Glasnost, the alleged Soviet "new openness," is an ideal disguise for the regime's ongoing predicament: The Soviet Union is in desperate need of Western credit, Western trade, and Western scientific and technological know-how. Glasnost is intended as the new Potemkin village to attract needed aid, in the tradition of Lenin's New Economic Policy of the 1920s.
Western credit for the Soviet Union, to be sure, is already massive. The West and Japan have supplied the Soviet Union with roughly $48 billion, and its indebtedness is rapidly increasing. In 1986, the Soviets and their satellites borrowed at the rate of $2 billion a month. At least 80 percent of the money, according to William E. Simon, former U.S. secretary of the treasury, was handed to the East bloc with no strings attached.
Western governments are now faced with an urgent question-- what to do? Clearly, our policy toward the Soviet Union must proceed from a sober appreciation of the fundamental differences between the two systems, from a realistic assessment of Soviet policy as it is, not as we wish it to be. Glasnost, and its cousin perestroika, in their foreign versions for Western consumption, are attempting to convince us that admitted former differences are vanishing, and the gullible are rushing to the Soviets' support. Writes one innocent and syndicated columnist: Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev "wants Russia to become a 'normalized' country. He wants Russia to be part of Western civilization. What he really wants is respectability in the world, which can come only through Western recognition of the Soviet Union as a normal country."
The same writer, enchanted with the Soviet "withdrawal" from Afghanistan, embraces the basis for an alleged new Soviet foreign policy: "The Russians now want to the accepted as a respected and respectable international partner of the big countries. They are bored, angered and fed up with the hopeless little countries such as Cuba." And with equally hopeless Ethiopia, Mozambique, Sao Tome, and the Cape Verdes, one hopes. But why, then, is the Soviet Union still pumping billions into Cuba and Nicaragua?
Certainly not for the first time, the West is being asked to take the East's rhetoric at face vale. The Soviet Union "wishes to live in peace with all countries, including the United States," and it "does not nurture aggressive plans, does not impose the arms race on anyone, does not impose its social order on any one." The Soviet Union "will continue to do everything possible to uphold peace on earth." These words were spoken by Yuri Andropov in 1983, four years after the invasion of Afghanistan, but the Soviet leadership's propensity for the truth, as they see it, does not change with the party's chairmanship. On behalf of the entire Soviet leadership, Gorbachev asserted on New Year's Eve 1986 that "when working out our policy in matters of war and peace, we are as honest with the American people as with our own people."
Apparently, no irony was intended, and none was detected when Gorbachev's assertions were repeated in America's prestige media. Not a single commentator or columnist suggested the truth--that no Soviet government trusts its citizens, that few Soviet citizens trust their government, that risks are involved anywhere in placing trust in Soviet propaganda speeches. Glasnost had found its first victims, in the United
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