Is Gorbachev, Like Lenin, Pausing to March Later?

According to a leading Soviet columnist, the real purpose of Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s “new foreign-policy thinking” is to gain the Soviet Union a much-needed pause before launching a major new offensive against the West. This was suggested implicitly but unmistakably in an extraordinary front-page commentary that appeared in the government newspaper Izvestia on Sept. 20.

The author of the almost page-long article is Alexander Bovin, one of the most respected journalists in the Soviet Union. A former senior staff member of the Communist Party Central Committee Secretariat, Bovin is known as Gorbachev’s enthusiastic and well-connected supporter.

That is why his recent Izvestia piece deserves a careful reading. On the surface, the piece is far removed from our time. Its focus is on the debate among the Soviet leadership 70 years ago regarding signing a humiliating peace accord with victorious Germany. But the Bovin article on the so-called Brest peace is a thinly disguised attempt to explain the strategic rationale behind Gorbachev’s international conduct.

Bovin assesses the fight in the Bolshevik leadership between Lenin and the Central Committee majority about accepting German peace terms that would oblige Russia to surrender about 500,000 square miles of territory populated by 56 million people.

Initially most Bolshevik leaders considered the arrangement unacceptable. Lenin, however, had gradually managed to persuade his colleagues to submit to the German diktat. Bovin points out that the founding father of the Soviet revolution “never was a pacifist for whom peace would be an end in itself.” Rather, Bovin argues, “he considered the struggle for peace as a part of a comprehensive struggle against imperialism in the name of interests of the revolution.”

Still, being an ultimate pragmatist, Lenin was able to see that in 1918 militarily weak and economically devastated Soviet Russia was not a match for Germany. From Bovin’s standpoint the Bolshevik leader had figured out that “peace with Germany would provide a peaceful pause and would allow--if one acts intellectually--to enhance positions of the revolution, to gain strength, and to continue revolutionary influence on the bourgeois Europe.”

Lenin ridiculed objections of Central Committee members who complained that the price of the treaty was prohibitively high. In his mind, agreements with imperialists were a matter of convenience rather than international law. And Germany, while predominant vis-a-vis Russia, was losing ground in the war with the Western powers. This is how Bovin, on the basis of memoirs of Lenin’s contemporaries, describes Lenin’s reaction to the nicely bound text of the treaty received from the German government: “Lenin . . . kept the booklet in his hands for a moment and said laughingly that in less than six months this pretty piece of paper would disappear without a trace.” Indeed, once Germany had surrendered to the Western allies, Russia dispatched the Red Army which, meanwhile, had been built up to retake control of the lost lands.

Bovin adds that Lenin’s superficial commitment to peace was instrumental in allowing the Bolsheviks to occupy a high moral ground and to win the international support without which the regime could not survive. The Soviet journalist concludes his article by stating point-blank that Lenin’s skillful handling of the Brest peace “became the political foundation on which the strategy of peaceful coexistence was gradually constructed” by the Kremlin. It is that very strategy that remains Moscow’s party line under Gorbachev.

Is it possible that Bovin was unaware of the implications that his analyses of the Brest peace carry for present Soviet international behavior? No way. He is far too experienced and smart. So what is his message and to whom is this message addressed?

Bovin is not in the business of warning the West about Soviet ambitious designs. First, by all indications the Soviet journalist is a devoted follower of Gorbachev. And his Izvestia editors-- glasnost or not--would not allow him to send alarmist signals to capitalist adversaries.

Thus it seems that Bovin’s audience is domestic. It is these party faithful who are uncomfortable with all the talk about the Kremlin’s new, more moderate international conduct. To some Soviet traditionalists, such talk smacks of unjustified concessions to the West. To offer them a strong reassurance is the apparent purpose of the Bovin commentary.

His Izvestia article confirms that not everyone in the Soviet elite supports Gorbachev’s foreign-policy flexibility. But it also suggests that the real foreign-policy debate in Moscow may be not between hawks and doves, but rather between two schools of thought equal in devotion to the Soviet imperial assertiveness. Except that Gorbachev, like Lenin, understands that a pause today may be a precondition for marching further tomorrow.