JERRY F. HOUGH
Soviet Policymaking Toward Foreign Communists
In recent years scholars have given increasing attention to the foreign policymaking process in the Soviet Union and to the institutions and domestic pressures that are part of it. To an overwhelming extent, however, foreign policy has been defined in very traditional terms in these discussions. Little, if any, mention is made of the way that the Soviet Union handles the other side of its dualistic foreign policy--its relations with revolutionary movements abroad. This has left us with a rather truncated view of the Soviet foreign policymaking process, and the purpose of this study is to try to assemble some of the material available on this question.
The Hiswrical Background For the first twenty-five years of its existence, the Communist Party did not have an international department with policy responsibilities. The institution that handled most Soviet relations with foreign Communist Parties until 1943 was the Communist International--the Comintern. Because it changed its policy so frequently and drastically to correspond with the needs of Soviet foreign policy (most dramatically at the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact), Western scholars have concentrated their attention on exploring Comintern policy and demonstrating that the Comintern was an agent of Soviet foreign policy. This image STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM
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was quite correct, but it was incomplete. The central office of the Comintern contained some 500 officials; t whatever the limitations on their power, they had knowledge about the outside world and they were in a position to express their opinions about it. They were part of the process that was shaping the policy that they were then obligated to carry out, although far from the most influential element in it. 2 The Great Purge of 1937-1938 had a devastating impact on the Comintern, as on other institutions; but the Comintern never recovered. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, Stalin had no desire to face the foreign Communists who had worked for the Popular Front, and in 1943 the Comintern was formally abolished. In 1947, a new Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) was created, but it embraced only the East European and a few major Western Communist Parties. More important from the point of View of the Soviet policy process, the Cominform was located in Eastern Europe, and it had an extremely small apparatus--really not much more than the staff of its newspaper. A few foreign Communists remained in Moscow, 3 but the large-scale foreign contingent that characterized the Soviet policy process of the 1920s and the 1930s was no more. With the abolition of the Comintern, the leadership brought the officials handling relations with foreign Communists into the Central Committee apparatus, but the way their work was organized remains surprisingly obscure. By all indications, Andrei Zhdanov remained the major Central Committee secretary in charge of relations with the international Communist movement until his death in August 1948. 4 Georgii Malenkov seems to have filled this role for at least the next four years, and probably until Stalin's death. I. Theodore H. Von Lane, "Soviet Diplomacy: G. V. Chicherin, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, 1918-1930" in Gordon A. Craig and Felix Gilbert (eds.), The Diplomats, 1919.1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 253. 2. Some of the debates between foreign and Soviet Comintern officials in 1934 about the desirability of a Popular Front policy are described in B. M. Leibzon and K. K. Shirinia, Povorot v politike Kominterna, 2nd e d . (Moscow: Mysr, 1975), pp. 93-96, and in K. Shirinia, "Politika narodnogo fronta" in B. M. Leibzon and K. K. Shirinia (eds.), Iz istorii Kominterna (Moscow: Mysl', 1970), pp. 149-150. Neither the foreign Communists nor the Soviet representatives constituted united,groups on this issue, but each included persons on both sides of the issue. 3. For example, Otto Kuusinen, who officially was chainnan of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Karelo-Finnish Republic, also served on the editorial board of the journal New Times and spent much of his time in Moscow consulting on the question of relations with foreign Communists. 4. Zhdanov certainly seemed to have the dominant role in organizing the Cominform, and his services in handling relations with foreign Communists were emphasized in his obituary. Pravda, September I, 1948, p. I.
