EAST-WEST: The Soviets Hit Back on Human Rights

The diplomatic cables from Moscow to Washington were sizzling last week with angry communiques. The protests, quipped one State Department official, “are getting so hard to keep track of, we’re thinking of numbering them.” At issue were the Carter Administration’s continuing support for Soviet dissidents and its challenge to the Kremlin on human rights. After weeks of smoldering anger in Moscow, and increasingly bitter thrusts at the U.S. in the Russian press, the Soviets’ counteroffensive had stepped up—with a vengeance.

The most vitriolic of the polemics was an extended “open letter” in Izvestia written by S.L. Lipavsky, a former dissident, whose claims were accompanied by an unsigned expose on U.S. espionage in Moscow. The articles accused the U.S. embassy’s current first secretary, Joseph Presel, and his predecessor, Melvyn Levitsky, of heading a spy ring that persuaded leading dissidents to provide classified defense material for the Central Intelligence Agency. Curiously, the Americans and their alleged accomplices—Engineers Vladimir Slepak and Anatoli Shcharansky—are Jewish. In talks with Western newsmen, the two engineers promptly denied the allegations. So did State Department sources in Washington, who called Izvestia’s charges “preposterous.”

The Izvestia blast was only one of several harsh Kremlin responses to Washington’s concern for dissent and freedom in the Soviet Union. Items:

> Pravda last week published an acidulous account of Jimmy Carter’s ten-minute meeting with exiled Human Rights Activist Vladimir Bukovsky. As Pravda put it, “J. Carter of the United States, received yesterday Bukovsky, a criminal law offender from the Soviet Union who is known as an active opponent of the development of Soviet-American relations.” On the day of the White House meeting, at which Vice President Walter Mondale was also present, U.S. Ambassador Malcolm Toon was summoned to Moscow’s foreign ministry for “a frank exchange of views” on U.S.-Soviet relations—in short, for a chewing out.

> The Senate last week unanimously adopted a resolution condemning “the recent beatings, imprisonment, and harassment of Soviet Jews and other minorities trying to obtain emigration visas.” Tass responded that the gesture was “pure balderdash” and claimed that “98.4%” of those who have sought to leave Russia in the past five years have been allowed to go. Substantiating the Senate’s concern, however, two Jewish “refuseniks” (would-be emigrants not allowed to leave the country) who attempted to contact U.S. embassy officials in Moscow were manhandled and hustled away by security agents.

> In Geneva, at the Third World-dominated U.N. Commission on Human Rights, U.S. Delegate Allard K. Lowenstein proposed that the organization request information from the Soviets on the arrest and detention of dissidents. In response, the Russian delegate, Valerian Zorin, launched into an angry hour-long diatribe against the American’s “illegal abuse of the commission’s authority” and warned that “inventing pretexts for defending human rights is not conducive to positive development of Soviet-American relations.”

Was all this a threat to détente? Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who makes his first visit to Moscow this month as Secretary of State, did not think so. “Détente does exist today,” he told a press conference in Washington last week, “and I believe and hope it will continue.” Despite their protests over Western “interference,” Vance added, Soviet leaders have shown “a continuing deep and abiding interest” in reaching agreements on arms control, trade and other issues with the U.S. Western analysts, and diplomats generally, agree that the dispute over human rights resembles a skirmish on a long cease-fire line. Says one Kremlin watcher: “There does seem to be a fairly sharp distinction between this kind of tit-for-tatism and issues like SALT.”

Still, Russia’s angry warning shots indicate that the Carter Administration has pressed a vulnerable nerve. Says one analyst: “The Soviets are extremely irritated. They’re puzzled, worried and scratching around for ways to fight back.” The bizarre charges of espionage in Izvestia could, in fact, trigger a fresh round of recriminations. Accused Diplomat Presel is now on medical leave in West Germany, and some U.S. officials assume that he will not be allowed back in. If so, the U.S. will surely reply by sending a Soviet diplomat of similar rank packing home to Moscow.