The Economic Decline and Soviet Foreign Policy

Chapter Two

The Economic Decline and Soviet Foreign Policy

At the heart of the historical debate about the Cold War lies one key question: is the way that conflict ran its course to be understood in realist terms—that is, as a process in which power considerations were of primary importance and in which ideological factors played a relatively minor role? Many writers, as William Wohlforth points out, “either dismiss or denounce explanations informed by realist theory,” but Wohlforth’s own view was very different. In a remarkable series of articles, he and his co-authors (most notably Randall Schweller and Stephen Brooks) argued that the final phase of the Cold War, at least, was to be understood in essentially realist terms—that it was a case, to use E. H. Carr’s phrase, of “rational and peaceful ‘adjustment to the changed relations of power.’”¹

From a realist perspective, relative power is in large part a function of relative economic strength, and the USSR’s economic decline, according to Wohlforth and his co-authors, was the main factor that led the Soviets during the period in the late 1980s when Mikhail Gorbachev was General Secretary to pursue the policy they did.² Their argument turned on certain claims about timing. For thirty years after World War II, the Soviet Union was “materially competitive” with the West, and until the mid-1970s the Soviet leadership had little cause for concern.³ At that point, however, “Soviet economic performance took a sudden turn for the worse.”⁴ But the Soviet leaders did not immediately realize how profound the problem was: “observers can only know that they are living through a ‘trend’ if the phenomenon has been under way for several years.”⁵ So it was only “in the early 1980s, just as the systemic decline of the Soviet Union became undeniable” that “Soviet policymakers at the highest levels began to agonize over relative decline” and the situation began to have a major impact on policy.⁶ Wohlforth in fact suggested that it was “in the 1982-83 period” that the new ideas about policy began to get through to the top leadership—that is, just before Gorbachev got the top job.⁷

That very important argument did not go unchallenged and the most cogent criticism focused on those claims about timing. As Mark Kramer pointed out in a 1999 article, Wohlforth had overlooked “the extent to which Soviet leaders perceived a sharp relative decline at the start of the 1980s,” well before Gorbachev came to power. Declassified Politburo transcripts as early as 1980, Kramer noted, were “full of apprehensive comments about the Soviet Union’s relative power.” Yet none of the Soviet leaders at that time, he says—neither Leonid Brezhnev (General Secretary from 1964 to 1982) nor Yuri Andropov (who served in that position from 1982 to 1984) nor Konstantin Chernenko (who served for about a year until his own death in 1985)—would ever have considered “any of the liberalizing steps that Gorbachev took.”⁸ The implication was that if economic factors were as important as Wohlforth had suggested, then one should have seen a relatively dovish policy emerge in the pre-Gorbachev period; since it was out of the question, in Kramer’s view, that Soviet policy at that time could have developed along those lines, the economic problem could not have played nearly as great a role as Wohlforth had claimed; it followed that other factors, especially ideology, were more important that Wohlforth had suggested.

Wohlforth responded by loosening his argument a bit. The break we associate with Gorbachev, he now pointed out, was perhaps not quite as sharp as was commonly assumed. “There was actually more pressure,” he and Brooks wrote in an article they published a year after the Kramer article came out, “to shift policy toward retrenchment before 1985 than standard accounts allow.” The growth in Soviet military spending had actually been capped in the pre-Gorbachev period, and “it was Brezhnev, Andropov, and Ideology Czar Mikhail Suslov who privately revoked the Brezhnev Doctrine in 1980-81 when they ruled out direct intervention in Poland as beyond Soviet capabilities.”⁹

That point about Poland was of fundamental importance because if true—that is, if the Soviets in the final analysis were prepared to accept the collapse of the Communist order in Poland at that time—that would mean that the decisive change in Soviet policy toward eastern Europe had taken place while Brezhnev was still in charge. Kramer, however, seemed to think that the Soviets before Gorbachev would never have accepted the loss of Poland. Indeed, he stated explicitly that Andropov would never have done what Gorbachev did with Soviet foreign policy. For Andropov, “the only important thing,” in Kramer’s view, “was to hold the socialist bloc together (and expand it if possible) under tight Soviet control.”¹⁰ What all this means is that the whole question of how powerful economic constraints were in shaping Soviet foreign policy turns to a considerable extent on this one fairly narrow historical issue: would the Soviets in the final analysis have intervened militarily in Poland in 1981 or 1982 if the Communists could be kept in power there in no other way?

And the important point to note here is that the evidence released in the 1990s—most of which Kramer had himself presented to the English-speaking world in a series of major articles—seems to show quite unambiguously that the Soviets in general, and Andropov in particular, were at the peak of the crisis unwilling to intervene even if the Polish Communists were unable to control the situation on their own. Andropov was astonishingly blunt in this regard. “We do not intend to introduce troops into Poland,” he said at the climactic Politburo session held on December 10, 1981. “That is the proper position, and we must adhere to it until the end. I don’t know how things will turn out in Poland, but even if Poland falls under the control of Solidarity [the main opposition group in Poland], that’s the way it will be.” The rest of the leadership, although reluctant to make the point as explicitly as Andropov had, evidently shared that view. “There cannot be any introduction of troops into Poland,” the foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, noted. And Suslov agreed: “there can be no consideration at all of introducing troops.” No one added: “except, of course, if that’s the only way Communist rule can be maintained.” No one even responded to Andropov’s remark about Solidarity by saying, in effect, that if the Communists were about to lose control in Poland, the basic decision about non-intervention would have to be reconsidered.¹¹

So could it be that the Soviets had in effect crossed the Rubicon well before Gorbachev came to power? Could it be, in other words, that the basic problem with the Wohlforth argument is that he had not taken it far enough? The Soviet economic problem, as was shown in the previous chapter, had been clear both to American specialists and to the Soviet leadership since the late 1960s.¹² Even the evidence that Wohlforth and his co-authors presented, if you read it carefully enough, indicates that Soviet economic performance had begun to deteriorate well before the mid-1970s.¹³ And if the seriousness of the problem had been clear for some time, wouldn’t that have had a real impact on Soviet foreign policy? Wouldn’t the Soviets have been more or less forced to adjust their policy to economic realities—forced, that is, to draw in their horns and pursue a relatively moderate, status quo-oriented, policy, not just in the 1980s, but well before that? That is what the basic thrust of the Wohlforth argument should lead us to expect. And suppose it turns out that Soviet policy during the Brezhnev period was a good deal more moderate than was widely assumed at the time, and suppose also that we conclude that the deepening economic problem had played a basic role in bringing about that sort of policy. Those conclusions would be of fundamental importance. We would have discovered a key, perhaps the key, to understanding why things ran their course the way they did not just in the late 1980s but in the whole period from the mid-1960s on.

