Bold Shift in Policy : Soviets Take W. Europe by Charm

When U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III arrived for talks with Kremlin leaders here last month, his game plan was clear:

Regain the initiative in an East-West dialogue that had come to be dominated by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and control its tone and pace while shifting its focus from arms control to other global and regional issues. In short, Baker intended to put a “George Bush stamp” on U.S.-Soviet relations.

The plan didn’t survive the first press briefing.

As U.S. correspondents gathered to hear State Department officials give details of the first day’s talks, Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov called his own briefing to announce the resumption of U.S.-Soviet strategic arms negotiations in mid-June--a Bush Administration decision that Baker had hoped to save for himself to unveil the next day.

A Soviet Initiative

With global news coverage highlighting Gerasimov’s announcement, the American decision suddenly became a Soviet initiative.

Then things got worse.

Halfway through the next day’s talks, Gorbachev dropped two public relations blockbusters that assured the spotlight would stay right where he wanted it--on arms control. And Soviet sources quickly leaked the initiatives, once Baker’s plane had taken off for Brussels.

Baker’s game plan was finished, ambushed by a potent, retooled Soviet public relations machine that stands as one of the most remarkable and important foreign policy successes of the Gorbachev era.

At a time when old-style Soviet Communist ideology is viewed as bankrupt, Moscow is suddenly winning the battle for world public opinion in a way that few ever would have thought possible.

It is a success that carries serious implications for the Western Alliance as it struggles to halt an alarming erosion of public support for the firm defense it has maintained for four decades.

Nowhere have Moscow’s public relations successes been more dramatic or the results more visible than in Western Europe, where a people who once were anguished over the shadow of the “Red menace” to the east now hang on the excitement of Gorbachev’s vision and the well-spoken Soviets dispatched to explain it.

“It’s the whole change in style compared with the wooden, monolithic solidity that was there before,” said Britain’s veteran foreign secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe. “The change is so unbelievable that it’s just an incredible novelty to see.”

But Moscow’s new public relations juggernaut runs far deeper than the handful of polished, high-profile salesmen like Gerasimov, who can turn one-liners in several languages.

It represents a fundamental shift in priorities for a nation where the task of image-building abroad has been accepted as a key element of foreign policy and, in its own way, as being equally important to the defense of the Soviet Union as military weaponry.

‘Easy to Change’

“Gorbachev obviously realized how counterproductive the bullying image was and how easy it was to change without having to give up anything in return,” noted Malcolm Mackintosh, a leading British Sovietologist.

The overhaul stressed “common human values” over “class interests” and called for resolving conflicts on a “balance of interests”--policy goals in themselves far easier to sell abroad.

“We don’t want any more Mr. ‘Nyets,’ ” Gorbachev reportedly told a high-level gathering from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1986.

Gorbachev’s confident, receptive style, his efforts to encourage a degree of openness at home, to allow dramatic change to unfold in Eastern Europe and to reduce the level of arms in the world’s most heavily nuclear-fortified region have affected Western Europeans to an extent Americans find difficult to comprehend.

And although Americans may still debate the point, Europeans of all political hues agree: The Cold War is over.

The closer one moves to Europe’s East-West divide, the less events on the fast-moving political tide are viewed with a detached analytical eye.

‘Double Gorbymania’

With a sense of anticipation usually reserved for pop idols at rock concerts, West Germans await Gorbachev’s arrival in Bonn on Monday for a four-day visit.

“In this country, a state of public opinion exists that can only be described as Gorbymania,” a ranking Western diplomat in Bonn noted recently. “In another month, it’s going to be double Gorbymania.”

President Bush’s dramatic proposal two weeks ago at the NATO summit in Brussels to cut conventional arms and follow that with talks to remove some, but not all, short-range nuclear missiles was explicitly designed as a propaganda counter-strike, and it succeeded to near-universal European applause.

But the initiative is seen as one blow in a long battle--and without intensive follow-up, its impact could diminish quickly, observers believe.

Moscow’s image builders have developed a well-stocked arsenal to soften European opinion. Gorbachev’s own personal diplomacy, for example, is carefully packaged as a “selling opportunity.” Much of it this year is directed toward Western Europe.

The intense competition among European leaders to host Gorbachev is one measure of how radically he has altered Moscow’s image since the early 1980s, when the Soviets faced a diplomatic freeze after their invasion of Afghanistan.

In April he was in Britain, and after next week’s trip to Bonn, he is scheduled to visit Paris and Strasbourg in July, Finland in September and Italy and the Vatican later in the year.

