A Break From 70 Years of Doctrine : Gorbachev Policy Reversal Dismisses Class Struggle

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s announcement of a unilateral troop reduction may have captured Thursday’s headlines, but it was by no means the most far-reaching element of his extraordinary speech to the United Nations on Wednesday.

That distinction, Soviet scholars said Thursday, went to Gorbachev’s outline of a new world outlook in which he replaced the international class struggle, the basis of 70 years of Soviet foreign policy, with what he called “universal human interests” and a “universal human consensus” to advance them.

Gorbachev downgraded the Russian Revolution of 1917, long an ideological beacon for the international Communist movement, to “a precious spiritual heritage” that had little more relevance to today’s world than the French Revolution of 1789.

And while global competition will continue between rival political systems, he said, the nations of the world should seek a “balance of interests” to avoid international conflicts.

“These constitute a courageous, profound, far-reaching break with past Soviet foreign policy,” said Dmitri Simes, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace in Washington. “The troop reductions are important in themselves, of course, but they stem from even more important, more fundamental changes.

“Moscow, it seems to me, is still working for a new world order, but it is different from what it has pursued for so long. It has a whole new agenda. In its boldness, this speech is vintage Gorbachev--an attempt to lay an entirely new basis for the Soviet Union’s foreign policy.”

In his address to the U.N. General Assembly, Gorbachev declared: “Life is making us abandon established stereotypes and outdated views, and it is making us discard illusions. . . . It would be naive to think that the problems plaguing mankind today can be solved with the means and methods that were applied or seemed to work in the past.”

Gorbachev made clear that Moscow’s top foreign policy priority was arms reduction--nuclear forces, conventional armaments and chemical weapons--followed by the negotiated resolution of regional conflicts, even those where the Soviet Union has long supported revolutionary movements.

New Role for U.N.

Giving new emphasis to the United Nations, he proposed that it play a key role in mediating disputes, protecting the global environment and resolving the Third World debt problem.

But as he put forward a dozen ideas to shape the international agenda in coming months, he returned repeatedly to the concepts--notably the “supremacy of the universal human idea”--that underpinned them.

Marshall D. Shulman, the retired director of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union, described the speech as “a concise, dramatic and forceful” summary of “the pivotal changes” that Gorbachev and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze have made in Moscow’s foreign policy over the past two to three years and will seek in the future.

“He undoubtedly wanted to make a clear, convincing statement to the world that these changes are as real as they are profound,” Shulman said.

“I think, however, that he still faces challenges at home to some of these principles, both on the level of party organization and then on an ideological level. There were very serious challenges in the speech to Marxism-Leninism, to Marx’s analysis of capital, to Lenin’s analysis of imperialism and to other concepts that were ideological bedrock for a very long time.”

Gorbachev himself, in a passing reference to the opposition he faces from conservatives within the Communist Party leadership, conceded that “even today, many would want these vestiges of the past to be accepted as immutable law.”

Murray Feshbach, a Soviet specialist at Georgetown University in Washington, cautioned against taking Gorbachev’s speech entirely at face value.

“The things that he would like us to believe as a result of it . . . need to be questioned,” Feshbach said. “What does he really mean when he says that social development in socialist societies as well as capitalist can be ‘multi-optional’? Does he really mean that there is an end to the traditional Communist claim to exert a monopoly or even a leading or guiding role on such questions? This is a very, very important factor in deciding how we relate to them.”

‘Fascinating’ Speech

Feshbach, while describing Gorbachev’s speech as “absolutely fascinating,” expressed some skepticism over Gorbachev’s call for “de-ideologizing” international relations.

“After 70 years of an ideologically based foreign policy, we will need some convincing that their views on class struggle, the spread of communism and all that have changed,” he said. “It is like the troop cuts and the disbanding of the tank divisions--we need to know which tanks, which troops, where they will go and so forth. I want to see a lot more before I say Utopia has arrived.”

Gorbachev’s reforms have been dictated largely by necessity, Feshbach argued. “Their economy is in a rotten shape, social order has decayed, and the political structure has been unable to cope. . . ,” he said. “So there are certainly major philosophical shifts under way, but there are also very pragmatic decisions made out of need.”

Soviet specialists generally agree, for example, that Gorbachev’s announcement of the half-million-man troop cut, roughly 10% of the Soviet armed forces, reflected not only Moscow’s strong emphasis on arms reduction but also the manpower constraints imposed by a decling birthrate. And it will allow the government to shift funds from defense to economic development.

“They are coming to the changes from both directions,” Feshbach said, “and it is hard to say whether philosophy or pragmatism is more important.”

Simes of the Carnegie Endowment, a Soviet emigre who graduated from one of the Soviet Union’s most prestigious foreign affairs institutes, raised some doubts of his own. Gorbachev’s speech, he said, “had anti-Western, anti-American undertones, strongly favored the cause of the poor developing nations of the Third World and cut across many American interests.”