The Summit: A World at the Crossroads

THE medieval towers of the Kremlin are topped by glowing red stars, which symbolize the deep underlying continuity of Russian power. This week, barring some wholly unexpected disaster, the Stars and Stripes will fly for the first time above the crenelated ramparts of the fortress complex. For six days, Richard and Pat Nixon will reside in the Kremlin's 17th century Terem Palace, surrounded by the shimmering splendor that once was Imperial Russia.

In terms of political drama, there was a stronger sense of excitement about the President's six-day visit to China last February, if only because of the aura of mystery that surrounded Mao's Middle Kingdom. By contrast there is not nearly so much for Nixon to discover in the way of fresh sights and sounds in Russia, a country he has visited four times before--most notably in 1959, when he held his celebrated debate with Nikita Khrushchev in a Moscow exhibition hall. But this week's summit meeting of the President and Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev has far greater potential consequences than Nixon's conversations with Mao and Chou Enlai.

The Moscow talks would put to the test Nixon's avowed goal of moving the world from a state of confrontation to one of negotiation. It would also provide further evidence of whether it is possible for the world's two ranking superpowers --one democratic and capitalist, the other autocratic and Communist--to put aside or at least tone down their longstanding ideological and political rivalry for the sake of peace and self-interest. The outcome of the talks could harm or help Nixon's chances for reelection in November. For Nixon's host, the Moscow summit is also something of a test, for the talks are the key to his policy of East-West detente. Brezhnev does not have an election in the fall --but he would face an even quicker verdict from his colleagues in the Politburo, of which he is primus inter pares, if the talks were a failure.

The President could hardly have gone to Moscow at a more crucial and perhaps even more auspicious moment. Seldom in modern history have so many significant interacting trends been brought into focus at one conference. In the wake of West Germany's ratification last week of the treaties of Moscow and Warsaw, the way is now open for a further series of diplomatic maneuvers that with luck could finally defuse the old cold war confrontation in Europe. In the Middle East, perhaps the most unpredictable area of superpower involvement, the Soviets seem to be restraining their Arab allies, perhaps pending the outcome of the Moscow summit. Then there is Viet Nam, where Hanoi's offensive against the South, and Nixon's consequent decision to step up the bombing of the North and to mine its harbors, have pushed the war into a new phase that could lead either to greater danger or a negotiated peace.

Perhaps most important, the Moscow summit comes at a time when the changed relationship between the two superpowers cries out for discussion and debate. When John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev met in the last full-fledged summit at Vienna in 1961, the U.S. still possessed an overwhelming edge in nuclear might. In a costly arms buildup, the Soviet Union has achieved parity in weaponry, a fact that naturally worries American military experts but nonetheless does have one positive aspect.

Having reached equality with the U.S., Russia now seems genuinely interested in curtailing the costly arms race. Partly because of its fear of Chinese expansionism, partly because of its desire for capitalist technology, the Soviet Union seems also willing to further curb cold war tactics and seek more detente with the West.

Obviously, the Soviets want detente on the best possible terms and without giving up their determination to expand their influence in the world. So, despite the favorable portents, the summit is certain to bring very hard bargaining and conceivably even ultimate disappointment for the U.S. Furthermore, over the summit lies the danger of some accident--the bombing of a Soviet freighter in Haiphong, perhaps, or a confrontation between U.S. warships and the growing Russian flotilla off the North Vietnamese coast. "It could still come unstuck," worried a White House aide shortly before Nixon's departure.

It is, in a sense, the strangest summit meeting to date, happening at a moment when Soviet ships are cautiously turning away from American mines at Haiphong. The strangest and most significant thing about it is that it is happening at all. When Nixon announced the mining of the North Vietnamese ports two weeks ago, he had no assurances on how the Kremlin might react. The Soviets had been told by Kissinger that Nixon was considering drastic action--but they did not know the specifics. Nixon's own hunch was that Moscow would postpone the meeting. But after an initial silence came the relatively mild Soviet denunciation of the President's move, followed a few days later by short notices in Russian newspapers quoting Press Secretary Ron Ziegler as saying that the President was preparing to leave for Moscow. After that, the Soviet press made it seem like a great achievement for Russia to press on with the summit despite "the reactionary forces," as Izvestia put it, that were seeking "to undermine peace." Rumors persist in the West that the fix is in, and that Nixon and the Russians have made a secret deal on Viet Nam --such as an agreement to deactivate the mines while the President is in Moscow. U.S. officials denied that there was any arrangement at all.

