The View from Moscow

The anti-Soviet attitude of the Reagan Administration is causing dismay in the Kremlin. During a two-week visit to the U.S.S.R., TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott talked with many Soviet officials about the new U.S. position. A summary of their views:

There is nothing muted or polite about Moscow's alarm and impatience with the new Administration. In a series of interviews, Soviet observers have lashed out sharply not just against the Administration as a whole but against individuals in key positions. Says Georgi Arbatov, the U.S.S.R.'s chief America watcher and a member of the Communist Party Central Committee: "The people who have come to power are more ideological than almost any in the past. Many of them hate us blindly. I'm not necessarily talking about the top level, but at the next level there are biased zealots, with rather low intellectual capacities at that. And the whole disarmament field has been turned over to people like [Eugene] Rostow, Rowny, Perle and Burt.* It's a bit like the Administration's trying to give responsibility for human rights to this guy [Ernest] Lefever. The whole thing is tremendously Orwellian. I don't know how close these people are to the President. As for [Secretary of State Alexander] Haig, some Europeans talk about him as the only politically literate, experienced and dependable man in the U.S. Government right now. I just don't know. If they're right, then we're really badly off. Step by step, almost everything Haig has said and done has been to destroy what small amount of trust remains."

The Soviets seem far less hopeful than they were at the outset of this Administration that Reagan will end up, like earlier postwar conservative Republican Presidents, presiding over better Soviet-American relations than liberal Democrats. Says Svyatoslav Kozlov, a retired general who now writes on military affairs: "Our experience with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon suggests that there may still be hope for avoiding a complete breakdown, but the paradox of our better relations with Republican Presidents is by no means predestined to be repeated with Reagan."

Alexander Bovin, an Izvestia columnist and party official, agrees: "The Nixon model is, in theory, still not excluded. But you Americans say Reagan is different from his predecessors in that he will fulfill his campaign promises--including, presumably, the most anti-Soviet ones."

So far, the Soviets seem to accept what many Reagan and Haig aides privately admit: the new Administration's means and goals for managing the relationship are still taking shape and, in some cases, are still under debate. As a foreign ministry official points out, "Even the one initiative in recent months that we have welcomed here--the lifting of the grain embargo--was motivated solely by domestic political considerations. It was potentially important for your relations with us, yet the decision was made in a foreign policy vacuum. We're waiting to see how that vacuum is finally filled."

"There's a general philosophy in Washington," says Bovin. "It's based on fear and ignorance and the most retrograde attitudes, but it's not yet a thought-out system for dealing with the real world. I cling to the hope that the contradictions between the initial philosophy and the still inchoate policy will be resolved positively." Arbatov agrees. He believes the current mood in the U.S. is a backlash against a decade of "disappointment and difficulty" that included Viet Nam, Watergate and the "humiliation" of the hostage crisis. "But I haven't lost all hope," he says. "These people in Washington may yet discover they must build a bridge between their gut feelings and reality. Politics is still the art of the possible."

* Edward Rowny, an opponent of SALT II who heads the U.S. delegation for arms control negotiations; Richard Perle, a longtime aide to Senator Henry Jackson, now a high official in the Pentagon; Richard Burt, a strategic affairs expert and former defense correspondent for the New York Times, now director of politico-military affairs in the State Department.

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