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Another ~entral Committee secretary, Mikhail Suslov, attended Cominform at'fairs and may have had special responsibilities for Eastern Europe. However, judging by his speech to the Nineteenth Party Congress, his primary duties at that time were domestic--propaganda, education, science, and culture. Because the "staff" of the Cominform was primarily its newspaper, it is possible that Suslov exercised general supervision over it, together with the other newspapers within his purview; but, to repeat, his speech at the Nineteenth Congress did not contain a word about foreign relations or Eastern Europe. Below the level of the Central Committee Secretariat, the organizational situation in the last decade of Stalin's life is even murkier. The former Soviet representative to the Comintern, Dmitrii Manuil'sky, has been identified as head of a new international department in 1943, but he soon became the head of the new Ukrainian Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, and Georgif Dimitrov headed the department in the last stage of the war. 5 No other reference to an international department between 1945 and 1955 has been found in the historical or biographical literature, let alone the press of the time. Boris Ponomarev, an employee of the Comintern Executive Committee from 1935 to 1943, is said to have been first deputy head of the international information department of the Central Committee from 1944 to 1946, but that is the only mention of such a department. 6 On December 29, 1945, the Politburo created a special "foreign policy commission" attached to the Politburo, and this commission, apparently headed by Malenkov from the beginning, presumably had a staff.7 In 1948, according to a later scholarly study, Central Committee departments (otdely) were created to supplant the personnel, verification-of-performance, and propaganda-agitation administrations (upravleniia), and one of these new departments was "foreign relations" (vneshnie snosheniia). 8 Then in 1949 the latter department was subdivided 5. Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1962), p. 24, and Rabochii klass i sovremennyi mir, No. 3 (1972), p. 170. 6. Indeed, the only known biography of him that gives the name of the department is in Kalininskaia pravda, February 8, 1979, p. I. 7. For the creation of the Politburo commission, see Werner G. Hahn, Postwar Soviet Politics: The Fall of Zhdanov and the Defeat of Moderation, 1946-53 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 202. The commission contained six Politburo members (and was called a sextet). On October 3, 1946 it was expanded by one man (the Chairman of Gosplan, Nikolai Voznesensky) and given domestic responsibilities as well. Khrushehev secret speech, in Leo Gruliow (ed.), Current Soviet Policies - - H (New York: Praeger, 1957), p. 187. 8. B. A. Abramov, "Organizatsionno-partiinaia rabota v gody chetvertoi piatiletki," Voprosy istorii KPSS, March 1979, p. 64.
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into a foreign policy commission and a department of personnel of diplomatic and foreign trade organs. 9 This phraseology seems to imply that the foreign policy commission, or at least its staff, did not exist for some time in the late 1940s and that the functions of the foreign affairs department had been performed by one or more of the three administrations prior to 1948. It is likely that the personnel administration of the Central Commitee was responsible for the selection of personnel for the foreign policy apparatus of the government, and that for at least some period prior to 1948 (perhaps a short period) the propaganda-agitation administration (led by Suslov) handled the staff work for relations with foreign Communists. Then this latter duty devolved, first, to the foreign relations department and then to the staff of the foreign policy commission. The top staff official in all three institutions was probably V. G. Grigorian, a close associate of Lavrentii Beria, I° and hence there may have been far less change in practice than in organizational charts. From 1950 to 1953, therefore, the functions of the international department seem to have been handed by the staff of the foreign policy commission. Grigorian was listed as head of an unspecified Central Committee Department in 1950, ~I and this was most probably the staff of the commission. From 1950 to 1955, Ponomarev is said to have been first deputy head of the commission. Grigorian and Ponomarev expressed very different attitudes toward foreign socialists in Pravda (Grigorian was much more negative than Ponomarev). 12 In practice, Grigorian may have concentrated more on the Third World and East Europe and Ponomarev more on the West. 13 Malenkov surely super9. Ibid., p. 64, n. 13. The phrase "foreign policy commission" is used in two ways in the Soviet literature. The actual commission itself contained Politburo members. It is unlikely to have been abolished and recreated in this period. The commission that Abramov is discussing is the staff of the commission. 10. For a good discussion of Grigorian, see Hahn, Postwar Soviet Politics, pp. 77, 107, 220 n. lg. In the spring of 1947, Grigoriart was the deputy head of the Propaganda and Agitation Administration, a post that by all indications put him in charge of the press. By July 1947, he seems to have retained the post but to have had his responsibilities shifted. (E. I. Bugaev and then L. F. II'iehev came to serve as deputy head in charge of the press.) This is the time of the creation of the Cominform, and Grigorian is likely to have been transferred to international responsibilities. Kul'tura i zhizn', January 11, 1947, p. 1; April 30, 1947, p. 2; August 30, 1947, p. I; March 31, 1948, p. 2; April I1, 1948, p. 2; April 30, 1948, p. 1. 11. Vecherniaia Moskva, November 30, 1950, p. 2. 12. See Pravda, July 19, 1952, p. 3. 13. For example, a representative of the American Communist Party who visited Moscow in 1951 was received by Malenkov and Ponomarev, with the former speaking the more authoritatively. Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 216.
