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<text> <title> (1970s) Detente & Dissidence </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1970s Highlights </history> <link 08149> <link 08151> <link 04269> <link 00021> <link 00180><article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Detente and Dissidence </hdr> <body> [The 1970s, at least the first half of the decade, was the heady era of detente with the Soviet Union, a time when it looked as though at least some of the vexing tensions between the nuclear-armed superpowers could be relieved. It was also a time of realigning other relationships between the Communist and non-Communist worlds. The most urgent problem, of course, was curbing the nuclear arms race.] (April 20, 1970) Amid the baroque splendors of Vienna's Belvedere Palace, U.S. and Soviet negotiators this week will open the long-awaited Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). They are possibly the most vital negotiations between the two superpowers since Yalta; London's Institute for Strategic Studies last week called them "the most important arms conference in history." The delegates realize that they will have little time to waste. Unless the two nations move quickly they may very well miss an opportunity to prevent the nuclear arms race from taking a quantum leap. The outlook is far from optimistic. But the U.S. and Russia are conducting advanced tests of the next generation of nuclear weaponry, particularly the missile system known as MIRV (multiple individually targetable re-entry vehicles). Since each MIRVed rocket is capable of carrying a number of warheads, and each warhead is capable of being delivered to a separate target, the system vastly increases the destructive power of an individual missile. Some experts believe that the point of no return has already been reached in the eventual deployment of MIRVs. Even if the SALT negotiators were to agree quickly on a ban against their deployment, the problems of policing such an agreement would be enormous. [Richard Nixon, that fervent anti-Communist, hardly seemed like the American President who would reopen the door to China for the first time since the Communist takeover in 1949. But once his Vietnam withdrawal policy was well under way, he could move more freely toward his goal of a normalized relationship.] (July 26, 1971) In just 90 seconds of television time, President Richard Nixon last week made an announcement that altered many of the major assumptions and patterns of postwar diplomacy. The President would go to Peking to meet with China's Mao Tse-tung and Premier Chou En-lai before next May. The arrangements had been made by his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, during a secret meeting with Chou in Peking the week before. The aim of the meeting, said the President, "is to seek the normalization of relations between the two countries and also to exchange views on questions of concern to the two sides." Worldwide speculation soared over the timing of the Nixon-Chou agreement, the amazing success in keeping the arrangements secret and the possible concessions each side may have made in order to make the Peking summit possible. U.S. officials declined to illuminate these shadows. (November 8, 1971) Soon after a triumphant Mao Tse-tung made his famous 1949 declaration in Peking that "the Chinese people have stood up," one of his closest aides sat down to draft a telegram to the fledgling United Nations in New York. The telegram demanded that the U.N. expel the Nationalist Chinese regime of Chiang Kai-shek, who had fled with 2,000,000 followers to the island of Taiwan. In its place, the message went on, the U.N. should seat a new delegation from a new regime: the People's Republic of China. Last week, 22 years later, the U.N. finally agreed by a decisive margin to admit the regime that it had once branded as an aggressor for its role in Korea. (March 6, 1972) What, if anything, did Richard Nixon bring back from Peking? Above all, the event itself, the fact that it took place. Rarely had a U.S. President spent so long a time--a full week--in a foreign land. The visit, moreover, was to a country with which the U.S.did not even have diplomatic relations and which for two decades had been a virtual enemy. That paradox was obscured by the pageantry and (most of the time) by the warm atmosphere. As summits go, the meeting was a glittering success, stage-managed with precision. The substance of the week's talks was finally revealed in a 1,500-word joint communique released just before the President left Shanghai to return to the U.S. It contained no great surprises, no great let-downs. Even as both countries acknowledged the "differences in their social systems," they found agreement on four broad areas. They would "progress toward the normalization of relations." They would try to rescue the world from the danger of international war. Neither would seek hegemony in Asia or