Survival Is Not Enough 0671495356

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As long as the Stalinist system prevails in the USSR, war will remain an ever­ present danger which the Western democracies cannot avert through either rearmament or accommodation, writes Richard Pipes, renowned foreign-policy analyst, former member of the National Security Council, profes­ sor of Russian history at Harvard, and author of Russia Under the Old Regime. In this timely and significant examination of the constraints on Soviet-American relations, Pipes estab­ lishes the crucial link-all but ignored until now-between political and eco­ nomic oppression in the USSR and Soviet expansionism and militarism abroad. Destined to become a landmark study; Survival Is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America's Future is a thoroughgoing history and critique of the absolute rule of the Soviet oligar­ chy and its Grand Strategy of global hegemony; as well as an analysis of the options presented by the Soviet system to the makers of American foreign pol­ icy. Pipes's unique perspective and authority make Survival Is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America's Future a vital document in the quest for genuine peace in the nuclear era.

PUBLICATIONS BY RICHARD PIPES WORKS:

Formation of the Soviet Union (Harvard, 1954; revised ed., 1964) Karamzin's Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia (Harvard, 1959) Social Democracy and the Saint Petersburg Labor Movement (Harvard, 1963) Europe Since 1815 (Harper & Row, 1970) Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870-1905 (Harvard, 1970) Russia Under the Old Regime (Scribners, 1974) Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905-1944 (Harvard, 1980) U.5.-Soviet Relations in the Era of Detente (Westview, 1981) WORKS EDITED:

Giles Fletcher, Of the Russe Commonwealth (1591) (Harvard, 1966, with John Fine) The Russian Intelligentsia (Columbia University Pre�s, 1961) Revolutionary Russia (Harvard, 1968) Collected Works in Fifteen Volumes (P. B. Struve) (Ann Arbor, Ml, 1970) Soviet Strategy in Europe (Crane, Russak, 1976)

SURVIVAL IS NOT ENOUGH Soviet Realities and America's Future Richard Pipes

SIMON AND SCHUSTER NEW YORK

Copyright© 1984 by Richard Pipes All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form Published by Simon and Schuster, A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Simon & Schuster Building Rockefeller Center 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, New York 10020 SIMON AND SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Designed by Jennie Nichols/Levavi & Levavi Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Pipes, Richard. Survival is not enough. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Soviet Union-Politics and government-19532. Communism-Soviet Union. 3. Soviet Union-Economic conditions-1975. 4. Soviet Union-Foreign relations-United States. 5. United States-Foreign relations-Soviet Union. 6. Peace. I. Title. DK274.P53 1984 327.73047 84-13848 ISBN 0-671-49535-6 The author is grateful for permission to use the following: "Bargaining Chips" -copyright© 1983 by Herblock in The Washington Post. "Comparison of Existing NATO/Warsaw Pact Land-Based Surface-to-Surface Warheads in Europe (Aggregate Yield in Approximate Megatons)" from USS! Report 83-1, The Nuclear "Balance" in Europe: Status, Trends and Implications, by Donald Cotter et al. (Washington, D.C., United States Strategic Institute). Cartoon by Steiger from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (May 22, 1981).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my appreciation to Ambassador Edward Rowny, Professor Michael Voslensky and Professor Wolfgang Leonhard for the valuable advice they gave me on various parts of the book. They are not responsible, of course, for any opinion contained in it. My assistant, Ms. Nellie Hauke, has also earned my gratitude for her dedicated work.

