Soviets Turn Eyes to Pacific Basin : Recent Efforts Aim at Expanding Influence in Region

The Soviet Union is rediscovering the Pacific Basin. As Korean Air Lines found out, Moscow does not take a Chamber of Commerce view of the Asia-Pacific region. But it anticipates an increasing and eventually important role in the area’s economic life.

That becomes clear when you combine:

- The statements of leading economists. “We are a Pacific country, as well as a European one, and there are gaps in Asian trade needs that we can fill,” says Prof. Margaret Maximova, head of the department of international economic relations of the International Economics Institute.

- The statements of policy spokesmen. “The task of the future in the Asia-Pacific region, which is equal to one-half the world, is to reach agreement among the powers on norms of behavior and to achieve a reasonable distribution of resources,” says Yuri Zhukov, a member of the Supreme Soviet and a leading voice of Soviet foreign policy. Zhukov envisions an understanding among the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan and China.

- Recent diplomatic moves. In the last year, Moscow has dispatched high-level officials on missions to Japan, China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Eduard Shevardnadze was the first Soviet foreign minister to visit Tokyo in 10 years. The Soviets also have signed their first commercial treaty with a South Pacific nation--a fishing agreement with Kiribati--and made overtures to six other small island nations, including Western Samoa.

Significantly, the Pacific Basin was specified by name in the Soviet Communist Party program published in November. The program identified the region as a “new economic and political center of rivalry.”

Attuning relations with China and Japan clearly comes first.

Russians have long memories, and winds from the East have borne little but ill ever since Tatars sacked Moscow in 1237. A Japanese emperor sank the Russian fleet in 1905, and the antagonism of Mao Tse-tung is still a fresh memory.

Although Soviet posture is en garde around the compass, the Kremlin view of Asia has been particularly primeval. The shooting down of Korean Air Lines’ Flight 007 was only an example.

Along the Chinese border, the Red Army has deployed some 50 divisions, heavily backed by missiles and fighter and bomber squadrons. The Soviet navy has mushroomed over the past two decades from a coastal defense force into a massive fleet of some 800 ships, including about 30 nuclear-powered submarines. With possession of former American naval bases at Cam Ranh Bay and Da Nang in Vietnam, the Kremlin fleet is an imposing force along the entire arc of Asia from the Sea of Japan to India.

Meantime, the breezes of capitalist commerce have reached cyclonic force, turning the Pacific Basin into the hottest trading area on the globe. For nearly a decade, as the Soviets have watched from behind the wall of their non-convertible ruble, U.S. trade across the Pacific has surpassed its trade across the Atlantic. Japan has become the free world’s second-largest economy, and the market economies of Asia as a whole have achieved the world’s highest growth rates.

However, just as the Soviet Union stood back from the winds of the Pacific war, it has let the winds of trade swirl around the ocean rim without significant Soviet participation, except for shipping and some barter-type transactions, mainly with Japan. Sourly, the Russians have denounced efforts to coordinate Pacific Basin economic activity as a U.S.-Japan-Australia conspiracy.

Soviet Economic Role Unclear

Clearly, the nation that once owned Alaska has a geographical claim to be a member of the Pacific Basin community. Its Pacific shoreline stretches farther than that of any nation. But where and how can the Soviet Union fit into the Pacific matrix of trade?

It can offer raw materials, including oil and gas, but there is a limit to that, particularly given its commitments to supply European markets. Another possibility is supplying products at the low end of technology to Japan as the Japanese concentrate their own production at ever higher levels of technology.

Increasingly, the question of the future Soviet role is concerning Pacific Basin members. Because so little study has been given to the subject, the East-West Center in Honolulu has organized its first conference on the Soviet Union next month. Scholars from throughout the Pacific Basin, including China, will attend.

“Nobody has the whole picture, but it will be a start if we put together the bits and pieces we each have from our own corners of the Asia-Pacific region,” an East-West Center official said.

But nobody from the Soviet Union was invited.