permit any other country to try to extend its power in the area. They agreed not to "negotiate on behalf of any third party" or to assist each other in any operation directed against another nation. On what China calls the "crucial question"--the status of Taiwan--the U.S. made what seemed the major news and concession: the assertion of an eventual goal of complete military withdrawal from the island. But in fact such a pullback from an essentially untenable position has always been implicit in Nixon's Guam Doctrine, and in the Administration's view, reiterated in the communique, that the problem of Taiwan is ultimately one for the Chinese to settle peacefully among themselves. [One of the high points of detente came with Nixon's visit in May 1972 to Moscow to sign the SALT treaty with Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev. The new relationship was supposed to result in benefits for all, especially trade for the U.S. and technology for the Soviet Union. Detente suffered a serious if not fatal blow, however, when the U.S. Congress mixed trade policy with human rights issues, notably the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate.] (June 5, 1972) The particular document signed and sealed with such pomp was the most notable in a series of agreements that the President brings back from the Soviet Union this week: the long-expected undertaking to limit nuclear weapons, not an end to the costly arms race but still a sign of hope and good sense. Other, lesser agreements had come with similar ceremony almost every day. It had all been stage-managed carefully and the accords had been worked on for months or even years. Theoretically, they could have been revealed to the world without the Kremlin spectacular. yet the way in which they were signed and sealed gave them special import. The meeting underscored the drive toward detente based on mutual self-interest--especially economic self-interest on the part of the Soviets, who want trade and technology from the West. None of the agreements are shatterproof, and some will lead only to future bargaining. But the fact that they touched so many areas suggested Nixon's strategy: he wanted to involve all of the Soviet leadership across the board--trade, health, science--in ways that would make it difficult later to reverse the trends set at the summit. (July 17, 1972) U.S. trade with the Communist world last year totaled $612 million, less than the nation's commerce with Colombia. If the events of last week are any indication, however, a new era has begun for East-West trade. The Commerce Department, urged on by President Nixon, granted the Boeing Co. a license to export $150 million worth of jet equipment to China. Representatives of dozens of U.S. firms returned from a high-level meeting in Warsaw aimed at substantially increasing U.S. trade with Eastern Europe. Then, at week's end the White House announced a blockbuster: the Soviet Union has signed a three-year, $750 million agreement for the purchase of American grains--on terms extremely favorable to the U.S. It was the largest grain deal ever made between two countries. (January 27, 1975) When Moscow repudiated its trade agreements with Washington last week, three years of delicate and arduous negotiations between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were aborted. Was something else aborted as well--namely the whole carefully crafted structure of detente between Washington and Moscow? The Kremlin action came in angry response to conditions imposed by Congress, such as the so-called Jackson Amendment. In declaring their 1972 trade accord with the U.S. invalid, the Soviets rejected by extension the Trade Reform Act signed by President Ford early this year. Thus the U.S.S.R. spurned lower U.S. tariff rates and $300 million in Export-Import Bank credits, while reneging on their agreement to repay $722 million in wartime Lend-Lease debts to the U.S. The Soviet decision to scuttle its trade accord with the U.S. constituted a major reversal of Kremlin policy. Determined to modernize their economy, the Russians--who will launch a vast, multibillion-dollar 15-year plan in 1976--want massive foreign investment, industrial know-how and sophisticated technology from the U.S. Although such aid has long been available from Japan and Western Europe, the Soviets calculated that only the U.S. could provide the technology for such grandiose enterprises as the $5 billion truck-manufacturing complex on the Kama River. In light of this hunger for credits, Moscow was stunningly humiliated when the Senate tacked an amendment onto an Export-Import Bank bill setting the paltry $300 million limit on the amount that would be available to the Soviets. It was probably this amendment, sponsored by Illinois Democrat Adlai Stevenson III, even more than the emigration amendment tacked onto the trade bill by Washington Democrat Henry Jackson, that finally prompted the Russians to scuttle the