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Arthur Hartman, who until earlier this year was U.S. Ambassador in Moscow, is particularly troubled by the unwarranted optimism he believes has erupted. "The little evidence we have is that this guy Gorbachev is a pretty orthodox fellow." Moscow's global ambitions and its "centralized authoritarian rule" seem unlikely to change, he says. "The Soviet Union is our antagonist and will be for the indefinite future."
Such worries about Gorbachev's ultimate goals involve another Leninist byword: peredyshka (breathing space). Both Lenin and Stalin were adept at justifying tactical retreats and temporary accommodations when these suited Soviet aims, only to return to the global struggle when conditions ripened. "The No. 1 question," says James Schlesinger, "is whether Gorbachev's new thinking is intended simply to achieve a respite, a pause, so that the Soviets can repair their economy; then in ten or 15 years go back to the ideological conflict."
The Soviets have previously made similar accommodating noises that turned out to produce breathing spaces of a dismayingly short duration. Lenin used the concept of "coexistence" to justify taking Russia out of World War I. Stalin subscribed to the doctrine of "collective security" against Hitler in the 1930s and then secretly negotiated a pact with the Nazi dictator.
Perhaps the most relevant historical analogy is the thaw promoted by Nikita Khrushchev in the late 1950s, when he was pursuing his internal reforms. That was when the phrase "peaceful coexistence" gained currency. Both sides professed their realization that they had a stake in preventing war. The quest for nuclear parity began with the limited test-ban treaty negotiated under Khrushchev, which led to the era of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and detente under Brezhnev. But Khrushchev's thaw turned out to be more rhetoric than reality. He crushed the Hungarian rebellion, built the Berlin Wall, deployed Soviet missiles in Cuba, directed Moscow's missile buildup and pushed a strategy of fostering pro-Soviet revolutions in the Third World.
Is there, then, any reason to believe that Gorbachev's talk of "mutual security" is more credible? In theory at least, there is one significant difference. The Khrushchev-Brezhnev doctrine proclaimed that the armed truce between the superpowers did not mean the end of the global "war" between Communism and capitalism. As Khrushchev said in 1963, "Peaceful coexistence not only does not exclude the class struggle, but is itself a form of the class struggle between victorious socialism and decrepit capitalism." Khrushchev also put this point in more typically blunt terms: "We will bury you." The "wars of national liberation" that he pursued produced an expansion of Moscow's influence in the far corners of the world.
Gorbachev sounds very different from Khrushchev. As he told an international peace group earlier this month, "Every nation has its own interests, and it is necessary to understand this reality. Refusing to recognize that is denying peoples the right of free choice." He also declared, in last year's Party Congress speech, "It is inadmissible and futile to encourage revolution from abroad."