulf and proposed that the "military threat" to the region be removed by international agreement. U.S. policymakers were unimpressed. "It's a stale reiteration of their desire to get a finger in the Persian Gulf pie," said an intelligence analyst in Washington.

European Security. One of Brezhnev's more intriguing gestures was an offer to extend the area of preannounced Soviet military maneuvers from 155 miles inside the Soviets' European borders to the Urals. The offer was in keeping with the so-called confidence building measures of the 1975 Helsinki accords. But Brezhnev called for a reciprocal, unspecified concession from NATO, even though the alliance is already obliged to report maneuvers anywhere in Western Europe. As one State Department analyst put it, "If they're talking about a zone that extends from the Rockies to the Urals, it's a non-starter."

Other Communist Countries. Brezhnev saw little chance for an early thaw in Moscow's ideological cold war with Peking. But he did recognize a surprising degree of socialist diversity in Eastern Europe, such as Hungary's new system of profit-making farm cooperatives.

Poland. The Kremlin's most worrisome problem naturally loomed large at the congress. Noting that "the Polish comrades are engaged in redressing a critical situation," Brezhnev said that the Soviet Union and its allies "will not abandon fraternal socialist Poland in its hour of need." As Western analysts saw it, Brezhnev was keeping his options open: he had decided not to invade Poland for the moment, but had not ruled out such possible "fraternal" aid in the future. The next day, Polish Party Boss Kania emphasized, almost pleadingly it seemed, that the Poles could solve their own problems. The Polish party chose "a political solution of the social conflict," he explained, because the split between the people and the government would have broken wide open and the situation would have been worse.

Brezhnev, according to some analysts, might have been looking at Poland last week with one eye on workers in the Soviet Union. The Soviets have paid for their vast military establishment by shortchanging their civilian economy. Now, the U.S.S.R. is beset by rising costs and a wasteful industrial system. To achieve new growth, it must somehow make better use of what it has. Not surprisingly, Brezhnev devoted two-thirds of his keynote speech to domestic affairs, stressing higher industrial and agricultural productivity and less waste. Speaking later in the week, Premier Nikolai Tikhonov spelled out the guidelines of a new five-year economic plan that aims, among other things, at overcoming chronic shortages of food and consumer goods. In that context, Tikhonov criticized the loss of trade with the U.S., which has dropped by more than 50% the past year. "It is not our fault that trade with the U.S.A. is declining," said Tikhonov in an obvious reference to Jimmy Carter's post-Afghanistan grain embargo. "That is a result of U.S. policy, which uses trade for unseemly political ends."

Despite its high propaganda content, the Brezhnev initiative could not be ignored. Some skeptics felt that his soothing tone was aimed mainly at driving a wedge between the U.S. and its European allies. But most assessments concluded that the overture should be explored. As Kremlinologist Starr put it, "Brezhnev's proposal indicates a commendable willingness to talk--and, at the same time, a staggering blindness to the recent events that have made us reluctant to talk. Still, [in the balance] I take it as positive."

It may also be one of the last chances for the West to deal with the devil it knows, as it were. As the congress settled into a numbing round of other speeches and reports, it bore throughout the un mistakable stamp of the cagey, infirm old boss who had once again exercised absolute control. Quite possibly for the last time.

--By John Nielson.

Reported by Bruce W. Nelan/Moscow and Eileen Shields/Washington

With reporting by Bruce W. Nelan, Eileen Shields

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