journal of european integration history revue d'histoire de l ...

92
Vladislav Zubok
structing communism through the emulation of capitalist know-how. Politicians
and diplomats expected that the increase of trade would encourage capitalists to
advocate to their respective governments the end of the Cold War. The political
message behind the state-controlled trade was obvious in the 1960s – 1970s: since
1963 when the Soviet Union had begun to buy grain from the United States, the
Kremlin began also to cultivate and promote special economic and trade ties, particularly
with those European countries who could be potentially “closer” to the
USSR politically: with France and European neutrals – particularly Finland, and to
a certain extent Austria and Yugoslavia, and (what they regarded as “neutral”) West
Berlin. The partial reintegration helped Soviet diplomacy to achieve some minor
goals, but its strategic consequence was very negative for the integrity of the Soviet
regime. The new emphasis on foreign imports was undermining the autarkic ethos
in East European and Soviet economies, and at the same time was preparing a revolution
of expectations in Eastern European countries and inside Soviet elites who
began to dream of Western goods and living standards. Molotov, in retirement,
severely criticized the new policy which, in his eyes, amounted to substituting the
cause of class struggle for consumerist pro-Western orientations. And essentially
this was what happened, particularly among the younger generation.
The Helsinki process for securing all-European peace was another case where
the Soviet leadership attempted to engage in a partial and state-controlled process
of reintegration with the West. Again the official goals were to further “the end of
the Cold War,” but the Breshnev leadership also sought apparently to acquire international
legitimacy and to become a member of the European club. The emphasis
on legitimacy grew as the traditional security concerns faded. Strategic parity with
the United States and the series of US-Soviet agreements in 1971-1974, particularly
on strategic armaments and on the status of West Berlin, made the Soviet leaders
more relaxed and confident in the future of the USSR. At one point, when the
Kremlin learned that Soviet diplomats agreed to include the “third basket” on
human rights into the text of the Helsinki agreement, hard-liners were horrified.
Yet, according to Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Gromyko
persuaded Brezhnev to sign the document as a package. The first argument
was that the Politburo could interpret the Helsinki “rights” as it liked inside the
USSR. The second was that the document would codify the post-war borders in
Europe, and, in its historic significance, would be another “congress of Vienna”.
Brezhnev agreed with this, and the Soviet regime undertook, against its will, commitments
based on Western democratic values and an all-European framework. 20
This led to a short-term boost for the Soviet “dissident” movement, but also to a
much more significant de-legitimization of domestic repression and to the spreading
of Western ideas in the Soviet cultural and even political establishment. Just a
decade after Helsinki, Mikhail Gorbachev embraced Western values as “all-human
values” and placed them above the cause of class struggle.
20. A. DOBRYNIN, In Confidence. Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents
(1962-1986), New York 1995, pp.346-347; his remarks to the author, Oslo, September 20, 1995.