Those basic conclusions would be of particular importance, given the way the Soviet foreign policy was commonly interpreted even in the 1980s—and the way it is still often interpreted. According to that view, the Soviet leadership, at least in the pre-Gorbachev period, was not interested in reaching a real accommodation with the West—a view shared even by writers who sensed that ideological fervor had declined dramatically. Indeed, the argument ran, a degree of aggressiveness was essentially built into the Soviet system. Imperialism, according to the Harvard political scientist Adam Ulam in 1978, perhaps the most distinguished scholar working in this area, was “a vital element of the rationale of the Soviet system.” With Communist doctrine discredited or irrelevant in the eyes of most of the Soviet people, “the regime strives to demonstrate its viability and vitality through foreign expansion.”¹⁴ According to Ulam, the Soviets were not interested in an accommodation with the United States, since “prolonged international tranquility eats at the foundations and rationale of any authoritarian system.”¹⁵ And Ulam was by no means the only writer to argue along those lines. “If the missionary ardor has vanished,” Walter Laqueur wrote in 1983, “the ecumenical ambitions persist, and the Soviet Union has not become a status quo power. The state-of-siege system is still needed to provide legitimacy for the ruling stratum.”¹⁶ The Harvard historian Richard Pipes, in a 1984 article, also recognized the decline of ideology. “Corrupted by privilege and peculation,” he wrote, the Soviet ruling class had “lost, since Stalin’s death, any sense of service or obligation, whether to the ideal of communism or to the nation.” But he went on to argue that imperialism was “endemic to the Soviet system in part because its ruling elite has no other justification for maintaining its power and privilege than to create the phantom of an ever-present external threat to the country’s survival, and in part because it seeks to compensate its citizens for deprivations at home by manifestations of its might abroad.”¹⁷ There was, in fact, nothing new to that line of argument. George Kennan, for example, had interpreted Soviet policy in internalist terms in his famous “X” article of 1947.¹⁸ Alexander Gerschenkron also thought the Soviets needed a certain level of international tension for domestic political reasons.¹⁹ And the theory, although never universally accepted, remained very much alive in policy circles throughout the Cold War period. In 1971, for example, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, then Henry Kissinger’s top assistant at the White House, wrote his chief that “for all the stultification of ideology, the Soviet state remains a revolutionary one” and could not be “brought into a rational system of world order.”²⁰

That theory provided an explanation for what was often portrayed as a simple empirical fact: Soviet aggressiveness in world affairs. Pipes, for example, referred in 1984 to the USSR’s “hitherto unbridled appetite for conquests.”²¹ Robert Conquest in 1975 spoke of the Soviets’ “total hostility to the West and all the West stands for.”²² That same year a number of former diplomats, journalists and academics who had “devoted their professional lives largely to work in and study of the Soviet Union,” met in Miami to discuss Soviet policy and in particular to talk about where things were headed. One is struck by how dark a view many of the participants took at those meetings. “The mass of Americans,” the veteran diplomat Elbridge Durbrow said, “think that peaceful coexistence means the Soviet want peace and stability. But the last thing they want is peace or real coexistence. No question about it.” Loy Henderson, who had also served for many years in the State Department, thought that “the Soviet Union’s main purpose at the present time is to become the most powerful country in the world”; it might not want a confrontation right now, but it would like to be able in a few years “to not hesitate any longer about confrontation,” hoping that America would “bow rather than risk a war we know we couldn’t win.”²³ And it was not just hard-liners who believed the USSR was not interested in true coexistence. In 1973 Marshall Shulman, then director of the Russian Institute at Columbia—during the Carter period he would become Secretary of State Vance’s advisor on Soviet affairs— wrote that the Soviet Union was “not a status quo power” (except in eastern Europe); it was insisting on “the intensification of the ideological struggle,” not just at home but abroad as well, “against an enemy identified as ‘American imperialism.’”²⁴ And Shulman was on the dovish end of the spectrum.

Many observers still argue along those lines. The “fundamental problem in dealing with the Soviet leaders before Gorbachev,” Jack Matlock, for example, wrote in 2010, was “the dogmatic view those Soviet leaders held of the world, and of their own policy.” They were “steeped in Marxist-Leninist thinking”; they saw the “bourgeois” world as “inevitably hostile”; Soviet security in their view “depended on imposing socialist governments on neighboring countries.” Matlock, who had served as U.S. ambassador in Moscow from 1987 to 1991, believed that the Soviet leadership before 1985 had not been able to escape from its own increasingly dysfunctional ideology, an ideology that “justified the totalitarian state the Soviet leaders headed.” “Soviet leaders before Gorbachev,” he wrote, “were locked mentally in a vicious ideological circle that prevented their perceiving that Soviet policies were not serving the real interests of the Soviet Union.”²⁵

That general view was linked to a particular interpretation of U.S.-Soviet relations in the 1970s. How were improved relations at the beginning of that decade to be explained? It was often taken for granted that basic Soviet policy had not changed. The core political issues that lay at the heart of the Cold War, the eminent international relations scholar Hans Morgenthau pointed out in 1971, had not been settled. The “improvement” was instead in good measure the result America’s “failure to compete with and oppose a Soviet Union steadily expanding its power throughout the world.” “What looks to the naïve and the wishful thinkers as a new harmonious phase in American-Soviet relations is in truth,” Morgenthau argued, “a by-product of our military involvement in Indochina. We have been too busy with trying to save Indochina from communism to pay much attention to what the U.S.S.R. was doing in the rest of the world and to compete with it or oppose it as our interests require.”²⁶ Détente for the Soviets, the argument ran, represented a shift in tactics; their fundamental goals remained unchanged. They were by no means interested in a real accommodation with the West. Their policy was still expansionist; their goal (according to a group of leading specialists writing in 1974) was to bring about a “decisive shift in the world balance of power in favour of the Soviet Union and its bloc,” which would enable the USSR “to attain further expansion without recourse to general war, largely by the use of methods of internal subversion and external intimidation.”²⁷

Given that the Soviets viewed détente in this way—given that they felt they could continue to promote revolution abroad and press forward with their own political agenda, and actually get the West to support them economically while they were doing so—it was scarcely surprising, many analysts argued, that the détente policy did not succeed: the policy collapsed when the West finally woke up and realized that détente had become a “one-way street.” William Hyland’s view was typical. Hyland, who had been one of Kissinger’s main assistants in the White House, summed up the problem this way in 1981: “The United States basically wanted to preserve the status quo, or at least regulate change in a measured fashion. It sought Soviet cooperation. The U.S.S.R., however, wanted to challenge if not assault the existing order whenever and wherever it was relatively safe to do so.”²⁸ Robert Gates, writing in 1996, took much the same view. Brezhnev, he wrote, had made it clear that détente meant “no change in Soviet support for ‘national liberation movements’ or any sacrifice of ideological principles. The Soviet leaders plainly believed they could achieve their goals—and deal with their nightmares—without paying a price.”²⁹ And William Odom, another key figure in the American national security establishment, went a bit further in an article he wrote in 1993. The concessions Nixon and Kissinger had made to the USSR, he wrote, had not had the desired effect: “the Soviet regime responded by more repression at home and more expansion abroad.”³⁰

That general historical interpretation has far-reaching implications. It relates directly to the question of what we are to make of the basic idea of a realist foreign policy of the sort Kissinger was supposed to have pursued. But is Soviet policy during the Brezhnev period really to be interpreted in those terms? The answer here turns in large part on how we deal with another issue, this one having to do with American policy: did the U.S. government during the Nixon-Kissinger period really “seek Soviet cooperation”? For if that were not the goal, that finding would have a major bearing on how Soviet policy during that period ought to be interpreted .

So what exactly were U.S. leaders trying to do during the détente period? Their rhetoric at the time suggested that the great goal was to build a relatively stable international system, and that to do that the American government would relate to the rest of the world in a more or less non-ideological terms, and that in particular it would try to balance between the USSR and China. Perhaps the rhetoric was a bit overblown, but it is commonly accepted that at its heart it is to be taken quite seriously: it revealed what Nixon and Kissinger were essentially trying to do.³¹ Even Raymond Garthoff, who rejects the whole notion that détente was a “one-way street,” and sees both America and the USSR “energetically pursu[ing] their own interests at the expense of the other throughout the period of ‘détente,’” thinks the public pronouncements, and in particular all the talk about balancing, have to be taken quite seriously. Garthoff, in fact, claimed quite explicitly that Kissinger “avoided aligning the United States with either the Soviet Union or China” and sought instead to balance between the two. Indeed, in his view, neither America nor Russia “intentionally duped” the other during the détente period; the policy, as he sees it, failed because expectations outstripped reality on both sides.³² But is that view essentially correct, and is U.S. détente policy in particular to be interpreted in those terms?