CONTENTS FOREWORD

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Chapter I THE COMMUNIST SYSTEM 17 1. The historic background 2. The nomenklatura

3. The Stalinist economic system 4. Soviet imperialism 5. The psychology of the nomenklatura

17 29 33 37 44

Chapter II THE SOVIET THREAT 49 1. Soviet Grand Strategy 2. Soviet political strategy

3. Soviet military strategy 4. Strategy in the Third World

51 60 83 102

Chapter III THE ECONOMIC CRISIS IIO 1. General remarks about the economic crisis 2. Agriculture

111

120

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CONTENTS

3. Living standards

4. Population trends

5. Foreign debts 6. Attempts at economic reform 7. The second economy

127 128 132 136 142

Chapter IV THE POLITICAL CRISIS 148 1. The corrupt Party 2. Intellectual dissent A. The Westernizing (democratic) opposition B. The nationalist opposition 3. Imperial problems A. The Soviet Union and its nationalities B. The colonies C. The dependencies D. Communist parties E. China 4. Can the Soviet Union reform?

149 158 163 169 178 179 186 188 193 198 199

Chapter V WHAT CAN WE DO? 209 1. Past patterns of U.S.-Soviet relations A. Containment B. Detente 2. Strategic opportunities for the United States 3. The military aspect 4. The political aspect A. Party politics B. The Alliance 5. The economic aspect 6. Who should be in charge of policy toward the USSR? 7. Concluding remarks NOTES INDEX

211 218 220 222 224 246 247 248 259 273 277 283 291

FOREWORD

The subject matter of this book demands no justification: relations between the United States and the Soviet Union and the means of preventing their disagreements from erupting into nuclear war have an obvious significance. What does call for an explanation is the rationale for yet another work in a field which is crowded already and every aspect of which seems to have been subjected to exhaustive treatment. My reason for writing derives from the conviction that the exist­ ing literature on U.S.-Soviet relations and the nuclear threat suf­ fers from a serious flaw: it treats these subjects almost exclusively as problems confronting the United States, to be debated and de­ cided upon by Americans. The Soviet regime, with its interests, ideology and political strategy, is regarded in this context as only tangentially involved. It manifests an extraordinary insularity as well as arrogance on the part of Americans to regard "the fate of the earth" as dependent on what they think and do, as if the other party to the equation were nothing but a passive agent, capable only of reacting. The shelves are full of books on the Soviet Union which describe in vivid detail conditions in that country: the political and cultural oppression, the social inequalities and corruption, the all-perva-

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FOREWORD

sive drabness. This literature is designed to satisfy the curiosity of the Western public about daily life in a country which impinges on it in so many ways and yet falls very much outside the range of its experience. Even the best books of this genre, however, make no connection between the Soviet system and Soviet foreign policy. They are, fundamentally, accounts of travelers returned from journeys to an exotic land, fascinating as human documents but politically irrelevant. Even in the specialized, professional lit­ erature on the political and economic system of the USSR, the link between its internal order and its international conduct is rarely established. The issue is treated as if what a country is at home and what it does abroad were two separate and self-contained matters. Now this cannot be. Historical evidence indicates that the for­ eign policy of every country is a function of its domestic conditions and an extension of its internal policies. The foreign conduct of a state may be strongly affected by the international environment in which it has to operate, but the impulses invariably come from within. Hence, the regime which Moscow maintains inside the Soviet Union and in other areas under its control should be for the West a matter not of mere curiosity but of the greatest and most immediate relevance. The manner in which a government treats its own citizens obviously has great bearing on the way it will treat other nations. A regime that does not respect legal norms inside its borders is not likely to show respect for them abroad.If it wages war against its own people, it can hardly be expected to live at peace with the rest of the world. That intimate connection between the internal order prevailing in Communist countries and their external behavior, which Western authors virtually ignore, is clearly understood by intellectuals who live in these countries. They plead with the West to grasp that how Communist govern­ ments treat their citizens constitutes not only a violation of human rights but a direct challenge to the West's own vital interests. " States with totalitarian political systems are a threat to world peace," a group of Polish intellectuals stated in a recent appeal to Western "peace" movements; "the necessity for aggressive expan­ sion arises wherever authority is based on force and lies, wherever societies are deprived of the possibility of influencing government policy, wherever governments fear those over whom they rule and against whom they conduct wars ... The sole ideology of the adherents of totalitarianism is the maintenance of power by any means. In the present crisis, even war can be considered an ac­ ceptable price for this aim." The author subscribes to this interpretation, and this shapes the

