Summit semantics - Moscow Summit

National Review, July 8, 1988 by Brian Crozier

SUMMIT SEMANTICS

YOU HAVE TO hand it to the old Hollywood pro and the up-and-coming Russian leading man: in terms of spectacle, the Moscow Summit was in the Oscar range. The sight of Ronald Reagan addressing students at Moscow State University beneath a massive bust of Lenin was not one that I (or I dare say other NR readers) ever expected to see. Reagan telling the Soviets to improve their record on human rights yet discarding his "evil empire" label . . . Where will it all end?

In fact, the show-biz dazzle concealed a far graver matter of political semantics, which is in a sense what the Summit was all about.

In the final phase of the Moscow Summit, Mikhail Gorbachev came back to the theme of his extended interview with the Washington Post on May 22. He said of his meetings with the President that they were "a blow to the foundations of the cold war." (In the Post interview, he had said that "the winds of the cold war are being replaced by the winds of change.") And he went on to appeal for "peaceful coexistence." To give credit where credit is due, I think it was the late Hugh Seton-Watson, many years ago, who pointed out that in Soviet semantics the two expressions are roughly synonymous. More accurately, they are two sides of the same coin. But the sad fact is that very few Western statesmen seem to grasp the point, so here goes again.

Since Bernard Baruch, financier and presidential advisor, used the term in a congressional debate in 1947, "the cold war" has been understood (in the West) as "denoting the open yet restricted rivalry that developed after World War II between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, a war fought on political, economic, and propaganda fronts, with limited recourse to weapons, largely because of fear of a nuclear holocaust" (to quote the wordy Encyclopaedia Britannica). We can do better than that. The cold war was seen in the West as the sum total of hostile deeds on either side of the Iron Curtain: a two-way traffic.

That, however, has never been the way Soviet ideologists defined it. To Moscow (and in Communist eyes everywhere), the cold war is a one-way traffic: hostile words and deeds against the Soviet Union and its allies, coming entirely from the Western side. What they do to us is called "peaceful coexistence." The West needs to be reminded that:

1. The term "peaceful coexistence" was coined by Lenin's Foreign Minister, Georgi Chicherin, in the 1920s, to refer to the period (which seemed to be taking longer than the Bolshevik leader had expected) between the 1917 Revolution and its extension to the rest of the world, which was confidently expected. (And still is, if less confidently?) during that time (however long it took) it was going to be all right to have trade and other deals with the "capitalist" countries, on the guiding principle that such deals should be to the advantage of the Communist side and of "History." (That particular guiding principle still applies, by the way.)

2. When stalin died, in 1953, he had spread the benefits of the Revolution to Eastern Europe, but had been stymied elsewhere. With Nikita Khrushchev in power, a new look was taken at "peaceful coexistence." A new gloss was called for. It came at the end of 1960 in a conference of the world's Communist Parties (the last, incidentally, in which the Soviet and Chinese Parties both took part). The new exegesis, spelt out in the final Declaration, was that peaceful coexistence implied "the intensification of the international class struggle." Back to semantics: the "international class struggle" is what the Kremlin and its allies do, or try to do, to weaken our democratic systems.

This definition not only has never been revoked but has been repeatedly reaffirmed. So when Gorbachev tells us that the cold war is on its way out, he means that the will of our democratic governments to stand up to what Richard Nixon calls "the real war" has been seriously weakened. And when he calls upon us to give peaceful coexistence a chance, he means something on the following lines: Thanks a lot for easing trade barriers; thanks, especially, to West Germany for that $2-billion loan. All that eases our arms burden so we can go right on building up Nicaragua's armed forces to the projected 600,000 level, spying on you, and conducting our "active measures," including forgeries and disinformation.

High marks to the President's aides, then, for talking him out of including a commitment to "peaceful coexistence" in the draft joint statement, as requested by Gorbachev.

HAVING UTTERED these words of caution, let me add that of course unprecedented things are happening in the Soviet Union. They include widespread riots and demonstrations, not only in Estonia and Armenia, but just about all over the USSR. They include the unprecedented spectacle of Boris Yeltsin, the demoted ex-Party chief in Moscow, rebuking the Politburo's Number 2, Yegor Ligachev, in an interview with the BBC. Things are humming, all right.