October 25--There can no longer be any doubt that the Soviet leadership is engaged in a massive effort to reorient its world relationships. This effort arises in consequence of the growing crisis generated by the bourgeois character of the social reforms which the Gorbachev administration has been so vigorously pushing, and which are daily proving impractical and unable to improve the daily life of the working masses.There is, of course, nothing wrong with the Soviet Union reviewing its foreign policy and attempting a reorientation. The question always is, in what direction? And to what concrete ends?
General statements, especially when phrased in the lofty language of "human values" and the "universalization of contemporary life," shed very little light. Such phrases, more and more indulged in by the Soviet foreign policy establishment, do more to obscure than to enlighten.
Shevardnadze on Afghanistan
We must therefore look elsewhere for a clue as to where the USSR leadership is headed, both at home and abroad. It is in this connection that the speech made by Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze to the Supreme Soviet on Oct. 23 is exceptionally illuminating.
We regret that at this early date we are obliged to write about it without having at hand the full text of his speech. It is necessary to comment, however, because the imperialist press has given it wide coverage, showering it with effusive praise. From the excerpts available, we are able to cull out three vital points made by the Soviet foreign minister in his address. They have to do with Afghanistan, the Krasnoyarsk radar station, and Eastern Europe.
Shevardnadze said about Soviet military assistance to Afghanistan that the USSR had "set ourselves against all of humanity, violated norms of behavior, ignored universal human values ... . At the time I am speaking about, M.S. Gorbachev and I were candidate [non-voting] members of the Politburo. I found out about what had happened from radio and newspaper reports. A decision that had very serious consequences for our country was made behind the back of the party and the people." (New York Times, Oct. 25.)
It's hard to imagine a more damaging blow to the position of the USSR as a stronghold of anti-imperialist struggle and as a defender of friends and allies in the socialist camp than this indictment by Shevardnadze of the previous administration for initiating what he clearly implies was an illegal and immoral adventure.
This in the tenth year of a bloody war, the end of which is not yet in sight!
The only result of his remarks will be to strengthen the imperialist resolve and weaken the position of the USSR. This ingratiating terminology will not change U.S. foreign policy one iota.
As the so-called "liberal" former CIA director from the Carter administration, Admiral Stansfield Turner, put it when asked, after the U.S. had shot down a civilian Iranian airliner with great loss of life, what the U.S. ought to do next in light of this tragic development, the answer was, "Hit 'em when they're down." And this from the so-called liberal wing of the Pentagon.
So what good does it do to indict the previous leadership for its policy of extending military aid to the besieged Afghan revolutionary government?
Was it correct in principle, from the viewpoint of the anti-imperialist struggle, to extend aid to the Afghan government? Yes or no? Even if the decision was a mistake, wasn't it purely from the point of view of wrongly assessing the situation surrounding the Afghan Revolution? And even if it was an adventurous act, shouldn't this be first discussed internally in the party and then the results of the discussion be brought to the public? This has not been done.
To say that in 1979 the decision was taken behind the back of the party and the people, as he puts it, is an indictment of the so-called small group that made the decision. This group, according to other Soviet accounts, was made up of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, KGB head Yuri V. Andropov, Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko, Defense Minister Dmitri F. Ustinov, Prime Minister Aleksei N. Kosygin, and ideology chief Mikhail A. Suslov. Were any of these leaders, all having long experience in dealing with foreign policy and/or military matters, likely candidates for rash or adventurous action abroad?
1979: "Committee on the Present Danger"
What was the external situation, the so-called geopolitical considerations, at that time? The SALT II treaty had just been signed, with hopes that the U.S. Senate would soon ratify it, but this proved entirely unfounded. Instead, dozens of U.S. generals and admirals, many of them retired, took the offensive to scuttle it. The sudden rise of the Committee on the Present Danger indicated that the Pentagon and the capitalist establishment as a whole were in no mood for serious arms limitations in the face of a new capitalist economic crisis.
Indeed, the Pentagon was searching for areas in which to engage the Soviet Union in order to divert the recent revolution in Iran into a confrontation with the East. One only has to remember the series of planted articles in the capitalist press at that time about the need to divert the fires of Moslem fundamentalism to the East, toward the Soviet Union. The imperialist press also looked for an affinity between the Moslem population in northern Iran and in Azerbaijan. They wrote scare stories about the proximity of the Soviet Union to the oil fields of Iran.
Then came the U.S.-sponsored insurgency, which endangered the Afghan Revolution and threatened to put a U.S. imperialist military base on the Soviet border. When the Soviet government received as many as 14 separate calls for aid from Kabul, weren't these the considerations weighing heavily on the Soviet leaders, rather than some personal bent in the direction of adventurism?
Shevardnadze is attempting to throw the onus for the decision on the old leadership, all of whom are now dead and for whom no one dares stand up (which in itself is an indication of the character of the democracy under Gorbachev). But this will in no way ameliorate U.S. foreign policy. On the contrary, it will only embolden them.
Why raise Krasnoyarsk?
Even more so with the so-called confession about the Krasnoyarsk radar station, which Shevardnadze now says was "built on the wrong site" and represented "a violation of the ABM Treaty." This is a totally inexplicable red herring, thrown in to discredit the deceased Defense Minister Ustinov, who was the main figure in what might be called the military-industrial complex at the time.
