Postponing It for a Bit Won’t Hurt : Summit delay: more in sorrow than anger

If next month’s summit meeting in Moscow is all but dead, it’s an announcement that the White House seems likely to make more in sorrow than in anger.

That makes sense. With Soviet soldiers patroling Moscow for fear that local police could not handle the turmoil that could easily erupt any day now, an abrupt change in Soviet-American relations is the last thing Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev needs.

With each day, evidence mounts that Gorbachev wildly underrated the power of Soviet reactionaries to block his reforms and that the miscalculation may cost both him and the Soviet people dearly.

Food rationing is about to descend on Moscow. Meat, grain, vodka and wine will be parceled out in the hope of making scarce supplies last at least through the winter, and in tacit acknowledgement of how badly things are going.

Unable to erase the damage of 70 years of Communist mismanagement, Gorbachev’s reform government now takes to adding blunders of its own. For example, it declared 50- and 100-ruble notes worthless in an effort with one neat blow to curb inflation and black-marketing.

As Times writer Michael Parks noted, anybody could have told the government that most speculators get rid of notes larger than 10-rubles as a contingency against just such a move. Devaluing big notes could only hurt the average citizen.

Nowhere has Gorbachev’s miscalculation been more apparent than in Lithuania and Latvia, where elite troops, apparently in cahoots with right-wing Communist functionaries, attack citizens and seize buildings in blithe disregard of Gorbachev’s attempt to disavow the acts.

A more puzzling sign of a slide toward chaos is the rejection by the Russian Republic’s Parliament of a motion to condemn the Baltic violence. The failure to condemn the violence is peculiar, considering the Russian Parliament includes some of the nation’s most radical reformers.

If President Bush sends Soviet Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh home from his visit to Washington this weekend with a rain check on the summit, the reason, of course, is not just worries about Moscow hard-liners. For one thing, the war in the Persian Gulf looks less every day like the two-week wonder that some took it to be in the early days of unimpeded pounding that Iraq took from allied bombers. Domestically, Congress is pressing for sterner rebukes of Moscow for its Baltic behavior than the White House has permitted so far. Congress also still has questions about Soviet compliance with the conventional arms control treaty that is to be a centerpiece of the next summit meeting between Bush and Gorbachev.

Putting the summit on hold without angry words or sudden moves is the best the White House can do for now. If Soviet right-wingers are as strong as they seem to be at this point, nothing Washington can do will change the course of events in the Soviet Union or make the winter easier for its people to endure. Americans, like most Soviets, are consigned to the uncomfortable role of watching, waiting and hoping.