Tough Bargaining Likely at Geneva : Split Seen in Politburo on Negotiations

Returning in a boisterous mood from a New Year’s celebration in Red Square, a group of young Soviet citizens spotted the distinctive license plate of an American car. They jeered.

The American driver, however, shouted a New Year’s greeting in Russian-- “Novim godom” --and the jeers changed to cheers.

No great significance should be read into this casual holiday encounter. Still, it reflects an apparent split within the Kremlin on the eve of arms talks in Geneva on Monday between Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko.

Soviet Position ‘Determined’

In a sign of differences within the ruling Politburo over arms control issues, the official press announced Friday that the “Soviet position has been determined” at a Politburo session only four days ahead of the opening of the Geneva talks.

This represents a departure from the usual Soviet practice of approving a negotiating position well in advance of such meetings, and it indicates that disagreements had to be resolved at the 11th hour.

In recent days, there have been plenty of jeers at American policy on arms control in the government-run newspapers. Some senior Soviet commentators have come close to suggesting that nothing will come from the talks.

Soviet critics apparently share a deep, instinctive distrust of President Reagan. They picture him as striving for military superiority over the Soviet Union while preaching peace.

At the same time--and often in the same publication--there is a new-year attitude of hope and satisfaction that the superpowers are at last talking again about disarming.

“The new year gives rise to new hopes,” Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, said, referring to the Shultz-Gromyko meeting.

The No. 1 optimist here appears to be President Konstantin U. Chernenko, who has boasted that he personally initiated the move toward Geneva. But some analysts here believe that Chernenko, in frail health and with uncertain authority over the military and foreign policy establishments, is taking a major gamble.

In effect, the Soviet Union agreed to drop its previous insistence on the removal of new American missiles from Western Europe before it would enter new discussions on nuclear weapons. In addition, the Kremlin is no longer demanding that the United States stop its research on space weapons before talks are undertaken on the arms control in space.

If the talks fail or falter, Chernenko could be blamed for sacrificing Soviet positions without getting anything in return.

But if Geneva leads to new negotiations with any promise of accord, Chernenko could claim his first foreign policy triumph since he came to office almost a year ago.

As a protege of the late President Leonid I. Brezhnev, the 73-year-old Chernenko seems at times to be nostalgic for the early 1970s, the Brezhnev era of detente. He has talked about “radical solutions” to eliminate entire nuclear arsenals.

“There are uncertainties involved in an unrestrained arms race, and both sides want to bring their arsenals to a manageable level,” a Western analyst said.

Chernenko may hope, too, for improvement in other areas of East-West tension. In fact, he said that Geneva will be the test of whether he would go to a summit meeting with Reagan, possibly later this year, on the entire range of Soviet-American issues.

Yet he is expecting Reagan to make a dramatic first move.

“The world,” he said recently, “waits for a practical confirmation from the United States of the sincerity of the assurances made by the Washington Administration of late.”

Chernenko re-emphasized Soviet interest in limiting space weaponry in a message to religious leaders, according to a Tass news agency report Saturday.

“Indeed, attempts by certain American quarters to foist a ‘Star Wars’ era on mankind are creating a new, additional threat to peace,” Chernenko said in the message.

“If militarist forces of the U.S.A. prevail in this issue, an irreversible situation will arise, which will be fraught with the most baneful consequences,” the Soviet president added.

Kremlin officials have made it clear that some U.S. concession on Reagan’s call for research on a space-based anti-missile defense system--the “Star Wars” program--is the bare minimum requirement to label Geneva a success.

Pravda, warning against a space arms race, has called the defense system America’s “most dangerous scheme,” and Gromyko termed it a “mortal danger” to world peace.

In propaganda terms, the Soviet attack on the perceived U.S. “militarization of outer space” has replaced the demand for removal of Pershing 2 and cruise missiles from Western Europe as Moscow’s main theme.

Red Star, the military newspaper, is the only Soviet publication that has recently mentioned the continued deployment of the intermediate-range American weapons, an issue that dominated discussions of disarmament only a few months ago.

Chernenko, by contrast, has stressed in his public statements the importance of a U.S. pledge not to be the first to use nuclear weapons and a total ban on nuclear weapons tests.

The Kremlin leadership appears to have accepted the presence of the so-called Euromissiles as an accomplished fact a year after Soviet negotiators walked out of arms control talks in Geneva to protest their deployment.

Meanwhile, Western diplomats note that the Soviets never mention their own anti-satellite weapons system, the anti-ballistic missile defenses around Moscow or Soviet research on laser beams in space when assailing “militarization” of space by the United States.

“Soviet diplomats keep their cards close to their chest,” one Western observer said. “The fact is that both sides have used space for military purposes for a long time.”

The Kremlin’s propaganda emphasis on space weapons, however, may indicate that the Soviets fear a U.S. technological breakthrough in this area, or that they prefer not to allocate billions of rubles to stay even.

“These (space) systems are new, relatively close to the ground floor, so they could be curbed more easily now,” a Western diplomat noted.

Valentin Falin, writing in the government newspaper Izvestia, warned of possible heavy additional spending on Soviet countermeasures if a U.S. “Star Wars” system is built.

The focus on Reagan’s controversial space plan, however, gives the Soviets little room to maneuver in the Shultz-Gromyko talks. Weapons in space would nullify previous achievements in arms control, Pravda said in an editorial, and added, “It is essential to prevent such a dangerous process--and without delay--before it becomes irreversible.”

Pravda commentator Alexander Krivitsky, in a New Year’s Day article, took a gloomy view of the Geneva talks.

“History knows examples of talks being used for marking time,” he said, “as a tool to build an alibi with public opinion or as a way to slip one over on the (negotiating) partner.”

And Vadim V. Zagladin, a member of the Communist Party Central Committee, writing in the newspaper Soviet Russia, declared:

“Assertions of a ‘turn’ (in Soviet-American relations) are unfounded. There is still no turn, although our country is ready.”

A contrasting view was presented by the popular weekly Literary Gazette, which said it expects good results from Geneva because Reagan’s “strategy of confrontation and arms race has exhausted its political limits.”