Soviet Union: Who's That Man With the Tin Cup?

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Integrating back into the world is a priority issue for the U.S.S.R. Today it is also a necessary issue, due to the economic straits of this country.

-- Soviet economist Grigori Yavlinsky

Yavlinsky, who advises both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, sounded what is rapidly becoming the predominant theme of Soviet policy. The nation needs enormous sums of Western aid to overhaul its collapsing economy. But it has no chance if it maintains a society largely walled off from the outside world. So Moscow is maneuvering to open the country to foreign influence in ways that might make not only Lenin and Stalin but also some of the czars spin in their graves.

For openers, Gorbachev is in effect applying for membership in that exclusive capitalist club, the G-7 (the Group of Seven major industrial and financial powers -- the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan). After dropping some heavy hints, the Soviet President last week came right out and asked for an invitation to the G-7 summit meeting to be held in London in July. There he could make his pitch in person to the leaders of the countries that could supply the grants, loans and credits he seeks and try to reassure them that the money would be put to good use rather than disappearing into the maw of the chaotic Soviet economy.

The Soviet President began by indirectly asking the West to help him plan an economic makeover. He gave his blessing to a mission by Yavlinsky to seek the advice of government and private economists from the capitalist world in drafting a coordinated program of foreign aid and internal Soviet reforms. The idea is to use the aid to finance the creation of a true market system in the U.S.S.R., which would inevitably open the economy to the influence of foreign governments and such aid-granting and -monitoring institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Yavlinsky spent last week meeting with academics at Harvard. This week he will join Yevgeni Primakov, one of Gorbachev's top troubleshooters, in Washington for talks with government experts.

Most dramatic of all, the Supreme Soviet, the nation's parliament, enacted a law granting all citizens -- as of Jan. 1, 1993 -- the right to travel freely overseas and even to leave the country for good and settle abroad. The statute is a major step in converting the U.S.S.R. from a dictatorship governed by its leaders' whims to what reformers call a law-based society. But at least the timing of passage was undoubtedly affected by the government's hunger for American dollars. Only a week earlier, the measure seemed to be sidetracked, probably for many months. But it was revived with Gorbachev's strong support after telephone conversations between the Soviet leader and George Bush. Free emigration is a precondition for a lowering of very high U.S. tariffs on Soviet goods and for the granting of Export-Import Bank credits to finance the purchase of American products.

The Soviet Union previously had not had an emigration, or even an anti- emigration, law. Policy was set by a series of decrees, some secret; in practice the government arbitrarily opened the gates or slammed them shut as it pleased. Jewish emigration, for example, has ranged from a low of fewer than 1,000 in 1986 to a high of 200,000 in 1990. Most of the time the policy was extremely restrictive, in line with a tradition of suspicion and fear of the outside world that goes back to czarist times and was carried to terrifying heights by Joseph Stalin. During his reign, not a few Soviet citizens were imprisoned or even shot because of unauthorized contacts with foreigners.

Traces of that attitude linger. During the parliamentary debate, Deputy Leonid Sukhov, a taxi driver from the Ukraine, warned that free movement of citizens in and out would open the Soviet borders to AIDS. Officers of the KGB border guards mounted an exhibit of guns and drugs seized by customs agents as a warning of what could be expected if the frontiers are opened. Nonetheless, the law stoutly declares that "each citizen of the U.S.S.R. has the right to exit and enter the Soviet Union" and that this right "cannot be arbitrarily denied." Full implementation was put off supposedly to give the government time to set up the customs, transportation and passport-issuing machinery necessary to deal with the many more people leaving. But Soviet citizens joining relatives abroad or accepting job offers from foreign employers are allowed to leave at once.

Though Gorbachev has reportedly expressed private worry about a brain drain that would leave too few educated citizens at home to build perestroika, emigration seems unlikely to take any great leap. Fyodor Burlatsky, a prime parliamentary advocate of the new law, estimates that 1.5 million people will leave for good during the first three years that the law is fully effective, not a major annual increase over the 450,000 expected to emigrate this year alone. Other estimates are that 2 million or more may leave quickly after the law takes full effect, but once they are gone, the outflow will dwindle. One reason is that the U.S. and European nations are unlikely to admit many more immigrants from the U.S.S.R. than they do now. Also, foreign tourism costs more money than most Soviet citizens can spare. But the knowledge that citizens can leave if they wish and the insights into other ways of living and thinking brought back by people who do travel overseas are likely to have major effects on Soviet psychology.

Under U.S. law, Bush may now authorize tariff and credit concessions. The White House has been noncommittal, on that subject and on the possibility of Gorbachev's attending the G-7 summit. Among the other G-7 members, Germany is strongly in favor of inviting Gorbachev and of doing anything else that might prop up the Kremlin leader; it trusts Gorbachev far more than any potential successor to carry through the barely begun pullout of 380,000 Soviet troops from what used to be East Germany. But the summit hosts in Britain are divided. Prime Minister John Major has spoken in favor of inviting Gorbachev, but Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd is known to be strongly opposed.

One reason for hesitancy is that the Western powers are a long way from agreeing on an answer to Gorbachev's pleas for aid. Though Gorbachev has not mentioned a precise sum (he did say last week that if the West could spend $100 billion on the Persian Gulf war, substantial funds should be found to save perestroika), aid on a scale large enough to be effective would be very expensive: $30 billion over five years is an often mentioned figure. The Western nations are by no means sure they either can or should spare the money. "Why give pennies to a man with a hole in his pocket?" asks a top British official. The return to favor of Yavlinsky, an author of last year's drastic 500-day reform plan, is encouraging, but the memory of how abruptly Gorbachev reversed himself and spurned that plan after first accepting it is sobering.

The U.S., in addition, would like to see how many political concessions it can squeeze out of Moscow -- on subjects ranging from help in settling the Cambodian civil war to final agreement on arms-control treaties -- before coming up with an aid package. Washington also is talking in effect of trying to help Gorbachev sell economic overhaul by expanding contacts with Soviet hard-liners and trying to persuade them not to see reform as a threat.

Gorbachev dispatched Soviet Chief of Staff Mikhail Moiseyev to Washington last week to try to iron out the last issues blocking ratification of the treaty reducing non-nuclear forces in Europe that was signed last fall. Some progress was made, but at week's end there was still no agreement. The U.S. is determined not to let the Soviets cheat by failing to make some troop withdrawals that Washington believes the treaty demands. But the numbers involved are so small that U.S. negotiators cannot believe a desire to keep those forces in place is the real Soviet motive for recalcitrance. They think the Soviet military is stalling in order to test its influence with the Gorbachev government. U.S. officials thought Moiseyev was negotiating as much with Gorbachev as with them.

Dangling aid before Moscow as an inducement to reform can work: witness the passage of the emigration bill. But it can also backfire if the Kremlin gets the idea that each concession is answered only by a demand for more concessions. At some point the Western powers need to work out a specific position: we offer so-and-so-many dollars in return for this or that reform. Given Gorbachev's penchant for zigzags between the authoritarian hard-liners who seemed to be in ascendancy as recently as mid-April and the democratic reformers who again are gaining strength now, that agreement ought to come sooner rather than later.

With reporting by John Kohan and Yuri Zarakovich/Moscow and Christopher Ogden/Washington