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The Kremlin has gone out of its way to keep old grudges alive. Invoking flimsy pretexts, it decided to the Los Angeles Olympics. It has all invitations to return to the bargaining tables in Gene preferring to deploy new weapons in Europe and to send additional to lurk near U.S. shores. The display abroad has been by a tightening of control at including efforts to silence Nobel Prize Recipient Andrei Sakharov The Kremlin has more than matched its deeds with angry, at times hysterical, A veritable Niagara of insults and threats continues to flow from the pages of Pravda and the tickers of TASS. The Reagan Administration is accused of plotting "covert subversive activities and terrorism," engaging in a "campaign of blackmail and threats," and "thinking in terms of war and acting accordingly."
West Europeans, whom Moscow so recently was wooing, have also felt the full force of Soviet fury. While discussing nuclear arms with Italian Foreign Minister Giulio Andreotti in April, So viet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko made a pointed allusion to the Roman city of Pompeii, which was destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79. After West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher's visit a month later, the Soviet press published reports that West Germany's soldiers resemble a "Hitlerite army" and that the government was plotting to take over East Germany. China, which Moscow has every reason to entice away from the U.S., received a pointed snub in May with the last-day cancellation of what was to have been the highest-level visit in 15 years. The Soviet Union, concluded an editorial in the British weekly the Economist, has "gone into hibernation."
Moscow's continuing allusions to war could be dismissed as so much propaganda if the nuclear threat facing both superpowers were not all too real. After a decade and a half of tortuous talks, the process of arms control is at the moment essentially dead (see following story). Meanwhile, the U.S. and the Soviet Union stand on the threshold of a revolution in nuclear technology that will vastly complicate future negotiations. The U.S. moved a step closer to Star Wars weaponry last week when it successfully tested a new defensive missile.
Although the twelve-man Politburo makes its decisions collectively, the new ultrahard Line is widely identified with the growing influence of one man: Andrei Gromyko (see box). The combination of Chernenko's rumored weakness as a leader and his lack of experience in foreign affairs appears to have given Gromyko more power than at any other time in his 27 years as Foreign Minister. Foreign delegations that have traveled to Moscow in the past few months have been startled to observe how Gromyko interrupts Chernenko during meetings. In private sessions with Westerners, Soviet diplomats, journalists and academics disparage Chernenko in an unprecedented fashion.