East-West All Roads Lead to Moscow

By Michael S. Serrill

The street near the American ambassador's residence, where Ronald Reagan will be staying, has been repaved. Buildings opposite the Kremlin have been repainted in pastel colors. Even the grassy boulevard in front of a home Nancy Reagan may visit has been replanted. Like a latter-day Potemkin village, Moscow last week was being spruced up for next week's summit meeting between Reagan and Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev. But the most noteworthy preparation for the superpower sit-down was in progress about 2,000 miles from the Kremlin on the dusty, sunbaked plateaus of northern Afghanistan. There a convoy of nearly 300 tanks, trucks and armored personnel carriers rumbled across the border into the motherland as the Soviet army began a retreat from its disastrous 8 1/2-year effort to prop up Afghanistan's tottering Communist government. The first phase of the withdrawal, involving 25% of the 115,000 Soviet troops in Afghanistan, is to end May 29, which just happens to mark the beginning of the four-day summit.

With the pullout from Afghanistan under way, a contentious issue in East- West relations has become a mere footnote to the summit agenda. The withdrawal lays the groundwork for what may be the most amiable -- and least productive -- of the four superpower meetings that have punctuated the Reagan presidency.

When the Moscow session was scheduled last March, there were hopes the two leaders might be able to sign a groundbreaking treaty on long-range weapons. But the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks in Geneva have proved so complex that a treaty anytime soon is considered unlikely. The remaining points of disagreement include establishing verifiable limits on air- and sea-launched cruise missiles, placing mutual restrictions on deployment of mobile missiles and, of course, working out an acceptable link between START and Reagan's cherished Strategic Defense Initiative. The START treaty is about 90% complete, but as TIME Washington Bureau Chief Strobe Talbott points out in the following story, the last 10% is so troublesome that a final agreement may not come until after Ronald Reagan has left the White House.

Reagan and Gorbachev are expected to use the Moscow talks to issue a detailed status report specifying what issues have and have not been resolved. As Reagan said in an interview late last week, "We'll try to see if we can't come up with some help for the people ((in Geneva)) that have been handling the details of this."

Since no START agreement is in sight, the highlight of the Moscow meeting will probably be a replay of last December's summit in Washington: the signing of the final draft of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty to abolish medium-and short-range nuclear missiles. Only a few weeks ago, hopes were fading that a skeptical U.S. Senate would ratify the treaty in time for the summit. But prospects brightened when Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze were able to work out last-minute questions about verification.

When the treaty reached the Senate floor last week, 90 lawmakers were ready to vote yes. A group of Democratic Senators, miffed at Reagan's reinterpretation of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, has proposed an amendment that would prohibit any future President from reinterpreting the INF accord. But the largest obstacle to speedy approval remained the staunch opposition of a group of right-wing Senators led by North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms. One of Helms' more imaginative objections: that Party General Secretary Gorbachev, because he is not head of state (technically, President Andrei Gromyko is), had no right to sign the treaty.

With no major new arms-control pact ready to be signed, the Moscow summit promises to be devoid of drama. Instead, it will consist mainly of the signing of protocols and agreements on trade and cultural exchange. "It is, after all, a rather ceremonial affair," said a Soviet editor. "It is a chance for your President to see Moscow. He is welcome." Reagan will attend the Bolshoi Ballet, visit a monastery and field questions from students at Moscow State University; First Lady Nancy will travel to Leningrad.

There will be few fireworks over what summiteers call "regional issues." Besides its Afghan pullout, the Kremlin is eager to wind down other conflicts that are a drain on its treasury, particularly those in Angola, Ethiopia and Kampuchea. In the area of humanitarian concerns, U.S. complaints are likely to be pro forma. Jewish emigration, one barometer of Moscow's human rights record, is now high. In April, 1,086 Soviet Jews emigrated, the biggest monthly total since 1981.

Among senior Administration officials there was speculation that Gorbachev would stir up a bit of excitement by announcing a unilateral withdrawal of some Soviet troops -- perhaps as many as 75,000 -- from Eastern Europe. Such a move would be consistent with the Soviets' vigorous courtship of Western Europe. As the Soviet Ambassador to West Germany, Yuli Kvitsinsky, put it last week, the Kremlin is eager to replace "the image of the enemy" with "the image of the friend."

In part, Moscow is intent on placating its foreign antagonists because Gorbachev would rather spend his energy on reforms at home. As the meeting with Reagan drew nearer, Soviet leaders were preoccupied with an even more crucial domestic summit, the Communist Party Conference set for June 28. Last Thursday the Politburo decided to call a plenum of the 307-member Central Committee to discuss the party conference.

At issue during the June meetings will be the future pace of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), the twin towers of Gorbachev's ambitious program of internal reform. It is crucial to him that the 5,000 delegates to the party conference represent what he likes to call "new thinking." U.S. analysts note that the Soviet leader has achieved remarkable success in shaking up a hidebound leadership. According to one estimate, during his three years in office Gorbachev has replaced 40% of the Central Committee, 90 of the 157 regional first secretaries and 72 of 101 members of the Council of Ministers. But his program is still being held back by party conservatives outside the major cities. "Every step is a struggle for Gorbachev," said a U.S. official. "He can't relax for a moment."

This internal struggle, carried on for the most part out of the public eye, explains some of the inconsistencies of Gorbachev's reform moves. While he cautiously moves toward a less rigid centralization of the Soviet economy, his program has in fact further centralized decision making. The idea is to keep those decisions out of the hands of conservative regional officials. While George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is now available, most of the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the exiled Soviet novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize, are still banned. Glasnost, it is clear, can go only so far without provoking retrogressive reaction. For that reason, Sergei Grigoryants, editor of a dissident journal named Glasnost, was jailed for a week earlier this month. When he was released, he discovered that the house from which he had published his journal had been sealed by the KGB and all his printing equipment smashed.

After three years of bureaucratic successes, few expect Gorbachev to lose ground in the upcoming party conference. "He is the consummate politician," said one Western diplomat in Moscow. But the Soviet leader could be brought low by circumstances beyond his control. Last week renewed unrest flared in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian enclave in the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan; the Communist Party at week's end dismissed the party leaders of the republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan. The continued turmoil suggests that Gorbachev's decision to allow dissent among ethnic minorities could still return to haunt him. So could the withdrawal from Afghanistan, especially if it were to result in a takeover in Kabul by the fiercely anti-Soviet, fundamentalist Islamic mujahedin.

Even as the first contingents of Soviet soldiers moved toward the border last week, the rebels began marshaling their forces. "The mujahedin are just gobbling up territory in the eastern provinces near Pakistan," said a Western diplomat in Islamabad. By week's end the rebels had overrun dozens of military posts abandoned by the hapless Afghan army and had besieged several important provincial towns. If the insurgents can take Jalalabad, a major town along the main supply route between Kabul and Pakistan, the capital itself may eventually fall.

Most Soviet citizens are gratified to see their sons and brothers leave an unpopular war, which officials in Moscow acknowledged last week had cost the lives of as many as 15,000 Soviet soldiers. Although they have tried to put a good face on it in public, conservative Soviet leaders must regard the withdrawal from Afghanistan as the worst setback for the Soviet army since World War II. In the political wars Mikhail Gorbachev is fighting in Moscow these days, a successful summit with Ronald Reagan just might help distract attention from the ignominy of the Afghan defeat.

With reporting by James O. Jackson/Moscow and Bruce van Voorst/Washington