Reflections on the Soviet Crisis

An interview with White House Kremlinologist Richard Pipes

One of the hardest of hard-liners in the Reagan Administration has been keeping one of the lowest of profiles. He is Richard Pipes, 58, a Polish-born historian on leave from Harvard University, who has served since the Inauguration as the chief expert on Soviet affairs for the National Security Council staff. Before joining the Government, he was an outspoken, highly controversial critic of detente and a leader of the Committee on the Present Danger, a private lobbying group that campaigned against SALT II and in favor of larger defense budgets. Partly because of his reputation for vociferous anti-Sovietism, and partly because the NSC has been trying to avoid publicity, Pipes until now was under orders to keep his strong views out of the press. Following the recent shake-up of the NSC, the new National Security Adviser, William Clark, not only asked Pipes to stay on as the White House's resident Kremlinologist but also allowed him to grant his first interview. Talking with TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott, Pipes discussed the future of Soviet Communism and the possibility of nuclear war. Excerpts:

On Kremlin succession: The Soviet Union is in deep crisis. Its economy is in serious trouble. Soviet power is overextended globally, and there is mounting disaffection among diverse social and ethnic groups. When [President Leonid] Brezhnev goes, his successors will face two choices. They can keep making outlandish appropriations for defense and engaging in global adventures, or they can face up to their internal problems, turning away from military expansionism toward reform of the domestic system. Russia has experienced throughout its history periods when the government had to turn inward to cope with its problems. The idea that the greatness of the country was achieved not on foreign battlefields but by building the society from within has fresh proponents today. But if Brezhnev's successors let the impetus of expansionism carry them forward rather than take the path of internal reform, that may risk war.

On U.S. influence on the Soviet succession: Many American liberals are wrong in thinking that the Soviet government is in the hands of relatively moderate men and that if we are not accommodating to them, we will strengthen the dreadful hawks waiting in the wings. I believe the contrary. The current leadership is dominated by parochial old Stalinists. What can be worse than that? The next generation will certainly be less parochial, and it will be post-Stalinist. The people who now run the Soviet Union are really very hawkish, and the alternative to them is not a still more hawkish group, but rather a group that is more reform-minded. These are dedicated, intelligent Russian nationalists who believe that a policy of hostility to the U.S. and confrontation abroad may have become counterproductive: they worry whether the Soviet economy can support such egregious imperialism. I think it is worth a gamble to support those latter elements, because every meaningful reform entails a certain degree of democratization, which would be good for the Soviet people as well as the rest of the world.

On the whole, I'm an optimist. I don't believe the Soviet system works. But if the Soviet leaders take the path of reform, they might be able to save the system and their own privileged positions in it, which is all that really matters to them. Hungary is an example of a relatively prosperous, relatively stable Communist country, and there are reasons to believe that the Soviet leadership is attracted by it. There are members of the Soviet hierarchy who view Hungary as a kind of laboratory that has proved that one can retain the basic elements of the system and still allow for some kind of reinvigoration from below.

On how to support the reformers: The U.S. can do this to a limited extent only, to be sure. First, by raising the cost of a Soviet expansion with a credibly strong military posture, and, second, by extending such support as we can to groups resisting a takeover by Soviet forces or Soviet proxies. I'm talking about Africa, Latin America and Southwest Asia--areas on which the Soviet Union and its clients are currently encroaching, not areas Moscow has long ago taken over. A third way we can encourage internal reform is in the economic field. It would mean for us and our allies not to transfer technology and assign credits to the East bloc.

If we proffer help of this kind, then we are only making it easier for those regimes to avoid reform. To the extent that we help the Communist economies to automate, for instance, we are bolstering the position of the present leadership, which is to say of the conservative hawks who don't want to democratize.

On the Kremlin and democracy: The Soviet leadership is neither traditional nor popularly mandated, but it cannot acknowledge this fact. So the leaders face a terrible dilemma: On what basis do they rule dictatorially? The answer they have come up with to justify their dictatorial power is to say, "We're surrounded by enemies, we're in a state of permanent class war, therefore we can't afford the luxury of elections and other democratic paraphernalia."

They try to create the illusion of legitimacy by generating or even inventing threats of all sorts and blaming them on alleged foreign enemies. They're constantly telling their people, "We defeated the Nazis; we saved you from slavery and annihilation. And we are doing so today, again."

On the imposition of martial law in Poland: There are two schools of thought on Poland inside the Soviet leadership? One, which was dominated by the late [ideological chief Mikhail] Suslov, has argued that events in Poland were due to the intolerable laxity of the Polish Communists, and that the only way to get rid of the problem is by brutal re-Stalinization. The other school holds that the Polish Communists lost touch with the masses and that mere repression will not restore a viable system there. As of now, the first group has carried the day. But repression alone surely will not solve Poland's desperate problems, and the other group may still have the last word.

On President Reagan's prediction that future historians will look back on Soviet Communism as an aberration of history: I was certainly impressed by that statement. But I don't think the President advocates historical inevitability. He does not mean for us to sit and wait for Soviet Communism to disappear of itself. If that's going to happen, free people will have to help make it happen.

On the Soviet-U.S. nuclear balance: The principal thrust of our nuclear doctrine has always been, and continues to be, retaliatory. We have concentrated on our ability to launch a second strike against their cities and industries if they were to attack us first. Soviet doctrine and deployments have been primarily ones of counterforce (the ability to destroy military targets). Counterforce suggests first strike rather than retaliation. The reason that we are now building up our own counterforce ability is not because we contemplate a first strike but because we are increasingly concerned that our traditional deterrent has ceased to be credible.

On whether the Soviets believe in a winnable nuclear war: The leaders think in terms of being prepared to do whatever is necessary to save themselves and their system should a general war break out. They cannot have a precise idea whether anyone could win a nuclear war. Nobody knows that. But they want to make certain that by developing redundant systems, by taking such measures as building antisatellite weapons and organizing civil defense, if it ever came to a war, they would win. Or at least they would emerge less the losers than we would.

On what the U.S. attitude toward nuclear war should be: If one believes that nuclear war is unwinnable, then no defensive measures against it make sense. We must adopt the attitude of saying, "Nuclear war is indeed a nightmare, but prudence requires that we face its possibility." I compare it to cancer, which used to be a taboo word. People were afraid to mention it lest they bring it about. Of course, cancer is a horror, but it exists all around us, as do nuclear weapons. Now we face cancer. And we cure a lot of cancer because of that. Nuclear weapons are a kind of international cancer. We can't pretend they don't exist. The Soviets decided 20 years ago that nuclear weapons would be decisive in an extreme situation. They concluded that if they ever had to go to war--which they do hope to avoid--they would have to make serious preparations for effective use of nuclear weapons. If they view the problem that way, we have little choice. If we insist on looking the other way and simply saying over and over again that these weapons are unusable and nuclear war is unthinkable, then we will have a defense unsuited to an adversary's offense, and that could get us into deep trouble. The objective is to formulate a strategy and proceed with deployments that will make a first strike against us not so much "unthinkable" (since the Soviet leadership considers it quite thinkable) as really unwinnable.

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