Tough Talk At Riga

Amid the turmoil that engulfed Soviet-American relations last week, some 250 U.S. citizens traveled to Riga, the resplendent medieval capital of the Soviet Republic of Latvia, for a meeting with 2,000 carefully selected Soviets that was sponsored by the Chautauqua Institution, a New York organization that has sponsored cultural, educational and public-affairs groups around the world for 112 years. Among the American panelists who accompanied the group was TIME Washington Bureau Chief Strobe Talbott. His report:

Like the calibrated give-and-take over summitry and alleged spying that dominated Washington and Moscow, the gathering in Riga dramatized a basic principle of superpower relations: even in the worst of times, the two rivals seek to maintain competitive engagement in diplomacy rather than let their antagonisms get out of control. The reason is simple. In the nuclear age, the breakdown of diplomacy and the resort to war is not an option. Precisely because last week was a tense moment, it was a good week for the U.S. citizens who traveled to Riga.

People-to-people exchanges of this kind can all too easily arc off into the stratosphere of goodwill. American participants are often at a curious disadvantage. They lean toward the view that both sides are to blame. Their Soviet counterparts agree with half of that proposition, eagerly endorsing any American selfcriticism while promulgating the doctrine of Soviet infallibility.

The Riga meeting, by contrast, was dominated by tough talk on both sides rather than toasts to mir i druzhba (peace and friendship). Largely because of the Daniloff affair, which was repeatedly raised by both Administration officials and private U.S. citizens, the Chautauquans were given a crash course in old-fashioned Soviet stonewalling. After a particularly harsh counterattack on Daniloff by Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Petrovsky, one of the Americans in the audience commented, "It's like watching the machinery of the big lie in action -- from the inside."

The Soviet spokesman on arms control, General Nikolai Chervov, delivered an attack on the U.S. that had all the subtlety of a 20-megaton warhead. He accused the Reagan Administration of holding "murderous positions" and of conducting "dishonest negotiations." Fending off American concerns over the U.S.S.R.'s 308 ten-warhead SS-18 ICBMs, he asserted that the comparable American MX "is already in a state of operational deployment." In fact, not until the end of the year are the first ten MXs expected to be operational.

Said Quintus Anderson, a businessman from Jamestown, N.Y.: "This conference has convinced a lot of us of the need for a strong defense, which is not the conclusion we expected to come to." Yet even the hard-line statements of Chervov and Petrovsky left room for a U.S. official in Riga to say, "If you listen closely, you can still hear them saying they are extremely eager to restrict SDI and they may be willing to pay a significant price in arms control to do so."

The conference had its share of lighter moments. In a program of informal exchanges, Maria Valsilyeva of Riga wanted to know about differences in men's and women's salaries in the U.S. Marilyn Levinson of Erie, Pa., wanted the recipe for shchi, a Russian cabbage soup. Later Anderson took his wife to a restaurant and they ended up dancing with a group of Ukrainian tourists from, of all places, Chernobyl. Said Anderson: "I'm sure those people will go home and tell their friends that we're not all that bad."

But these moments were the exception rather than the rule, just as they are in Soviet-American relations more generally, last week and every week.