Echoes Across the Gap

By John Kohan

With relations on hold, the superpowers hurl weighty words at each other

Words, not deeds, have now become the measure of superpower relations. After each new difficulty, it seems, Washington and Moscow have tried to match charge with countercharge. As the distance separating the U.S. and the Soviet Union has grown wider, those words have begun to echo loudly across the gap. The world last week still heard the shrill reverberations from President Reagan's unfortunate joke about bombing Russia. As the Soviets took full advantage of the incident with denunciations and pious indignation, the Reagan Administration weighed in with yet another affront: the message that it considers the Soviet subjugation of Eastern Europe to be far from permanent. Amid all this, the level of international anxiety was raised by persistent rumors that Soviet President Konstantin Chernenko was in poor health.

When President Reagan quipped on Aug. 11 that he had outlawed Russia and would begin bombing in five minutes, he little suspected that his off-the-cuff remark would bring such a storm of protest. If many Americans had already forgotten, the rest of the world was still talking about a gaffe that seemed to reinforce the worst stereotypes of Reagan as the trigger-happy cowboy President. Even to many in the U.S., the President's rhetoric of late has lapsed into the stark, sometimes reckless-sounding anti-Sovietism that he indulged in early in his Administration and later toned down under criticism.

In a less than subtle reference to the Reagan gaffe, a Soviet commentator for the Novosti press agency last week declared that the Republican Party platform adopted in Dallas echoed "most of the inane statements made by President Reagan over the past years, which have sent shivers down the spines of people in many countries, especially [in] Europe." Moscow's chief negotiator at the 40-nation disarmament talks in Geneva made a point of putting the President's jest on the official record to illustrate U.S. "hostility" to the Soviet Union. In Western Europe, the West German weekly Stern appeared on newsstands with a cover that depicted Reagan wearing a clown's red plastic nose. Underneath were the words: PRESIDENT REAGAN'S JOKE: TO BE LAUGHED TO DEATH!

The concern about Chernenko's health arose from the fact that he has not been seen or heard from since he began his vacation at an undisclosed location on July 15. The new Soviet leader has issued no policy statements and summoned no leaders from the Warsaw Pact for private chats in the Crimea, as did Leonid Brezhnev during his summer vacations. Chernenko also passed up the opening ceremonies of the Friendship '84 Games, Moscow's answer to the Los Angeles Olympics, letting Politburo Member Mikhail Gorbachev preside in his place. None of this proved that Chernenko's health, already frail, has deteriorated. But suspicious Soviets were quick to draw parallels with the late Yuri Andropov, who went on vacation last August and did not reappear in public before his death nearly six months later.

For all the words coming out of Moscow and Washington in recent weeks, the superpowers for most of this year have refused to engage in serious dialogue, preferring instead to concentrate on scoring propaganda points off each other. Last June the Soviet Union invited the U.S. to talk in Vienna in September about, among other issues, banning antisatellite weapons in outer space. The U.S. accepted but could not swallow Soviet preconditions, so the talks have not convened. Instead, relations have settled back into the jittery holding pattern that began when the Soviets quit nuclear-arms talks late last year to protest the deployment of new U.S.-built Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe. In a direct response to that deployment, the Soviets last week announced that they are testing ground-launched cruise missiles of their own.

The Kremlin seems to expect Washington to make the first move toward conciliation, and may have decided to wait out the U.S. elections. The President has so angered the Soviets that even his occasional efforts at accommodation--toning down his anti-Soviet rhetoric, accepting a Soviet proposal for a ban on the use of force in Europe--have met with a cold rebuff. Says Radomir Bogdanov of Moscow's Institute for U.S.A. and Canada Studies: "Our relations are at the lowest point since World War II, and what is very disturbing is that a kind of hopelessness is setting in, a feeling here that it is impossible to improve relations with these people."

Some members of the Reagan Administration find the Soviets equally difficult to deal with. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick sounded that theme in her address last week before the Republican National Convention. Reagan's 1980 election victory, she said, marked the end of a "dismal period of retreat and decline," in which the Soviets had built up their arsenal and expanded their global influence. Blasting critics of Reagan policy, Kirkpatrick recited a litany of Soviet actions from the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan to the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 a year ago this week. Said she: "The American people know that it is dangerous to blame ourselves for terrible problems we did not cause."

Only a few days earlier, Kirkpatrick's boss had given Moscow a good example of what she meant. Addressing a White House lunch for Polish-American leaders, the President said that the U.S. could not passively accept the "permanent subjugation of the people of Eastern Europe." Reagan cited the 1945 Yalta Conference, at which Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin discussed the fate of postwar Central Europe. Said Reagan: "[The U.S.] rejects any interpretation of the Yalta agreement that suggests American consent for the division of Europe into spheres of influence." Secretary of State George Shultz carried the same message to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, gathered in Chicago last week for their annual convention. "We will never accept the idea of a divided Europe," said Shultz. "We may not see freedom in Eastern Europe in our lifetime. Our children may not see it in theirs. But some day it will happen."

