Profound Shift Seen in Soviet Foreign Policy : News ANALYSIS

When President Mikhail S. Gorbachev began to speak more than three years ago about “new political thinking” as the basis for the Soviet Union’s foreign policy, it was taken in the West as just another slogan from an Establishment that had produced many others over the years.

“What about Afghanistan?” Western commentators would ask. “What about East Europe--Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland? What about the massive concentration of Warsaw Pact forces in Central Europe? What about support for Third World Marxists? What about human rights?”

What, in other words, had changed? What was new in this policy that Gorbachev proclaimed would be based on “universal human values?”

Those changes are now appearing with increasing rapidity around the globe.

Soviet forces completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan in February. With Soviet approval, Poland’s Parliament has installed the first non-Communist government in Eastern Europe in 40 years. Hungary has opted for a true multiparty, parliamentary democracy. A costly and often dangerous 30-year rift in relations with China has been ended.

Moscow is halfway through a unilateral 500,000-man reduction in its armed forces, and the cutbacks in Central Europe are sharply, and deliberately, curtailing its offensive capability there. Soviet arms shipments to Nicaragua have been suspended in support of a political settlement in the region. And Soviet efforts to improve its observance of human rights were praised this month by one of its sternest critics, Amnesty International.

Taken individually, the changes are quite significant, reducing the confrontation between East and West and helping to end regional conflicts.

Together, however, they constitute a dramatic, profound and unparalleled reorientation of Soviet foreign policy.

Reflecting last week on the reasons for such a fundamental shift, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister, attributed it primarily to perestroika, the Soviet Union’s domestic reforms, and he implied that further changes lie ahead as the reform process here deepens.

“Perestroika gives new meaning to the questions of what place socialism and the Soviet Union occupy in the world, of the correlation of interests, of values and priorities,” Shevardnadze said in a major address to the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, on the philosophical underpinnings of the new foreign policy. “Perestroika, in other words, dictates the necessity of a thoroughly new foreign policy.”

Shevardnadze stressed, as Gorbachev has, the primacy of “universal human values” over Marxist class struggle and traditional national interests alike. “No national and state interests,” he declared, “can justify a political decision or a diplomatic action, however pragmatic, unless they are moral.”

To underscore his point, he went on to describe the Soviet Union’s military intervention in Afghanistan a decade ago as a violation of international law, of Soviet law, of Communist ethics and of the “universal human values” that he said should be the basis of Soviet foreign policy.

Afghanistan was a grievous error, he said, but there were others equally serious in recent years--the construction of a large radar station in Siberia in direct violation of an arms control treaty with the United States, the “continued mass production of toxic agents” despite a halt by the United States in the manufacture of chemical weapons in 1969, and the whole arms build-up beyond the minimum necessary for the Soviet Union’s defense.

“As minister, I shall comply with every lawful decision,” Shevardnadze declared, breaking political precedents here, “but I reserve the right to resign when I cannot agree with any decision for moral or political reasons.”

Shevardnadze’s candor itself was breathtaking, particularly after years of diplomatic waffle and quite deliberate deceit.

Not only had the Soviet people been lied to, he told the lawmakers, but so had members of the Communist Party’s leadership. The decision to send troops into Afghanistan was made by a few members of the ruling Politburo with the others confronted with the result, and the real capability of the controversial Krasnoyarsk radar station, now being dismantled, was kept from Gorbachev until this year.

Shevardnadze’s speech was itself a historic attempt to place Soviet foreign policy under parliamentary oversight as part of a broad process of democratization and, at the same time, offset the influence of those institutions, such as the military, that have had a preponderant voice in determining Moscow’s stance and actions.

“When you say to our Parliament, ‘This is how you are being cut out of the action,’ you can be sure today of a reaction, a countermove,” a Soviet foreign policy specialist said. “Shevardnadze’s speech was his own little ‘declaration of independence’ from the traditional foreign affairs establishment. The people will now have a voice through Parliament. . . . For sure, that means no more Afghanistan.”

But the philosophical shift in Soviet foreign policy is far greater than even these statements suggest.

In asserting that socialism veered badly off course in the Soviet Union under the dictator Josef Stalin and is only now being corrected, the Communist Party has acknowledged that its rule has been undemocratic and its policies frequently and often fundamentally wrong.

And what is true for domestic policies is being seen as equally true for Soviet foreign policy.

