The Moscow Summit : Long-Held War Fears Eased by Reagan Visit

“I am very glad your President is here,” the waitress told an American visitor in one of the new cafes that have sprung up in Moscow as a form of state-approved free enterprise. “It means a peaceful future. So I am very glad.”

After the Russian winter, spring is a special season here. Children weave wreaths for their hair using the dandelions that grow in astonishing profusion. Lilacs bloom in the courtyard of Novodyevichy Convent, where Peter the Great once imprisoned his sister when she became a political threat.

But for millions of ordinary Soviet citizens, spring this year has brought something more precious even than the strong May sun.

Conditioned by Propaganda

For people conditioned by centuries of history and decades of Communist propaganda to fear the prospect of war with a vividness Americans can hardly imagine, the sight of the President of the United States smiling and beaming inside the Kremlin itself conveyed a message of overwhelming simplicity and power:

War is not coming.

All their lives--in movies, books and television documentaries--the Kremlin’s leaders have drummed home the theme that the Soviet Union was surrounded by enemies, in constant danger of imperialist aggression.

So pervasive is the resulting anxiety that Donna Hartman, wife of the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, said the first words she heard from Raisa Gorbachev, wife of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, were: “Soviet women want peace.”

The American replied that all women want peace.

Reagan’s Prior Reputation

The fear-of-war message was reinforced in recent years by President Reagan’s prior reputation as a strident anti-Communist, a man who once denounced the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” whose leaders would lie, cheat and steal to gain world domination.

Soviet citizens have been told that the evil lies elsewhere: that capitalist countries inevitably will seek to destroy Communist nations because of their domination by reactionary ruling circles.

Now, however, the propaganda posters picture peace-loving American children as well as Soviet kids releasing peace doves. A new frankness, encouraged by Gorbachev, indicates that the United States has not deserved all the blame for world tensions.

“Let’s not be hypocritical,” one Soviet commentator put it. “We haven’t always supported our peace-loving course with practical deeds. Our diplomacy was stagnant.”

Despite their continuing differences, however, the four Reagan-Gorbachev meetings in 2 1/2 years have given ordinary Soviet citizens here the feeling that the momentum toward peace is irresistible and Reagan’s presence in Moscow itself has powerfully reinforced that conclusion.

‘Hope for Survival’

“They have put the world on a track leading to a world without nuclear weapons and gave humanity hope for survival,” wrote Vitaly Kobysh, a commentator for the official weekly newspaper Moscow News.

“Things are moving in the right direction,” said a journalist for Tass, the Soviet news agency, during a reunion with an American correspondent who expressed surprise at the aura of good feeling.

In fact, some Soviet intellectuals now regard improvement in Soviet-American relations as the norm for the future, rather than the exception it was before the first time Reagan met Gorbachev at Geneva in November, 1985.

“Nobody seriously believes war is imminent, whether your President is here or not,” said one highly placed Soviet official.

Even so, the arrival of Reagan did seem to make a difference with many of Moscow’s less exalted.

“It took a long time, but at last your chief made it here,” said a smiling Moscow driver to his American passenger. “Isn’t it a great day for peace?”