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vised the commission as a whole, ~4 but another Beria associate, Vladimir Dekanozov, was responsible for the Middle East, Sinkiang, and Eastern Europe in the Commissariat o f Foreign Affairs in World War II, ~5 and Beria may have retained de facto control over these parts of the world and over Grigorian. With the flow of power to the foreign policy commission, Suslov may have lost most of his role in relations with foreign Communists, except for the Cominform newspaper. The Central Committee Secretariat and Apparatus After Stalin's death, Grigorian was quickly moved from the Central Committee apparatus to the press department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (even before Beria's removal), and it is likely that the foreign policy commission was abolished and replaced by an international department. In 1955, Ponomarev became the head of the department; in 1961 he was given the rank of Central Committee secretary as well. Early in the Khrushchev period, Suslov (an old associate of Khrushchev in the early 1930s) was made the Central Committee secretary in charge of relations with foreign Communists. One would, indeed, surmise that this occurred immediately after Stalin's death and that Suslov served as head of the international department from 1953 to 1955, perhaps even as early as the Central Committee elections after the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 1952. In general, the post-Stalin policy process with respect to the foreign Communist movement has featured the same type of Soviet institutional participants as in the Stalin period, but the characteristics and relative weight of the participants have changed. As the Soviet response to the non-Communist left became more flexible, as the Communist movement itself fragmented, the Soviet policy process dealing with the foreign left became more differentiated. The most notable such development occurred in 1957, when the international department was split and a new department for relations with socialist countries was formed. (The term "socialist" was defined 14. An 6migr~ claimed that foreign policy in this period was handled by the special sector
(osobyi sektor) of the Central Committee, headed by Malenkov. N. Ruslanov, "Voskhozdenie Malenkova," Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, Vol. 33, No. 7-8 (July-August 1953), pp. 127-131. The special sector, however, was in fact headed by Poskrebyshev until the last days of Stalin's life, and Ruslanov, no doubt, confused it with the foreign policy commission. The validity of the general picture presented in this paragraph is also suggested by the private assertions of two Soviet officials--one, that Grigorian was associated with the foreign policy commission in the early 1950s, and the other, that Ponomarev was an assistant (pomoshchnik) of Malenkov's near the time of Stalin'sdeath. 15. This information was provided the author in a private interview by a Soviet citizen.
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very narrowly in this context--"Communist" in Western phraseology-and countries such as Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and even Castro's Cuba until 1963 have been the responsibility of the international department.) The first head of the socialist countries department was Iurii Andropov. In 1961 Andropov, like Ponomarev, was given the status of a Central Committee secretary as well as a department head. By the 1980s, the Central Committee apparatus had come to include a number of different types of officials who were involved in relations with non-Communist countries: (1) the personal assistants of the General Secretary (and other Central Committee secretaries), (2) the regular staff of the international department, (3) the group of consultants of the international department, (4) the foreign information department, (5) the cadres-abroad department, and (6) the officials in the propaganda department dealing with Soviet foreign correspondents, and Novosti agency, and so forth. Obviously, any officials who deal with international relations and who work in a well-placed institution may have an impact on any type of policy--if nothing else, through informal personal contacts with friends in other parts of the institution. Leaving aside this type of chance influence, however, some of the units of the Central Committee seem to have a minimum role in the making of policy with respect to foreign Communists. One such unit seems to be the cadres-abroad department. This department is a very shadowy one; at one time it was usually (and apparently incorrectly) referred to as the travel-abroad department in the Western literature, t6 The primary function of the department seems to be the supervision of the selection of diplomatic, foreign trade, and foreign aid personnel who are stationed abroad (and perhaps those in the central ministries as well). The general practice in the Soviet Union is for significant posts in the governmental service or other organizations to be placed in the nomenklatura (list) of a Party organ and for the approval of the latter to be required before personnel action is taken with respect to the post. The most important posts in the nomenklatura of the Central Committee are usually confirmed by the Politburo, the second-rank jobs by the Secretariat, and the least important by the departments; but the departments also perform the staff work for the most important positions (in Soviet jargon, these appointments "go through" 16. The only reference that I have found to this department (otdel zagranichnykh kadrov) is in Vedomosti Verkhovnogo Soveta RSFSR, No. 45 (November 17, 1965), p. 994. The name, however, must still be used, for Soviet scholars and diplomats respond naturally when it is mentioned today.