The division of Europe that followed Yalta has, in fact, long since been tacitly accepted in the West. But the failure of the Soviet Union to meet the agreement's call for free elections in postwar Eastern Europe still provokes anger among some U.S. policymakers. Such concern over the fate of "captive nations" has been held in check by a more pragmatic sense of the limits of U.S. power and influence within the Soviet bloc. Administration officials denied that the Reagan and Shultz speeches signaled any new departure, but the growing strains between the Soviet Union and its East European allies have been watched with fascination in the White House.

The U.S. has sought to encourage greater independence from Moscow through a policy of "differentiation." Explains a senior State Department official: "What we're prepared to do is reward those countries that differentiate themselves from the Soviet Union in terms of their foreign policy, like the Rumanians, or in terms of their internal polities, like the Hungarians." But overt calls for independence and self-determination, says Dimitri Simes of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, may be risky: "Given the current status of the U.S.-Soviet relationship, any declaration of that nature is going to generate a particularly hostile reaction in Moscow."

Reaction to Reagan's Yalta speech came swiftly from the Soviets, who consider the preservation of Europe's postwar boundaries one of the major objectives of their foreign policy. Moscow is particularly sensitive even to hints of the reunification of the two Germanys, which the Soviets find threatening both militarily and politically. The official news agency, TASS, said that Reagan's speech did nothing less than "challenge the postwar political setup in Europe." Says Bogdanov: "We paid too high a price to take his words lightly. There is only one way to change the results of World War II and that is by fighting World War III."

The Kremlin's problems with the two Germanys cannot be blamed on Reagan. Moscow originally encouraged East German Communist Party Leader Erich Honecker to seek closer ties with the West before NATO began to deploy new nuclear weapons in Western Europe. But in the months since Pershing II missiles were installed in West Germany, Moscow has subjected the government of West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to a steady barrage of criticism and expected the East Germans to do the same. Instead, Honecker has pursued detente. He has eased emigration restrictions so that 27,182 East Germans were allowed to leave for the West this year. He has negotiated a $333 million loan with West German banks and gone ahead with plans to visit West Germany in September, the first such trip by an East German leader.

The daily Sovietskaya Rossiya last week joined the orchestrated campaign against West German "revanchism," the desire to restore the boundaries that existed before World War II. The Soviet newspaper warned that Bonn wanted to achieve "what Hitler dreamed of--the hegemony of German militarism over Europe." Moscow had a more subtle message for Honecker. When Pravda reprinted an interview with the East German leader, portions dealing with closer relations with West Germany were deleted.

The Soviet Union may dislike Honecker's show of independence, but that show has been supported by Rumania, which has often declined to follow the Kremlin's foreign policy line. When Honecker traveled to Bucharest last week to attend ceremonies marking the 40th anniversary of Rumanian independence, President Nicolae Ceausescu presented him with the Star of the Socialist Republic of Rumania, first class. Ceausescu has refused to permit Soviet troops to be stationed on Rumanian soil and has opted out of Warsaw Pact plans to counter the new NATO weapons by installing Soviet missiles in Eastern Europe. The Rumanian leader told the Brazilian daily Jornal do Brasil last week that his country "is determined not to accept any kind of nuclear weapons on its territory."

Meanwhile, there are no signs that any movement can be expected soon in stalled East-West relations. Administration officials hope that the U.N. General Assembly session that opens in September will provide the venue for Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to talk with Shultz--and possibly with Reagan. In the aftermath of the KAL 007 crisis, Gromyko was refused entry last year to international airports in New York and New Jersey, and he decided to cancel his annual U.N. appearance. The veteran diplomat has been included on this session's roster of speakers, but there is no official word from Moscow about his plans.

Until the deadlock is broken, every utterance by Moscow and Washington will be freighted with significance. The Reagan bombing quip, repeated and amplified by the East bloc's controlled press, has poisoned the already contentious atmosphere. "Nobody should ever joke like that, even in his thoughts or dreams," said a Polish retiree. Said a Moscow student: "If it's true, it means Reagan hates all of us, not just our politicians." An elderly Soviet housewife angrily noted that "such words could only come from a person who has never lived through an air raid." But a Hungarian electrician recently discharged from the army had a different view. The President's five-minute warning, he said, provided enough time for a counterattack--and a global nuclear holocaust--to begin. --By John Kohan.

Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof/Moscow and Ross H. Munro/Washington

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof/Moscow, Ross H. Munro/Washington