Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union. David Satter
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opinion of mankind” played a vital role in Soviet internal political life, because the system does not set its own limits. In many cases it has seemed that the Soviet Union took an action specifically to provoke a Western response because it was powerless to make value judgments on its own.
Soviet acceptance of “foreign interference” in its internal affairs was made explicit last year, when Moscow bargained with Washington for two convicted spies by releasing five of its own political prisoners. It thereby confirmed the right of the U.S. to interest itself in the fate of Soviet citizens on general humanitarian grounds even if the persons involved had no connection with the U.S.
The USSR allowed Jewish emigration in 1979 to increase to 50,000 a year in an effort to gain most favoured nation trade status from the U.S.
The action against Dr. Sakharov, however, shows that the authority’s readiness to bargain Soviet internal liberty for Western concessions also has ominous connotations. If relations suffered, entire sections of the population could be held hostage.
Now, with detente faltering, Moscow has acted against Dr. Sakharov who symbolised the hope for greater freedom. Without the extra protection to others which his presence in Moscow afforded, the Kremlin will find little to restrain it if it decides to intensify repression to levels not seen in many years as the particular Soviet response to the chance pattern of foreign events.
1 Dr. Sakharov was arrested in Moscow on January 22, 1980 and exiled to the Volga River city of Gorky (now Nizhnii Novgorod).
Financial Times, Friday, January 25, 1980
The Limits of Detente
The progress of detente has always been based on some necessary illusions. With the invasion of Afghanistan and the exile of Dr. Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and leader of the Soviet human rights movement, they are being dispelled all at once.
The Soviets want detente for political, economic and psychological reasons. Disarmament reduces arms expenditures and trade brings access to western goods. Cultural, technological and sporting exchanges earn the respectability which comes of co-operation with the rest of the world. But the Soviets, because of the ideological nature of their society, have no political goal—including detente—which transcends their commitment to expanding their own power. They have insisted from the beginning that Soviet military intervention in the Third World and the final say on how they treat their own people are no concern of anyone else.
Recent events have seemed to be dominated by a sinister automatism. The invasion of Afghanistan expanded at a stroke the area of the Soviet military bloc, but it also prompted U.S. grain and technology embargoes and President Carter’s intention to boycott the Olympic Games in Moscow.
Soviet officials answered the U.S. moves not by taking economic and political steps against the U.S., but by exiling Dr. Sakharov.
While it lasted, the freedom of Dr. Sakharov, who symbolised resistance to totalitarianism, epitomised the Soviet authorities’ desire to appear less repressive and to preserve elements of trust and mutual comprehension essential to the development of East-West relations. His forcible removal from Moscow signals a new attitude towards dissent and towards the opinion of the outside world.
Relations between the Soviet Union and the U.S. have now sunk to their lowest level since the Cold War, and the speed with which the fabric of relations has come unravelled reflects the diametric opposition of the Soviet and American conceptions of detente, which could only be ignored, but not reconciled.
The U.S., guided by Dr. Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State, sought to restrain Soviet behaviour by creating a web of mutually beneficial relations that the Soviets would be unwilling to risk by adventures in the Third World or by the kind of mistreatment of their own citizens that would attract unfavourable attention in the West.
The Soviets saw detente more narrowly, as a means of reducing military tension with the West to enable them to meet the threat from China and to gain western technology. They assumed it would be possible to continue to expand militarily in the third world and that the fate of the Soviet human rights movement, however much it might exercise western public opinion, would not affect their relations with western governments.
The incompatibility of the two viewpoints became obvious at the latest with the invasion of Afghanistan. But the Soviets mounted their first overt challenge to detente, as the U.S. understood it, in 1975, three years after President Nixon had gone to Moscow to sign the first Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement, SALT 1, and the major agreements on scientific and cultural exchanges and trade. Soviet advisers and Cuban troops intervened in the Angolan civil war and assured the victory of the MPLA faction of Mr. Agostinho Neto. The angry public reaction in the U.S. to the intervention was an important reason why the SALT 2 negotiations were put off for more than a year.
Flexibility
The Soviets did show some flexibility on human rights. They avoided arresting prominent dissidents and allowed others to be exchanged. They did renounce the 1974 Trade Act when amendments made to it in the U.S. Congress tied trade advantages to explicit assurances that Jews would be allowed to leave the country. But Jewish emigration, after a temporary drop, began to increase to record levels a short time later. Soviet officials made a quiet effort to use this fact to get the amendments removed.
When President Jimmy Carter took office in 1977, the SALT 2 negotiations were resumed, but the reaction to the Angolan intervention did nothing to dissuade the Soviets, using the Cubans as their proxies, from mounting another military operation in Ethiopia early in 1978. Soviet advisers, $1bn worth of Soviet weapons and 17,000 Cuban soldiers helped the regime of Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam defeat an invasion from neighbouring Somalia. In 1978, Vietnam, a close ally of Moscow’s, invaded Kampuchea and replaced the Pol Pot regime with the Vietnamese puppet government of Heng Samrin.
It was against this background that the Afghanistan crisis which threatens to take U.S.-Soviet relations back to the Cold War emerged. The Soviets were faced with a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan where a pro-Soviet Government, installed by a coup in 1978, appeared in danger of being overthrown by anti-Soviet Muslim guerrillas.
The Soviets paid no political price for their intervention in Angola and Ethiopia. But they cannot have been under any doubt that there would be a sharp American reaction if they flouted the U.S. notion of detente by intervening openly in Afghanistan.
Detente created greater security in Europe, but only on the condition that the Soviets did not go too far through open military intervention in tipping the balance of forces in the Third World. The U.S. had little choice but to link detente agreements to Soviet behaviour in the Third World because the Soviet Union has several inherent advantages there. No public outcry within the Soviet Union will prevent the dispatch of Soviet or Cuban troops to a zone of conflict. Once a Soviet-style regime has been installed in another country, the Soviets work to ensure that it will never be displaced.
When the Soviets decided to go into Afghanistan they had reason to be worried about the strategic situation on their southern border. Soviet officials saw little prospectfor good relations with Iran’s religious leaders in the long run, in spite of present U.S.-Iranian conflicts. All attempts to improve relations with China had been rejected as China moved steadily closer to the U.S.
Soviet officials have said that when the Soviet Union went into Afghanistan they believed that they had very little to lose because of the failure of the U.S. Senate to ratify SALT-2, the NATO decision to deploy new medium range missiles in western Europe, the increase of U.S. and NATO defence spending, and the long standing U.S. failure to respond to Soviet “signals” asking for broader trade opportunities.
All this is probably true. But there is little possibility that the Soviet Union would have desisted from invading Afghanistan had the survival of a Marxist regime there depended on it, no matter what the state of detente. The goodwill of the detente era carried within it the risk that people in West,