As the foreign leaders and their ministers took their seats in the Kremlin's white-columned Hall of St. George last week, they could see the long roster of names engraved in Cyrillic script on marble tablets along the chamber's walls. The list is an honor roll of czarist military regiments, officers and soldiers who displayed extraordinary bravery in defending the motherland, or rodina, as Russians say with almost mystical fervor. The dignitaries were there to represent the nations most closely allied to the Soviet Union: its six satellites in Eastern Europe, plus three poorer relations from the Third World: Cuba, Viet Nam and Mongolia.
They had come to Moscow for the first top-level meeting in 15 years of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the Sovietled trading community. They talked about agriculture, oil prices and technology. But something even more urgent than economics underlay the discussions.
With U.S.-Soviet relations close to rockbottom, the rare COMECON meeting represented Moscow's urgent summons for present and future solidarity from its allies. The motherland needed friends and comfort.
Soviet Leader Konstantin Chernenko, who looked hale but moved stiffly in the brief conference footage broadcast over national TV, closed the meeting with a short speech calling on the Western democracies to let capitalism and Communism live in "peaceful coexistence." But he warned, "A dangerous test of strength, being imposed on us by the most reactionary imperialist circles, primarily in the U.S., is not our choice, not our policy. But we will be able to stand up for ourselves.
Let no one have any doubt about that."
Chernenko's words were echoed in the political declaration issued by the ten Communist nations after the close of their meeting. "International tension has grown substantially as a result of the course pursued by the aggressive forces of imperialism, primarily U.S. imperialism," the document charged. Ignoring the conciliatory tone of President Reagan's press conference, which had taken place twelve hours earlier, the statement went on to accuse Washington of an "escalation of the arms race" that "jeopardizes the very existence of mankind."
It had seemed at the beginning of the year that relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union could hardly become worse, short of an armed conflict.
Reagan had, after all, branded the Soviet Union an "evil empire," and Moscow had declared with convincing finality that it could no longer do business with Washington. NATO had begun deployment missiles in Western Europe, in response the Soviets had stalked away from every negotiating table where the superpowers had been discussing nuclear arms control. Yet in the four months since Chernenko succeeded the late Yuri Andropov, the chill factor from Moscow has intensified. The trend is all the more noticeable because it contrasts so sharply with President Reagan's new and uncharacteristically conciliatory tone (see NATION).