Some quite extraordinary evidence on this issue has been made available in recent years, and it now seems clear that all the talk about a new “global structure of peace” is not to be taken too seriously—indeed, that the realist rhetoric should be viewed essentially as window-dressing, one of whose functions was to prevent people from seeing that U.S. policy was based on a very different set of ideas. The American leadership during that period, in fact, was more interested in balancing against the USSR than in balancing between Russia and China. It sought, in particular, to enter into what amounted to a “tacit alliance” with China directed against the Soviet Union.³³ But it calculated that that policy could not be pursued too overtly. It was worried that the USSR might attack China while the Sino-American relationship was still being firmed up; a chief goal of the détente policy was to hold the Soviets back during that critical period.

Perhaps the most revealing document here is the record of a meeting Kissinger had with the French president, Georges Pompidou, in May 1973. The United States, Kissinger assured Pompidou, was by no means choosing “the Soviet Union over China.” America, he said, was in fact more interested in “playing China against the Soviet Union.” It was in America’s interest that the USSR not be permitted to “render China impotent,” since if that happened “Europe would become a Finland and the United States would be completely isolated.” But how could China be supported? It would take “several years to establish with China the links which make plausible the notion that an attack directed against China could be an attack on the fundamental interests of the United States.” His government was moving in that direction. It intended to “turn rapidly toward China in the space of two or three years.” But it was “important that this movement not serve as a pretext for a Soviet attack against China.” It was thus essential, he said, “that our policy be such that it does not seem to be directed against the Soviet Union” and that détente be “carried on in parallel with the Soviet Union.” That strategy “may be complex, but it is not stupid.” The aim was to “gain time, to paralyze the Soviet Union”—not to capitulate to them, but rather to “enmesh them.”³⁴ This, Kissinger recognized, was not an heroic strategy, but the U.S. government, he thought, needed to use such “complicated methods.” As he pointed out repeatedly, especially in meetings with the Chinese, the Americans needed to “maneuver” in that way, in large part because of the domestic political situation in both Europe and the United States.³⁵

Those comments, of course, were not for public consumption, but in the third volume of his memoirs, published in 1999, Kissinger lifted the veil a bit and portrayed his policy as more anti-Soviet than people had thought at the time. The right-wing charge that détente had been a “one-way street” he viewed as nonsense. The Soviets themselves had complained in 1974 that they were getting nothing from détente, and Kissinger himself did not dispute that assessment. He in fact viewed the early 1970s as “a period of considerable Soviet restraint,” and indeed, looking back, was “convinced that Brezhnev did want serious improvement in relations with the United States in the early 1970s.”³⁶ And U.S. policy, he now argued, was a lot tougher than the critics realized. He made the point by quoting a passage from the memoirs of Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador in Washington at the time. Neither Nixon nor Kissinger, Dobrynin had written, “proved able (or wanted) to break out of the orbit of the Cold War”; their policy was based essentially on military strength; their arms control efforts “disguised this policy of strength, but only slightly.” And Dobrynin’s assessment, Kissinger now wrote, was essentially correct: the ambassador had “understood our strategy far better than our neoconservative critics.” Détente, as Kissinger put it later in the book, was for the U.S. leadership “a method for conducting the Cold War.”³⁷

All this bears directly on the basic issue we are concerned with here, the question of how the USSR’s growing economic problem affected the way it dealt with the world as a whole. One might be tempted to suppose that the Soviets were bound, because of that problem, to pursue a more moderate foreign policy; but if that view is correct, how then are we to explain what the Soviets were doing in the mid- and late 1970s, in places like Angola, Ethiopia, and especially Afghanistan? Those findings about U.S. policy during the Nixon-Kissinger period are important because they suggest one possible answer to that question. They suggest that what the Soviets were doing in those areas is not to be viewed as evidence of a deep-seated aggressiveness on their part, but rather has to be understood in the light of what we now know American policy to have been. For if the Americans were not really prepared to develop a cooperative relationship with the USSR, why should the Soviets go out of their way to accommodate the United States? Given America’s real policy, what did the Soviets have to lose in terms of their relationship with the United States by dealing, for example, with the Afghan situation the way they did?³⁸ A cooperative relationship, after all, is sustained by the implicit threat that defection will be met by counter-defection—that if you don’t cooperate with me, you can’t expect me to cooperate with you. And perhaps the sanction is even stronger: that if I enter into an arrangement in good faith, and that arrangement has turns out to be a sham, then maybe you need to be punished for taking advantage of me in that way.³⁹ Is this the key to understanding Soviet policy in the Third World in the mid- and late 1970s?

To be sure, this is just a theory. It is just one of the possible mechanisms we need to bear in mind when we look at Soviet policy in the 1970s and early 1980s. And it is that larger issue that is the focus of the analysis here. Our goal is to try to understand what Soviet foreign policy was during that period—how seriously the Soviets took their own rhetoric, how their basic policies changed over time, and how important economic factors were in this whole story. And we can get some insight into these issues by looking at Soviet foreign policy—first in the Third World and then in Europe—in the light of the remarkable (albeit still quite limited) body of evidence that has become available since 1991.
Soviet Policy toward the Third World

The Soviet regime, it was often said at the time, had given up very little in pursuing a détente policy. Its leaders felt they could have it both ways. They could have better relations (including improved economic relations) with the West, but their policy toward the Third World would not have to undergo the slightest change. Indeed, as was frequently pointed out, Soviet leaders did not even bother to conceal the fact that they still supported revolution in the Third World. The détente policy, as they themselves had repeatedly made clear, had changed nothing in that regard. After all, didn’t they openly “admit” that the goal of the policy was simply to avoid war with the West—that it did not mean that the “international class struggle” was being abandoned or that the USSR would no longer support “wars of national liberation” in the Third World?⁴⁰ The problem here, however, as the very distinguished scholar Alexander Dallin once pointed out, was that mere “verbal formulations” of this sort are not necessarily to be taken at face value. It is not, of course, that the rhetoric was meaningless; it can tell us something, especially when it shifts over time. But it is certainly a mistake to just assume that “aggressive Soviet rhetoric” was “a clue to behavior—not a substitute for it or an alibi for inaction.”⁴¹

We thus need to take a look at what the Soviets were actually doing in the Third World. How much of an effort were they making to promote revolution in Asia, in Africa, and in Latin America? Was Soviet policy becoming more moderate and less ideological? And to what extent did economic factors play a key role in shaping Soviet policy in that part of the world?

For years the basic picture that scholars painted has been mixed. It has long been clear that while the Soviets certainly did support certain “progressive” movements in the Third World, in many respects they did not take a particularly militant line. They supported India in her conflict with Communist China, and scarcely batted an eyelash when the Indonesian Communists were exterminated in 1965 or when the leftist Allende government was overthrown in Chile in 1972.⁴² But the evidence that has become available since 1991 supports that general view in some quite striking ways.

