Baker Works His Magic on Congress (Soviet Version)

Secretary of State James A. Baker III, one of Washington’s acknowledged political wizards, was a man in his own element on Saturday: working the halls of Congress, charming and cajoling a roomful of lawmakers toward seeing the virtues of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy.

Only this time, the legislators were members of the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies, the hearing room was a chamber where Josef Stalin once ruled--and Baker quickly learned that Soviet politicians know how to ask tough questions, too.

In an unprecedented hearing by the Soviet legislature’s new Committee on International Affairs, Baker offered lavish praise for Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s drive for reform, which he called “a new Russian Revolution,” and hailed the elected deputies as “the founding fathers of a new Soviet Union.”

“Now is the time to put the legacy of struggle behind us,” Baker said, sitting at a dais before a glowering marble bust of Lenin. “Now is the time to move beyond the Cold War.”

At first, the Soviet lawmakers politely responded in kind. “A very good statement,” committee Chairman Alexander S. Dzasokhov said.

But soon, as Baker submitted to more than an hour of questions, the gloves came off.

“The Soviet Union has changed its military doctrines to make them defensive and has restructured its armed forces, while the United States has virtually not reduced its forces at all,” complained Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev, a senior Gorbachev adviser who is also a member of the Congress. “Forty-five years ago you surrounded us with military bases, and so far, despite all our requests, you’re not doing anything about them.”

Baker replied: “I think that relations between the Soviet Union and the United States are improving because peace has been maintained through strength, Marshal. We’re both in the process of seeing declines in our defense budgets . . . and I think that is a very healthy situation.

“The fact of the matter is we are closing some bases,” Baker added. “We’ve announced the closure of, I think, 10 or 12 bases over the course of the past several weeks.”

“But you have 1,500!” Akhromeyev shot back.

Congress member Nikolay Neyland, a deputy from Latvia, took Baker to task for the U.S. invasion of Panama last December.

“I don’t even want to mention all the norms of international behavior that the United States violated,” Neyland said. “I just want to tell you . . . that we have hawks and doves here, too, and the invasion of Panama played into the hands of our hawks.”

Baker responded with a spirited, finger-wagging defense of the invasion.

“We know that it created certain problems here in the Soviet Union, that it energized the hawks,” he said. “But let me emphasize that Panama is an extraordinarily unique situation.”

Besides, he added, “the United States hasn’t used force in Latin America, except in Panama, since 1965.”

“What about Grenada?” half a dozen deputies protested instantly in Russian.

” . . . Unless you want to talk about Grenada as a use of force,” Baker amended himself.

But the secretary of state gave back as good as he got. He repeatedly castigated Cuba, a Soviet ally, for supporting revolutionaries in Central America and said that he could not understand why the Soviet Union continues to provide as much as $9 billion a year in aid to Havana.

“Quite frankly, the American people . . . cannot understand how your government can afford to send billions of rubles of assistance--billions of rubles to countries like Cuba and Nicaragua,” said Baker, touching off murmurs of apparent agreement from some of the deputies. The Soviet Union’s foreign aid has come under unprecedented public criticism here recently, with some deputies arguing that the money could be better spent at home.

Not every question to Baker was a hardball. The deputies--politicians all--exhibited a repertoire as varied as any on Capitol Hill:

-- The friendly softball: “Our public has the impression that U.S. foreign policy hasn’t changed along with our initiatives,” said Fyodor M. Burlatsky, a leading liberal in the Congress. “Can you please tell us about your initiatives in U.S.-Soviet relations?”

-- The local-interest question: “Can you do anything to help release Soviet prisoners of war in Afghanistan?” asked Deputy Nikolai Enger.

-- And the newspaper editorial question: “Is it true, as we read in the Washington Post, that . . . President Bush wants the movement (toward independence) in the Baltic republics to take a peaceful road?” asked Latvia’s Neyland.

Baker, too, took the opportunity--like any congressional witness--to make the points he wanted to make.

Making an open pitch to the new lawmakers, he told them that they hold the key to the democratization of the Soviet Union.

“Strengthening the power of the Supreme Soviet can be one step forward toward . . . advanced democracy,” he said. “The free exchange of ideas in an open, public legislative debate tempers political passions and encourages the solution of society’s problems through dialogue, not force.”

That message, Baker aides said, is a major reason the U.S. actively sought Saturday’s hearing: The secretary of state hopes that the Soviet lawmakers will grab the chance to increase their own power and thus propel the Soviet political system ever more quickly toward the West.

Members of the committee agreed that they aspire to play the same role in overseeing and prodding Soviet policy as do congressional committees in the United States but quickly added that they have a long way to go.

“We are still building this committee,” said Neyland. “I would be exaggerating if I told you that we have determined the proper scope of our influence. But we have ambition, ambition to become an important institution in building the foreign policy of the U.S.S.R.”

One senior State Department official said he was slightly surprised by how tough some of the Soviet questions were. “I didn’t expect it to be quite so vigorous,” he said.

But other Baker aides argued that the spirited debate was actually a sign of improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations. “It’s a sign of normality when we can argue about our differences in a straightforward way without damaging the overall tone of the relationship,” said one.

There were some incongruous notes. The committee met in Catherine Hall, an elegant domed room in one of the Kremlin buildings built during the 18th-Century reign of Catherine the Great.

Despite its old-regime grace, however, the room has a lugubrious history, at least under Soviet rule: It was here, in 1937, that Stalin ordered the arrest of some of his closest collaborators, and in 1964 it was here that the Communist Party Central Committee voted to depose Nikita S. Khrushchev.