Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 25, 1990                   TAG: 9007250400
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A/9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: LEON V. SIGAL
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WHO LOST POLAND

That's what happened in 1949; hard-liners asked insistently, "Who lost China?"

And it's happening today in the Soviet Union.

"Who lost Eastern Europe?" ask old-guard Communists, pointing at President Gorbachev.

Foreign Minister Shevardnadze responds with pointed questions of his own: "What could we have done? Send in the troops, tanks, aircraft, artillery?" That would have ended perestroika and democratization, "and what would our people say?"

To Shevardnadze, hard-line attacks on the Gorbachev policy invite comparison to McCarthyism in the U.S.

There's something to that.

The attacks manifest what the historian Richard Hofstadter called "the paranoid style" of politics: an inclination to blame setbacks on personal malevolence, not impersonal causes, and to see some master plan and a master planner behind them.

In 1949, the Soviet atomic bomb test put an end to U.S. invulnerability.

Then the Chinese Communists defeated the corrupt Chiang Kai-shek regime.

Hard-liners, who had ignored the corruption and who never did say how they would have saved Chiang, charged President Truman with giving away China.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy wondered, "How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in the government are concerting to deliver us to disaster?"

Truman sidestepped the question.

And Secretary of State Dean Acheson privately dismissed McCarthy's charge as "the attack of the primitives."

The Soviet Union in 1989 suffered perhaps even more devastating shocks: an end to invincibility in Afghanistan, followed by the disintegration of its position in Eastern Europe.

Soviet hard-liners want their countrymen to believe that Gorbachev's weakness caused it all.

Shevardnadze seems to have learned that caustic asides aren't sufficient to dispel foreign-policy paranoia. He rebukes hard-liners who say Eastern Europe was lost, "as if it were our own property."

Mikhail Gorbachev did not lose Eastern Europe any more than Harry Truman lost China.

The people of these countries went their own way, to be resisted only at tragic cost.

"Soviet diplomacy," says Shevardnadze, "did not and could not have set out to resist the liquidation of those imposed, alien and totalitarian regimes."

For candor and good, hard political sense, that's tough to top.