With regard to Vietnam, for example, Soviet policy was surprisingly moderate. The Soviets, of course, opposed the U.S. policy in that area and gave a certain amount of assistance to the Communist side in the war, but, as Ilya Gaiduk, the leading student of Soviet policy in this area, has written, the USSR’s “principal goal was the political settlement of the conflict, and the sooner the better”; the assistance provided to North Vietnam was in large part designed, according to Gaiduk, to give the Soviets a certain degree of influence over the Communist government there, which would enable them to press for a negotiated settlement of the war.⁴³ “Putting an end to the Vietnam conflict,” Gromyko told the Politburo in 1967, “would undoubtedly have a positive effect on Soviet-American relations and open up new possibilities for solving certain international problems.”⁴⁴ In 1972, the Soviets were unwilling to allow what the United States was doing in Vietnam to affect their relations with America: after the bombing of Hanoi that year, some Soviet leaders, like Prime Minister Kosygin, thought the USSR should register its disapproval by canceling the visit President Richard Nixon was about to make to Moscow, but Brezhnev and Gromyko were appalled by the idea and rejected it out of hand.⁴⁵

In the Middle East, the story was much the same. The Soviets, certainly from 1973 on, were unwilling to back the Arabs to the hilt. When U.S. nuclear forces were put on alert during the 1973 war, the Soviet reaction was quite mild. And after the war, Soviet leaders seemed seriously interested in working with America to bring peace to the region. The USSR, Brezhnev said, would “participate in guaranteeing the borders,” including Israel’s—this he thought was the heart of the problem—and if the Arabs got upset by that, then they could “go to hell!”⁴⁶

The problem was that the Americans were unwilling to collaborate with the USSR in this area and instead sought to eliminate Soviet influence from the region. The Soviets, as Nixon’s national security advisor Henry Kissinger admitted privately in 1974, were thus “getting nothing out of détente.” The United States was “pushing them everywhere.” The Soviets, he recognized, had “tried to be fairly reasonable all across the board.” You could not find a single place, he said, “where they have really tried to make serious trouble for us. Even in the Middle East where our political strategy put them in an awful bind, they haven’t really tried to screw us.”⁴⁷ “If I were in the Politburo,” he said on March 11, “I could make a case against Brezhnev for détente—more so than against us.” Brezhnev, he remarked about a month later, was “a political idiot and has given us all sorts of gains.”⁴⁸

Kissinger made the same sort of argument in a meeting with his top assistants on August 1. Critics of the détente policy like Eugene Rostow, he thought, were dead wrong for blaming the Soviets for the recent mideast war. Indeed, according to Kissinger, Soviet policy in general was relatively restrained; “during the last two years” the problems in America’s relationship with them, he admitted, had “mostly been our fault.” “What have they done that’s so bad?” he asked. Even in the Middle East “they were relatively restrained considering they were being kicked around by both Egypt and Syria.” As for Rostow’s argument “that the Soviets started the Middle East war to destroy US influence in the region,” that claim, in his view, was “absolutely preposterous.”⁴⁹

So it really does seem that the claim that in pursuing the détente policy the Soviets had given up nothing and were as aggressive as ever is not supported by the evidence. Soviet policy in the early 1970s comes across nowadays as quite moderate. In the second half of the decade, however, the picture is rather different; everyone knows about the more assertive Soviet policy in the Third World during this period. But the old picture of Soviet aggressiveness it now seems has to be modified in certain ways. “Soviet involvement in Angola in 1975,” as Vladislav Zubok writes in his important book A Failed Empire, “lacked any clear strategic plan or goal.”⁵⁰ Brezhnev himself had opposed the idea.⁵¹ But the Soviets were drawn in, one step at a time. “We were caught in a web in Angola,” Karen Brutents, at the time a senior Soviet official involved with these issues, later recalled; “my opinion is that there was no strategy in Africa.”⁵² The Soviet leadership, in fact, did not seem to care much about Africa at all and did not really take these African questions too seriously. (According to one former diplomat, at one point Gromyko was reading a cable about some African issue, and he turned to the deputy foreign minister responsible for Africa and asked, “Lusaka, where is that?” The deputy foreign minister replied, “I believe it is in Africa.”⁵³) But the Soviets believed they had a general responsibility to support “progressive” movements in the Third World, and when the Cubans sent combat troops to Angola in late 1975, the Soviets felt they pretty much had to step up the level of assistance being provided. The Cubans had made the decision to send troops on their own: that decision, according to O.A. Westad, was made “without Moscow’s agreement or knowledge.”⁵⁴ Brezhnev, Westad points out, “flatly refused to transport the Cuban troops or to send Soviet officers to serve with the Cubans in Angola,” and the “Soviet General Staff opposed any participation in the Cuban operation.”⁵⁵ Indeed, according to Georgy Kornienko, a former Soviet foreign ministry official, when the Soviet government found out “at the last moment” that the Cubans were going to send combat troops, they sent a telegram to Havana “trying to stop it,” but it was too late—the planes were already in the air.⁵⁶ But once the Cubans had moved in, the Soviet leadership felt it had to support them. “We could not let them die there, be killed there,” Kornienko recalled, “without helping them, sending our weapons.”⁵⁷ Brutents saw things the same way. “When the Cubans were in place,” he pointed out, the USSR’s room for maneuver had become “very narrow.” “And so step by step,” without any long-term plan—indeed, “without any strategy”—the Soviet involvement in Angola began.⁵⁸ Anatoly Dobrynin, who comes across as an honest, perceptive, and exceptionally well-informed observer, took much the same view:

Now, when something occurred that to us represented a kind of revolution—well, we always tried to be helpful to "progressive" revolutions, as we called them. If some government or movement said adamantly "we are trying to throw off the imperialist-capitalist devils, please give us some arms"—well then, you know, we would send in some things. Then we would get little-by-little involved in these kinds of situations, but without really thinking about any connections they might have with our relations with the United States. I think that if you would have asked Brezhnev or Gromyko at the time: “are you worried about how Angola will undermine the SALT II treaty?”—they would have looked at you in amazement. Sincerely! They would have told you that there is no connection—no connection whatever—between Angola and SALT, between Ethiopia and SALT, etc., etc. I know this. I know it for a fact.

One gets much the same general impression when one reads the new literature about the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. It now seems that the decision to invade that country (and indeed to overthrow a Communist government there) was not the act of a determined, expansionist power, but instead needs to be understood in less aggressive terms. That decision, one astute observer concluded, “was certainly a grave error of policy. But it was not irrational, and by the time the final decisions were taken in December 1979 it had become all but inevitable.” The Soviets intervened reluctantly, and against the advice of top military officers, in order to prevent the “loss” of Afghanistan; indeed, at the very end, they were worried that if Afghanistan were lost, “the vacuum would be filled by the Americans.”⁶⁰

Finally, what can one say about Soviet policy toward Latin America? It now seems that Soviet goals in that area were more limited than many Americans feared at the time. During the détente period in the early 1970s, the Soviets, in fact, seemed to take a very moderate line. “Andropov, like the Soviet leadership in general,” Christopher Andrew writes, “was anxious not to provoke the Nixon administration by too ostentatious a challenge to American influence in Latin America—all the more so because the United States seemed tacitly to accept that the Soviet Union was free to act as it wished within its own sphere of influence in eastern and central Europe.” Andrew then goes on to quote from a memorandum Andropov wrote in 1972: “Latin America is a sphere of special US interests. The US has permitted us to act in Poland and Czechoslovakia. We must remember this. Our policy in Latin America must be cautious.”⁶¹

And cautious it was, at least until about 1979. “Up to that point,” as one expert in this area notes, “the Soviets had refrained from support for revolutionary groups” and even insisted that Castro abandon that strategy.⁶² That pressure was successful, and the Soviets were pleased (as one document from around 1974 put it) that Castro had now “disclaim[ed] the policy of exporting the revolution.”⁶³ The Soviets instead preferred to work through established Communist parties, and indeed through established Latin American governments, provided that they were anti-American enough. The point was later recognized Nikolai Leonov, the KGB’s most important Latin American expert. “Reasonable patriotic centre-left forces in Latin America,” he noted, “always found strong support in the USSR.” The Kremlin, on the other hand, disliked the revolutionaries on the extreme left, which “were always sidelined.”⁶⁴ Indeed, according to one writer, the “Bolivian Communist party even contributed to the destruction of Che Guevara’s quixotic guerilla band.”⁶⁵

