(4 of 6)
There were also some strangely discordant notes in Moscow. Just one day after Andropov held his cordial get-together with Bush and Shultz, Georgi Korniyenko, first Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, blasted the Reagan Administration at a lunch in honor of 234 U.S. businessmen who had come to Moscow to discuss East-West trade. Speaking in English and without notes, he launched into a 90-minute attack on the Administration that seemed to reflect all the grievances of the Kremlin over the past three years. Korniyenko lambasted Washington's trade sanctions and its policy toward Eastern Europe, but reserved most of his fire for the U.S. failure to ratify SALT II. He assailed Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger by name, saying that "Weinberger continues cursing the SALT II treaty, and he hasn't even read it. He seems to be saying, 'My mind is made up, don't confuse me with the facts.' " At the end of the tirade, Korniyenko did urge talks between the businessmen and the Soviets, but then he curtly added, "Let's meet and discuss whether it is better to have a democracy where everyone works, or one where there is 10% unemployment."
The U.S. Ambassador, Arthur Hartman, who attended the lunch and sat patiently through the attack, decided to mount a counterstrike. At a panel discussion in front of the same group of U.S. businessmen, Hartman berated the Kremlin for a host of actions, including the invasion of Afghanistan and the Soviet Union's human rights record. He defended U.S. trade sanctions, saying that "it is not realistic to isolate our economic relationship from our overall political relationship." Hartman's speech, which was unusually harsh for the ambassador, drew an immediate rebuttal from Georgi Arbatov, a fellow panelist and director of the Soviet Institute of the U.S.A. and Canada Studies. Denouncing Washington's talk about human rights as "hypocritical," Arbatov angrily criticized Washington's treatment of American Indians and its role in El Salvador. Said he: "Don't think we owe you something. We will not pay for the lifting of sanctions by changing our society."
But then the verbal volley suddenly stopped. In a warm, conciliatory speech before the assembled businessmen at a Kremlin dinner, Premier Tikhonov called for "normal and, even better, friendly relations" between the two countries. At the end of Tikhonov's talk, Hartman told the Premier, "Now that's what I call a good speech." Tikhonov smiled faintly.
What lay behind Korniyenko's initial outburst? Soviet officials explained, with some embarrassment, that Korniyenko had simply been spouting on his own. Said a Soviet journalist: "It was a bureaucratic screw-up." Perhaps. Although Soviet trade officials were taking the American businessmen aside last week and telling them to ignore Korniyenko's speech, no one could be sure that it had not been intended as a deliberate warning that, however much Andropov may want to ease tensions with the U.S., he will not do so at the cost of abandoning fundamental Soviet policies.