THE SOVIET WAY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP85T00153R000300070038-1
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 23, 2008
• Sequence Number: 38
• Publication Date: September 11, 1983
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Approved For Release 2008/01/23: CIA-RDP85T00153R000300070038-1 ft /1) /983
THE WASHINGTON POST, SUNDAY, SEPT]
The Soviet Way
From the beginning the Soviet approach in the Korean airliner crisis has been marked by a
distinctive national style, one remote from American ways. Here the character of the Kremlin's
public comments since the shooting down of the plane is analyzed by Robert Conquest, a leading
British student of Soviet affairs. Kevin Klose, formerly the Moscow correspondent for this
newspaper, discusses the nature of the Soviet Union's own state-run civilian airline, Aeroflot,
which has become the focus of much international attention.
Robert Conquest
Brutality and Deceit: So What's New?
The American public seems almost more sur-
prised by Andrei Gromyko's and Nikolai Ogar-
kov's clumsy falsifications over the airliner inci-
dent than by the actual killings themselves.
But this mix of brutality and deceit is and al-
ways has been a normal characteristic of the
Soviet regime. In fact, they are twin aspects of
the same thing. Boris Pasternak spoke of "the
inhuman reign of the lie," Alexander Solzhenit-
syn of the lie being the necessary vehicle of the
totalitarian tyrant.
Every few years the Soviet leaders do some-
thing that reveals them in their true light.
Kronstadt, the, slaughter of the peasantry, the
take Moscow '('vials, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Hun-
gary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan ... why do
these lessons never stick?
First, no doubt, because of the parochialism
we all suffer from unless we make a continual
and conscious effort to transcend it. We project
onto the Politburo our own ideas of what is
natural and normal for any human being. Even
if we see that they are not "good" people, we
think that they are "bad" people within our
own traditions of what constitutes reasonable
behavior for good and bad alike. Or we assume
that though deviant, their natural gravitation is
toward the values or attitudes we find natural.
Above all, it is alien to our political culture to
consider that there are rulers who really do not
mind killing people. A glance at the history of
Tamerlane or Genghis Khan should be enough
to remove that delusion. And the present Soviet
leaders began their careers at a time when the
regime was practicing massacre on a grand
scale. This month in Washington there will be a
commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the
Ukrainian holocaust. And it can now he shown
from modern Soviet statistical work that the
excess, unnatural deaths in the period 1926 to
1937, which saw the collectivization terror, was
not less than 14 million-with the Yezhov ter-
ror and its various sequels yet to come.
If parochialism is one barrier to our under-
standing of the U.S.S.R., optimism or self-de-
ception is another. A Soviet regime that was es-
sentially peaceful, or about to become
peaceful, would mean far less anxiety
about war. Tan Kahn of the AFL-
CIO argues in the current issue of the
social democratic New America that
in many well-meaning minds "the
view of the Soviet Union as a totali-
tarian expansive state is incompatible
with detente and curbing the arms
race," so that "if you would work for
peace you must reject" this view. The
truth lies elsewhere: the Soviet Union
is such a power, and a true peace can
only be sought with the realities borne
firmly in mind.
Third, there is (in the United
States, though the species scarcely ex-
ists in France or Britain) a powerful
caste of academics of whom it might
be said, in the words of "Waiting for
Lefty": "For all their education they
don't know from nothing"-political
"scientists" who treat the West and
the Soviet bloc as identical chess
pieces in an abstract international
game; who are learned in the "struc-
tore",of the Soviet regime but care
? nothing about the basic motivations
of its leadership. For to understand an
alien phenomenon requires, as George
Orwell put it, an effort not only of the
intellect but also the imagination. It is
a notable phenomenon that novelists
,,'like Orwell and Arthur Koestler un-
derstood Stalin's Russia better than
scholars like the Webbs or Sir Ber-
nard Pares.
President Carter said after the invasion of Af-
ghanistan that it had made him change his views
of the Soviet leadership. But why did he have er-
roneous views in the first place? Because he was
misled by well-meaning advisers, from Averell
Harriman to Marshall Shulman-who neverthe-
less continued even after that debacle to be seen
as respected experts in the field by those who
seek reassurance in the view that a wolf that occa-
sionally puts on sheep's clothing is a sheep.
But reliance on such estimates is made worse
by yet another factor-factiousness, internal divi-
sions, partisan habits of mind. In Susan Sontag's
formulation there are many here who would
rather be wrong with '['he Village Voice than right
with Reader's Digest, or at any rate wrong with
Harriman than right with Ronald Reagan.
"It is alien to our political
culture to consider that
there are rulers who really
do not mind killing
people. "
Sen. Charles Mathias, in an ill-timed article
in the current issue of the prestigious Foreign
Affairs, takes Reagan to task for his recent pro-
nouncements on Soviet motives, calling them
"black-and-white depictions of an adversary."
No doubt Reagan sometimes overstates or
overloads his case. But every single assertion
Mathias deplores is the merest fact: that "to
them negotiation is only another form of strug-
gle"; that "generosity in negotiation . . . runs
counter to the basic militancy of Marxist-
Leninist ideology"; that Lenin had laid down
that "the only morality they recognize is what
will further their cause-meaning that they re-
serve unto themselves the right to commit any
crime, to lie, to cheat in order to attain that,
and that is moral"; that "their cause ... is world
ONE Of OUR PILOTS, ACTING
ON ORDERS, DELIBERATELY SIIO1
THE PLANE DOWN CAUSING THE
DEATHS Of 269 INNOCENT
PEOPLE.
revolution"; that they "seek subversion and
conflict around the globe"; and so on.
But what exactly is Mathias complaining of?
Lenin did indeed say, often and publicly, that
`bur morality is completely subordinated to the
interests of the class struggle"; and equally pub-
licly, he urged communists to use any deceit nec-
essary (in this case to penetrate the Western
trade unions, but the principle is obviously a gen-
eral one). When Lenin was not writing for the
record he went further, as when he approved, as
"a beautiful plan," hanging class enemies and
blaming it on anti-communist peasants.
It is equally the case that the Politburo publicly
seeks a "socialist" world; and that by the term "so-
cialist" it excludes any regime, even a Dubeekite or
Maoist communist one, that does not follow the
Soviet model or submit to Soviet control. As for
negotiations being "another form of struggle," this
too is their normal doctrine: indeed, "detente" it-
self has been so defined from the start in scores of
pronouncements from Leonid Brezhnev down.
And they equally publicly seek "subversion and
conflict" defined as assistance to "proletarian turd
national liberation movements" (if only of ones
they control or hope to control).
The view of a prominent dissident is that the
Soviet leaders would not object even to a nuclear,
war on two conditions: that they themselves would
be safe, and that their power would remain intact.
At any rate, the best guarantee of peace is making
sure that these conditions are not attainable.
For the moment those who really understand
the U.S.S.R., as my friend Sen. Henry Jackson
did, are being listened to, and the voices of
delusion are silent. But in a year's time? Or two
years' time? Let us hope that this once we shall
see the lesson properly learned, at least by
enough citizens and formers of opinion to tip
the scale toward a permanent bipartisan policy
founded on fact.
Robert Conquest, British historian and
poet, is the author of many works on the
Soviet Union. Ile is a senior research fel-
lotu at the Hoover institution.
", No, W. I UNDERSTAND '1
WHAT NAPPENEO:
I MEAN EXPLAIN WAY
EVLRYO V IS SO UPSET
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