Whereas the late Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev’s rare foreign forays were preceded only by a few officials and a single foreign policy specialist--who conducted invitation-only briefings and agreed to limited television exposure--today a veritable circus primes a country for Gorbachev’s arrival.

The advance work for Gorbachev’s trip to Bonn by a large, diverse team of specialists reflects both the depth of the new Soviet P.R. effort and the eagerness of Western Europeans to receive it.

In addition to a battery of official briefings and interviews, an unprecedented media blitz is is unfolding. Among the events:

--Radio Moscow will co-produce live talks shows jointly with West Germany’s external broadcast service, Deutsche Welle, a station that the Soviets had jammed as an instrument of the Cold War for 26 years until last November. Further, post-visit cooperation is already under discussion.

--Soviet and West German television will broadcast a live, 90-minute prime-time folk music special from Moscow and the Ruhr industrial city of Duisburg to audiences in both countries. “Songs that act as bridges” is how West Germany’s leading television magazine, Hoerzu, described the planned concert.

--After being permitted for the first time to poll Soviets on their attitudes toward Germans, West Germany’s leading pictorial magazine, Stern, last week published the reassuring--if somewhat unlikely--result that Soviet citizens now show a growing sympathy for Germans.

Even the hard-bitten Axel Springer publishing house, at one time a fountain of anti-Soviet rhetoric, has been swept up in the mood, sponsoring an unprecedented and widely publicized face-to-face discussion between Soviet and West German soldiers at the offices of its flagship paper, Die Welt.

“A few years ago such a meeting would have been consigned to the empire of Utopia,” the paper noted at the top of its own full-page article on the session.

And instead of seeing Moscow’s stone-faced former Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko stoke German angst, something that once seemed to precede top-level Soviet visits to Bonn, the 2.2 million readers of Springer’s Bild am Sontag newspaper were introduced to a visiting military cadet named Yelena Menskitsheva, who met with West German President Richard von Weizaecker, swapped uniform shirts with a West German soldier, rode in a Porsche and declared she could never fight against those she had met.

“In the Red Army too, feminine charm is a strong weapon,” gushed the paper, the one-time mouthpiece of the Cold War.

In many ways, Moscow’s image builders are pushing on an open door in Western Europe, for an insatiable public appetite has developed to learn from unprogrammed Soviet citizens about life in their country.

In Britain, the audience participation TV show “The Time, The Place” last year linked up with Soviet state television to produce discussions between audiences in London and Moscow, Tallinn and Riga, that ranged from human rights to sex and ended with a London housewife’s extending a spontaneous invitation to her Soviet counterpart.

“That’s now in the works,” said the program’s executive producer, Mary McAnally.

Evening News Star

As part of her national evening news coverage of the current student protests in Beijing, French television anchorwoman Christine Ockrent called in a senior Soviet Communist Party Central Committee member, Andrei Gratchev, who promptly gave France Moscow’s version of events in relaxed, impeccable French.

The impact of the Soviet charm offensive is there to see.

Unpublished U.S. Information Agency soundings conducted in Britain, albeit before Bush’s recent European trip, provided their own shock. By a margin of roughly 3 to 1, citizens of America’s staunchest European ally favored Gorbachev over Bush as a leader working for world peace.

“I can’t believe there’s ever been figures like that before in this country,” one U.S. official commented.

Commercial opinion polls in the Netherlands and Greece echoed these sentiments.

In fact, Soviet image makers have so effectively tied their leader to progress in the arms control field that many West Europeans automatically credit him with any success, no matter who is the instigator.

Much as Gerasimov’s quick footwork left Europeans believing Moscow brought the strategic arms negotiators back to the table, polls show that a majority of Europeans credit the Soviet leader with the December, 1987, U.S.-Soviet agreement to scrap medium-range nuclear missiles, even though it was first proposed by the Administration of former President Ronald Reagan.

Gorbachev’s decision to withdraw 500 nuclear warheads from Europe captured headlines, but the U.S. disposal of nearly five times that number over the past decade raised barely a ripple of interest.

Because the 500 warheads constituted barely 10% of the Soviet short-range total, Gorbachev’s move was far more important in shaping public opinion than in altering the East-West nuclear balance.

“Look, the guys’s a master of P.R.,” one of Bush’s closest aides said recently. “We withdrew 2,400 (nuclear warheads) and got almost no play at all. It’s obvious P.R. We’ll work at it.”

Occasionally, the United States is just out-hustled.

