History's Ugly Rules

By Strobe Talbott

As yet another week of suspense passed in the drama of Poland, the armies of the Warsaw Pact were still waiting for orders from the 14 men who make up the Soviet Politburo. Most of those leaders are old and weary. Some, like Leonid Brezhnev, are chronically ill and sometimes incapacitated. Politburo members have less and less time and energy to study briefing books prepared by their staffs or to sit through lengthy deliberations with their advisers. They have come to rely more and more on instincts born of long experience.

For years the Politburo has ruled as a secretive, inbred board of directors dedicated to the protection and preservation of the Soviet system. The euphemism for this imperative is "security." In Russian the word means literally absence of danger. Today, all the instincts of the old men in the Kremlin must tell them that the Soviet system is in the gravest danger in Poland, as indeed it is and deserves to be. Their instincts probably also tell them that sooner or later they will have to intervene, that they have a right to do so, and that they will be able to get away with it.

As they edge toward a decision in Poland, the Methuselahs of Moscow figure that they have not only the slogan of Marxist-Leninist internationalism on their side to justify an invasion, but 36 years of precedents as well. Many of these men, after all, have careers that stretch back to 1945 and the wartime Allied conference at Yalta, which established a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. In Joseph Stalin's eyes, Poland was the most important part of that sphere because it is a buffer between Russia and Germany.

Stalin's successors have repeatedly exercised the Soviet claim over Eastern Europe by using military force against obstreperous satellites. Soviet tanks quelled riots in East Berlin in 1953 and crushed the rebellion in Hungary in 1956, an episode that cost the lives of more than 25,000 Hungarians. And in justifying the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviet press proclaimed the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine: the U.S.S.R. reserves the right to use force in any "fraternal country" where it deems "socialism" to be in jeopardy. None of those interventions, whether in time of cold war or thaw, elicited from the West meaningful political and economic sanctions, to say nothing of military retribution. One of Brezhnev's diplomatic triumphs was the 1975 Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe at which 35 governments, notably including the Ford Administration, ratified the postwar order in Europe. De facto, the Iron Curtain and the Brezhnev Doctrine were, and remain, very much a part of that order.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 was, in one significant and ominous sense, something quite new: the Soviet army's first sustained advance beyond the sphere of influence established in 1945. In another sense, however, the invasion of Afghanistan was consistent with Soviet behavior since World War II. It demonstrated again the U.S.S.R.'s proclivity for using brute force as the best way to ensure an "absence of danger," and for filling vacuums created by the limits of Western diplomacy and alliances. In ordering that invasion, the Soviet leaders calculated correctly that they were not risking a direct military confrontation with the U.S. or its allies.

Nor would they be running any serious risk of World War III by invading Poland. Rather, they would be consolidating their gains from World War II. Ill-gotten though those gains surely were, they have been at least tacitly conceded by eight U.S. Presidents, from Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter. Though some second-echelon hard-liners in the Reagan Administration actually would like to see the U.S. espouse the early '50s goal of "rolling back" Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, the U.S. does not have the military or political power to do that. Therefore Reagan's top advisers seem committed, for the foreseeable future at least, to the more realistic aim of holding the line against further Soviet adventurism. Soviet intervention in Poland would qualify in neither of those categories. It would be something just as bad--the brutal suppression of a brave people--but it would be, according to the ugly rules of geopolitics, "allowed."

To be sure, the Kremlin would have to pay political, diplomatic and economic penalties. What the Soviets like to call "international public opinion" would be outraged. Advocates in the West of more vigorous anti-Soviet propaganda and increased defense budgets would have a field day. In fact, some may welcome the Polish crisis for just that reason.

But the instincts and long personal experience of the old men on the Politburo may tell them that they can weather those firestorms. If anything is staying the Soviets' hands in Poland, it is uncertainty over how the Poles themselves will react. Berlin '53 was essentially an isolated police action. Budapest '56 and Prague '68 were operations aimed at decapitating the heretical local party leaderships. In Poland, however, the Soviet Union must be prepared to go to war against an entire populace. The Polish challenge to the Soviet system is both far deeper and far more widespread than any that the old men in the Kremlin have ever faced.

But they may still decide that they have no choice but to invade. That is why the events unfolding in Poland offer not only the suspense of drama but also the chilling possibility of tragedy. --By Strobe Talbott

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