The time is now - proposal for U.S. aid to Soviet Union in return for radical disarmament - column

National Review, May 28, 1990 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

President Gorbachev's Chamber of Commerce speech in Sverdlovsk, named after the agent of Lenin who chose that site to execute the czar and his wife and children, brings to mind a dispatch Published this space almost a year ago, which began with the freighted sentence, "Remember the date: Friday, June 16, 1989."

What Gorbachev said on Thursday of this week was plain talk on the subject of economics. If we do not get out of the system we're in-excuse my rough talk then everything living in our society will die.... We will begin to asphyxiate" if reforms are not made, he said to the crowd.

And while he spoke in Sverdlovsk, at home in Moscow one of his chief economists, Stanislav Shatahn, was writing in Pravda that if economic change didn't take place, we will find ourselves in a common grave." Shatalin went on: %Wile private ownership has already proved socially useful throughout the world, our state ownership has only proved that it can land the country in a mess."

What were they saying on June 16, 1989, that made that date remarkable? It was a seminar of economists who were also deputies in the new national congress of the Soviet Union, and that meeting, at the Institute of the Economy, was presided over by Leonid Abalkin, who had just been nominated by Gorbachev to serve as his deputy prime minister.

Addressing six hundred people, Abalkin said, "Our studies clearly show that if the economy is not stabilized over the next one and a half to two years [read: by June 19911 ... a rightward swing by society is inevitable."

We all know what a "rightward swing" is. If you have forgotten, look up the nearest Lithuanian.

But Leonid Abalkin was only one of the speakers at the June 16, 1989, economic conference. Another deputy, Vladimir Tikhonov, spoke in terms of the ultimate economic coin: hunger. In the absence of economic progress, there will be famine in the very near future." How can famine be avoided? Until farmers own the land and decide for themselves what to grow, there will be no increase in production."

The next speaker saw Akhonov and raised him one. Viktor Belkin is a research economist from the Academy of Sciences. Me economy is becoming increasingly cannibalistic, feeding on itself." Oleg Bogomolov, another economist, carried the idea of private property beyond agriculture. Without personal property, workers don't have the power of the work force and can't decide how to use their labor."

But could all of this simply be dismissed as rhetoric designed to spur on an indolent population? Gennady Lisichkin, another deputy and economist, warned against dismissing the plight of the Soviet economy as a pre-crisis": We are in deep crisis." And how had the Gorbachev government treated that crisis? By printing more rubles. To put in positions of power the kind of people who deal with economic scarcity in that way is like putting an alcoholic in charge of a liquor shop."

Meanwhile every day brings confirmation of the scale of the plight of the Soviet economy. We are indebted to a handful of economic analysts, including Soviet technicians, for analyzing the raw data, and substantially to William Safire for publicizing the results of egregious CIA mis-estimates. We coasted along for years on the assumption that the Soviets' output was about half our own and that they were spending in the neighborhood of 15 per cent of it on armament. In fact, their GNP is less than one-third our own and they have been spending as much as 25 per cent of that on armament. Try doing that and living on Marxist-Leninist principles and you get the awful mess faced today by the Soviet leadership.

Late last year I proposed a grand exchange. Our dollars, their guns. The Soviet Union needs iron-lung sustenance as it moves, as it must move, toward a free-market economy. We should avoid coexistence with a convulsive creature that commands 12,000 nuclear warheads. The proposal: Give them what they need to sustain life in exchange for radical disarmanment. For a reduction in their nuclear and conventional power to defense proportions. They wouldn't do it? Why.? Pride? Is there a greater fall in pride than that of Gorbachev's saying that asphyxiation" is where the Soviet Union is heading under the aegis of the economic and philosophical mandates of Communism's progenitive saints? Even Stalin's pride wasn't enough to keep him from signing a treaty with Adolf Hitler. Go go go, Mr. Bush. Now.