A Gentle Battle of Images

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Ronald Reagan was born to campaign: he loves it and does it well. Last week, in the twilight of his presidency, he was back to his specialty, this time amid the onion domes of Moscow. Strolling around Red Square, talking to priests, writers, students and refuseniks, toasting his hosts at gala dinners, the President was unmistakably campaigning -- primarily on behalf of American- style human rights but also, and somewhat confusingly, on behalf of his opposite number and sometime adversary, the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.

Mikhail Gorbachev has never had to run for office, at least not in the conventional sense. But he too is a natural campaigner, as anyone who saw him pick up a child in Red Square and tell him to "shake hands with Grandfather Reagan" would testify. He was running a kind of countercampaign, seeking to present himself as a radical reformer who is revitalizing the Soviet Union and toning down conflict between the superpowers -- but also as a confident leader who would not get pushed around by any Reagan sermonizing.

For both, it was a complex task. Reagan had to praise Gorbachev's drive for glasnost and perestroika while still making clear that it does not yet go nearly far enough, and he had to criticize the Soviet human-rights performance sharply without attacking Gorbachev personally. Gorbachev had to alternate between chumminess with Reagan and resentment of his unabashed preachiness.

Not surprisingly, each stumbled at times: Reagan by pulling his punches at the end and weakly blaming Soviet human-rights violations on "bureaucracy" rather than the Communist system or (heaven forbid!) his host; Gorbachev by taking now and then an almost contemptuous attitude toward Reagan. But like the seasoned troupers they are, they generally brought off their assignments with a surefooted panache.

Given their goals, it was not surprising that their fourth summit revolved around the ceremonial events rather than the one-on-one Reagan-Gorbachev meetings. With the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty ratified, the potential Strategic Arms Reduction Talks treaty bogged down and the Soviets pulling out of Afghanistan, there was not much top-level business to transact -- or at least not much that could get transacted given the constraints. Aides dutifully produced seven agreements, a procedure that has become de rigueur for summits lest they be popularly judged failures. But the agreements mostly concerned such minor matters as nuclear-testing procedures, fishing rights and exchanges of students. In effect, though certainly not in title, this was the Photo Opportunity Summit.

In the battle of images, Reagan several times appeared tired and disengaged, to the point that Gorbachev felt obliged to come to his rescue and cut off reporters' questions before one of their private sessions. Gorbachev is a generation younger, and looked it; he appeared constantly animated, bursting with ideas and emotions.

But it was the President who set the tone and the theme, and he did it almost as soon as he stepped off Air Force One. After a brief opening ceremony on Sunday, Reagan began his first private meeting with Gorbachev by handing him a list of cases involving Soviet people who are being denied the right to leave the U.S.S.R. or, in the U.S. view, unjustly imprisoned. Spokesman Marlin Fitzwater quoted him as telling Gorbachev that for Americans the issue of human rights "has pride of place" because they view it as being at the bottom of differences between the superpowers.

That appeal apparently had little effect, and later in the day Reagan got a lesson in U.S. and Soviet cultural differences. When he and Nancy went for an unscheduled walk around the Arbat, a quaint Moscow shopping mall, the friendly but thrusting crowds alarmed the KGB. Guards appeared out of nowhere to form a flying wedge around the Reagans and roughed up everyone from journalists to children. "It's still a police state," the President was heard to mutter. That night Reagan was expected to visit the Moscow apartment of Yuri and Tanya Zieman, refuseniks who have been denied permission to emigrate. He desisted after a Soviet official warned an American counterpart that such a visit would doom forever any chance that the Ziemans would be let go.

On Monday and Tuesday, Reagan took his human-rights campaign public. At the ancient Danilov Monastery, recently given back to the Russian Orthodox Church, he preached religious freedom: "We pray that the return of this monastery signals a willingness to return to believers the thousands of other houses of worship which are now closed, boarded up or used for secular purposes." At ; Spaso House, the American Ambassador's residence, the President was host to a meeting with 96 dissidents and refuseniks, including the Ziemans; some of them attended despite harassment and left fearing punishment. Said Reagan: "I wanted to convey . . . support to you that you might in turn convey to others, so that all those working for human rights throughout this vast land . . . might be encouraged and take heart."

Speaking to writers and intellectuals Tuesday morning, Reagan quoted from works of long-suppressed Russian authors. And at Moscow State University that afternoon, he developed a new theme: expanded human rights are essential to the economic revival that Gorbachev is trying to promote. "We are emerging from the economy of the industrial revolution, an economy confined to and limited by the earth's physical resources" into a new type of postindustrial economy in which the "freedom to create is the most precious natural resource," he said as Lenin's bust beamed down on the crowd.