Last month, Soviet spokesman Gerasimov delayed for two hours the departure of the plane carrying Moscow-based correspondents to the Sino-Soviet summit in Beijing to assure that reporters had time to send their dispatches about Gorbachev’s latest arms control offer. The next day in Brussels, Baker only belatedly scheduled a news conference for the European press.

Maintaining public support for Western Alliance defense policies in such a climate is proving increasingly difficult, as the Bush Administration recently discovered before crafting its last-minute arms control compromise in Brussels.

Few expect it to get easier.

“In this climate, no West European country is going to respond for calls to increase defense spending,” said Lord Carrington, the former NATO secretary general.

In West Germany, polls indicate that 94% of the population now see war as unlikely and a bare 8% of those questioned unconditionally support controversial NATO plans to modernize the American short-range nuclear missiles based there.

“Support for defense has evaporated,” a senior diplomat in Bonn said. “It’s gone because the threat has gone. All the arguments in favor of low-flying (military planes), extending the draft and nuclear missiles no longer have any context.”

In a part of the world that has already endured two wars this century, there is a strong desire to accept Moscow’s peace offensive and equate U.S. caution with procrastination and lack of will.

Longings Satisfied

“When Mr. Gorbachev talks of peace and the end of nuclear weapons, he satisfies every longing of people in the West,” said Bernard Ingham, who as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s media spokesman for a decade is a veteran at sensing public opinion. “The problem is that when he says this, they think it’s already arrived.”

Aside from Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the main salesmen for Soviet policy are the talented freethinkers of the Gorbachev generation--men like Yuli Vorontsov, Alexander Bessmertnykh and Igor Rogachev, all first deputy foreign ministers, or Yevgeny Primakov, director of the Institute of the World Economy and International Relations, and Mikhail Titarenko, director of the Institute of the Far East.

Titarenko recently spent the entire eight-hour return flight from Beijing to Moscow, after Gorbachev’s visit there, talking with British and American correspondents.

While Gerasimov, with his polished manner, fluent English and tailored suits, most personifies Moscow’s redesigned public image, he is merely the most visible element of the new system.

News conferences and briefings, once a rarity, are now daily events at the Foreign Ministry’s refurbished press center, replete with simultaneous translation into English, Spanish and French.

When Gorbachev travels, Moscow-based Western reporters now get background press kits, prepared texts of key speeches in several languages and can fly on chartered planes--unheard of a few years ago.

There has been a similar, though slower, opening of other ministries, including defense, which has its own offices to deal with the foreign press.

With Gerasimov sitting on both top Foreign Ministry and interagency committees, public relations strategy is carefully integrated with broader diplomatic activities.

Certainly not every Soviet PR venture is a success, however.

The Soviets’ maiden press charter, organized to fly resident Moscow correspondents to New York with Gorbachev last December, ended in chaos. There was no Soviet briefing officer aboard the 19-hour flight; the Soviet Mission in New York was closed on arrival, and the reporters were unceremoniously dropped with their luggage to fend for themselves at First Avenue and 45th Street.

And last month in Bonn, Shevardnadze’s implied threat to renege on the medium-range missile treaty was widely seen as a major gaffe, evoking images of a previous era.

Still, the success of the Soviets’ public relations offensive has unsettled U.S. officials and triggered a debate on how best to respond.

While they still publicly deny there is substance in Gorbachev’s appeal, privately officials acknowledge that they are developing a strategy to combat it by shifting the focus to issues such as human rights and democracy in Eastern Europe and other areas where the West has a comparable advantage.

Baker and National Security Adviser Brent A. Scowcroft have been working on initiatives for next month’s presidential visit to Poland and Hungary that they hope can replicate the public relations boost Bush received from last month’s NATO summit.

Many in the West believe the Soviet leader is riding a wave of popularity based in part on the fresh, dramatic nature of the change he has instituted and that it is therefore impossible to sustain.

Others are not so sure.

“We are, in my opinion, losing the public relations battle,” Rep. Norman Sisisky (D-Va.) told officials at a hearing last month. “I’m concerned (that the Europeans) really think peace has broken out.”

Sisisky, a former marketing executive, added: “You really don’t have to give any bargains. You just have to make them believe they’re getting one.”

“The West must put itself in a situation where it’s capable of presenting its own vision of what Europe should look like as we enter the 21st Century,” he said. “Gorbachev has expressed a much greater readiness to talk about core issues.

“He talks about a common European home,” Heisbourg added. “It lacks specifics, but the fact remains: He’s the one who’s presenting visions of that sort.”

Marshall reported from London and Parks reported from Moscow. Times staff writers David Lauter and Doyle McManus, in Washington, and Rone Tempest, in Paris, also contributed to this article.