Soviet Union: Battening Down the Hatches

Moscow issues plenty of bluster but no word on Sakharov

“In Washington, they are not interested in reaching agreement. They only speculate in general terms about the usefulness of dialogue.” That note of scorn in Soviet Leader Konstantin Chernenko’s remarks to West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher last week was characteristic of Moscow’s increasingly hostile posture toward the West. The Kremlin categorically rejected Genscher’s plea for a resumption of the Geneva arms-reduction talks that the Soviets broke off last November to protest NATO’s deployment of new missiles in Europe. Only a few hours before Genscher’s arrival, the Soviet news agency TASS published a lengthy interview with Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, in which he warned that the new NATO missiles “increased the probability of a nuclear conflict.” In retaliation, Ustinov said, the Soviets had dispatched to U.S. coastal waters additional submarines carrying nuclear missiles that could strike American cities within ten minutes.

Even before the Kremlin announced that the Soviets would not attend the Los Angeles Summer Olympics,*Soviet leaders were using every opportunity to foster a crisis atmosphere. Further evidence came in the way Moscow was handling the case of Andrei Sakharov, intellectual leader of the besieged Soviet dissident movement. The Nobel Peace Prize recipient began a hunger strike on May 2 to secure permission for his ailing wife Yelena Bonner to travel abroad for medical treatment. Turning a deaf ear to a growing chorus of international protests and inquiries, the Soviets refused to give any details on Sakharov’s health and whereabouts. Said a top Washington diplomat: “They are not capable of taking any positive steps, so they are turning inward and isolating themselves. It is leadership by tantrum.”

The Kremlin is still smarting from the failure of its campaign to prevent NATO from deploying new missiles in Europe. But Moscow’s primary motive is to signal the U.S. that it will not do any business with the Reagan Administration. “You are dealing with a defiant and bitter Russian bear,” says Dmitri Simes, a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Everything they were trying to do internationally went wrong. They have now fallen back on a policy of assertive isolationism.”

At his White House press conference last week, Reagan did not appear particularly troubled by the vitriol coming out of Moscow. “Yes, the Soviet Union is unhappy,” he observed. “They are unhappy because for the first time in a couple of decades we are preserving our security ability.” If the Soviets were so concerned that the U.S. would surpass them in the arms race, said Reagan, they should come back to the negotiating table. The President pointedly avoided chastising the Kremlin for its treatment of the Sakharovs. “I just have a feeling that anything I might say publicly could be injurious to [Yelena Bonner’s] chances,” he noted diplomatically. Reagan also down-played the threat posed by any new Soviet submarines off the U.S. coast.

U.S. military officials shared Reagan’s assessment. Five of the U.S.S.R.’s Yankee-class submarines, each armed with 16 missiles, already patrol near U.S. shores; three ships have been stationed in the Atlantic and two in the Pacific. Adding two submarines with longer-range missiles might marginally enhance the Soviet nuclear deterrent, but it would expose the new subs to greater surveillance.

Ustinov also announced last week that if NATO continued with its plans to deploy 572 new nuclear weapons in Europe by 1988 (so far at least 32 cruise missiles and nine Pershing IIs have been installed), the Soviets would add to their arsenal of 243 triple-warhead SS-20 missiles aimed at Europe and position more tactical nuclear weapons in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. The Soviet warning was certain to heighten anxiety in The Netherlands, where a reluctant parliament is currently debating whether to fulfill an earlier pledge to take 48 of the new NATO cruise missiles.

Genscher’s reception was the most frigid of the 15 or so encounters he has had in Moscow with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in the ten years that Genscher has been managing West German foreign policy. It was preceded by a press campaign in which West Germans were caricatured as Nazis festooned with swastikas. When Genscher protested to Gromyko about such characterizations, the veteran diplomat replied that Soviet journalists were not the only ones with misgivings about West German intentions. In their 1-hr. 45-min. session, Chernenko told Genscher that Moscow would not return to arms talks unless NATO withdrew its new missiles. The Soviet Union, warned Chernenko, was prepared for the “buildup in military confrontation.” Except for a shortness of breath, probably the result of chronic emphysema, the Soviet leader seemed fit during his meeting with Genscher.

West German diplomats were struck by Gromyko’s assertiveness. During the meeting with Genscher, the Soviet Foreign Minister often interrupted Chernenko to clarify a point. Gromyko’s criticism of the Reagan Administration became so venomous that Genscher felt compelled to depart from the text of his luncheon address and reject the “unjust and undeserved reproaches to our American friends.” Gromyko’s behavior seemed to support the view of many analysts that under Chernenko, who has limited experience in international affairs, Gromyko enjoys unprecedented influence over Soviet foreign policy. “You must remember that Gromyko was trained in the Stalinist techniques of threatening and stonewalling,” says an American who has dealt frequently with the Foreign Minister. “But for a quarter-century he has been tempered by his superiors.”

Meanwhile, as Sakharov marked his 63rd birthday last week, there were benefit concerts, protest rallies and impassioned editorials on his behalf, as well as a flood of personal appeals to the Kremlin. In Paris, 2,000 demonstrators massed in front of the Soviet embassy, chanting “Free Sakharov!” The Italian Communist Party expressed dismay in a front-page editorial in the official daily L’Unita. West Germany’s anti-NATO Green Party dispatched a telegram to Chernenko protesting “the inhumane treatment” of Sakharov.

But the Soviet dissident’s whereabouts, and the state of his health, were cloaked in mystery. Two weeks ago, Bonner had sent a telegram to relatives in Moscow informing them that Sakharov had been taken from their apartment in Gorky, the industrial city to which he was exiled in 1980. French Communist Party Chief Georges Marchais said that sources “at the highest level” had implied to him that Sakharov, who has a history of heart disease, was in “satisfactory” health and under regular observation at a Gorky clinic. Later the Soviet Ambassador to France told Socialist Party Leader Lionel Jospin that Bonner and Sakharov were well and in their Gorky apartment. Neither account persuaded Tatyana Yankelevich, Bonner’s daughter by her first marriage. Said she: “We can not exclude the possibility that Sakharov is no longer alive.”

Bonner came under savage attack last week in Izvestia. The government daily accused Bonner of pushing her husband into anti-Soviet activities. The commentary described her as a “shallow,resentful and greedy person” whose primary goal was to flee to the West “even if it meant over her husband’s dead body.” Izvestia also repeated allegations that the U.S. embassy in Moscow had involved Sakharov’s wife in a “provocative operation.”

TIME has learned that among the documents that Bonner gave U.S. officials during a meeting in Moscow in April was a third message from Sakharov requesting temporary refuge for his wife in the embassy. The dissident physicist apparently feared that the KGB would take actions against Bonner if he went on a hunger strike. He also wanted her to have access to American medical care.

There were other signs last week that the Soviet leadership was intent on tightening internal control. The Communist Party daily, Pravda, published a selection of letters that it had received in response to a story last October calling for a ban on Western rock music, blue jeans and T shirts emblazoned with everything from advertising logos to American flags. Most readers shared the feelings of one letter writer who urged that “we must not let the Stars and Stripes into our life at this time.”

Late in the week Pravda charged that there was a worldwide conspiracy by Christian, Muslim and Jewish extremists to undermine Communism by promoting the practice of religion. The campaign to check “dangerous” foreign influences could mean only one thing—the Kremlin was battening down the hatches in anticipation of stormy seas.

— By John Kohan.Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof /Moscow and Douglas Brew/Washington

*Cuba and North Korea, not unexpectedly, last week joined the boycott. But Rumania broke ranks with the Warsaw Pact and said that it would send its athletes to Los Angeles.