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the department). The evidence suggests that the cadres-abroad department handles this responsibility in the foreign relations realm, although the international department or the socialist countries department may sometimes be consulted. (The appointments of foreign correspondents stationed abroad, however, are handled through the propaganda department of the Central Committee.) The cadres-abroad department, by all testimony, has almost no involvement in substantive foreign policy discussions as an institution. One would think that it would have even less in those on policy toward the foreign Communist movement. Its only natural involvement would be in the process by which any representatives of the international department might be placed in embassies abroad. Of course, the head of the cadres-abroad department, Nikolai Pegov, is a full member of the Central Committee who served as Ambassador to Iran, Algeria, and India in the period 1956-1973. He had been a Central Committee secretary in the same 1952-1953 period when Brezhnev held that post. One can imagine that as an individual he may be consulted, especially on the areas in which he served--but that is a different matter. The foreign information department also seems to have little institutional involvement in policy toward foreign Communist Parties. It has little responsibility for the collection of information about foreign countries, focusing instead on the dissemination of such information. The head of the department, Leonid Zamiatin, serves as the General Secretary's press secretary for foreigners, performing the same function for the Central Committee when needed. (For example, he was the press secretary for the Twenty-sixth Party Congress in 1981.) The foreign information department is organized geographically (e.g., it has a North American section, headed by the former lzvestiia correspondent in New York City and Latin America), and its job is to determine the way in which the Party should explain events and policy to the various regions of the world. So far as can be judged, the foreign information department is not acting as an agency that is trying to coordinate foreign propaganda, but is performing the quick-reaction function of a press secretary. It does not even seem to oversee the information agencies abroad (foreign correspondents, Novosti, foreign radio, and the like) or to exercise the nomenklatura functions with respect to their officials. Its officials apparently become personally involved in the day-to-day drafting of TASS statements, "I. Aleksandrov" articles in Pravda, and so forth. As a person, a press secretary may or may not be a confidant of his principal; and, since words in international relations are a significant part of pol-
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icy, the department's drafting role may well have an impact. Both of these roles should, however, be diminished with respect to policy toward nonruling Communists than that toward foreign governments, for official Soviet statements almost always relate to the latter. The other enumerated actors in the Central Committee apparatus (the international departments, the personal assistants to the General Secretary, and the propaganda department and the secretary supervising it) clearly have a more active role in relations with foreign Communists. The major actor is the international department. In 1959, the United States government estimated that it had a staff of 100 to 150 persons, and it may be in the 200-person range now. The inner structure of the department is never discussed as such, but increasing press openness in mentioning Central Committee officials who have dealings with foreign Communists makes it possible to infer the department's structure with greater confidence as time progresses. The following is my best estimate of the list of sections (sektor) within the department, together with the latest section head identified. 1. English-speaking America, including such countries as Jamaica (N. V. Mostovets) 2. Spanish-speaking America (M. F. Kudachkin) 3. Great Britain and some Commonwealth Countries (D. A. Sharif) 4. Scandinavia (I. P. Rozdorozhny) 5. Germanic-language Europe, including West Germany, Austria, and Luxembourg (D. N. Mochalin) , 6 . Romance-language Europe, including France, Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland (Iu. I. Zuev) 7. Southeast Europe, including Greece 8. Near and Middle East (Iu. S. Griadunov) 9. Africa (P. I. Manchkha) 10. South Asia (P. V. Kutsobin) 11. Southeast Asia 12. Far East (I. I. Kovalenko, although he may have been replaced when he became deputy head of the international department) 13. "Public" Organizations for Cultural Ties and Friendship (A. I. Legasov) 14. "Public" International Organizations (G. V. Shumeiko) The sections are said to be small--perhaps no more than the section head and one other person in, for example, the Scandinavia department. Normally, the lowest "responsible" officials with the Central Committee apparatus have the title of "instructor," but because that word has unfortunate connotations in relations with foreigners, the