Side Trips. Accompanied by Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State William Rogers, a staff of 36 and a mammoth press corps of 260, the President and his First Lady last Saturday flew off to Salzburg, Austria, for two days of rest and sightseeing. On Monday morning, Air Force One was to take off from Salzburg for the 3-hr. 40-min. flight to Moscow. Nixon will spend nine days in Russia, including two days of side trips to Leningrad and Kiev. After that he will fly to Iran for one day and to Poland for another before returning on June 1 to Washington.

The nation he left behind remained deeply divided over the wisdom of his decision to mine North Viet Nam. Last week someone claiming to represent the long-dormant radical Weathermen credited that group with setting off a bomb in a women's room of the Pentagon; it did considerable damage but luckily injured no one. On Sunday a scheduled peace march in Washington was expected to draw a crowd of 15,000. About the Moscow summit, though, there was cautious optimism. The stock market, that nervous and uncertain barometer of public feeling, rose 20 points in two days, partly on expectations of more peaceful relations between the superpowers.

Nixon would find Russia not only expectably ordered and disciplined but also wondrously spick-and-span. The Russians have been giving Moscow an elaborate facelift. More than 200 eyesore buildings, long marked for demolition, were torn down along the routes that the President was expected to take. The empty lots, which were sodded with lawn, were dubbed "Nixon squares" by Muscovites. Near the Kremlin, new lawns and flower beds were planted, and thick new asphalt sidewalks were put down outside the American embassy. There was a less pleasant aspect to the cleanup as well: to prevent possible demonstrations by Russia's small but determined band of dissidents, the secret police were searching for seven Jewish activists and cracked down on suspected editors of underground journals.

Both Nixon and Brezhnev have stressed that the meeting would be devoted to work. "This summit is primarily directed towards substance, not cosmetics," said the President. Nonetheless, on their first evening in Moscow, the President and Mrs. Nixon will be honored at a state dinner in the Kremlin. Later they will watch the Bolshoi Ballet, which will probably present one act each from Swan Lake and Giselle. The President may also visit Star City, the cosmonaut center near Moscow, or be flown to see an unmanned space shot at Baikonur in central Asia. More important, he will be accorded the privilege of making a short television address to the Soviet people. Pat Nixon will be the guest of Mrs. Brezhnev at tea and will visit Moscow University, the GUM department store, the Bolshoi ballet school and the Moscow circus, whose trained bears are likely to delight the First Lady as much as Peking's pandas did. The Nixons will fly to Leningrad for a day to visit the Summer Palace and the war cemetery of the victims of the city's World War II siege. They will also visit Kiev, where they are expected to go to the cathedral and a factory.

Nixon clearly lacks the earthy, outgoing qualities that Russians prize. But Brezhnev and his colleagues may have perceived that as a certified anti-Comunist, Nixon can make concessions that a more liberal Democratic President could not dare offer for fear of American conservative backlash. They have been anxious about Nixon's unpredictability, but they decided that they had to do business with him.

The summit will give Nixon and Brezhnev their first chance to take each other's measure. Although Brezhnev was standing at Nixon's elbow during the kitchen debate, the two men have never really met. In 1968, when Nixon --then an unemployed politician marking time as a lawyer--paid his last visit to Russia, he sought an interview with Brezhnev, but was turned down. In a sense, that rebuff reflected the Russian leader's suspicion of Nixon as an archetypal cold warrior.

The talks will take place amid the tapestried elegance of St. Catherine's Hall in the Kremlin, which once served as the Empress's throne room. Flanked by aides and translators, Nixon and Brezhnev will face each other across a wide table. The two men already are thoroughly briefed on each other's positions. For more than a year, they have been exchanging secret communications in which they have spelled out their positions on a number of vital items. The chief topics:

NUCLEAR BALANCE. After 2 1/2 Soviet Union are on the verge of a potentially important agreement that would 1) curtail the arms race between the superpowers, and 2) provide them with a justification for insisting that smaller nuclear powers limit their own development of weapons. Barring a last-minute misunderstanding, the two leaders will this week put their signatures to a treaty that will restrict deployment of anti-missile missiles (ABMs) to only two complexes of 100 missiles each in Russia and the U.S. The ABM treaty would lead to a freeze on the numbers of offensive missiles.