“We have a deformed socialism at home--that’s the best we can say of it--and we exported the result as the salvation of the rest of the world,” a senior Soviet diplomat commented after Shevardnadze’s speech last week. “If you start with a political system that was undemocratic to the point of being a tyranny under Stalin, how can you pretend that its foreign policy was any different? We cannot even argue today that we acted in our national interests, for how do you determine national interests without democracy?”

Nikolai Popov, a Soviet political scientist, had argued earlier this year that the Soviet Union could only blame itself for the “culture of confrontation” with the West--and suggested that this had also helped excuse its own failings.

“For prewar Europe and the United States, our country . . . was above all the country of bloody, enforced collectivization, mass repressions and camps, of terror and dictatorship--the country of Stalin,” Popov wrote in a seminal article in the influential weekly Literary Gazette.

“We must try to see our country through the eyes of the rest of the world, both half a century ago and today, to understand the sources of the policy of the Western states towards us. . . .

“If we want to melt the ice of mistrust, then we must show an example of self-purification, of profound criticism of our past vices, including those of the not-so-long-ago past.”

A senior Western ambassador, whose service here over more than three decades has made him a normally cautious observer, commented after Shevardnadze’s speech last week: “We always assume that the Soviet Union, like other countries, acts in its own national interests, but how it views those interests is changing so fast that it is hard to predict how far it will go in what is becoming a total transformation of its foreign policy.

“Certainly, the changes are now coming with such great rapidity that we cannot project future developments--except that they will come faster and probably be greater in dimension than we expect.”

Soviet officials are fully aware that these changes have brought a new energy to international relations and are giving Moscow unprecedented opportunities to reshape the balance of political power.

“The peoples of the world associate with our perestroika their hopes for peace, for the settlement of global problems and for the improvement of their general well being,” Shevardnadze said. “This may flatter our national ambitions or irritate others, but it is a fact. . . .

“The world interprets perestroika as a living symbol of faith. It has long ceased to be our internal affair, and it is now seen as a truly universal cause. People are not indifferent to the way the process of renewal struggles ahead for they associate our internal stability with global stability. . . . There is no exaggeration here--it is really that way.”

Changes were attempted earlier, Shevardnadze said, recalling two previous “thaws” in East-West relations, first under Nikita S. Khrushchev and then under Leonid I. Brezhnev, but they failed, first, because “a new generation not guilty of the notorious deformations” under Stalin had not yet come to power and because the country was not yet secure from foreign threat.

Through the 1950s, ‘60s and even into the ‘70s, he said, “there was no firm awareness of our nation’s safety.”.

“The danger of war was felt as imminent, even inevitable. This could not but curtail the possible reforms. We had to become assured, to get rid of our sense of vulnerability, if we were to appraise the present situation objectively, without bias.”

Yet, such fundamental changes--and the break that they mean in Soviet history--have aroused considerable opposition, Shevardnadze acknowledged in a further burst of candor, saying that Moscow ought to stop “pretending that all our disarmament actions are unanimously supported.”

The Soviet-American treaty to eliminate intermediate-range missiles, a landmark in disarmament, had brought strong criticism of the negotiators for “having gone too far and conceded too much to the detriment of our defense,” he said, citing it as an example of the continuing political resistance the Soviet leadership faces on defense issues.

“Today, we have the treaty and live with it. Where are the critics? Soviet people feel more secure--the other side has no missiles capable of hitting a target in the European part of the Soviet Union with the terrible accuracy of several meters . . . . after seven miles of flight. And the treaty helps us save 400 million rubles a year (about $640 million). . . .

“Such is the price of the ‘concession.’ There can be no compromise without concessions, and there can be no accord or even diplomacy without compromise solutions.”

Answering other critics, Shevardnadze declared, “Our people and socialism at large have paid a heavy price for the notion that we can supposedly ignore the rest of the world and disregard the interests of others.”

The “new political thinking” is based on a “balance of interests,” which accepts at the outset the need for compromise and thus for concessions. “Changes are necessary in many instances,” Shevardnadze said, speaking as much about the Soviet Union’s old friendships as its new relationships, “and if we want to change anything we have to sit at the negotiating table with the other party to reach understandings on new conditions.”

Under the triple political prism of perestroika, glasnost, or openness, and democratization--all implemented largely for domestic reasons--the changes in Soviet thinking on foreign policy are kaleidoscopic.