In 1979, however, after the Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua, the Soviets took a new look at the whole issue of “armed struggle.” Some Soviet statements from this period suggested that the USSR was prepared to back the revolutionary cause in the Caribbean area more forcefully, and indeed the Soviets provided a certain amount of military aid not just to the Sandinistas but to the guerrillas in El Salvador as well.⁶⁶ But by 1981-82 the whole thrust of Soviet policy had changed. “Almost as soon as they had spoken the words ‘armed struggle,’” Wayne Smith writes, “the Soviets had second thoughts,” and from 1982 on, “the prevailing view among Soviet analysts and area specialists was most definitely one of extreme skepticism concerning the efficacy of armed struggle.”⁶⁷ Indeed, the Soviet government made it clear to the Americans in 1981 that they would take no action if the United States moved against Cuba—that “Cuban activities in the Western hemisphere were a matter between the United States and Cuba.”⁶⁸

The same basic point applies to Grenada. A Marxist party had seized power there in 1979 and was eager to ingratiate itself with the USSR. But as Grenadian diplomats in Moscow put it in 1982, the Soviet leadership was “dealing with us cautiously and sometimes skeptically”; “the core of the matter” was that the Soviets regarded “Grenada as a small distant country” and were “only prepared to make commitments to the extent of their capacity to fulfill, and if necessary, defend their commitment.”⁶⁹ This is a far cry from the claim that was sometimes made at the time that “Grenada was being readied as a pawn, like Cuba before it, in the struggle for world hegemony.”⁷⁰ The Grenada documents, in fact, confirm the general idea that in the early 1980s Soviet policy in this area was relatively moderate—that the Soviets had opted for a Latin American policy “that was decidedly less than adverturist” well before Gorbachev came to power in 1985.⁷¹

Indeed, the standard view today in the scholarly literature is that with regard to the Third World in general, the Soviets by the early 1980s had shifted course and were no longer so interested in promoting revolution in the “less developed countries.” That shift in policy did not go unnoticed at the time. Stephen Sestanovich, then working at the National Security Council, “had noticed new and rather interesting discussions of the Third World appearing repeatedly in statements and speeches by Soviet leaders since around the time of Leonid Brezhnev’s death” in 1982, “which indicated that policy in this area, as in others, appeared to be under review in high Kremlin circles.” He “eventually published these observations” in an important article in the Washington Post in May 1984. There was “strong evidence,” Sestanovich wrote, “that a major foreign policy reassessment is underway.” He went on to cite a speech Andropov had given in June 1983 to the Central Committee, in which the dying General Secretary spoke of the need, in the light of “the threat of a nuclear war,” to “reappraise the principal goals . . . of the entire communist movement.” The Third World countries, Andropov suggested, needed to make their own revolutions; the Soviets themselves would concentrate on matters closer to home. There was a certain link, Sestanovich thought, between “the allegedly growing ‘danger of war’ and diminishing Soviet interest in the Third World.” He cited in this connection an article that had appeared in Pravda a week after Andropov’s June 1983 speech, which noted that the deployment of the new American missiles in Europe would “create a situation in which the protection of the developing countries’ vital interests becomes even more difficult.” “The gist of the message,” Sestanovich comments, was that “Soviet clients may have to look more to their own effort than to aid from Moscow.”⁷²

Other writers, both at the time and more recently, were struck by the fact that something important had changed. Francis Fukuyama, for example, also reached the conclusion that in the early 1980s, “a wide-ranging reassessment has been taking place in elite Soviet policy circles concerning the Third World.” The Soviets seemed to be lowering their sights; they now felt that at least a degree of retrenchment was called for. Fukuyama, in fact, thought the reassessment had begun in the late 1970s: Andropov’s statements from that period, for example, revealed “a consistent skepticism concerning heavy Soviet involvement in the Third World.”⁷³ And indeed most scholars who have studied this issue believe the thinking in official circles had begun to change well before the early 1980s.⁷⁴ But even those scholars who think that the Soviets were riding high in the late the 1970s—that this was a period, as one former Soviet official later put it, when the “world was going our way”—recognize that by the early 1980s Soviet policy had changed in some very fundamental ways. According to Christopher Andrew, for example, Andropov was still optimistic about how things were going in the Third World as late as 1980. But by 1983 Andropov’s mood, Andrew writes, “had changed dramatically”; it was during the brief period in 1982-83 when Andropov held the top job that the KGB’s “cherished belief that the Cold War could be won in the Third World began to disintegrate.”⁷⁵

What conclusions are to be drawn from an analysis of the scholarly literature on Soviet policy toward the Third World? For our purposes here, there are two main points worth noting. First, one has the sense that by 1982 or 1983 at the latest, Soviet policy toward the Third World was changing in some very fundamental ways. By that I mean that the thinking was changing in official circles; as was perhaps to be expected, what the Soviets were actually doing was not changing quite so rapidly, but in the long run it was the thinking that really mattered. And these changes were taking place well before Gorbachev came to power: during the Andropov period, for example, a basic reorientation of foreign policy was by no means out of the question.

The second and somewhat related point has to do with the very important role economic factors played in shaping Soviet policy in this area. It was becoming increasingly clear that Soviet resources were limited and that Soviet political goals had to be brought in line with that economic reality. “Sometime in 1975,” Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier notes, “the Intelligence Section of the KGB produced a report stating that the USSR could not match its economic capabilities with its political ambitions. It simply could not sustain supporting radical states on three continents.”⁷⁶ “Under Andropov and Chernenko,” Christopher Andrew writes, “Moscow increasingly saw its Third World friends and allies as burdens on its over-stretched economy rather than allies marching towards the global triumph of socialism. [The senior KGB officer] Nikolai Leonov, once a confident supporter of a Soviet forward policy in the Third World, had come to regard Soviet aid to developing countries as ‘a cancerous tumour, sapping the strengths of the ailing organism of our own state.’”⁷⁷ The sense that the drain on Soviet resources had to be limited had been a major factor shaping Soviet policy toward the Third World ever since Brezhnev came to power in 1964: “where radicalism had become an excessive burden,” Valkenier writes (referring to the first decade of the Brezhnev period), “—as was the case with Mali, Ghana, Indonesia, and Burma—the USSR declined to shore up ailing economies.”⁷⁸ By the time Andropov took over, those attitudes had become much sharper. Soviet officials, one scholar writes, “made it abundantly clear” that they did not “want, and cannot afford, another Cuba.” The commitment they had made to that country have proved quite burdensome and, as one prominent Soviet academic openly stated in 1983, the USSR would not “like to repeat—in Nicaragua—on a larger scale, the commitment which we have made to Cuba for the last twenty years.” It was important, he said, that Nicaragua “maintain flexibility in its international relations; it must not adhere to a single country.”⁷⁹

The sense was growing that a certain shift in priorities was in order, and that the USSR would be better off focusing on its own economic problems. Views of that sort were expressed from time to time in the 1970s, as Galia Golan, a leading expert in this area, noted in 1987. She pointed out, for example, that following the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War “a Pravda commentary on the December Central Committee plenum called for a reappraisal of the national liberation struggle, assigning it a low priority in relation to the ‘urgent tasks of the world socialist system,’ which would assume highest priority.” But it was only in 1981 and 1982 that “these positions took on the appearance of an official policy line,” when “a spate of articles espousing the Soviet Union-first position” began to appear; “two of these, written by economists, implied that the economic problems of the Soviet bloc necessitated a rethinking of its overseas role.” And she notes that after Brezhnev’s death in 1982, the new, more sober, line “began to emerge in leadership pronouncements,” pointing especially to Andropov’s November 1982 and June 1983 speeches. The new leader, she pointed out, opposed “the export of revolution without any mention of counterrevolution” and repeated “his earlier line against ‘contest of ideas’ turning into military confrontation.” “Gone were the glowing references to past Soviet support”; Soviet help would be given only “to the extent of our possibilities”; the Third World countries the USSR sympathized with would ultimately have to rely on themselves.⁸⁰