In every speech, however, Reagan took care to compliment Gorbachev on the liberalization he has already achieved in Soviet society. To the dissidents he proclaimed that "this is a moment of hope . . . the freedom to keep the fruits of one's own labor, for example, is a freedom that the present reforms seem to be enlarging. We hope one freedom will lead to another." Aides left no doubt that Reagan was deliberately attempting to give a boost to Gorbachev, who faces key votes on further proposed reforms at a Communist Party conference beginning June 28. Reagan "believes that without Gorbachev there wouldn't be any of this" liberalization, says one adviser.

Gorbachev did not altogether appreciate the plug. The General Secretary and his aides repeatedly expressed resentment at Reagan's human-rights prodding, which some feared would play into the hands of Gorbachev's domestic rivals. Toasting Reagan at a state dinner, Gorbachev pointedly asserted that "we want to build contacts among people in all forums . . . but this should be done without interfering in domestic affairs, without sermonizing or imposing one's views or ways, without turning family or personal problems ((a reference to refuseniks)) into a pretext for confrontation between states." At other times, he treated the issue as an annoying distraction from more serious business, grumbling that he would prefer to talk "real politics" with Reagan.

Mostly, though, the Soviet reply to Reagan's human-rights pressure was suave, if a bit patronizing: the aged President, he implied, does not understand how rapidly events are moving in the Soviet Union, and is denouncing conditions of the past. Americans, said Gorbachev, "just do not know about the process of democratization in this country." Indeed, the Soviets put on an impressive show of glasnost for the world press. Public figures roamed though the press center offering comment on all manner of subjects, some having nothing to do with summitry. Gorbachev held a two-hour televised press conference, the first he has conducted in Moscow (though he has held such sessions abroad). Soviet officials staged a press conference for Andrei Sakharov, the celebrated dissident freed from internal exile by Gorbachev, and even arranged an interview for the BBC, CBS and ABC with Boris Yeltsin, who was sacked as Moscow Communist Party boss last November. Yeltsin called for the ouster of Yegor Ligachev, No. 2 in the Politburo, provoking a startled reaction from Gorbachev that will probably end what remains of Yeltsin's political career. All in all, it was an amazing lesson on the new scope of glasnost and also on its limits.

Face to face, Reagan and Gorbachev continued to get along, though sometimes with strain. At their first private session, Gorbachev proposed language for the closing communique that Reagan said seemed all right but thought he ought to discuss with his aides. They found the language filled with Soviet code words from the Nixon-Kissinger era of detente (peaceful coexistence, for example) that might be interpreted to prevent the U.S. from continuing to press for more Soviet human rights and to support anti-Communist insurgents in Third World countries. U.S. and Soviet experts worked out more noncommittal language. But at the last formal session on Wednesday, Gorbachev directly challenged Reagan: "You said you were for peaceful coexistence. Then why not put ((those words)) in the communique?" He went further to ask Reagan's aides, "What about you, George ((Shultz)), Frank ((Carlucci))? Why not this language?" After a five-minute recess, Reagan stood toe to toe with Gorbachev and said quietly, "l'm sorry, this language is not acceptable." "Why not, Mr. President?" asked the Soviet leader. "We can't accept it," Reagan replied without elaboration. "O.K., I can see I'm not going to change your mind," said Gorbachev, quickly changing the subject.

On his way home from Moscow, Reagan got a victor's welcome both in London and at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington. In an exceptionally eloquent speech Friday in London's 550-year-old Guildhall, he pledged a "forward strategy of freedom" in dealing with Moscow, a "strategy of public candor about the moral and fundamental differences between statism and democracy, but also a strategy of vigorous diplomatic engagement." Back in the U.S., speaking to a flag-waving crowd, the President was more brief and personal. "We're a little tired," he said, "but we're exhilarated at what has happened."

Exhilaration is perhaps too strong. The superpower leaders had merely got through a summit that produced no breakthroughs but no backsliding either. Given the angry animosity that for so long divided the U.S. and U.S.S.R., however, that is no small achievement. As Reagan put it in his Guildhall speech, "To those of us who remember the postwar era, all of this is cause for shaking the head in wonder. Imagine, the President of the United States and the General Secretary of the Soviet Union walking together in Red Square, talking about a growing personal friendship." Even when summits end without any breakthrough on arms control -- even if, as Gorbachev said, they leave a vague sense of missed opportunity -- the fact that they now seem almost a matter of course may, in fact, be the most amazing thing about them.

With reporting by James O. Jackson/Moscow, Barrett Seaman and Strobe Talbott with Reagan