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basic officials of the international department below the level of section chief have a more neutral title, "referent." In other contexts, this word is translated "research associate" or "clerk," but that is misleading in this case. As is typical in the Soviet Union, the sections of a department are supervised by deputy heads of the department, who are the important figures in the department. By the 1980s, the number of deputy heads had grown to six: Vadim Zagladin, the first deputy head (overall coordination and special responsibility for Romance-language Europe), Anatolii Cherniaev (the United States and Great Britain), V . S . Shaposhnikov (the rest of Europe and international organizations), Rostislav Ul'ianovsky (Africa and South Asia), Ivan Kovalenko (the Far East), and Karen Brutents (most of the rest of the Third World and perhaps Iberia). In addition to the basic staff of the sections, the international department (like other large departments of the Central Committee) has "a group of consultants" (gruppa konsul'tantov). Despite the name, the group of consultants is composed of full-time staff. It is concerned with the longer range questions--which often means participation in the formulation of the major doctrinal statements and the writing of major speeches. With its responsibility for such questions, its staff is often drawn from the scholarly community; increasingly, it comprises individuals who had studied other questions than the Communist movement. Thus, in the late 1970s, the deputy director of the Institute of the International Workers' Movement, N. A. Kovalsky, who specialized on the Catholic Church and relations with it, was named to the group; and in 1980, S. M. Menshikov, one of the deans of Soviet analysts of the Western business cycle and a former deputy director of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), joined it. The personal assistants of the General Secretary and the propaganda department (and the Central Committee secretary supervising it, Mikhail Zimianin) also have some involvement in this realm. The increase in the number and status of the General Secretary's personal assistants has been one of the noticeable institutional developments of the Brezhnev period. The secretaries for internal ideological questions over the years--Zhdanov, Suslov, Dmitrii Shepilov, and Leonid Ilichev-have often had .an active foreign policy role. Zimianin has served as head of the press department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador to Vietnam, Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, and Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, and certainly is well prepared for participa-
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tion in foreign policymaking. If one is, however, talking about day-to-day policymaking toward Communists in non-Communist countries, one should probably deemphasize the role of the personal assistants and of the domestic ideological officials. Brezhnev's two major foreign policy assistants, A. M. Aleksandrov-Agentov and A. I. Blatov, worked for years in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before becoming his assistants, and they are likely by experience to concentrate on governmental relations. Aleksandrov-Agentov specializes on relations with United States and the Middle East--areas in which local Communism is not a major factor. While Blatov specializes on Europe, he seems to focus on Germany and Eastern Europe; relations with France and Italy seem more the province of Zagladin in the international department. Whatever Zimianin's personal relations with Brezhnev (and they may be close), 17 the propaganda department seems to have a declining role in international relations. The creation of the foreign information department deprived it of much of its responsibility for working out the short-run propaganda line in foreign policy. The man appointed to head it in 1977, E. M. Tiazhelnikov, came out of the Komsomol and seems much oriented toward internal policy. The department does oversee the foreign correspondents and the foreign departments of Soviet newspapers. Its responsibility for supervising local propaganda makes it a conduit for public reaction and questions on all types of policy. It has a staff of full-time lecturers, who often speak in the provinces on international relations and who perform the same function of reporting on public opinion. Yet the population's interest is much greater in relations with foreign governments than with foreign Communists, and this should make the short-range impact of the propaganda department greater on governmental policy than on policy toward Communists out of power. The Role of the Scholars When Westerners think of policymaking toward foreign Communists, they focus almost exclusively on the Central Committee apparatus. This is, indeed, the institution that should be emphasized, but the number of participants in the process is much larger, especially in policy toward revolutionary forces in the Third World. Thus, the Sandinistas 17. Brezhnev was a top political officer in the troops that liberated Czechoslovakia in 1945. Hence Khnlshchev often chose him as the Soviet representative to visit Czechoslovakia, and he often met Zimianin, who was serving as ambassador there.