The economic factor was related to Soviet policy toward the Third World in another and perhaps more subtle way. “Progressive” regimes in the Third World, it turned out, were not particularly successful in economic terms; their poor performance in this area led to a degree of disillusionment. Maybe it did not make much sense for those countries to adopt the Soviet model. Maybe that model, in fact, did not make much sense for the USSR itself. All these issues were bound up with each other. Soviet policy in the Third World, Valkenier wrote in 2002, had been “based on a firm belief in the demonstrable superiority of socialism over capitalism and on the Soviet capability to prove it.” “That belief,” she points out, “was an inseparable element of Soviet-USA competition in the Third World and elsewhere.” The failure of Soviet policy in that area—and especially the economic failure of the socialist economies in the Third World—led the Soviets to question those basic premises. “What started out in the late 1960s,” she writes, “as suggestions for readjustments in Soviet policies and prescriptions for the Third World ended up a decade later as increasingly serious questioning of the fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism in its official interpretation.” The pre-Gorbachev decade (1975-85) “witnessed a rising tide of skepticism about the viability of systemic models and policies for the Third World.” “After 1975,” according to Valkenier, “articles in specialized publications offered an increasingly frank discussion of the failed economic policies in the radical LDCs [Less Developed Countries] and of the factors responsible for these failures.” “Discussion of effective policies,” she writes, “increasingly contained an appreciation of market forces in engendering development. The unspoken underpinning to such arguments was that any policy that was economically efficient was acceptable, regardless of what political label one could apply.” The LDCs, in fact, were now urged to take advantage of the existing, capitalist-dominated, international division of labor. “Under the impact of Third World realities,” she concludes, the Soviet prescription for the LDCs had shifted 180 degrees.⁸¹

This was very important in its own right, given that the USSR’s interest in “exporting revolution” was one of the main issues that lay at the heart of the Cold War. But it was perhaps even more important for a second reason. Disillusionment with the radical policies pursued by Marxist regimes in the Third World, Valkenier points out, “undermined faith in socialism itself not merely in the Third World but also at home”: people were also beginning to wonder about “the viability of socialism as applied and practiced in the USSR itself.” Indeed, discussion of how radical policies had “malfunctioned in the Third World,” she says, was able to serve “as an Aesopian outlet for comments on similar failures at home.” As one leading Soviet economist noted in 1988, “in very reserved and disguised ways [one could] express almost anything.”⁸²

The implication is clear: the general discrediting of the ideology, linked to economic failures both at home and abroad, was bound to have a very far-reaching effect on Soviet foreign policy. It was thus bound to have a profound effect on the way the Cold War ran its course.

Even in the late 1960s, many well-informed observers had concluded that when it came to Europe the USSR basically wanted to keep things as they were. The Soviets, it seemed, were willing to live with a divided Europe in general and a divided Germany was by no means a problem for them. As Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson, perhaps the U.S. government’s top Soviet expert at the time, pointed out in 1968, “the essence of Soviet foreign policy is now to keep the status quo—in order to concentrate on internal affairs.”⁸³ And indeed the fundamental goal of the USSR’s European policy in the late 1960s and early 1970s was to get the western powers to accept the status quo in that continent; the fact that the West German government was willing to do so during the Brandt period was viewed as a major accomplishment.

Those points are fairly familiar, but some new evidence that has become available in recent years suggests that Soviet policy toward Europe was even more moderate than people thought at the time. CIA analysts in 1976, for example, were struck by the fact that the Soviets, whatever their long-term goals, did not seem particularly interested in helping Communist parties come to power there. Intelligence reports indicated that the decision of the Portuguese Communist Party “to push an all-out bid for power in 1975 was taken against the advice of the Soviets.” The Soviet government also sought to hold the Italian Communists back. “Brezhnev,” according to the CIA at that time, “went so far as to suggest to [Italian Communist leader] Berlinguer in 1973 that in Moscow's eyes, the ‘historic compromise’ could go too far. Brezhnev hinted that the Soviets would not like to see the [Italian Communist Party] move beyond the stage of influencing the Italian government to the stage of actual participation in a government because this would cause uneasiness in the West and might damage the prospects for detente.” The Soviets, more generally, had “been sensitive to the possibility that a role in government for any of the Western [Communist] Parties would cause deep anxiety in the West and might trigger a reaction against the Soviet Union, threatening Moscow's access to Western technology and undermining its diplomatic initiatives.”⁸⁴

And there is even some evidence that with regard to Germany the Soviets had begun to at least toy with the idea that they might not be able to keep that country divided forever—in large part because of the economic problem. Gordon Barrass, in his recent book on the Cold War, gives an account of what he learned from Viatcheslav Kevorkov, one of Andropov’s key advisors:

“Andropov had a better idea than most about just how weak the Soviet Union was economically,” Kevorkov emphasized. “He didn’t think we could prevent unification. The only sensible option was damage limitation. Moscow would have to try to establish good relations with Bonn long before the two Germanys were unified.”
It was for that reason, Barrass thinks, that Andropov, beginning in the late 1960s, supported the policy of improving relations with the German Social Democrats and with the government they headed.⁸⁵

This evidence, to be sure, is a little thin, and it is certainly possible to argue Soviet moderation in Europe is to be understood in essentially tactical terms. The Soviets, the argument runs, might have taken a moderate line in the early 1970s in order to get certain things from the West, but as soon as they got what they wanted, they simply pocketed the gains and returned to their usual confrontational policy. Martin Malia, for example, viewed the “three or four years of détente” as a “kind of diplomatic NEP designed to build Soviet strength for a new offensive” and saw “the ten years of renewed Soviet pressure after 1975” as a “return to the system’s norm.”⁸⁶ Robert Kagan, writing in 1999, took much the same view.⁸⁷ These theories are more in line with the evidence than the view that the Soviets had given up nothing in exchange for the “foreign policy advantages” they had gotten in the early Nixon period.⁸⁸ But they are still theories and need to be assessed in the usual way. It is important to ask, for example, whether the Soviets had really made substantial gains during the détente period in the early 1970s. Kissinger, writing many years later, still found it hard to see what those “enormous gains” were; Brezhnev’s efforts at that stage “still focused on a quest for status,” which, as he pointed out, was “in itself a sign of insecurity, since those who know themselves to be genuinely equals do not require constant certification of that fact.”⁸⁹

The basic issue here—the question of how aggressive Soviet policy was in the pre-Gorbachev period—needs to be explored in the light of the documents, and that analysis should begin with the most important case, Soviet policy during the Polish crisis in 1981-82. That case has a very direct bearing on the issue at hand, for if the USSR was really willing to let go of Poland, that policy could scarcely be interpreted in tactical terms. It thus makes sense to return to the Polish question and indeed to examine Soviet policy during the Polish crisis as carefully as we can.⁹⁰ And in analyzing this issue, it is important to remember that not every scholar accepts the view that the Soviet leadership had decided by December 1981 not to intervene, no matter what happened in that country.

