Moscow Speaks Softly

Back in 1981, Moscow bristled in near fury at Solidarity. A * "counterrevolution," snapped then Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov. "A Trojan horse of imperialism!" cried the official media. As the trade union's protests roiled Poland, Soviet troops massed threateningly along the countries' common border. Finally, when General Wojciech Jaruzelski crushed Solidarity with martial law, TASS said approvingly, "The authorities are taking necessary measures to restore tranquillity."

How times change. Last week, as a member of Solidarity was about to become Prime Minister, Soviet officials said simply that it was an "internal" Polish matter. A Moscow television reporter noted that "it is necessary to form a new government as quickly as possible," then ticked off a short list of potential leaders that included Lech Walesa. The reaction was expected. Visiting Paris in July, Gorbachev had said, "How the Polish people . . . will decide to structure their society and lives will be their affair."

The Soviet inaction appeared to sound the death knell for a policy that took shape under Leonid Brezhnev. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviet Union proclaimed that socialist countries had the right to invade a fellow socialist nation whenever the Communist political monopoly was threatened. The so-called Brezhnev Doctrine justified the tanks rolling into Prague and, by extension, Nikita Khrushchev's intervention in Hungary in 1956. But last December, Gorbachev announced that the "use or threat of force no longer can or must be an instrument of foreign policy."

Andranik Migranyan, a Soviet intellectual, last week explicitly condemned the Brezhnev Doctrine in the reformist weekly Moscow News. Migranyan noted, however, that "the ((democratic)) processes going on in ((Poland)) may be properly understood by the Soviet Union only when Soviet foreign policy interests are not challenged." No one knows how Moscow's military hard-liners would have reacted had Walesa refused to leave the Defense and Interior ministries in Communist Party hands.

Soviet fears may also have been assuaged in July, when senior Solidarity leaders invalidated their votes and allowed Jaruzelski to be installed in the presidency, thus proving that the trade union was sensitive to geopolitical realities. The Kremlin may have changed its thinking since 1981, but Solidarity has changed as well.