Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 17, 1990 TAG: 9006170119
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL KELLER THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Medium
Whether the issue is limiting nuclear warheads or getting a taxi driver to go to your destination, the characteristic Soviet bargaining style is a chesslike probing for weaknesses, a stubborn patience in the end game.
Since he returned invigorated from his tour in America, Mikhail Gorbachev has been the grandmaster, taking on all challengers simultaneously - easing into negotiations with the wayward Baltic leaders, inching toward an agreement on German unification, jockeying with his popular rival, Boris Yeltsin, testing the country's appetite for a market economy.
With Gorbachev, the game is still chess. But for students of the game, the past week has been filled with illustrations of how Gorbachev has altered the Soviet style of play.
In "Negotiating with the Soviets," his recent book on Soviet conduct at the bargaining table, Raymond F. Smith identifies three related rules of behavior that tend to govern Soviet officials' negotiating style.
Gorbachev, says the author, who is counselor for political affairs at the American Embassy in Moscow, seems bent on violating all of them.
The first trait, according to Smith, is a preoccupation with authority. While Americans may start out looking for common ground, the typecast Soviet citizen, whether a restaurant doorman or an arms control negotiator, is keen to establish his place in the pecking order.
Every relationship is initially a test of strength. Compromise, the pragmatic ideal of American civil relations, is in Russian tradition a form of submission and, worse, a sign of weak principles. Negotiations tend to be a bartering of concessions, but the idea of splitting the difference is shameful.
Second is a powerful aversion to risk. American culture tends to reward the optimist, the entrepreneur. Russian tradition and Communist practice teach that he who sticks his neck out gets his head lopped off.
The Soviet negotiator takes no chances; his strategy is to draw out the proposals of the other side and snipe at them.
Josef Stalin reinforced this authoritarian, risk-avoiding Russian tradition with a pervasive central control over society. In negotiations, Smith writes, the Soviet style is to try to manipulate all possible outcomes - for example, by seeking generally worded agreements that can later be reinterpreted in their favor.
Gorbachev, it now seems clear, has set out to introduce a new political culture, one that tolerates pluralism, values compromise and rewards initiative.
It shows in the style he brings to his bargaining on both foreign policy and domestic issues. But he still struggles with traditional habits, which are rooted deeply in his society and - because Gorbachev is himself a Russian of peasant stock and Communist upbringing - in his own instincts.
Gorbachev is comfortable with risk and compromise in a way that his predecessors were not. Where a traditional Soviet negotiator might have waited out the other side, Gorbachev has little patience with impasse.
Watch him coming to terms with the future of Europe, where the Soviets have measured their security in terms of control - a buffer of subjugated territory and a huge arsenal.
Now the comforting buffer is dissolving and the linchpin of the Warsaw Pact military alliance, East Germany, seems in the process of defecting to the West. Gorbachev keeps reaching into his bottomless briefcase and pulling out a new compromise.
Last week he announced he would not object if West Germany's army remained in the NATO military alliance, even if East Germany's troops are withdrawn from the command structure of the Soviet bloc.
When it comes to domestic challengers, Gorbachev's behavior has been more ambiguous. He has freed his society from Stalinist controls but his sense of the authoritative pecking order sometimes seems right out of the old textbook. Rivals like Yeltsin, who as the new president of the Russian Federation has been promoting sovereignty for that vast republic, have been treated with scorn.
Gorbachev has dismissed suggestions he share power with insurgents, offering them only the most subordinate posts in his government. In his dealings with the Lithuanian separatists, he insisted that any negotiations could begin only after Lithuanian leaders had bowed to the authority of Soviet law. To drive the point home, he slapped an oil embargo on the republic.
But last week, Gorbachev invited in the leaders of all the republics, including Yeltsin, and offered to remake the union as an alliance of "sovereign states."
Then he met with the presidents of the three Baltic republics and proposed terms that he said could lead to their independence. If Gorbachev is sincere about treating republican leaders as equals, last week's meetings were a turning point.
by CNB