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Diplomats who for more than a quarter-century have learned to read the lines on Gromyko's face for clues about Soviet moves abroad have noticed that the fleeting smile that he would offer during the halcyon days of détente has turned to a quasipermanent scowl. His lips seem pursed to utter a defiant nyet at a moment's notice. Says a West German official recently returned from Moscow: "His is the first face you see when you arrive and the last face you see when you leave. These days it is not a pleasant face."
Western diplomats who met privately with Gromyko at the Stockholm Conference on Confidence-and Security-Building Measures and Disarmament in Europe last January found him keeping three Reagan speeches close at hand. The text of the President's "focus of evil" address seemed to be particularly dog-eared. Gromyko's repeated references to those speeches underscored the degree to which the U.S. President's slaps at Soviet power and prestige have stirred anger and animosity in Moscow. Few Soviet officials like to be reminded that they once considered Reagan a potential "closet" Nixon who might correct the foreign policy zigzags of the Carter Administration and return to something like détente.
The obsession with Reagan goes well beyond his words. Soviet officials view the President's commitment to a $1.6 trillion military buildup as evidence that the U.S. is determined to achieve military superiority over the Soviet Union. (When asked at his press conference last week whether the Republican Party platform should call for "parity" or "superiority," Reagan answered that he would prefer "we not ask for superiority.") They accuse the Administration of having presented deliberately lopsided proposals in nuclear arms talks in order to prevent any agreement from being reached. Soviet officials tirelessly repeat the argument that the new Pershing II missiles that NATO began deploying in West Germany last November are first-strike weapons capable of reaching Moscow in eight minutes (in fact, the new missiles cannot reach the Soviet capital from their present launching sites).
Recalling the famous statement by Reagan that Marxism would be consigned to "the ash heap of history," Moscow accuses him of wanting to do nothing less than overthrow the Communist regime. One Soviet official advanced the following frightening hypothesis last week: "Reagan has tried to create an image of the Soviet Union as a hostile and inhuman country. It looks to us as if he is preparing the home front, because people must be taught to hate the enemy before a war can be launched."