Notes
uppose you are a nob in the Kremlin
and you have just got rid of Nikolai Ogarkov, your Chief of Staff and Deputy Defence Minister, for reasons best known to yourself, what do you do next? You attempt the justify his dismissal, of course, by identifying the calamitous tendency of which he was such an outstanding express- ion. You then get on the phone to the editor of Pravda and tell him you would like to place a piece in a forthcoming issue about a peculiarly nauseating deviation from Marxist-Leninist principles that has Just come to light. But hang on a moment! Who reads Pravda? Nobody except for a few eager young men in the US State Department anxious to discover what lies behind the inscrutable facade of the Soviet Union. So perhaps it might not be a bad idea to use the opportunity to drop a few hints about your foreign policy objectives thus enabling the American government to orient itself in advance to your require- ments and to respond swiftly to any of your Initiatives. Just a moment! What are your foreign policy objectives?' Ah yes of course, to sow dissension within the West- ern camp and to thwart every attempt by the US to increase its influence in the World. So you probably have at your fingertips a precise analysis of recent US actions as well as up-to-the-minute hypoth- eses to explain any shifts in the nuance of Policy. This is strange! There does not seem to be any policy except for building !IP their defences and ignoring us unless it i is absolutely impossible to do so — and in an election year it is absolutely impossible. So what will you want to suggest in your article? Are you going to come out with that old chestnut about Ogarkov, an hard- liner, having lost out to a responsible _leadership eager to open a dialogue with Washington? Or do you come out with the other one about his having wanted an arms Control agreement and his now having lost out to a self-confident group who believe that they can stay the course; and win an arms race? However, you are probably shrewd enough to want to save some Money if you can, so an arms control akgreement might be quite a useful thing to !aye, though you would be well advised not to be seen to be wanting it too badly.
Was Ogarkov for or against an arms i-ontrol agreement? Perhaps this is an
u rair question to ask anyone not schooled ' the subtle intricacies of life in the Kremlin.
Previous page