TRADE. The Soviet Union, which suffered severe frost damage to its winter-wheat crop, wants to make the largest purchases of U.S. wheat since the cold war began. More important, it hopes to work out agreements to buy U.S. grain for the next decade in order to overcome chronic meat shortages. Moscow also needs easier access to sophisticated American industrial equipment. To facilitate growth in U.S.-Soviet trade, which amounted to only $217 million last year, the Soviets are likely to clear up their old Lend-Lease debt of $800 million. That, in turn, could help qualify Russia for most-favored-nation status and give Moscow access to U.S. credit. The trade negotiations will be long and complicated, but it is possible that Nixon and Brezhnev may sign a maritime accord that would open more ports to each other's shipping.

COOPERATIVE VENTURES. U.S. and Russian diplomats have been negotiating on treaties that would replace rivalry with cooperation in two specific areas. One is a space treaty, which would provide for a uniform docking mechanism so that spacecraft of one nation could link up with those of the other for joint flight or rescue. The other is a naval agreement that would end the "chicken of the sea" games of near-miss tag, which U.S. and Soviet warships have been playing for years on the world's oceans.

EAST-WEST DETENTE. In the wake of West Germany's ratification of the Moscow and Warsaw treaties (see THE WORLD), the Soviets are expected to press for further relaxation in Europe. Nixon, who also wants to maintain the momentum, is especially interested in the signing of the new four-power agreement on the improved status of West Berlin, which will guarantee unimpeded access between the city and West Germany, 110 miles away. In principle, the President has no objection to the convocation of the Soviet-backed Conference on European Security, which would confirm the existing borders of Europe. But Nixon is expected to insist that balanced U.S. and Soviet troop pullbacks from Europe must be an important element of settlement. There is also a possibility that Nixon may sign a renunciation-of-force treaty with Moscow as a gesture of good will.

THE MIDDLE EAST. On this issue, the two sides will probably do nothing more than agree to disagree. Neither wants a war there, but the Russians will certainly shrug off a U.S. request to limit arms aid to the Arabs to purely defensive weapons. Conversely, the U.S. will not abandon its support to Israel. Both sides agree that Israel should pull back from all occupied territories, but the Soviets want an imposed settlement, which the U.S. rejects.

VIET NAM. For years the Soviets have insisted that they had no control over Hanoi and no choice but to supply the North Vietnamese with arms to keep them out of Peking's influence. Nixon is not prepared to buy that. In essence he will ask Brezhnev: "What kind of superpower are you if you cannot control your allies?" As a precondition for U.S. cooperation in other areas, Nixon is likely to insist on a Soviet pledge to supply only defensive arms to North Viet Nam. If Brezhnev raises the question of what is to become of the twelve Soviet freighters stranded in Haiphong, Nixon is likely to reply that they will have to remain there until Hanoi accepts his peace proposal. Although Hanoi's Politburo depends upon Russia and China for supplies, it makes its own political decisions. Thus there is little that Moscow can do about the current offensive other than to urge them toward realistic negotiations.

Tripolar Alignment. Ironically, the most important political item was not on the agenda and would probably not even be mentioned in the formal talks. Yet the summit might never have taken place except for China. In private, though, Brezhnev is almost certain to try to find out from Nixon whether there were any secret agreements made during his China trip. The President can honestly reassure his Soviet counterpart on that point. Even so, there is no doubt that the new relationship with China has given Washington an advantage in the tripolar alignment. Previously Moscow was the only power that talked regularly with both Peking and Washington. But now Washington has better relations with the Chinese and Soviets than they have with each other. Despite some Russian claims to the contrary, there was no hard evidence that Nixon's mining operation had started a reconciliation between the two Communist giants, whose antipathy cuts far too deep for any quick patch-up.

The importance of the Moscow summit to the Soviet leadership is disguised by ideological rhetoric. In fact, one major reason why Brezhnev is eager for detente with the West is economic. For the first time, the Soviet Union is in the grip of a consumer revolution, a revolution that can no longer be ignored or satisfied by appeals for more sacrifices for Communism. Under Brezhnev, the Soviet citizen is aware of improving living standards. The average Russian family can buy a wider selection of clothing than ever before, and can eat plentifully, if plainly. Most Soviet workers now have enough surplus funds to save up for a movie camera, a refrigerator and a stereo set. Although Russia's housing shortage is still very acute, the waiting lists for apartments in the vast new residential complexes mushrooming on Moscow's outskirts have grown shorter.

