16 MARCH 1985, Page 5

Notes

So he has come at last. The golden boy of Western Kremlinology, 'young', 'humorous', 'charismatic' Mikhail Gor- bachev is finally at the helm, and the World's media sing, like a Gilbert and Sullivan choir: '0 yes, he is the very model Of a modern Soviet leader.' Reading some of these reports, one might conclude that the only thing wrong with the Soviet Union in the last decade was that it had elderly, ailing leaders. The technological back- wardness of the Soviet economy, the cor- ruption of its governing class, the death of ideology, the permanent crisis in Eastern Europe, its failure to win the developing world, its alienation of the great rising Powers of the Far East, the Afghan morass — all, as it were, symptoms of emphysema. Yet the character of the leader is more important in the Soviet Union than in any Western country, just because it is a dictatorship. If you have a pyramid it matters very much who sits at the top. Both Stalin and Khruschev showed, in their different ways, how much one man can change. Now many Western analysts have argued that the entrenched polit- bureaucratic ruling class (the nomenkla- tura) will never allow a new leader to gain such power again, fearing for their own comfortable positions and privileges. But Gorbachev's chances are improved by the generational change. The Great Reaper will be his ally. As the septuagenarians fade away he should be in a position to replace them with men of his choice. We shall watch the forthcoming Party congress for such telling promotions. Moreover, the very gravity of the Soviet Union's structu- ral crisis should make it more obvious to More people in power that the Soviet Union must either reform or resign from any pretensions to that superpower parity With the United States which it appeared to enjoy in the mid-1970s. Yet there is abso- lutely no guarantee that members of the nomenklatura will put the long-term national interest before their own short- term individual interests. It is precisely in the suit where Mr Gorbachev is strongest — the economy — that the resistance of vested interest groups will be most intense. !Tow will the succession affect Soviet fore- ign policy? The conventional wisdom is that a would-be reformist Party leader, such as Mr Gorbachev is taken to be, must seek better relations with the West. He cannot hope to modernise the Soviet eco- nomy without access to the new informa- tion technology which, in Japan and the United States, is making a 'third industrial revolution'. He must be interested in arms control, so as to divert resources from the military to the civilian economy. Both

interests are combined in the fear of President Reagan's 'star wars' initiative and therefore, so the argument goes, we can expect him seriously to pursue agree- ment in the talks which opened in Geneva on Tuesday, as a prelude to a more general return to 'detente'. All this is quite plausi- ble and rational, but the rationale is not necessarily a Soviet one. To guard against illusions, we should recall three things. First, the Soviet Union, in returning to the negotiating table in Geneva, is also return- ing to the political game which it has been playing for years: that of trying to woo West European countries away from the United States, of sowing dissension in the Western Alliance. Anyone who has read the West German press will know that 'star wars' is an issue, which, like the NATO deployment of Cruise and Pershing mis- siles, could make an awful lot of trouble in Western Europe. We must assume that Mr Gorbachev knows this too. Second, even in the halcyon days of the mid-1970s, the Soviet Union always regarded 'détente' as eminently divisible. What applied to Europe did not apply to Africa or Afgha- nistan. In the rest of the world the Soviet Union reserved to itself, and will reserve to itself for the foreseeable future, the right to behave as it has always behaved: seizing power wherever the opportunity arises. Third, the power question remains the crucial question for Soviet leaders, as it has been since Lenin. Turning Marx on his head, the Soviet system has always man- ifested the absolute priority of politics over economics, of the superstructure over the base. Economic reform, disarmament, détente and the rest may appear to us 'urgent necessities' for the Soviet leaders, but if anything appears to them to threaten their physical and political control over their empire, or its military security — in a word, their power — they will not do it. Our reasoning may not be their reasoning, just as their interests are not our interests. If we are looking for immediate indica- tors of the way Mr Gorbachev may try to go, we could do worse than to turn towards Eastern Europe. For here, by contrast with the Soviet Union, there are powerful vested interests — indeed governments — which are palpably straining towards closer economic ties with the West, and a greater flexibility in their own economies. Here, unlike in the Soviet Union, Mr Gorbachev has only to let them get on with it, instead of trying to wrestle them back into the strait-jacket of Comecon and Warsaw Pact integration. But will he dare? This is something the Foreign Secretary should attempt to ascertain when he visits Eastern Europe next month.