trade agreement. Kissinger, who opposed the credit ceiling, dismissed the sum as "peanuts." For the prideful Kremlin, it was an intolerable putdown. The principal victims of the Soviet cancellation may well be the 130,000 Russian Jews who are awaiting permission to emigrate. Since early December, harassment of would-be emigres has intensified and the number of Jews allowed to leave has dropped to a four-year low. But Moscow-based diplomats, and Israeli Sovietologists, were hopeful that the U.S.S.R. would not entirely halt emigration. [Detente seemed to pick up momentum again with the signing of the Helsinki Agreements on Security and Cooperation in Europe.] (August 4, 1975) The declaration that the leaders will sign this week took 22 months to produce. The completed document has five parts: a preamble stating the conference's general goals (of "peace, security, justice and co-operation") and four major sections known for no discernible reason as "baskets." The area of greatest Soviet interest is Basket One, which covers the inviolability of frontiers, peaceful settlement of inter- national disputes, nonintervention in internal affairs, the right of self-determination of peoples and other articles of cooperation and good faith. Basket Two, which was of particular interest to the East bloc and some smaller Western European nations, covers agreements regarding economic, scientific and environmental cooperation. Basket Three is the major area of Western concern. It deals with increased human contacts between East and West, includes the flow of information, the right of travel, improved working conditions for journalists and cooperation in matters of culture and education. The fourth basket--by far the weakest--involves follow-up arrangements. [Then the new, closer relationship between the superpowers began to unravel. The issue was the fierce Soviet crackdown on dissidents, especially those who had the effrontery to take the human rights provisions of the Helsinki agreements seriously.] (February 21, 1977) Whenever a Soviet dissident picks up his telephone, he can be sure that the KGB has either bugged it or disconnected it. So it was last week that in a tiny Moscow apartment, a tall, stooped man of 55 bundled himself into his worn overcoat and ratty fur hat, walked down seven flights of stairs and made his way through a noontime snowstorm to a public phone booth. It was by now a familiar routine for Andrei Sakharov, foremost builder of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize and leader of the Russian human rights movement. On that day, friend had brought a report of yet another arrest, and it was Sakharov's self-imposed duty to inform Western journalists, who would tell the world. In a tremulous voice, Sakharov spoke of the imprisonment of his close friend and collaborator, Physicist Yuri Orlov, 52. A diminutive man with a shock of red hair, Orlov is chief of the unofficial eleven-member Helsinki monitoring committee, which keeps close watch on Soviet compliance with the human rights provisions of the 1975 Helsinki agreement. Who are the dissidents? In Russia, there are only a handful, mostly intellectuals, writers and professionals who have achieved some success and even distinction. In the vast Soviet Union, with its 257 million population, Sakharov estimates that between 2,000 and 10,000 dissidents are "prisoners of conscience"; it is impossible to say how many others are still free. They are despised or regarded with suspicion by most of the population. Their significance does not lie in their numbers, but in the fact that they were driven to protest in the first place--and that their rulers are not sure how to cope with them. The world knows that the Soviet Union is a police state; what is surprising is not that dissidents are repressed but that they have as much relative freedom as they do. They are jailed, confined in metal institutions, harassed in a dozen ways, ranging from merely annoying to brutal. But Soviet dissidents call press conferences, circulate forbidden books and manuscripts, bombard Washington, Paris and the Vatican with their protests. As soon as one of their number is arrested, wives, children and friends set up a clamor. Sakharov is almost a tourist attraction in Moscow, and regularly receives foreign newsmen. None of this would have been conceivable under Stalin. Part of the Soviet dilemma stems from the Helsinki agreement. Would-be reformers in the Soviet Union and East Europe have used the Communist governments' ratification of Helsinki as a lever to press for liberalization on many fronts, such as censorship and immigration--with scant success. The Kremlin and the other East bloc regimes have no intention of permitting the free flow of ideas and people that Helsinki calls for. (July 24, 1978) He was, until 18 months ago, virtually unknown--an unemployed Jewish computer programmer on the fringes of the Soviet Union's human rights movement in Moscow. Then the Kremlin leaders decided to crush, once and for all, the flickering life signs of dissidence in the U.S.S.R. That is how last week, Anatoli Shcharansky became the symbol of deteriorating U.S.