So what else does the Soviet family want? More. Despite a ban on nearly all Western publications, most Russian citizens are aware that their standard of living lags far behind the West's. According to recent estimates, the average monthly take-home pay of a Soviet industrial worker is $127 v. $529 for his American counterpart, $307 for a West German, $253 for a Briton. Admittedly, the Russian worker has free social services unavailable to Americans, but the disparity still exists. Food costs are high. One Western calculation places the price of a food basket filled with 28 standard items at $56 in Moscow compared with $33 in New York, $48 in Munich, and $38 in London. In addition to prohibitively high prices, periodic shortages of meat, vegetables and fruits still persist throughout much of the Soviet Union. Because of planning snags and distribution muddles, the situation is much the same in clothing, shoes, household appliances and furnishings.

The consumer revolution has put great pressure on the regime to relocate the country's resources away from defense and other heavy industries to farm and consumer production. At present, however, such a shift by itself would have limited impact, since Soviet industry has arrived at that critical stage of development in which manpower and investment resources are insufficient to make possible dramatic production gains. Instead, it must seek production gains through increased productivity, which calls for better technology and better management.

Just as the Soviets once mythologized the tractor and the assembly line as the magic elements that would help Russia overcome its backwardness, they are now placing a mystical faith in modern technology as the solution to their myriad of problems. The Russians have even done a complete turnabout on computers, which for years they dismissed as both unnecessary and distinctly un-Marxist. Cybernetics, the old argument went, stressed technical and managerial facts rather than social and political forces as the decisive factors in administering societies.

The Soviets know that they can get the latest technology only from the West.* They want more Western automated machine tools for their auto and truck plants, computerized petrochemical processes for refineries, airport guidance systems and just about everything else that is needed to run a successful modernized country. The problem is that the Russians have few finished goods they can sell to the West to finance such gigantic purchases. Hence they must barter raw materials, notably the rich natural-gas deposits of Siberia, and line up huge long-term credits.

Mutual Benefit. Even if the Soviets get all the technology they want, there is no guarantee that it will solve their problems. One of the root causes of the Russian economic problem is overcentralization and political interference in what should be purely business decisions. "Even if advanced technology is imported from the West, it cannot be properly applied in the present system," declared one visiting U.S. scientist recently. "The party gets in the way."

Yet the opportunity to share in America's modern industrial revolution is one of the major enticements that Nixon will offer. It fits well into his general strategy, which is to seek to enlist the Soviets in undertakings of mutual benefit, so that each side will have a stake in maintaining good relations. As Kissinger put it after his return from his secret trip to Moscow: "We are on the verge of not just success in this or that negotiation, but of what could be a new relationship of benefit to all mankind, a relationship in which on both sides, whenever there is a danger of crises, there will be enough people who will have a commitment to constructive programs that they could exercise a restraining influence."

Certainly, that ambitious goal will not be achieved by one meeting of two political leaders, no matter how well they get along. Time and again, would-be negotiators from the West have been enraged and frustrated by the Soviets' capacity to back off from an agreement at the last possible moment or undermine it later. Goals and policies in the all but unknown deliberations of the Politburo can change overnight.

Before their own people Brezhnev and his colleagues must maintain a stance that is in accord with the Communist propaganda that continually exhorts the Soviets to be on guard against Western imperialism. Still, they have shown that they, rather like their guest this week, are essentially pragmatists. How much leeway do the Soviet leaders have today in changing old and outmoded positions? And to what extent do they really want to? Those will be the questions in the President's mind as he faces Leonid Brezhnev this week across the table in St. Catherine's Hall.

*They have made use of Western technology before. Joseph Stalin's first Five-Year Plan, which began in 1928 and aimed at the industrialization of Russia, depended heavily on both Western equpiment and experts. By 1931, more than 1,000 U.S. technicians and engineers were employed in the Soviet Union: Henry Ford built a factory in Russia that was capable of turning out 100,000 vehicles a year, including Model A Fords.

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