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There is much evidence to support Reagan's and Shultz's claims. The Soviet Union is beset by economic and demographic troubles at home, as well as reversals and quagmires abroad. Still, the truth hurts--all the more so when it comes from the West. A Soviet official traveling with Politburo Member Vladimir Shcherbitsky during his visit to the U.S. two weeks ago commented privately that American "boasts and taunts" about the correlation of forces have been "the single most offensive and provocative lie of propaganda that we have had to put up with these past few years."
Quite possibly part of the Politburo's purpose in choosing Gorbachev is to put a damper on such talk. According to Arnold Horelick, the director of the Rand Corp./UCLA Center for the Study of Soviet International Behavior, "Gorbachev is being picked as an embodiment of characteristics that the Soviets want to be associated with--dynamism, optimism, confidence."
As though to confirm that interpretation, a Soviet diplomat last week gloated over the contrast between Gorbachev's age and Reagan's: "Now if there's a | summit, it will be your old leader sitting down with our young one. You might say we are turning the tables on you after all these years, going back to the meeting between John Kennedy and Khrushchev in 1961."
Well before his formal accession, Gorbachev and the managers of his image had launched a campaign to present him as someone with whom the West could do business. Horelick predicts that Gorbachev will be a "smooth, persuasive purveyor of antihistamines for our nuclear allergies," that is, proposals in arms control that will appeal to nervous Europeans and perhaps nervous Americans too, while not compromising the objectives of Soviet policy.
In this regard, Andropov's brief tenure may have provided a hint of what the West can expect from Gorbachev. Andropov's ascendance, too, occasioned high hopes in the West. The code words of wishful thinking were the same: moderate, pragmatist, technocrat, sophisticate. Within a day of his selection, there was talk of an Andropov era, a phrase that suggested a clean and welcome break with the past. His style seemed fresh and that, it was assumed, connoted a change in the content of Soviet policy. Here was a Soviet leader who would be comfortable and stimulating on the Georgetown cocktail circuit, and who would therefore be equally easy to get along with at a summit.
Andropov never had much of a chance. But even before he was purged by Comrade Death, he demonstrated that the change he represented was very much one of style and not of substance. The preoccupying issue of Soviet-American relations in those days of late 1982 and early to mid-1983 was the prospective deployment of new U.S. ballistic and cruise missiles in Western Europe. Under Brezhnev, Soviet policy had been absolutely uncompromising, and absolutely unacceptable: the U.S., said the Soviets, had no right to deploy even a single Euromissile.