Does Gorbachev Want a Deal?

By Richard Stengel

"The President is always saying that he wants a meeting," Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev told a group of Soviet farmers last month. "To shake hands with each other, to chat. But we did this in Geneva . . . It's necessary not only to talk, but to agree . . . Why meet again in order just to talk?"

When he does meet Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik, Gorbachev will at least have traveled halfway toward achieving his goal of a summit with substance. The American President and his Soviet counterpart have been sparring with each other over the conditions for their next meeting since shortly after they left the Geneva International Center last November. Like Reagan, Gorbachev has a < coterie of conservative critics who see no purpose to a second summit. Some Western observers believe the Communist Party General Secretary was criticized within the Politburo last year for getting too chummy with Reagan, and is now dogged by resistance, if not outright opposition, from the military and the conservative party officials.

As Gorbachev has pressed ahead with well-publicized but politically difficult arms-control overtures like his ban on nuclear testing, the feeling has grown in the Soviet Union that this time he must return from a summit with something more substantial than an autographed picture of Reagan. "We have been saying deeds matter more than words," said Central Committee Member Georgi Kornienko at the recent U.S.-Soviet conference in Riga, Latvia. "We want to see a summit that accomplishes deeds and doesn't just produce more words."

Some hard-line factions are not interested in deeds or words. They are apparently convinced that Gorbachev should hunker down and wait until Reagan gallops off into the sunset. "Many in the leadership believe (a second summit) is not in the Soviet interest," says a Western diplomat. "Many here believe it is impossible to do business with Reagan."

Why, then, has Gorbachev seemed so eager to make a deal, proposing compromises on intermediate missiles and releasing Daniloff in order to get a face-to-face meeting with Reagan in Iceland? One reason may be that the Soviets, with their penchant for worst-case analysis, consider it possible that the next American President may be even less easy to do business with than Reagan. They can foresee an American President who is more vigorously anti-Soviet and even more committed to strategic defense than is Reagan. As they survey the U.S. political landscape, Soviet-American-affairs specialists are noticeably curious about such cold-warrior candidates as Jack Kemp and Paul Laxalt.

Moreover, some sophisticated Soviet observers reason that now is the time to make a deal because Reagan is in a unique position to achieve and then sell an arms-control agreement. His credentials as an arch anti-Communist would enable him to weather criticism from the right about any kind of deal. In addition, his immense popularity will help him persuade the American public to embrace any agreement he negotiates.

Gorbachev has his own domestic agenda to consider. He is deeply committed to his crusade for perestroika, an overhaul or restructuring of the entire * Soviet economic and social order. His vision entails far more than just reducing drunkenness on the job and replacing petty-minded bureaucrats with efficient technocrats. He wants to make the Soviet Union an economic superpower as well as a military one.

To accomplish that, Gorbachev knows, he must reduce the oversize portion of the annual gross national product carved out by the military -- as much as 14%, by some estimates -- and devote more money to domestic economic growth. If he genuinely wants to modernize Soviet society and produce goods that can compete with Western products in world markets, he will have to divert more young men from military service to computer and technical training.

Arms control is one way -- perhaps the most efficient way -- to effect that change. The American Strategic Defense Initiative disturbs the General Secretary not because it would render nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete, as Reagan puts it, but because the effort to build their own Star Wars system could strain the Soviets' treasury.

Gorbachev is not so eager to reach an agreement with the U.S. that he will compromise Soviet security interests, nor so keen for perestroika that he will stint on defense. He sometimes feels compelled to remind his audience -- and certainly his critics -- that military security comes before economic well- being. But at the same time, SDI has forced Gorbachev and others to re- examine what they call "common security." For leaders who see themselves as the caretakers of a great revolutionary tradition, the men in the Kremlin are extremely conservative. They dislike discontinuity, uncertainty, unpredictability. SDI has compelled them to face up to some of the more worrisome consequences of their promiscuous accumulation and deployment of land-based ballistic-missile warheads. Having pressed their advantage on missiles for so long, the Soviets now find themselves stumbling into the terra incognita of high-technology defenses, where the Americans may turn out to be more at home.

Perhaps the most important statements Gorbachev has made during his first two years in power concern common security. "The character of present-day weapons," he told the 27th Soviet Communist Party Congress, "leaves a country with no hope of safeguarding itself solely with military and technical means . . . Security can only be mutual . . . for the fears and anxieties of the nuclear age generate unpredictability in politics and concrete actions."

Yet the basic problem in Soviet-American relations is that the Soviet Union defines security in a way that makes much of the rest of the world feel insecure. Gorbachev's statements and his apparent desire for a second summit and an arms-control agreement may suggest a recognition on his part that such a policy is no longer practical in the nuclear era. Or his reassuring words could merely be part of another campaign to lull the West into complacency.

With reporting by Strobe Talbott/ Washington and Nancy Traver/Moscow