THE TSAR MIKHAIL
Timothy Garton Ash on the
Soviet leader's concern for traditional Russian interests
Geneva HE is extraordinary. Even through the television screen he positively nails you down with his immense self-confidence and the radiation waves of power. For more than an hour he harangues the world press like the owner of some huge metallurgical combine addressing the assembled work- force on the shop-floor. He speaks for the most part in short, straight, businesslike sentences. He emphasises a point by jab- bing with his forefinger, punching the air with his fist or gently karate-chopping the table. Otherwise he holds himself in stu- died immobility: the eyes steady and un- blinking behind metal-rimmed spectacles. He talks a lot about work. His most vivid metaphors are drawn from the world of industry. When you find a path is blocked as a miner or a geologist, he says, you call in a special brigade to try and unblock the path . . . . That's what we need in East- West relations today.
It's not that Mikhail Gorbachev is parti- cularly skilful in handling the Western press. His weapons are cudgels not rapiers. 'I'm trying to have a little less cotton wool in my speech,' he jokes at one point, but actually it still contains bags of the tradi- tional cotton wool of Soviet propaganda (partly, no doubt, because he knows that this press conference is to be broadcast live on Soviet television). A sample: he was, he says, very much impressed by the letters calling for peace that he received from all over the Soviet Union, from the United States, from Asia, from Africa, and even from Australia (I liked that 'even'), from men, from women, from children, from youth. . . . yes, especially from youth, be- cause it is youth that is most important, it is their future we are talking about, it is youth that blah blah (takes out onion and removes metal-rimmed spectacles). Well, talk about B-movie actors. No, he impress- es rather when he cuts the cotton wool. He impresses by the sheer blunt force and directness with which he will sometimes articulate the interests, the attitudes and the arrogance of a very powerful nation. He impresses when he talks like a Tsar. At one point he recalled Palmerston's famous remark that Britain has no eternal allies and no eternal enemies, only eternal in- terests. This, he said, he had quoted to Mrs Thatcher, asking her to recognise that other nations had such interests too. The eternal interests of imperial Russia. There speaks the Tsar.
In its present day form, one of those interests is clearly for Russia to be seen to be treated as an equal by what ig, in fact, the single most powerful nation in the world. (Soviet super-power is one- dimensional, American super-power is multi-dimensional — economic, political and cultural as well as military.) This Gorbachev triumphantly achieved in Geneva. In the symbolic politics, his wife and he matched up to the Reagans, smile for smile and jewel for jewel: a fact which will surely strengthen his position at home, even if Mrs Gorbachev continues to be a virtual non-person in the pages of Pravda. In his press conference he kept coming back to the point of superpower equality. We want equality, he said, we want 'equal security'. What exactly this means should be thrashed out between the Soviet and American experts who are 'the greatest authorities on these subjects in the world as a whole'. Asked if — in the absence of an agreement — the Soviet Union could compete technologically with the United States on 'Star Wars' he replied: 'We've always been able to respond.' He told us that he had said as much to President Reagan and also 'I said to the President: you surely realise you are not talking to simple folk . . . .' There speaks the old Russian inferiority complex.
He talks toughly and at enormous length about 'Star Wars' (although apparently in his fireside chats with Reagan he referred to it more courteously as `GDI'). This went some way to conceal the fact that having for months declared that the summit would have no point at all unless it produced an agreement to stop 'Star Wars', he was now coming away from Geneva with no such agreement, with only the vaguest commit- ment in their Joint Statement to 'prevent an arms race in space', and yet declaring it a success. He talks briefly but interestingly about regional issues. When countries like Mexico and Brazil have such enormous debts that they can't even pay the interest on them, let alone repay the capital, he declared, with blithe disregard for the national pride of those two countries, it is absurd to ascribe the resulting tensions to 'the hand of Moscow'. Enough of 'that sort of stupid remark' had been made before the Geneva meeting 'thanks to you, our journalistic friends!' He talked not at all about human rights.
In sum, he said, we are at 'a watershed in international relations', indeed 'a water- shed in history'. With a lot of work, it should now be possible to put international relations on a new footing. He spoke like a man who feels that he has decades in power ahead of him, and all Russia behind him. Monday's Politburo statement streng- thened this impression, but we will have to wait for the Party congress in February before we can say with confidence that he holds his power unchallenged, and what he really intends to do with it. What he has promised his own people so far has been well summed up as 'coercive modernisa- tion'. An improvement in living standards, yes, but only following an improvement in labour disciplines. The new Party program- me sets a target of doubling the country's 'production potential' by the year 2000, but links it to increasing labour productivity by '130-150 per cent' — in the same period. Western science and technology, yes, but not a pip or squeak of Western-style liberties. If the young Peter the Great worked incognito as a carpenter in the London shipyards, once could imagine the young Tsar Mikhail working incognito as an engineer in the Ruhr. But like Peter, he intends to modernise the autocracy, not to democratise it.
It is logical to suppose that he would like at least a breathing space in the arms race, to give him time to re-tool Russia. But the new basis for international relations that he seems to be offering is no less competitive than before. He explicitly declared: 'We are for active competition, for rivalry with the United States.' The nature of this competition is described in the first part of the new Party programme as 'the Struggle Between the Forces of Progress and Reac- tion in the Modern World'. In the West it is more pithily called 'cold war'. What Gor- bachev seems to want are new, clearer and more regular terms of engagement in this conflict; as it were, a Geneva Convention for cold war. Under these terms, we might have better security devices to prevent the cold war ever turning hot, and in various fields and regions the Soviet Union and the United States might sometimes agree that it is in their mutual interest to call a truce even in the cold war. And that is the best we can expect from Tsar Mikhail's Russia.
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