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in Nicaragua were not, after all, the Nicaraguan Communist Party; once they unexpectedly won, they became a government with which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had dealings. Decisions about military aid both to Nicaragua and to the rebels in El Salvador surely also involve the Ministry of Defense, and Andrei Gromyko and his ministry would certainly have an input because of the implications for SovietAmerican relations. It is unclear just where the control of covert Soviet action is located (in the 1920s and 1930s any that involved weapons or military advisers was centered in military intelligence), but it is difficult to imagine that the KGB does not have some role in this sphere. One group that deserves special emphasis is the scholarly community: Many in the West have come to understand the role of the Institute of the USA and Canada and of the IMEMO in Soviet governmental policymaking, but the same phenomenon is present in policy toward foreign Communists. Some institutes were created in substantial part to provide expertise to policymakers in the Central Committee. The Institute of the International Workers' Movement was actually subordinated to the Central Committee before it was transferred to the Academy of Sciences. The departments studying the Communist and workers' movements in the Academy of Social Sciences and the Institute of Marxism-Leninism (both under the Central Committee) clearly have a direct responsibility to consult on policy toward Communist and radical movements. The Institute of the Social Sciences under the Central Committee (which is different from and administratively independent of the Academy of Social Sciences) provides theoretical instruction to foreign Communists, and its staff surely should report what they learn from their students. Other Academy of Sciences institutes are also drawn into policymaking with respect to foreign Communists. The Institute of Oriental Studies will be discussed shortly, and the Institute of Latin America certainly seems to have closer relations with the international department of the Central Committee than with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Institute of Africa, by contrast, has been directed by the son of Andrei Gromyko since that continent became important in SovietAmerican relations. It is difficult to believe that the institute has not become a major source of expertise for the foreign minister in his interactions with the international department on policy toward African radicals. Even IMEMO, although better known for its large international relations and economics departments, has a small group of important spe-
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cialists on Third World social and political developments. The head of this department, Georgii Mirsky, has been one of the most influential analysts of revolution in the Third World, while two of its Latin Ameri~can specialists, Kiva Maidanik and Irina Zorina, were leading protagonists in the arguments about Allende's Chile. Maidanik, who is informally called "Che Guevara" by his opponents, has been the most fervent exponent of an immediate revolutionary strategy in Latin America for the last dozen years, ta And, of course, as the major institute on Western Europe in the system, it has specialists who are expert on Eurocommunism. But perhaps even more important than formal institutional responsibilities are the informal ties that have developed over the years between officials of the international department and the scholarly community. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has followed a policy of regular rotation between the field and the home office; it also shifts diplomats from geographical area to area, especially outside the realm of its American specialists. As a result, the diplomatic community tends to be somewhat isolated socially from other specialists on the outside world, who live full-time in Moscow. The situation with respect to the international department and scholars is very different. All the major institutes are located in Moscow; both the Central Committee officials and the scholars are concerned with analyzing the long-range political evolution of the outside world; both must produce written work that summarizes both the objective situation in the world and the desirable revolutionary strategy in the proper ideological terms. The Central Committee officials and the scholars of the same age were educated in the same handful of colleges, and the Central Committee officials attend scholarly conferences. Many of them write scholarly books and articles, which are part of the scholarly debate. In the process, the relationships of individual Central Committee officials and individual scholars can become quite close. For example, the first deputy head of the international department, Zagladin, serves as the responsible editor for many of the books of Boris Koval, the deputy director of the Institute of the International Workers' Movement and one of the leading spokesmen for the view that the politics of the major Latin American countries are becoming Europeanized and non18. For a discussion of his views and the debates among the Soviet Latin Amedcanists, see Jerry F. Hough, "The Evolving Soviet Debate on Latin America," Latin American Research Review, 'Col. 16, No. I (1981), pp. 124-143.