-Soviet relations, the object of confrontation politics between the Kremlin and the White House, and the personification of the struggle for human rights being waged by the Soviet Union's dogged dissidents. Put on trial for treason in Moscow, he was speedily convicted and sentenced to 13 years in prison and a hard-labor camp. The accusation: spying for a foreign intelligence service that was obviously, though it was not explicitly stated, the CIA. Although President Carter had categorically denied the charge, Washington--for humanitarian reasons--was exploring the possibility of exchanging two Russian spies arrested in New Jersey for Shcharansky. Throughout the Western world, there was a storm of protest directed against the Shcharansky trial and the court cases conducted simultaneously against two other human rights activists: Alexander Ginzburg and Viktoras Pektus. They also were found guilty last week and sentenced respectively to eight and ten years. Thus in a single week Soviet authorities had managed to dispose of three more notable dissidents. Of 38 founding members of the Helsinki Watch Committees, 17 are now in prison, while seven have emigrated or been exiled. [By decade's end, the Helsinki watch groups had all but ceased to exist, and Sakharov would be arrested and exiled to the provincial city of Gorky in 1980. Meanwhile, the Chinese were finally putting the terrible upheavals of the Cultural Revolution behind them, with the death of Mao Tse-tung and the unseating of those responsible for the worst of its ravages.] (October 25, 1976) It was a drama that had been played out countless times during the dynastic changes of bygone eras. First there were rumblings of earthquakes. Then came the death of the aged Emperor, followed by quarrels among his heirs about how to dispose of his body. Rival factions plotted within the walls of the Forbidden City--one of them led by the dead Emperor's shrewd Chief Minister, the other by scheming, ambitious and hated widow. There were rumors of a forged will, secret meetings and, finally, a series of arrests in a great purge. What it all added up to was one of the most climactic episodes in China's recent history. Almost overnight, Premier Hua Kuo-feng, only last year a relatively unknown official, succeeded Mao Tse-tung as Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. Mao's widow, Chiang Ch'ing, leader of the party's radical faction, was arrested, along with three of her closest allies. With Hua in power and the radicals in disgrace, China's moderate faction, backed by the army, seemed to have scored an astonishing triumph, one that may set China's new course for the immediate post-Mao era. It is not hard to find reasons for the moderates' desire to get ride of their radical antagonists. For one thing, there has been an enormous reserve of anger and bitterness against the radicals ever since the Cultural Revolution. Zealots like Chiang Ch'ing and her ideological allies led the campaigns to discredit thousands of veteran party officials and technicians, humiliating even prominent companions of Mao on the historic Long March by parading them with dunce caps pulled over their heads in front of crowds of howling young Red Guards. For another, there are signs that the public at large has tired of the radicals' wearisome attempts to politicize every aspect of life in endless meetings and parades. Chiang Ch'ing was so unpopular, reported one Japanese correspondent from Peking last week, that "contemptuous laughter used to break out in the darkness of movie theaters whenever she appeared on the screen." For the past few months, there have been growing signs of a low morale in the country, of a yearning for stability and a better standard of living. There have even been strong signs of active political dissent. The most dramatic came in April, when about 100,000 people, angered by the removal of memorial wreaths to Chou En-lai, demonstrated in Peking's vast T'ien An Men Square against radical policies. The T'ien An Men rioters bloodied several radical university students and waved placards that allegorically assailed Chiang Ch'ing. (August 1, 1977) In the cutthroat world of Communist politics, there are no second chances--with one exception. Last week Peking's official Hsinhua News Agency announced that the Central Committee of the Communist Party had voted to restore Teng Hsiao-p'ing, 73, to his former posts as Vice Premier, Vice Chairman of the party and Chief of Staff of the Army. At the same time, said the communique, the "Gang of Four" headed by Mao Tse-tung's widow, Chiang Ch'ing, had "once and for all" been expelled from the party and dismissed "from all posts inside and outside the party." It was a stunning triumph for Teng, a protege of the late Chou