Mark Kramer, for example, has denied that the Soviets were ever prepared, in the final analysis, to live with a non-Communist Poland, and given his stature in the field, his views deserve to be taken very seriously. Kramer’s argument on this point is hard to miss. In his view, the claim that the Soviet Politburo by 1980-1981 had completely forsaken the option of using force in Eastern Europe”—that Brezhnev himself “had secretly renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine”—“flies in the face of a vast amount of evidence.” Until the fall of 1981, Kramer points out, the Soviets were fully prepared to intervene to help the Polish Communists crush the opposition. At that point, however, their tactics shifted. The Poles were told the USSR would not send in troops. But that was only because they did not want to provide the Polish Communist leader Jaruzelski with a “a crutch that might cause him, if only subconsciously, to refrain from cracking down as ruthlessly as possible.” It did not mean that if he did act and things then went awry, the Soviets would not have sent in troops. In Kramer’s view, it seemed “extremely unlikely—indeed inconceivable—that the Soviet Union would have stayed on the sidelines and allowed the Polish Communist regime and Soviet troops in Poland to come under deadly attack.” He therefore thought that the argument made by a number of scholars—Matthew Ouimet, Wilfried Loth, and Vojtech Mastny—to the effect that the Soviets had ruled out the use of force and were willing, in the final analysis, to allow the Communist regime in Poland to collapse if the Polish Communists could not deal with the situation on their own, simply did not stand up in the light of the evidence. The claims made by Loth and Ouimet he considered “especially fanciful.”⁹¹

What is to be made of Kramer’s argument? It certainly seems, first of all, that the three authors Kramer was referring to did go too far with some of their claims. Loth, for example, in summarizing the record of the October 29, 1980, Politburo meeting, says that “Andropov, Ustinov and Gromyko agreed that there was no way of resolving the crisis by military means since they would only make matters worse,” but the record of that meeting does not support that point.⁹² And Ouimet’s more general claim that the Soviets in 1980 “had no intention of invading Poland” is also not supported by the evidence he presents.⁹³ That claim, in fact, is somewhat at odds with his later argument that it was only later, in June 1981, that the issue was resolved—an argument which, however, rests on a very thin evidentiary base.⁹⁴ And as for Mastny, his claim that “for all intents and purposes the military option” was abandoned in April 1981 is also not adequately supported by evidence he presents. A section of his paper, titled “December 1981: Intervention Abandoned”—implying that the key decision was made months later—in fact begins on the very next page.⁹⁵

So the Soviets seemed inclined, in 1980 and early 1981, to intervene in Poland if that was the only way to prevent the Communist regime there from collapsing. To be sure, the various military measures the Soviet government was taking at that time—measures that suggested that troops might be sent in—were certainly taken with various political goals in mind. The threat of an invasion, it was understood, might prod the Polish Communists into taking action on their own. As Kramer himself notes, “Soviet leaders at various points during the crisis deliberately sought to create the impression that the USSR would invade—even if they did not intend to follow up on it—because they hoped this would induce the Polish authorities to take action.”⁹⁶ And the Soviets also wanted to intimidate the opposition in Poland and put pressure on it to take a more moderate line. “As a deterrent to counterrevolution,” the Politburo’s Commission on Poland argued, the USSR “should maximally exploit the fears of internal reactionaries and international imperialism that the Soviet Union might send its troops into Poland."⁹⁷ Indeed, the assumption was that it was only the threat of a Soviet invasion that held Solidarity back.⁹⁸ But although those goals were important, one gets the impression that those steps were not taken solely for political effect. One does have the sense, that is, that the Soviets were inclined to intervene, if that were the only way to prevent the collapse of the Communist government there. But even then they were much more willing to send in troops to support a Polish government crackdown than to take action without the cooperation of that government; what they would have done if the Polish Communists government did not give them the green light is very unclear.

These questions, however, are not of fundamental importance, because the key issue has to do not with 1980 or the first half of following year, but rather with the climactic phase of the crisis in late 1981. For it is very clear that by October 1981 Soviet policy had shifted in a very fundamental way. The evidence seems to show quite unambiguously that the Soviets had decided by that point that they were not going to intervene militarily in Poland no matter what happened in that country. Andropov, for example, said in a Politburo meeting that month that whereas the Polish leaders were “talking about military assistance from the fraternal countries,” the Soviets needed “to adhere firmly to our line—that our troops will not be sent to Poland.”⁹⁹ And that basic line was reaffirmed subsequently on a number of occasions, most notably at the very important December 10, 1981, Politburo meeting.¹⁰⁰ The main point was that whether the Poles instituted martial law or not was entirely up to them: as Andropov summed it up, “whatever they decide is what will be.”¹⁰¹ The Soviet government would not intervene no matter what happened in Poland. It was willing even to live with a Solidarity-led government in that country. The key passage from the Politburo minutes was already cited in the introduction to this chapter, but it is so amazing that it is worth quoting again, this time at greater length:

We do not intend [Andropov said] to introduce troops into Poland. That is the proper position, and we must adhere to it until the end. I don't know how things will turn out in Poland, but even if Poland falls under the control of Solidarity, that's the way it will be. And if the capitalist countries pounce on the Soviet Union, and you know they have already reached agreement on a variety of economic and political sanctions, that will be very burdensome for us. We must be concerned above all with our own country and about the strengthening of the Soviet Union. That is our main line.

Even today, with the document in front of us, it is hard to believe that the Soviets had decided that troops would not be sent no matter what happened in Poland. Would the Soviets really have been willing in the final analysis to accept the collapse of the Communist order in Poland? If one thinks the answer is no, one needs to explain why the Soviet leadership took the line it did in late 1981—that is, why it seemed to be ruling out a possible military intervention. Kramer’s crutch theory provides one such explanation. The Soviets, he thinks, decided not to “offer any assistance to Jaruzelski” because they were afraid “it might give him an excuse to avoid acting as forcefully as he needed to”; they were confident that the “martial law operation would be successful provided that Jaruzelski implemented it without letting up,” and “the last thing they wanted was to give him a crutch” that might lead him “to refrain from cracking down as ruthlessly as possible.”¹⁰³

What, however, is to be made of that argument? The Soviets certainly wanted Jaruzelski to move, and from their point of view it was obviously best if he could act on his own. But it is hard to see why he would be more likely to act forcefully if he was told he could not count on the Soviets for military support, even if things got out of hand in Poland, than if he was assured the Soviets would bail him out if he got into trouble. To tell him that a Soviet intervention was out of the question no matter what happened in Poland could easily have led him to back off from the crackdown and strike some sort of deal with Solidarity.¹⁰⁴ That kind of policy, that is, could also give him “an excuse to avoid acting as forcefully as he needed to.” On the other hand, a policy of telling Jaruzelski that the USSR would not intervene right away, but would come in if the imposition of martial law in Poland led to a full-scale civil war in that country, might have given him the feeling that his risks were limited and that he could afford to take the plunge. But the Soviet leaders deliberately chose not to go that route.¹⁰⁵ They instead told Jaruzelski at the peak of the crisis that “no Soviet troops would be sent to help him ‘under any circumstances.’”¹⁰⁶ So that’s the first problem with the crutch theory: the policy they adopted scarcely made sense if the Soviets wanted to maximize the chances of Jaruzelski acting on his own, and if they were absolutely determined, come what may, to make sure Solidarity did not come to power in Poland.