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revolutionary, at least in the foreseeable future, t9 (Being a responsible editor means that a man takes some responsibility for the contents and quality of a piece, even if he does not agree with every word.) The deputy head of the international department, Cherniaev, has worked for years with the leading specialist on Europe in the Institute of the International Workers' Movement, Aleksandr Galkin, 2° and the institute's long-time director, Timur Timofeev (the son of the American Communist leader, Eugene Dennis) is said to have had a close relationship with Suslov and Ponomarev. The relationships of scholars and Central Committee officials can be antagonistic as well as friendly--and both antagonistic and friendly with different Central Committee officials. The most innovative scholars on the Third World in the 1970s were three friends who are called the "brain trust" of the Institute of Oriental Studies--Aleksei Levkovsky, Lev Reisner, and Nodari Simoniia. The work of Levkovsky and Simoniia, in particular, has been repeatedly and severely criticized by Ul'ianovsky, the long-time deputy head of the international department for the Third World. 2t Yet, the younger and new deputy head of the department, Brutents, 22 who has been given most of Ul'ianovsky's duties in recent years, has much better relations with this group. A man who received his postgraduate degree (candidate of science) from IMEMO and who has good relations with the institute, Brutents agreed to serve as one of the official "opponents" at Simoniia's defense of his doctoral dissertation (usually sympathetic authorities are selected for this role), and he inscribed his approval of the dissertation--which became the basis for a book attacked by Ul'ianovsky. When the Institute of Oriental Studies produced a major three-volume study of the social and political problems and trends in the Orient, the 12-person editorial group included not only Levkovsky and Simoniia, but also Brutents. 23 The influence relationship between the various Central Committee officials and scholars is obviously extremely complex; they themselves, no doubt, could not define it precisely. Sometimes, powerful men may 19. For example, B. I. Koval', Rabochee dvizhenie v latinskoi amerike (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), p. 2. The two sometimes serve as responsible editors together. See Mezhdunarodnoe rabochee dvizhenie: Spravochnik (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1980), p. 2. 20. For example, the two were joint editors of $otsial-demokraticheskii i burzhuaznyi reformizm v sisteme gosudarstvenno-monopolistichesko8o kapitalizma (Moscow: Nauka, 1980). 21. See Jerry F. Hough, "The Evolution in the Soviet World View," World Politics, XXXII, 4 (July 1980), p. 529, n. 19 22. Brutents was misidentified as the head of the Latin American department in the U. S. Department of State White Paper on El Salvador. 23. Zarubezhnyi vostok i sovremennost' (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), Vol. I, p. 2.
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for complex personal and political reasons protect scholars with whom they significantly disagree; sometimes the officials may be relying on scholars for information, speech-writing, or even ideas; sometimes the officials and scholars are simply friends who talk over events and ideas together and could not sort out the constantly shifting impact of one's thinking upon the other. Overview
With a substantial number of persons involved in the formulation of policy toward foreign Communists, the question of their respective roles is obviously a complex one. The very nature of the situation guarantees that their relative influence varies from situation to situation and from time to time. Probably the most useful general distinctions that can be made center on the type of decision that is being made. Thus, to a large extent, a number of the most important questions about the relations toward the Communist movement have been made in a crisis or semi-crisis framework; the top leadership has surely been deeply involved in this process. For example, in the Khrushchev era, the most important decisions seemed to be in the hands of an inner core of generalists: after 1960, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Kosygin, Frol Kozlov, and Anastas Mikoyan (although Nikolai Podgorny was added to the group after Kozlov had a stroke). It is symptomatic that when the various East European leaders came to Moscow for explanations and consultations after the Cuban missile crisis, the men who conducted the actual conversations were Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Kozlov. Other leaders--including Suslov--attended the dinner for the Eastern Europeans, but precisely this difference in treatment seemed to be making a point about the relative importance of leaders in this context. 24 An analogous inner core quickly arose in the Brezhnev period as well. This time Suslov was included in the inner circle, overseeing the entire realm of international relations and the internal "ideological" sphere (culture, education, propaganda, and science). However, this relative influence on the major decisions with respect to Eurocommunism, Chile, African radicalism, and so forth, compared with that of Kirilenko, Kosygin, Podgorny, and, of course, Brezhnev, is most unclear. Kosygin and Podgorny often traveled abroad and met with foreigners--Kosygin especially with Europeans and Podgorny with Af24. Pravda, October 31, 1962, p. I; November 3, 1962, p. I; November 5, 1962, p. I.