It's all the more gratuitous because a U.S. congressional delegation composed of Rep. Thomas J. Downey (D-NY), Jim Moody (D-Wis.), and Bob Carr (D-Mich.) visited Krasnoyarsk and said in September 1987: "We judge it to be not a violation of the ABM treaty at this time." Furthermore, the Soviet Union has already agreed to dismantle it. So what's the point of bringing it up again after the U.S. had apparently lost interest? It can only be explained on the basis of trying to discredit the military people who participated in the decision.
Dismantling Krasnoyarsk is unquestionably connected with the need to cut down on military spending. But this is an utterly unprincipled way in which to bring up the issue.
Cuts in military spending and the deployment of military forces are not entirely new phenomena in the USSR. They occurred immediately after the Civil War, when many forces were demobilized, and again after the Second World War. Further cuts would have been made had the Pentagon not become so belligerent toward the Soviet Union after its success with dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nevertheless, cuts were made from 1945 to 1955, as well as during the Khrushchev period.
All this was done without having to indulge in bourgeois pacifism or deliberately fomenting an inner struggle over military spending. What is needed is a principled discussion of how to balance defense needs with civilian needs, how to convert military plants to civilian purposes, which is a considerable problem. Instead, the discussion is proceeding in the spirit of bourgeois pacifism.
There is also pressure to develop a professional army as against universal military service. The latter is the democratic way of meeting the defense needs of a socialist country. A professional army strengthens a military caste system.
Euphemism for counterrevolution in Eastern Europe
Finally, in regard to Eastern Europe, Shevardnadze said there must be "recognition of each country's absolute freedom of choice," and characterized the counterrevolutionary developments in both Hungary and Poland as the entry of "alternative forces" into the political arena.
The entire bourgeoisie, from Finland to Tokyo, are as clear as a bell in seeing that in both Poland and Hungary these are counterrevolutionary developments. But Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister, talks about "alternative forces."
It means that Gorbachev and his cohorts are deliberately disengaging themselves from their most intimate allies and throwing them to the wolves. Wasn't this the upshot of Gorbachev's appearance at the 40th anniversary of the German Democratic Republic?
Is there any method to this madness? Is it really possible that the bourgeois forces led by Solidarity, which Jaruzelski and the Polish party called an outright counterrevolution only a few years ago, are now to be embraced as friendly allies?
All this leads to one conclusion. The projected reorientation of the USSR's world relations is in the direction of a new form of accommodation with U.S. imperialism at the expense of the anti-imperialist movement and its socialist allies.
The "condominium" theory
This view is borrowed from one of the cherished bourgeois theories of Henry Kissinger and his think tank. This projects the formation of a new axis in the world struggle for supremacy. These bourgeois theorists see a new and greater threat to U.S. hegemony than the U.S.-Soviet world struggle: the emergence of Japanese imperialism as the principal creditor nation in the world and as the financial, commercial and technological rival of the U.S. A secondary challenger to U.S. ambitions is the emergence of a so-called united European capitalist community.
It is assumed by these geopoliticians that as the strength of Japanese finance capital grows, as well as that of the European Economic Community, the difficulties of U.S. imperialism could become insurmountable unless they find a new axis of struggle against the Europeans and the Japanese. What better than a "condominium" of the two "superpowers," who together would be able to subordinate the growing might of the Euro-Asian bloc! Such is the vision of the Kissingers, the Eagleburgers, and some of the so-called soft-liners in the Bush administration.
It would be the height of naivet� for Gorbachev, Shevardnadze and their new crop of advisers to fall for this malarkey. What appeals to them, however, is the thought that if the Soviet Union can relieve itself of its fraternal, revolutionary responsibilities to the anti-imperialist movement and disengage itself from its East European fraternal allies, then a U.S.-USSR condominium could become an established fact of world politics.
There is one big problem
What stands in the way of this alluring fantasy? It is the impossibility of liquidating the class antagonism between imperialism and the USSR. The two social systems, notwithstanding the erosion that has enveloped the USSR as a result of the bourgeois economic reforms brought in by the Gorbachev grouping, are from a class point of view utterly irreconcilable. And none of the serious bourgeois thinkers forget it for a moment. None of the honeyed phrases that flow from the bourgeois press in praise of the Gorbachev administration can cover up this yawning abyss.
The illusions being fostered in the USSR are based not just on this phantasmagoria but on the wishful thinking that the U.S. capitalist government is going to open up its treasury as well as its technological warehouse and say to the USSR, "Here it is! We'll give you what you need!"
This is 90% fraud and 10% wishful thinking on both sides. What Shevardnadze should have done in his speech to the Supreme Soviet, instead of delving into past factional struggles in order to envenom the present ones, was to explain to the Supreme Soviet the details of his conversations with Secretary of State James Baker in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. That would have been illuminating. But alas! Such information is confined to a very small group, to which the party and the Supreme Soviet are not privy.
He also should explain the extraordinary visit to Moscow of Alan Greenspan, head of the U.S. Federal Reserve system, which is much more significant than a junket by some secondary statesman from the imperialist countries.
What was the content of those conversations? Is it really necessary to get the advice of a U.S. central banker on reforming the Soviet banking system? This is a hopeless utopia. How can the imperialist countries help solve the economic problems in the Soviet Union when they result from trying to foist capitalist market and property forms on a basically centralized, socialist system which is being eroded day by day?
The two are incompatible and irreconcilable. One or the other will achieve supremacy in the end. There cannot be any resolution of this problem on the basis of patchwork and compromise.
It is now almost five years into the Gorbachev administration, and it has been shown that his reforms are unworkable. There is a burning and imperative need to return to socialist construction, and this in turn calls for reliance on the working class, the only class in Soviet society which is consistently for socialism. Together with the collective peasantry, it is invincible.