America Watching

A new kind of specialist is emerging in the Soviet Union: the America watcher. Though he is perhaps less interested in scholarly research than his Russia-watching counterpart at Harvard or Columbia, he wants to study his subject with the same wide-angle lens. Russia has always observed the U.S. with the help of spies and diplomats, who specialized in such vital subjects as U.S. technology, economy and weaponry. The newer America watchers are attempting to give Russia a more systematic picture of the U.S. as a complex, diverse and often contradictory nation. The view of the U.S. that results is perhaps reflected in Soviet newspapers, which now find it necessary to distinguish "sober imperialists" and "realistic-thinking and -speaking imperialists" from the more sinister everyday variety.

The Soviet leadership has of course never fully believed its own propaganda image of the American as a top-hatted, cigar-puffing Wall Street capitalist. But neither has it built up an objective store house of information on the U.S., even for scholars. An American diplomat stationed in Moscow some years ago, for example, discovered that books pertaining to the study of the U.S.-Persian relations in the famed Lenin library were catalogued under the letter I, for "In famous U.S.-Persian relations." Such a lack of the generalist's sane overview often made American society, as seen from Moscow, something of a mystery. Was racial violence, for example, a sign that it was coming apart at the seams?

Did U.S. domestic ills foreshadow a change in foreign policy? The Kremlin's experts could not agree--any more than America's own experts could.

Russia's ranking America watcher is probably Yuri Arbatov, head of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Science's one-year-old Institute of American Studies. From his office in a renovated 18th century mansion in Moscow, Arbatov presides over a research staff of some 50 youngish, English-speaking specialists, a growing library, and space for a prestigious, soon-to-be-installed computer. The staff is made up of economists, historians, lawyers, foreign affairs specialists and social scientists, including a demographer. Anatoly Gromyko, son of the Soviet Foreign Minister and author of a book on the Kennedy Administration, is a member specializing in U.S. foreign policy.

Organic Link. The institute's working hypothesis was probably summed up by Arbatov in his only published work as I.A.S. director--a review in the government newspaper Izvestia of the Brookings Institution's Agenda for the Nation. Said Arbatov: "One discovers in this book what is probably one of the basic problems of the U.S. today--the organic link between internal difficulties that have reached an unprecedented height and the foreign policy course that Washington pursues."

Arbatov, 45, is a stocky, heavy-eyed journalist-administrator who smiles easily and speaks idiomatic English. He was reportedly picked for his job because he cultivated both party members (he is one) and scholars--two groups that do not always agree in Russia. Arbatov has, as he says, "done his homework" on the U.S. Currently he is doing some firsthand research by traveling in the U.S. and talking with journalists, businessmen (California's Norton Simon, Litton Industries' Charles--"Tex"--Thornton), and even U.S. Russia watchers (Columbia's Zbigniew Brzezinski, Harvard's Merle Fainsod). He participated in a discussion group of U.S. and Russian leaders in Rye, N.Y., and will travel to Washington, Boston and California before his return.

Undoubtedly much of the institute's work will be kept under tight security wraps and go directly to the top men in the Kremlin (Arbatov is said to have the ear of Premier Aleksei Kosygin). But the institute has announced an ambitious publication list--none of it so far available--for this year. Arbatov plans to bring out a monograph showing the influence of ideology on foreign policy. Deputy Director Evgeny Sergeevich Shcherchnov, an economist, is scheduled to publish a study of trade policy, and a group of specialists, including Gromyko, is expected to produce a work on U.S. foreign policy doctrines and machinery. There are also plans for a regular journal, and even talk of teaming U.S. and Soviet specialists to work on joint projects.

Delphic Marxism. In the past, most nonmilitary research was collected piecemeal from various study centers. The one really systematic attempt to keep scholarly pace involved science; translated editions of U.S. technical journals were distributed regularly to Soviet specialists. The official attitude on other subjects altered two years ago, when the Communist Party Central Committee severely criticized the state of Soviet social science research. As a result of this turnabout, Russian specialists began taking a new look at dozens of U.S. phenomena--from the rebellion of youth, which has its parallels in Russia, to the glut of automobile traffic, which so far has few.

Some Soviet thinkers have even begun to play with scenario building, the concept that Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute and others have used so effectively. Arbatov himself, however, dismisses comparisons between his group and U.S. "think tanks." As one of his assistants explained: "We are dialecticians, not formal logicians."

Precisely what conclusions the Soviet America watchers have reached is still classified information. From the advance indicators, however, they will cause few sleepless nights for party-liners. Arbatov, in his review of the Brookings report, rather grandly diagnosed many U.S. problems as "the natural outcome of the social system and the way of life prevailing in the country." As for Nixon, the institute's scientific director, Vladimir Filatov, last week safely predicted that "he will be true to his class."

If that bit of Delphic Marxism is representative of work to come, the institute may not do much to make the U.S. a more understandable country in Russia. However, one aspect of U.S. life that is said to intrigue some America watchers is the prominence of professors in Washington politics. That discovery alone could produce an interesting scenario.

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