FOREWORD

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contents as well as the argument of his book. The bulk of its contents is devoted to the Soviet system: its structure, its political interests and strategy, its strengths and weaknesses. This feature alone distinguishes it from most of the existing works on the sub­ ject, which address themselves primarily to American policies and their options. The book opens with a discussion of the essential feature of the political system prevailing in the USSR and its colo­ nies, which is absolute rule by an oligarchy of Party officials who not only monopolize political authority but literally own their countries and everything that lies within their boundaries. It is the author's contention that its internal position commits the Com­ munist oligarchy to engage in militarism and expansionism, and that as long as it is able to maintain its present status, international tension, with all the risks it carries, is unavoidable, no matter what the Western powers do. The discussion then proceeds to the meth­ ods which the Communist oligarchy employs to expand its influ­ ence abroad. This is depicted in terms of a "Grand Strategy" whose principal objective is global hegemony and whose principal means is political attrition. The middle chapters of the book are devoted to the economic and political crises which Communist regimes presently experience and which inhibit their ambitions and even endanger their authority. These crises, which include declining rates of economic growth, the emergence of an uncon­ trolled "second" or free economy, widespread corruption, political dissent, and the demographic decline of Slavs, cannot be over­ come by repressive measures: they confront these regimes with the necessity of thoroughgoing internal reforms. The author con­ cludes from this evidence that a growing discrepancy is emerging between the global aspirations of the Communist elite and the means at its disposal, that this elite is finding it increasingly diffi­ cult to pursue its global ambitions and to maintain intact the Stalin­ ist system. While the Soviet government is in no danger of imminent collapse, it cannot forever "muddle through" and will have to choose before long between reducing its aspirations to worldwide hegemony and transforming its internal regime, and perhaps even find it necessary to do the one and the other. These premises determine the practical recommendations con­ tained in the concluding section of the book. The principal point they make is that the West, in its own interest, ought to assist those economic and political forces which are at work inside the Communist Bloc undermining the system and pressuring its elites to turn their attention inward. Experience has shown time and again that attempts to restrain Soviet aggressiveness by a combi­ nation of rewards and punishments do not accomplish their pur-

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FOREWORD

pose because they address the symptoms of the problem, namely aggression, instead of its cause, which is the system itself. This is a call not for subverting Communism but for letting Communism subvert itself. By neutralizing its military threat and, at the same time, withholding those political concessions and that economic assistance which enables the Soviet elite to maintain the status quo, the West may well, in time, help to force it to emulate the example set by the post-Mao leadership in China and alter its priorities. For this to happen, the Communist elites must be sub­ jected to the maximal internal pressures which the system itself generates. It is a central thesis of this book that the Soviet regime will become less aggressive only as a result of failures and worries about its ability to govern effectively and not from a sense of en­ hanced security and confidence. The whole set of issues connected with the danger of nuclear war is addressed here in the same context of Soviet politics. West­ ern books on the "bomb" look upon it as if it were some new breed of deadly bacillus, instead of a manmade device. They con­ centrate on the disastrous consequences of a nuclear exchange, by now familiar to most people, and ignore the men who design them, deploy them, and formulate a strategy for their eventual use. The consequence of this abstract approach is that the danger appears to come not from enmity and lawlessness but from the building of bombs, which again confuses effect with cause. After all, the United States border with Canada has been peaceful for nearly two centuries not because it is disarmed; rather, it is dis­ armed because it has been peaceful. It has been one of the most spectacular accomplishments of Soviet diplomacy and propaganda to persuade much of the Western public that the threat to its sur­ vival and way of life stems not from Soviet intentions and actions but from inanimate objects. This stratagem has achieved two ob­ jectives. In the first place, it has concentrated everyone's attention on the West's efforts at rearmament while the much grander mili­ tary pi;ograms of the USSR have been discreetly concealed. In the secon