LENIN TO THE RESCUE
ONE GOOD THING about Divinity is that it responds in time of need. Mikhail Gorbachev's need of Divine approval and support has never been greater, so he must have been enormously relieved and grateful, the other day, when a Pole named Kuligowski sent him a letter, said to have been addressed to Kuligowski's father by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
I hope, for Gorbachev's sake, that nobody in his entourage will be so caddish as to submit the alleged letter to the kind of skeptical analysis that established, not long ago, that the diaries attributed to Hitler were forgeries. But if the letter is genuine, it is a remarkably handy document to have come into the General Secretary's mailbox at this difficult time.
As everybody knows since Pravda published its account the other day, Kazimir Kuligowski Sr. was a worker on a railway-construction project north of Moscow in 1919. He had written to the great man to complain about the shortcomings and abuses of the local Party bureaucracy, and was rewarded with a letter from Lenin condemning Party "hangers-on' and advocating "a businesslike and practical approach' to eradicate excesses. Ever pedagogic, Pravda remarked: "Today the Party is using Lenin's methods in its struggle against those who further their own petty selfish interests and is acting in the way Lenin advised.'
One might say that it has taken the Party an awfully long time to get round to acting in the way Lenin advised. On the other hand, as early as December 19, 1917, Lenin also had the foresight to set up the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, usually shortened to Cheka, and now known as the KGB. History will have to decide which of the two, Stalin or Gorbachev, was the better Leninist.
Such comments are not as frivolous as they may sound. In his breathtaking current campaign, the General Secretary is having almost daily to urge his people to speak their minds and, in the next breath, to warn them not to go too far. Thus in his major address to "leaders of mass media and creative unions' on July 14, he said that "we shall never be able to forgive or justify what happened in 1937 and 1938.' But he then praised the socialist system for having survived and gone on to defeat Nazism.
To illustrate the dilemma Gorbachev is in, and the dilemmas he is creating every day for the Party faithful, consider the case of Nikolai Shmelev of the Academy of Sciences. In an article in the literary review Novy Mir, Shmelev advocated, among other heresies, convertibility of the ruble, a free market in prices, an end to subsidies, and the acceptance of unemployment as a necessary evil. This almost constitutes Thatcherism and Reaganomics.
It is important to keep the background of internecine Party strife in mind when considering the proposals Gorbachev continues to shower upon the expectant West. Gorbachev recently chose the unexpected forum of an interview he granted to the Indonesian newspaper Merdeka to extend his half of the "double-zero' offer to Asia. Interestingly, he referred to the "destruction' instead of to the "dismantling' of the Soviet Union's one hundred medium-range missiles in the Soviet Far East, "provided, of course, that the U.S.A. does exactly the same.' Moreover, the U.S. could maintain its nuclear presence in South Korea, the Philippines, and Diego Garcia.
Obviously, such proposals go beyond any previous ones on the Soviet side (if one excepts the purely propagandist offers of "general and complete disarmament') and have to be examined seriously.
They need, however, to be seen in the wider context of the extension of Soviet influence and power by non-military means. Although recent Soviet maneuvers in the Pacific have attracted some media attention, their full significance has not yet come out. The USSR cleverly endorsed the Rarotonga Treaty of December 11 last, which envisions the establishment of a Pacific denuclearized zone. In an article in Kommunist in January, Mikhail Titarenko, Director of the Far East Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, gave his enthusiastic support. He omitted, however, to mention that although the Soviets actually signed two protocols to the treaty, they specifically reserve the right "to strike by nuclear means at a potential adversary in the zone of the treaty, and even a signatory country should it have helped-- for example by welcoming American warships--the Allied effort in the military domain.'
THE SOVIETS are far weaker than the Americans in the Pacific area, and therefore have correspondingly less to lose in supporting such initiatives. Thus the Soviets enthusiastically welcomed the anti-nuclear stance of New Zealand's Premier David Lange and similar positions taken by the governments of Kiribati (formerly the Gilbert Islands), Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides), and Fiji before the curious coup d'etat in that country this spring.)
Add to that the signing of "fishing fleet' (i.e., electronic spy ship) accords with Kiribati (1985) and Vanuatu (January 1987), and similar plans for Fiji, as well as the encouragement of "peace' movements in New Zealand and elsewhere, and a Pacific strategy emerges with some clarity.
One last thought: The Pacific region is absolutely essential to the testing and development of the Strategic Defense Initiative. This fact, too, has been noted in Moscow.