Soviets Admit Foreign Policy, Defense Errors : Officials Say Mistakes Led to Unnecessary Conflict With West

The Soviet Union’s own errors in foreign policy and defense strategy brought it into unnecessary conflict with the West over the past two decades, senior government and Communist Party officials acknowledged here Saturday.

The Soviet Union was often blinded to the realities of international relations by its own ideology, they said, and as a result acted in ways that heightened or prolonged tension with the West.

“In diplomacy, we allowed ourselves to be carried away by polemics,” Yuli M. Vorontsov, the first deputy foreign minister, said. “We placed a high value on scoring polemical propaganda points, and often the propaganda stood in the way of real work.”

That and other candidly self-critical comments came at a press briefing in advance of the Soviet Communist Party’s special conference, which begins Tuesday, on the political and economic reforms proposed by Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the party’s general secretary. Foreign policy is one of the items on the agenda.

Ties Based on Cooperation

The comments stem, however, from the hard, perhaps unprecedented look that Soviet officials are giving foreign policy in an effort, they say, to break out of the old patterns of confrontation and conflict and establish new relationships based on cooperation.

Vadim V. Zagladin, deputy head of the international department of the Communist Party’s policy-setting Central Committee, said that the Soviet Union’s foreign policy until recently had no conceptual logic holding it together.

“While we rejected nuclear war and struggled to prevent it,” he said, “we nevertheless based our policy on the possibility of winning one.

“From this arose a confrontational approach to non-confrontational situations, a military response instead of a political one and a number of purely propaganda exercises.”

Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev, the Soviet armed forces chief of staff and first deputy defense minister, cited the deployment of Soviet SS-20 intermediate-range missiles in Europe as one such mistake.

“In the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, we answered too directly to the arms race that the West had unleashed,” Akhromeyev said, noting that he himself was involved in those decisions.

“Probably we should have taken more of an initiative in trying to find political means to respond to the constant increase in the military budget of the United States.”

Compounding Mistakes

And there were mistakes in the way policy was made that compounded the others, the officials said.

Soviet foreign policy generally was formulated with only one or two options for the leadership, said Yevgeny M. Primakov, director of the Soviet Institute of the World Economy and International Relations, and alternative policies were never examined.

Oleg T. Bogomolov, director of the Institute of the Economy of the World Socialist System, another influential think tank here, said the government had erred for many years in believing that there were foreign policy solutions to problems, particularly economic development, that actually required domestic policy changes.

And Genrikh A. Borovik, a journalist and head of the Soviet Peace Committee, said that further error in the way Soviet foreign policy was formulated was the virtual exclusion of most citizens, even Communist Party members, from the process.

‘Monopoly on the Truth’

“We often ignored public opinion, or failed to take it into consideration, and we acted on the assumption that we had a monopoly on the truth,” Borovik said.

But Borovik and the other Soviet officials complained that, while Moscow’s foreign policy now benefits from “new political thinking,” their partners in the West have not caught up and are still thinking in old stereotypes.

In the West, particularly the United States, the underlying assumption of foreign policy is that the Soviet Union is the No. 1 enemy and a serious military threat, they said, and the result is an orientation toward conflict.

“Anti-Soviet propaganda is a major mistake for the West because those shaping the destiny of the world fell victim to their own propaganda,” Bogomolov said. “Now, they can’t see beyond that ‘enemy image’ they have created.”

Zagladin added, “Many Western policies proceed from the position that the differences in our social systems are an insurmountable problem, and that remains the source of many difficulties. Even today they say, perestroika is fine but we still haven’t abandoned socialism. Of course not.”

Unworkable Premise

Another Western policy error, Primakov said, is to assume that international relations are a zero-sum game, so that what is good for the Soviet Union is bad for the West. “If we follow that logic, we would never be able to do anything together,” he said.

Similarly, the West continues to operate--as Moscow did for years--on the basis that whatever it does is good and whatever the Soviet Union does should be condemned, Primakov said. Finally, the United States does not treat the Soviet Union as an equal partner on non-strategic issues, such as regional conflicts, and then is surprised when they grow into serious disputes.

Vorontsov added that the West also errs when it tries to dictate to the Soviet Union. “You cannot make the Soviet Union or the socialist countries do anything,” he said. “You can discuss things and reach agreements with us, but compel us you cannot.”