Soviet Peace Movement May Be Having an Effect

The Nobel Peace Committee has been criticized for its award of this year’s prize to the Soviet co-chairman of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

Yevgeny Chazov, who is sharing the award with his American counterpart, Bernard Lown, is a deputy minister of health in the Soviet Union. He was (and perhaps still is) the personal doctor of the Communist Party general secretary, and on that basis was made a full member of the Central Committee--scarcely a man independent of the government.

Even if he wanted to, Chazov cannot publicly criticize the policy of the Soviet Union. When he goes abroad, Chazov supports Soviet foreign policy.

Nevertheless, much of the criticism of this award and the official Soviet peace movement in general betrays a real lack of understanding of the Soviet political system. The role of the men and women in this movement is far more complex than we in the West usually recognize.

When we see statements by Soviet scholars (such as Georgi Arbatov) or officials (Chazov) in favor of disarmament or peace, we have the very self-centered assumption that they are directed only at us and are intended to get us to lower our guard.

What we forget is that the scholars who are part of the official Soviet peace movement also write in the Soviet press. The censorship does not permit them to criticize Soviet policy, at least directly, but they are saying things that are deeply disturbing to powerful military and conservative elements within the Soviet Establishment. Before he was removed as chief of the general staff, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov complained bitterly in print about those in the Soviet press who treat any peace as a good peace. “It is necessary,” he said, “to bring the truth about the existing threat of a military danger to the Soviet people in a deeper and more well-argued manner.”

The members of the Soviet peace movement (who are not to be confused with the dissident Helsinki monitors) must pay their dues by supporting Soviet foreign policy. But they are arguing against the traditional military way of thinking in the Soviet Union.

For instance, talk about winning a nuclear war and the launching of preemptive nuclear strikes was part of the official Soviet military doctrine in the 1960s and early ‘70s. Soviet colonels wrote matter-of-factly about starting conventional attacks with a barrage of tactical nuclear shells (like the artillery salvos that were used at the start of battle in World War II) in order “to inspire a huge enthusiasm in our troops.”

Without saying it openly, the peace movement’s role inside the Soviet Union has been to get political and military leaders to understand that nuclear war would be different from World War II. To a large extent they have won on this point. Soviet leaders, most recently Mikhail S. Gorbachev at Geneva, say unequivocally that nuclear war is not winnable.

These Establishment peace scholars and officials also attempt to change Soviet thinking about the relationship of military spending to the achievement of political goals, and they try to lessen the country’s sense of threat from the outside.

In 1955 Arbatov wrote that “the masses in our day display a vital interest in foreign policy, and the imperialist government cannot fail to take their opinion into account to this or that extent.” It was an early effort to break down the Stalinist images of an implacably hostile American government and to say that detente is possible.

In 1973 and ’74 Arbatov was drawing the lesson from Vietnam that “military force has become all the more difficult to translate into political influence.”

“All the more obvious the impotence of military force becomes in its way, the more evident is the impossibility of using it for political goals,” he said, indicating that any drive for Soviet military superiority would be a waste of money. Perhaps he had some influence on the decision to end the growth in military procurements a few years later.

In 1982 Arbatov said on Moscow television that “everybody is dependent on the stability of the international economic system and the international monetary system.” He was calling for a recognition of an integrated world economy of which the Soviet Union was a part and, implicitly, for a rejection of rigid ideological distinction between the socialist and capitalist world. Gorbachev has become the first general secretary to talk in this way.

Arbatov’s role is easiest to document because he writes a great deal. To repeat, he pays his dues, especially when he is abroad. But had he been the one receiving it, Arbatov would have deserved a Nobel Peace Prize. It is impossible to judge whether Chazov himself deserves one. If he talked about nuclear war to Leonid S. Brezhnev and was one of those who persuaded the late Soviet leader to change doctrine, then he does. But in any case the recognition that the official Soviet peace movement has been playing a key role in eroding simplistic Soviet military doctrine and ideology is long overdue.