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ricans--and Kirilenko had a great deal of contact with Chileans. Their views may have been quite important. We simply do not know. By 1982, the inner core had been transformed. After Suslov died, he was replaced by Iurii Andropov, a man with great foreign policy experience. Brezhnev took over Podgorny's portfolio as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, and Kosygin's place was filled by Nikolai Tikhonov, a man with almost no foreign experience outside of economic relations with Eastern Europe. One would have thought that Andropov's relative influence was quite large, but Konstantin Chernenko, Brezhnev's long-time personal secretary, rose to the number two status position in the system. By all indications, he became Brezhnev's closest confidant, and, although he has had little prior foreign policy experience, he may have acquired great influence in this policy area. If crisis decisionmaking has often involved a small group of generalist leaders, then a second type of decisionmaking--that which might be called "day-to-day" decisionmaking--surely has rested predominantly with the appropriate officials of the Central Committee staff. In fact, this natural tendency in any bureaucracy must have been enormously strengthened in the post-Stalin period by the fragmentation of the Communist movement and the Soviet courtship of the non-Communist left. Simply keeping track of the different Communist Parties in a country, the factions within them, and the views and alliances of constantly changing leftist groups became a major undertaking. In these circumstances, the men with knowledge must have a major impact on policy. It has been authoritatively reported that the Central Committee specialists on Latin America were convinced that the Sandinista revolution would not be successful in Nicaragua. While a different prediction might not have resulted in a different Soviet policy, this prediction strongly tended to preclude another policy. The leadership does have other sources of information in some cases, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not have an embassy in Managua and the major scholars do not specialize on a small country such as Nicaragua. With the nature of revolutionary groups tending to be murky for reasons of secrecy, if nothing else, a semi-monopoly on information and private contacts makes it likely that an agency's tactical advice will be accepted. Finally, there is a third type of question which can be characterized neither as a crisis nor as a day-to-day decision. This is the broader type of policy that the leadership has some time to consider and that, at
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least in theory, can involve a major change of direction. It is on this type of decision that outsiders can have a major impact. When a major decision of noncrisis character is made in the Soviet Union, the normal practice in either the domestic or the foreign sphere is to form a commission in which all the interested institutions are represented. It is said that the international department tends to have an especially large role in the commissions on Third World questions, both because of the need to understand the leftist movements and because of the problems of coordination arising from arms sales or gifts. Nevertheless, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the State Committee for Foreign Economic Relations, the KGB, the Ministry of Defense, and the scholarly community also participate. The meetings of the commissions, which frequently are held in the Central Committee dachas in the Moscow suburbs, can extend for days or even weeks, and the participants are shielded from all outside responsibilities, including telephone calls. The output of such commissions varies enormously. If a formal Brezhnev speech or Central Committee document is being prepared, then the problem is to find language that reflects any existing leadership directives and that, to the greatest extent possible, is acceptable to all the institutions. The draft may then go through a number of changes as it is passed around for clearance. If the commission is preparing material for a Politburo decision, then the participating institutions may have some self-interest in finding a mutually acceptable "common language," if possible. However, they also can be asked to prepare a range of options for Politburo consideration---or can be forced to do so when there is unresolvable conflict within the commission. In the kind of committee politics involved in this activity, the impact of different individuals may be quite unpredictable by an outsider, essentially depending upon their skills and personal authority in this intimate setting. Indeed, in a broader and especially long-term sense, this third type of decision can go well beyond concrete documents prepared by commissions or other formal bodies. The policy process by which monetarism became a significant part of American economic policy stretched over the years and began far from any governmental committee meeting. Similarly, the change in Soviet policy toward Third World radicals in 1954-1955 was largely shaped by behind-the-scenes discussions that occurred in the Stalin period but that were prevented by Stalin from determining policy. Brezhnev, Suslov, and Ponomarev undoubtedly formed most of their
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assumptions about the outside world long ago, and it is unclear that any broad debate was likely to change these assumptions in a fundamental way. In a time of leadership change, however, the situation may be very different. If a consensus forms within the community of international specialists, that may be very hard for any new leader to resist, if for no other reason than that it will spill out intQ the community as a whole through friendship networks, conversations at parties, and the like. The advice not only may affect a new General Secretary with less fixed views, but may shape judgments about who is sophisticated that in turn may determine who is selected as his chief lieutenants and their chief sublieutenants in the realms we were discussing. It is crucial to keep these different types of decision in mind, for the distinctions among them may lead to real errors in judgment if we carry generalizations that are valid for one type of question over to another. The leaders have the crucial role in a crisis, and their general assumptions limit how far specialized officials can go in improvising with respect to the countries they are handling. Yet it surely would be wrong to see some Politburo master plan in negotiations with obscure factions in countries that most Politburo members could not locate on the map. But, by the same token, one should not assume that international department monopoly over negotiations with many Communist Parties means that they are the only----or even the primary--influence on the general discussions that are a crucial part of the "politics of the future." Since the policy that is of most interest to us is that which will be carded out in the mid- and late-1980s, we should be especially sensitive to the groups and influences that, while they may have little impact on policy of the last decade, may be preparing the ground for a change of policy in the future that is as profound as that which occurred in 1954-1955.