But there is a second, and more fundamental, problem with that theory. It cannot explain why the Soviet leaders were telling each other in private that troops would not be sent in. It cannot explain why, when discussing these issues among themselves, they affirmed their readiness to allow events to run their course. If they had said to each other, in effect, “we’ll have to tell our Polish comrades that we’re not going to intervene so that they’ll realize they’ll have to deal with the problem themselves, but of course if things get out of hand we’ll probably have to go in,” then that would have provided support for the theory that the non-intervention policy was to be understood in essentially instrumental terms—that is, as an attempt to get Jaruzelski to crack down hard on Solidarity. But the fact that they were assuring each other that they were not going to send in troops, and that (as Andropov put it in the December 10 Politburo meeting) they had to adhere to that position “until the end,” even if that meant that Poland would fall “under the control of Solidarity”—strongly suggests that something fundamental had changed, and that the new non-intervention policy is to be understood in substantive and not mainly tactical terms.¹⁰⁷

And it is important to note that that remark of Andropov’s was no mere flash in the pan. He had evidently already come to the conclusion in 1980 that the USSR could not send troops into Poland—that “the quota for our interventions abroad has been exhausted.”¹⁰⁸ The Soviet leadership knew that the Communist system there did not have the support of the people; what that meant, one key KGB official pointed out, was that at some point power would fall into the hands of the opposition.¹⁰⁹ Even the Polish Communist leader Stanislaw Kania, the Soviets learned in October 1981, had come to the conclusion that “the Soviet system of Socialism had failed the test,” that the “power of the Soviet regime was maintained only through the army and other agencies of coercion,” and that Soviet military power was in decline “as the Soviet economy would no longer be able to meet the additional expense of developing and producing new types of armaments.”¹¹⁰ The implication was that the Soviets had to rely less on force and try to reach some sort of political accommodation with their opponents. And by 1983 the dying Andropov himself seemed to be thinking in those terms. “I’m absolutely sure,” he told his son, “that we need a deep change in our relations with socialist countries. We cannot go on holding the whip over them.”¹¹¹

All this suggests that by December 1981 there had been a very fundamental change in the USSR’s European policy. And the date here is of great importance for our purposes: the change took place well before Gorbachev came to power in 1985.

The Soviet Union during the Brezhnev period was scarcely a revolutionary power. It was not gaining economically on its much wealthier and more technologically advanced rivals in the West; in some ways, it was actually falling behind. Soviet policy had to adjust to that basic reality, and indeed Soviet leaders were coming to think that the most the USSR could hope for was to maintain its hard-won position in world affairs and that a militant Cold War policy was not in line with the Soviet Union’s core political interests. Rather than pursue an ambitious and provocative policy abroad, the USSR needed to focus more on getting its own house in order—and good relations with the West made particular sense in that context. As Andropov put it in the December 1981 Politburo discussion of the Polish problem, the Soviets had to be “concerned above all with our own country.” And that meant avoiding sanctions and maintaining economic relations with the West, something he clearly viewed as essential for “the strengthening of the Soviet Union.”¹¹² What all this implied was that the USSR should aim at a real accommodation with America and her allies. “We had to develop détente with the Western countries,” Dobrynin says; if the Soviets were rational, they clearly needed to pursue a policy of that sort.¹¹³

To be sure, not every Soviet leader had come to think in those terms. The USSR, especially in the late 1970s, was still pursuing policies which, to use Matlock’s phrase, “were not serving the real interests of the Soviet Union.” The various “gains” one could point to were often more a source of weakness than of strength. The ties with Cuba were bound to alienate America, especially given what Cuba was doing beyond her borders. And Soviet ties with Vietnam were bound to alienate China, making her feel more encircled by Soviet power, thus increasing China’s incentive to align herself with the United States. Much the same point can be made about Soviet policy in the Third World more generally. That policy, and the rhetoric that supported it, suggested that nothing fundamental had changed—that Brezhnev’s “peace policy” was not to be taken too seriously, and that a real accommodation with the USSR was just not in the cards—and was thus grist for the mills of the anti-détente forces in the West.

It is thus clear that ideological considerations still carried a certain weight, even in the early 1980s. Many people at home, and especially in the ruling party, were still caught up in traditional attitudes: they found it hard to accept the desirability or feasibility of a real accommodation with the West and had an interest in framing issues in traditional ideological terms. The feeling in those circles was that the legitimacy of the system still depended, at least to a certain extent, on the ability of the USSR to play a certain role in the world, and in particular to support “progressive” forces in the Third World. And even those in the leadership who tended to think in less ideological terms had to take those attitudes into account: to maintain a certain degree of consensus, people like Brezhnev had to throw a bone or two to those who took the more traditional view by paying lip service to the ideology and indeed by appearing to pursue certain foreign policy goals that appealed to those who still thought in traditional, ideological, terms.¹¹⁴

That, in any case, is the impression you get from reading the diaries of Anatoly Chernyaev for 1972 and 1973, another extraordinary source that has become available in recent years. According to Chernyaev, then working in the International Department of the Central Committee, the “real politicians,” as he called them—a pragmatic group headed by Brezhnev personally and including people like Gromyko—sincerely wanted an accommodation with the West. They understood that the “truly radical change in the world order” they had in mind was “bound to have profound social-psychological, and consequently ideological consequences.” Drawing the USSR into the world economy, and thus exposing Soviet cadres to direct contact with the West, would inevitably undermine the old, and increasingly “outdated,” ideology, and that group was willing to accept change of that sort. But the leaders who thought in those terms were not free agents. There was a vast “multi-million-man army” of people who fed off the official ideology. “These people,” Chernyaev noted, “comprise a very influential part of our social and Party mechanism and have to be taken into consideration,” especially at the level of packaging. Change in the form of a “liberation of public life from ideological dogmas”—he used the word “perestroika” in this context—could only come from the top down.¹¹⁵

Dobrynin, in his memoirs, takes a similar view. “Ideological prejudices,” he writes, “remained very strong” in the Politburo. The idea was that “a historical process was under way”; the old colonial empires were collapsing, the capitalist system was becoming weaker, and “for ideological reasons” the Soviets had to support that process whenever possible; but that had “nothing to do” with U.S.-Soviet relations, which proceeded on an entirely different plane. “Such was the abracadabra of the official reasoning at the top of Soviet leadership,” Dobrynin remarked. “Of course, some of them who dealt with the outside world, such as Gromyko, Andropov, and Kosygin, understood that the situation was not that simple, but when confronted with the heart of our party ideology they often preferred not to argue too strongly against it.”¹¹⁶

So the top leadership—people like Brezhnev, Andropov, and Gromyko—might have been serious about détente, but their room for maneuver was constrained in important ways. For domestic political reasons, there were limits to how un-ideological their policy, and especially their rhetoric, could be. And the problem was compounded by the fact that the U.S. government was not being particularly helpful. “Certainly the Americans did not help us get a new approach,” Brutents noted in 1993. U.S. leaders in the 1970s had not been interested in working with the Soviets in the Middle East; U.S. policy in that area was for the Soviet leadership, according to Brutents, “a very distinct proof that Americans didn’t want to build our relations on new basis.”¹¹⁷ Given that experience, it was even harder than it would otherwise have been to sell a genuine détente policy to skeptics in the Soviet leadership.

Still, whatever the obstacles, it is clear that the basic thinking of the USSR’s top leaders was moving in a certain direction. The Soviets were increasingly inclined to do what they had to in order to reach some kind of accommodation with the West. By late 1981—that is, well before Gorbachev came to power—policy itself had shifted in some very fundamental ways. Soviet policy on eastern Europe had been utterly transformed: the Soviet leadership, by that point, had decided not to intervene militarily in Poland, and indeed was prepared in the final analysis to live with a non-Communist government in that country. That shift was of enormous historical importance, but in other areas as well the Soviets were pulling in their horns and pursuing less ambitious goals. And it seems quite clear that the growing economic problem played a key role in bringing about that very far-reaching shift in policy.