How Russia gets away with it
David Levy
In a recent interview, Andrei Amalrik, a Russian dissident-in-exile who has in his time endured as much as that which Alexander Ginsburg and Anatoly Shcharansky are now enduring, or are about to endure, admitted that his original forecast of a Soviet collapse by the year 1984 (for which he Was imprisoned) was based on an overestimate of the West's strength, and that therefore the collapse would take place a little later. This -week, it would seem that strength of the West is being put to its greatest test so far, with our press once again expressing horror at the way Russia bludgeons its subjects for speaking out of turn (this is their fundamental sin, regardless of trumped-up charges), while our Politicians, forgetting that Russia is, after all, Russia, solemnly sermonise against its behaviour and warn that it will not get away With it.
Yet the Russians quite clearly think they d1 get away with this and much more, or else they would certainly not have baited us the way they have. While most Western comment debates why the Kremlin has put Shcharansky and Ginsburg on trial, in contempt of the Helsinki Agreement, a better question is being ignored: Why did Mr Brezhnev sign the Helsinki Final Act in the first place when all its provisions on individual human rights are, when read in Russian, just arrant nonsense?
The easy answer is that he had no choice. Having pushed so long for a major EuroPean security conference to guarantee in Perpetuity the Soviet Union's East EuroPean empire, he had to sign the Agreement, While intending, from the start, to ignore its more distasteful provisions whenever he felt like it. The storm of indignation that would surely follow such infringements Would somehow be absorbed, as it always has been in the past. But not so. One must not forget that Soviet policymakers come from a society of consummate chess players, strategists who leave nothing to chance and whose greatest Pride is to plan all moves well in advance. It IS also a society with such an innate sense of Propriety that to manufacture truth is not only a way of life but an art — an art at least in the sense that art's function is to improve upon Nature.
The Kremlin accepted the Helsinki Final Act not with the intention of violating its Provisions, but of getting around those provisions by legal devices. The clue lies in the journalistic connection. It is surely no accident, but rather an element in a master plan that the prelude to the Shcharansky and Ginsburg trials was the charging of two American correspondents with slander for what would qualify as routine reporting not only all over the world but even in the Soviet Union itself. There had to be a connection between the three events which bore a message: What the Helsinki Agreement bans, namely the expulsion of foreign journalists for what they write about the host country and the persecution of nationals for acting as sources for those journalists, the Kremlin will carry out by treating such persons as having violated Soviet law.
This message was first transmitted to the West with the expulsion in February 1977 of Associated Press reporter George Krimsky for alleged spying, this on the basis of his use of coded phrases on the telephone in planning meetings with local sources. Next came the more serious detention, interrogation and subsequent expulsion of the Los Angeles Times correspondent Robert Toth for allegedly being an outright CIA agent heavily involved in the gathering of classified information from such people as Shcharansky. The Toth case, indeed, has proved to be the genesis of the Shcharansky case, with one of the charges against Shcharansky being that he -gave scientific defence secrets to Toth.
That this is all of a piece, all part of a carefully worked out plan of several years' standing is typical of the way in which the Soviet system works. Nothing in Russia is allowed to happen spontaneously. Even railway and air disasters are hushed up, basically because they happen by accident.
By shifting into the department of espionage that which the Helsinki Agreement bans in the department of human rights, the Kremlin is moreover acting in an area in which the right of a country to act decisively is still held to be sacrosanct, untouched by Helsinki sanctions, and in which, even in Western courts, as Dr Owen admitted in Parliament on Monday, 'there is a different procedure', meaning that trials can legitimately be held in camera and justice need not be seen to be done. The Helsinki Final Act specifically disallowed the expulsion of foreign journalists for what they write, so, having agreed to abide by this, the Soviet Union now expels them for what they do as aliens in a foreign country and according to Russian tradition, what anyone does is what authority says he does. This is why all Soviet trials of the sort now under world scrutiny are, by definition, show trials, with acquittals out of the question.
In this sense Mr Callaghan was right when he talked of a return to Stalinist times. The consequences for Western journalists in Moscow are not pretty. The Helsinki Agreement's 'third basket' provisions on human rights and the treatment of foreign journalists, which stops the Russians from simply expelling journalists they don't like, has forced them to revert to still older methods under which citizens were shot or jailed for 25 years for merely associating with foreigners. Now, instead of treating journalists as journalists they have to treat them as spies.
Another question being asked is what will be the effect on world opinion of the Moscow show trials? Does Moscow not care? The answer seems to be that Soviet strategists care little about the opinions of politicians and journalists. Mass opinion and the effect on the masses and on Western businessmen concern them far more, and here they are probably quite right in assuming that the Western masses are either indifferent to what happens in Russia or represented by what Ronald Hingley has aptly called the 'Russia fanciers', those who are ultimately convinced that Russia is always right and its leaders always reasonable. As for Western businessmen, the Kremlin knows how dearly they would like this whole furore to go away. As indeed it will.
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