What was indisputably right in Soviet terms a decade ago--the invasion of Afghanistan or the Krasnoyarsk radar station--became unsustainable, then regrettable and now finally wrong.

And what was unthinkable, such as a non-Communist government in a Warsaw Pact member, the transformation of another East European country into a Western-style parliamentary democracy and the broad retreat from Communism as it has been practiced for the past 50 years, is now accepted and even praised as good.

“We put forward our model of socialism for our neighbors in Europe, for China, for other developing countries, and now we ourselves see that it is flawed, deformed or even, some here say, not even socialism,” another Soviet foreign policy specialist said this month. “So, now that Poland and Hungary seek to find different paths of development, how can we say anything but ‘God bless’ and wish them the best?

“We ourselves are grappling with what socialism is, what it should be, what its goals should be and the means to them--all core issues. In acknowledging our own errors, how can we tell others that they are wrong in wanting to go back, as it were, to the point from where we diverted them?”

For many reasons, this is a touchstone issue for Moscow’s “new political thinking.” It involves Eastern Europe, first of all, but also those other countries, from China and North Korea to Cuba and Nicaragua, that followed the Soviet Union into Marxism-Leninism and those liberation movements across the Third World that still look to the Moscow model for guidance and inspiration.

Almost from the time that the Bolsheviks came to power in the 1917 revolution, the Soviet Union has made the spread of communism one of its principal foreign policy goals. The Western response to what was seen as an aggressively expansionist and totalitarian system provided the rest of the dynamics for much of international relations, especially since World War II.

Speaking to the U.N. General Assembly last December, Gorbachev chose this issue to demonstrate the break with past Soviet policy. “Freedom of choice is a universal principle that should allow no exceptions,” he declared. Refusal to recognize this, he said, leads to “extremely grave consequences for world peace.”

Poland and Hungary have tested this Soviet commitment over the past year in developing their new, pluralist political systems. Moscow now expects other East European nations to follow and sees the need for what Shevardnadze called “new pivotal principles in the entire system of Soviet links with socialist countries.”

“We recognize every country’s right to absolute freedom of choice,” Shevardnadze said, reaffirming one of the principles of Moscow’s “new political thinking.”

“New forces are emerging on the political scene,” he continued. “They are not pushed forward by anyone; they appear because the people want them. This does not mean that these states stop being our neighbors, allies or friends. All our commitments remain in force.

“One further thing is clear: We can no longer act within obsolete structures. Economic, scientific, technological and cultural cooperation must be transferred to a new basis. We understand the striving of our friends to have versatile, broad relations with the whole world. We ourselves are following the same course.”

In Warsaw, later in the week, he told Solidarity’s newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza in confirmation of Soviet acceptance of political pluralism in Poland, “We may not ultimately like the fact that Poland is led by non-Communists, but we respect the will of the Polish nation.”

Looking at Soviet-American relations, Shevardnadze was able to focus on some of the early results of the foreign policy change. He characterized in almost rhapsodic terms the once-confrontational relationship as a “dialogue (that) has ascended to a new level of openness and businesslike attitudes with broad issues under discussion and high degree of mutual understanding and good will.”

“For all the differences in our political philosophies and world outlooks,” he said, “the two sides . . . see their priorities and project their plans of action in similar categories--going in the same direction. There is also the understanding that the conditions are ripe for a major new step forward.”

“Both the Soviet and the American leadership are guided by long-term prospects in the growing, positive and constructive cooperation in bilateral relations and in the whole range of world problems.”

This, quite clearly, was a partner, not an adversary, that Shevardnadze was speaking about.

Another measure of Moscow’s changing foreign policy came in Shevardnadze’s discussion of relations with Cuba and Nicaragua.

Confirming the suspension of Soviet arms shipments to Nicaragua in support of a political resolution of the conflict there, Shevardnadze praised Washington for its “realism” nearly as much as it did the Sandinista government in Managua for agreeing to general elections there in February.

Any remaining doubts were dispelled as the Soviet foreign minister called for a “radical improvement” in Moscow’s economic relations with Cuba, saying that “serious work” was needed to make them profitable and that this was the “top priority” now in the overall relationship.

All this, of course, depends on perestroika, how deep it goes, how long it lasts.

“Major difficulties await perestroika, “ Shevardnadze said, “but today we can guarantee that it will never make a U-turn. This is essential for our foreign policy.”