Soviet Times They Are A’Changing

A particularly interesting Soviet visitor was in Southern California last week, speaking at Claremont Graduate School as part of a month-long tour of the United States.

In one sense the visit of Valentin Berezhkov, editor of the journal USA and an interpreter for Vyacheslav Molotov in his 1940 meeting with Adolf Hitler and for Josef Stalin at the 1943 Tehran conference, is just one of many that Soviet citizens make to this country each year.

In a larger sense, however, Berezhkov is a symbol of an extremely important development now under way in the Soviet Union. For the very fact that Berezhkov is back in the United States seems to say a lot about a general loosening of some of the Soviet Union’s crazier restrictions on its citizens.

Americans probably best remember Valentin Berezhkov because of a 1983 incident involving his son Andrei, then 16. Berezhkov was assigned to the Soviet embassy in Washington when Andrei ran away from home. While he was away, a letter under his name was received by President Reagan, asking for asylum. The youth voluntarily returned to the embassy, and there was a long wrangle before the Soviets would allow American officials in to interview him. Andrei said that he did not want to defect, and father and son were then shipped back to Moscow. The son’s last flip remark as he boarded the plane was, “Say ‘Hi’ to Mick Jagger.”

In the old days the son would have been severely punished and his father would have been retired in disgrace. Neither would ever have been let out of the country again. In fact, the boy has been living at home (although he likely has sacrificed a career), and his father has been given back his editorship of an important foreign-policy journal. Now Valentin Berezhkov is again traveling in the United States like other Soviet Establishment scholars.

The Soviet behavior toward Berezhkov is, of course, a normal and intelligent one. Teen-age sons are known for foolish and defiant acts, and it is a mistake to make a lot out of them. What makes this visit such big news is that in the past the Soviet Union has so seldom acted in a cool and intelligent fashion.

While the Soviets still have not lessened--and are not likely to--their suppression of dissidents whom they consider dangerous to the state, interesting things have been going on in less sensitive areas.

The published debates, especially on economics, have become considerably freer this year. Many people are advocating, or condemning, the idea of introducing more market mechanisms. Izvestia has just published a letter to the editor that criticizes the Soviet press for not telling its readers that many of the unemployed in the United States do receive substantial unemployment benefits.

In the arts, some movies and plays are being shown that have been suppressed for years. The leading literary journal (with a circulation of 350,000) published a long article by poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko in which he alluded to Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s secret-police chief, who had been unmentionable for 30 years, and implied that Stalinism was like Hitlerism.

This loosening will surely go further. The 27th Party Congress is scheduled to open on Feb. 25--the 30th anniversary of Nikita S. Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin. The Western press will make much of this anniversary. If Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev does not rehabilitate Khrushchev or call for honesty toward Stalin, he will receive a terrible black eye in the West. It is likely that he deliberately selected the date of the anniversary to make a point.

Other types of steps are likely. As economic reforms progress, the debates will become even freer. While it is improbable that mass Jewish emigration will be resumed, there may well be an accommodation with Soviet Jews--easing some of the restrictions on the practice of their religion, for instance. It is a fairly good bet that Mikhail Baryshnikov, the great ballet dancer who defected to the West, will be invited back to dance this year.

It remains very uncertain how far all this “liberalization” will go. Gorbachev knows that if he is to achieve the equality in computerization that is needed to maintain Soviet defenses, he must accept a freer flow of information and greater integration with the West. However, he will probably ease up gradually--to see what the results are and how far he can continue to go without producing an explosion.

By 1990, however, the Soviet Union may look very different from what it did in 1984. Gorbachev is now talking about Western civilization and about Western and Eastern Europe as an organic whole. The effect of this--both on our image of the Soviet Union as an alien, barbarian place and on actual Soviet behavior in foreign policy--may be great. We are probably leaving the familiar postwar era, but the outlines of the future are still very unclear.