In this month's feature report on events surrounding the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in December, Joyce Hollyday juxtaposes two events that resound with irony for the U.S. peace movement and its thinking about the Soviet Union. On the Saturday before the summit, a number of U.S. peace organizations sponsored a demonstration in downtown Washington, D.C., to celebrate the treaty eliminating intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. A similar, simultaneous action took place in Moscow, sponsored by the Soviet Peace Committee (SPC), an officially recognized institution devoted to propagandizing and mobilizing the Soviet population for the cause of peace. An official of the SPC was also featured prominently on the platform in Washington. As Hollyday recounts, the whole event conveyed a warm image of the Soviet Union as a humane, peace-loving nation.
The next day in Washington, there was a massive demonstration on behalf of Soviet Jews, especially the "refuseniks," those denied permission to leave the USSR. The same day, in Moscow, a courageous band of refuseniks and sympathizers tried to hold a simultaneous demonstration for Jewish rights. Arriving at the demonstration site, they were met by a group from the Soviet Peace Committee who said the location was already claimed for an anti-SDI demonstration. It soon became apparent that the SPC action was a hastily designed cover allowing the police to break up the refuseniks' demonstration.
Within 48 hours we were given a neatly symmetrical view of the two faces of the Soviet Union through the activities of one of its official arms. The same peace-loving proclamations that came from a smiling face of humane cooperation abroad were turned into instruments of repression at home.
For many Americans the message of those two events is clear -- the repression proves that the talk of peace is a lie and disarmament a ruse. For too many in the American peace movement, the message is that the proclamations of peace are to be embraced, and the repression ignored, discounted, or "understood."
Real life is more complicated than either of those interpretations allows. And with the new mood in U.S.-Soviet relations, the tentative reforms within the Soviet Union, and the resulting intra-Soviet battles over the scope and pace of reform, real life is getting more complicated by the minute.
Much in this new situation is good news for the peace movement. But as the above anecdote indicates, there is also much that challenges us to some "new thinking" of our own regarding exactly what we as a movement want. We are especially challenged to be clearer than ever in our posture toward the "other" superpower.
THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN a tendency in the U.S. peace movement to gloss over and play down militaristic behavior of the Soviet Union and the repressive nature of the Soviet system. During the Reagan era, these tendencies have become more pronounced. In an understandable and often justified reaction against an almost pathological anti-communism at the highest levels, the peace movement has become more determined to explain the Soviet viewpoint and to present humanizing images of the Soviet Union. Toward that end, peace activists have often kept a relative silence on Soviet abuses and sought whatever contacts and exchanges with the Soviet people that the Soviet government allowed.
In that quest for cooperation, our movement has often been as gentle as a dove, but sometimes not so wise as the serpent. As a result the peace movement has sometimes fallen into a de facto alignment with official institutions of the Soviet system.
One of the best examples of this conundrum is the subject of Western peace movement relations with the Soviet Peace Committee. The SPC, which has counterparts in the other countries of the Warsaw Pact, is usually represented to Westerners as a non-governmental organization funded by voluntary gifts from its millions of supporters among the Soviet people.
In this capacity the SPC is often the co-sponsor of joint initiatives with U.S. peace organizations. SPC officials are frequently taken around the United States in "exchanges" with U.S. peace organizations to speak for the Soviet people. We're led to believe that the SPC is not unlike our own peace movement. It's just much bigger, better-funded, and more unified. The SPC takes great pains to establish itself as the Soviet counterpart and partner to the Western peace movement.
But there are other differences between our peace organizations and the SPC. For instance, the SPC never, ever, disagrees with its own government. Like ourselves, they support an immediate ban on nuclear testing, oppose Star Wars development, and call for an end to the U.S. war against Nicaragua. But they also support the invasion of Afghanistan and the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe.
In the early '80s, the SPC was opposed to the deployment of U.S. Pershing and cruise missiles in Western Europe, but not Soviet SS-20s in the East. The head of the SPC is a member of the Supreme Soviet, the country's highest legislative body. Needless to say, he didn't attain that post by popular election.
NONE OF THIS SHOULD come as any great surprise. The Soviet party and state apparatus does not extend official recognition to its opponents. Autonomous self-organization, the very lifeblood of democracy, is outlawed in the Soviet Union. Glasnost may someday change that. But it hasn't yet.
In short, the Soviet Peace Committee is a creation of its country's ruling elite and an instrument of Soviet foreign policy. It's part of a whole network of "mass organizations" for particular concerns (women, youth, trade unions, etc.) designed to keep the whole of Soviet public life under the control of the Communist Party.
Given that fact (which is not universally accepted by American activists), the question of how to relate to the SPC and its counterparts remains. Some, with an unvarnished view of the SPC's essential nature, still see it as an important instrument for East-West dialogue. Its very official status can also be seen as an avenue for quietly and indirectly influencing the thinking of Soviet higher-ups.
There is a case to be made for the worth of those contacts. This is especially true if the Americans involved have no illusions about who they're talking to and avoid granting the SPC legitimacy as a counterpart to our own independent and non-aligned organizations.
But under glasnost, those choices are becoming, if anything, more complicated. As Polly Duncan Collum reports in this month's "Times" section, a wide array of genuinely independent groups interested in peace, human rights, ecology, and other concerns are bursting forth from the tiny crack of political space opened by Gorbachev. Some are new groups, but many have existed for years and are now enjoying a higher public profile. The authorities are greeting these organizations with a mixed response of reluctant toleration, attempted cooptation, and intermittent doses of that old-time repression.
These groups are still small by Western standards. But they are growing rapidly. And thanks to the work of organizations like the New York-based Campaign for Peace and Democracy/East and West, the area of contacts, alliances, and joint initiatives between independent activists on both sides of the East-West divide is expanding steadily. The Soviet Peace Committee, and other state-aligned institutions, may have once seemed from afar to be the only game in town for East-West cooperation and dialogue. But that is no longer the case.
Marginalized and embattled as they may be, these groups in the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc, operating more or less openly, are our genuine counterparts -- grassroots, democratic, non-aligned, and critical of both superpowers. They are seeking a voice in the debate over the future of their societies and cooperation and dialogue with kindred movements abroad.
ONE VIEW OF GLASNOST, widely apparent in peace movement circles, is that the Soviet leadership is basically going in the right direction, at home and abroad. We should simply support and encourage those changes. After all, for Gorbachev's reform agenda to succeed, he must gain a favorable response from the United States on defense and arms control issues.
That's true as far as it goes. But it's also true that reform from the top, which is what glasnost is, can be reversed by the departure of one man. The only permanent guarantee of Soviet domestic and military reform must grow from the bottom, from a mobilized citizenry able to create its own political and cultural centers of power committed to peace and human rights.
The embryo of such a movement is now emerging in the Soviet Union. So is a countermovement committed to a militaristic Soviet-Russian nationalism. An unprecedented struggle could be afoot, with clear consequences for both sides of this symbiotic relationship called the Cold War.
If we want an end to the Cold War, we should recognize that there must be changes in the economic status quo and political balance of power within both the Soviet Union and the United States. On both sides there are powerful institutional constituencies with vested interests in that status quo. Ultimately, making peace requires that those institutions, in the United States and the Soviet Union, become more accountable to the majority of their respective publics, who do in fact want peace.
One way for the American peace movement to do that is to take every opportunity, including official contacts where they exist, to publicize and support the struggles of those in the East who are our allies in the struggle against both oppression and war. We can also avoid asymmetrical alliances that lend an unearned legitimacy to undemocratic Soviet institutions.
Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.
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