En-lai's, who was ousted from leadership positions by Mao in 1966, and again in 1976, when Chiang Ch'ing led the pack that hounded him into ignominy. Teng's return was also a dramatic demonstration of China's erratic course in the past decade--from pragmatism to radical zeal and back again. In modern Communist history, no other politician had ever risen to such heights of power and descended to such depths of disgrace--twice in a lifetime--and survived to rule again. [Teng proceeded to set China on a new course that would lead to vastly greater economic prosperity for China's hundreds of millions.] (November 27, 1978) In California, six Chinese scholars arrived at Stanford University, the first cadre of 700 students and researchers that Peking intends to send to the U.S. within the next twelve months. A consortium of West German companies is negotiating a $14 billion deal with Peking to build in Hopei province what would be the world's largest steel-making complex. Britain's government agreed to negotiate the possible purchase of Peking of 30 Harrier vertical-takeoff jet bombers at $6.6 million each. All these unprecedented events were part of an extraordinary Great Leap Outward. Departing from the rigid xenophobia of the late Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the Peking government has embarked on a policy of winning new friends, discrediting and isolating the Soviet Union and, above all, acquiring the capital, technology and expertise to transform China into a superpower by the year 2000. Scuttling Mao's sacred precept of national self-sufficiency, China's leaders have called for "a New Long March" toward modernization. The principal architect of this new policy is Teng, who has clearly emerged as China's strongman, overshadowing Mao's titular successor as Chairman, Hua Kuo-feng. Teng has given supreme priority to reversing the disruptive effects of Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. While Teng has not directly attacked the memory of the Great Helmsman, a gradual process of de-Maoification is under way in China. (December 25, 1978) It was the most momentous foreign policy announcement of Jimmy Carter's two-year-old presidency, and one of the most important in recent U.S. history. At precisely 9:01 Friday evening, the President, seated at his gleaming wooden desk in the Oval office, looked gravely into the TV cameras and in a calm, steady voice revealed that the U.S. and Communist China had secretly and suddenly decided to end nearly 30 years of bellicose estrangement. The two countries would establish normal diplomatic relations on Jan. 1. Under the agreement, the U.S. would terminate formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, cancel the 1954 mutual defense treaty that committed the U.S. to guarantee Taiwan's military security and withdraw the 700 troops now on the island. On March 1, the U.S. and Peking would exchange ambassadors. Moreover, said Carter, Chinese Vice Premier Ten Hsiao-p'ing would visit Washington at the end of January for an unprecedented series of summit talks. [At decade's end, the U.S. and Soviet Union had concluded another SALT treaty.] (May 21, 1979) The normally restrained Cyrus Vance allowed himself a small half-smile as he faced a packed, steamy White House press room last week. He knew that he was about to make one of the most important announcements of the Carter Administration. But it had been so long in coming that instead of elation and high drama, the final declaration was something of an anticlimax. Reading from a prepared text, the Secretary of State said simply that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. "have concluded our negotiations on SALT." What these few words meant was that after more than six years of frustrating bargaining, Washington and Moscow were finally ready to sign the Strategic Arms Limitation treaty known as SALT II. It will be signed by Carter and Soviet Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev when they meet in Vienna, June 15 through 18, for their first summit conference. The time it has taken to negotiate the new accord indicates the sensitivity and complexity of arms control. At stake is the national security of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. SALT is not a disarmament treaty, and there are large elements of military force that it does not cover at all. What it does seek to do is maintain a strategic balance that deters nuclear war by allowing each superpower a force that could suffer a surprise atomic strike and still be capable of launching a devastating, unacceptably destructive counterattack. Eventually the SALT process is supposed to enable both sides to maintain the strategic balance at a lower level of armaments, but that still lies far in the future. [The treaty was never ratified by the U.S. Both sides observed it, but each side periodically accused the other of violating one or another provision.] </body> </article> </text>