of Babrak Karmal. We don’t have all the information. We can’t see the peaks of policy. We see what is known to us but we know enough to take a view.”
Financial Times, Tuesday, August 5, 1980
How the Kremlin Kept Moscow Under Wraps
The 1980 Moscow Olympic Games were for long the focus of the most varied hopes and expectations. The games have now passed into history as an athletics success, but their impact on Soviet society has been strangely inconclusive.
To a limited extent, the games have improved the Soviet Union’s image. Athletes and foreign tourists have been impressed with the Olympic restaurants and hotels and the sports facilities, as well as the precision with which the transport to events was organised. But many in Moscow believed the games would mark a turning point towards either liberalisation or repression, a view made plausible by the years of careful preparation.
The opportunity to meet foreigners and be exposed to a different, freer way of life was one aspect of the Olympics which had most appealed to Moscow residents. The tight security thus gave rise to bitterness. People in Moscow began referring to the games as “our lipa,” diminutive for the woman’s name Olympiada which can also be translated as “sham” or “fake.”
To people in Moscow, the Olympics seemed remote. The foreign visitors, whose numbers were cut by the U.S.-led boycott by as much as three-quarters to around 75,000, were little seen by Russians, except in the windows of buses passing in convoy to Olympic events.
The opportunities for tourists to meet Russians were carefully controlled. Foreign visitors proved unadventurous, and tourist hotels were closed to all but registered guests and those with special passes.
Just before the Olympics began, the Soviet Komsomol, the communist youth organisation, opened 20 or so Western-style discotheques in the buildings of professional clubs around Moscow. The discotheques were intended to remedy one of Moscow’s longstanding shortcomings as a tourist attraction—the lack of street life or night clubs.
The discotheques offered Western rock music under strobe lights, and a relatively daring disco fashion show. Foreign tourists were brought to a club by their Soviet guides, ostensibly to show them Moscow’s hidden night life. In some cases, whole delegations were taken to the disco, where they were given the opportunity for political discussion or to dance with carefully vetted young Komsomols as well as plainclothes militia men and members of the KGB.
The number of Russians who might meet tourists was also restricted. The ban on travel to Moscow by non-residents and the successful efforts to persuade residents to take vacations during the Olympics, helped to reduce the number of people in Moscow by at least 1m.
The apparent object of this was to eliminate queues and improve the food supply. But, combined with the massive police presence, the reduction had an eerie effect. Ubiquitous police stood watch over unnaturally thin crowds.
Some Moscovites remember ruefully the last great influx of foreigners in 1957. About 40,000 foreign students, most from the communist bloc, the Third World or Western Socialist organisations, came to Moscow for several weeks for the International Youth Festival, and changed Soviet society fundamentally. For many Russians, the youth festival offered the first contact in their lives with foreigners. After decades of political terror, the free atmosphere in Moscow then, with foreigners and Russians meeting openly, impromptu Jazz concerts in the parks and a carnival atmosphere on the streets, gave people enormous hope as Moscow entered the period known as “the thaw.” Many of those in Moscow old enough to remember the International Youth Festival wondered if the Olympics would rekindle some of the hope for liberalisation and a freer life which surfaced then.
The generous hospitality of individual Russians is as real now as it was in 1957, but the decision to bring in as many as 200,000 uniformed militia men to ensure order during the Olympic Games was, in a sense, an answer to those expectations—an unmistakable sign that, for the moment at least, liberalisation in the Soviet Union has gone as far as it is going to go.
Financial Times, Thursday, August 28, 1980
Russia Keeping Its Hands off Poland
Poland would need to descend into chaos and near civil war before the Soviet Union felt compelled to intervene.
Trouble in Poland has historically been associated with a weakening of the Russian empire. If the Soviet press has given pro-forma endorsement to changes in the Polish political structure unthinkable 10 years ago, it was because, under present circumstances, the Soviet leadership may have had little choice.
The extreme sensitivity of the Polish strikes and the threat they pose to the whole Socialist bloc, were emphasised by the Soviet decision to jam Russian-language broadcasts by the BBC, the Voice of America and Deutsche Welle, and by the almost total silence in the Soviet press about Poland which prevailed until Monday.
Workers emulating the Polish model could undermine the Communist Party dictatorship in every East European Socialist country, and the decision to allow the changes proposed by Mr. Edward Gierek, the Polish party leader, which include free elections to the government trade union, was a major Soviet concession.
To have refused to compromise with the strikers would have carried even graver risks for the Soviet leaders than those presented by liberalisation. The Soviet Union is in no position to launch an invasion in Europe. It is badly strained by the resistance in Afghanistan and the prospect of worsening relations with the West.
The East European allies are independent of the Kremlin only to the extent that they are able to resist its wishes. If Poland were allowed to become as free and pluralistic as Yugoslavia, thereby exerting a strong attraction for people in other Socialist bloc countries, it would be because the Russians knew that, if they invaded, the Poles would be ready to fight.
The Soviet decision to invade a satellite state depends not only on the threat of ideological contamination from fundamental democratic reforms, but also on the military and political risk.
The Soviet leaders had little to lose when they ordered the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Detente and the development of economic and trade ties with the West had not begun, the Soviet Union was not militarily engaged elsewhere, whereas the U.S. was bogged down in Vietnam, and Czechoslovakia, with a population of only 15m, would clearly not resist.
Poland today is far different. Popular animosity towards Russians has deep roots, and the Soviet Union has tried not to interfere in Poland as long as Communist Party rule was not threatened. In 1956, when Mr. Wladyslaw Gomulka came to power backed by popular riots, Mr. Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier, was taken by surprise and immediately flew to Warsaw without informing Polish border guards.
The invasion of Czechoslovakia required 600,000 troops, 500,000 of them drawn from the Soviet Union itself, even though there was no significant Czechoslovak resistance. An invasion of Poland, through which run vital supply and communications lines between Russia and Soviet forces in East Germany, would require at least a million men. In the face of the expected intense resistance from the Polish Army, such an invasion would arouse little enthusiasm among more liberal Warsaw Pact members.
Since the invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviet leaders have, with remarkable skill, managed to maintain their ties with West Germany, and France. These ties, and the access to Western technology which have flowed from them, have become more important to the Soviet leadership as the U.S.-Soviet relationship has come under strain.
An invasion of Poland, and
