bout de papier, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1985) — Summer 1985 // Été 1985, p. 36
David Kilgour on BREAKING WITH
MOSCOW: Arkady N. Scheuchenko, 370
pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985
$26.95.
This is an important book, and perhaps especially so for those in and beyond Ottawa who prefer to see the world exclusively through North/South rather than East/West prisms.
The author abandoned a rewarding career in the Soviet foreign service (“a regime I knew well and had grown to hate”) in 1978 while serving as Under Secretary General of the United Nations. He opens his memoir by stressing that his purpose is not to complicate in any way efforts to promote peace. “The survival of mankind,” he goes on, “may depend upon temperate relations between the Soviet Union and the United States….. it is vitally important for the West to know as accurately and completely as possible the thinking and attitudes of those who make policy in the Kremlin”. The remainder of the work is devoted essentially to that objective.
We learn, for example, much about the 75-year-old Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, whom he had known from his student days and to whom he served as a personal advisor before going to the UN. Gromyko’s advance from humble rural beginnings, through the Moscow Institute of Economics, membership in the Party, and entry into the American Department of the Foreign Affairs Ministry is set out. Early prominence was assisted by Stalin’s wholesale purges of the first generation of revolutionary public servants but once he was sent to Washington as Ambassador in 1943 the way was steadily upward. Since 1946, asserts Shevchenko, Gromyko has remained a truly Talleyrand figure, being personally involved in every important aspect of East-West relations and serving all Kremlin leaders from Stalin to Gorbachev.
Since Gromyko’s elevation to the Politburo in 1973 under Leonid Brezhnev, moreover, he has been in reality a key maker of policy rather than its implementer.
“When I observed his performance at Politburo meetings in the early 1970s”, says Shevchenko, “it was even then difficult, if not impossible, for other to argue with him or challenge his views. Today I doubt that anyone except Defence Minister Ustinov would risk confronting him”. Gromyko more than any other Politburo member wants to reconstruct the détente of which he was earlier a major architect. Other Kremlin leaders worry that they will be left behind in an uncontrollable competition for more and more technologically-advanced strategic or space-based weaponry. They also understand “that bad relations with Washington have backfired in Western Europe, created strains among the Warsaw Pact countries, and given Peking a trump card to play against Moscow”. Better than anyone in Moscow, says the author, Gromyko knows that it’s in Moscow’s interest to re-establish normal relations with the West.
Mikhail Gorbachev is portrayed as intelligent, highly educated, well mannered, competent, and openminded. The author’s past conversations with the new Party Secretary General convinced him that Gorbachev and the entire new generation of Soviet leaders will probably be more thoughtful than Brezhnev – Andropov – Chernenko about the need to “overcome economic and social stagnation within the country – and most especially in this regard, that they will comprehend the necessity of a significant reallocation of resources from the military to the civilian sector; the present military buildup has created structural economic imbalances that effectively preclude the growth and development of industry, agriculture and technological innovation”
Vitaly Vorotnikov, 59, the recent visitor to Canada, is seen by Shevchenko as one of the new generation of leaders with a promising future. “He is a blend of Party apparatchik and government bureaucrat” he asserts, “with some diplomatic experience thrown in (He is a former Ambassador to Cuba)”.
The author, to be sure, entertains no false hopes and essentially agrees with a conclusion of Richard Pipes expressed in the fall 1984 edition of Foreign Affairs: “As long as the nomenklatura remains what it is, as long as the Soviet Union lives in a state of lawlessness, as long as the energies of its people are not allowed to express themselves creatively, as long there can be no security for anyone else in the world”. Shevchenko himself doubts that this group will disappear soon, and thinks it self-evident that the bosses in the Kremlin have for many years wanted only to preserve the status quo at home and to project power and influence abroad.
In 1979, during a period of détente, he reminds us that Moscow took a step unprecedented since World War Il when it used its own troops to invade a state outside the Soviet bloc: Afghanistan. The regime continues to violate systematically the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Final Act and a number of other international comments to which the USSR is a signatory in its treatment of its own citizens. A subcommittee of SCEAND recently concluded after hearing from bodies such as Amnesty International, the Council of Churches, and the Canadian Polish Congress that human rights violations in Eastern Europe have actually increased in recent years.
He concludes by urging the West to maintain dialogue with Moscow and to seek reasonable and practical accommodation where our interests are aligned in order to avoid cataclysm. In doing so, however, he warns that the West must never forget an old lesson: “What the men in the Kremlin understand best is military and economic might; energetic political conviction; strength of will. If the West cannot confront the Soviets with equal determination, Moscow will continue to play the bully around the globe.
From a Canadian standpoint, preventing war between East and West must obviously remain the first duty of our new national government. This will require in my judgement above all that the Free World become as cohesive and consistent as possible. One advantage the industrial democracies have here in terms of the Third World, as the book points out, is greater economic resources to help build those economies. Our own country and its diplomats are as uniquely well placed to lead in the East-West dialogue as in the North- South one.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1985) — Summer 1985 // Été 1985, p. 36. Read the rest of this issue →
