Gorby mania - 13 December 1987

Coming out of four days of Gorby mania is rather like the feeling on, say, 27 December when you've just emerged from a funfair of razzle-dazzle, of barkers and winking lights and blasting music and unceasing merriment and everybody's stuffed to the gills. And then some innocent, some small child says, "What's Christmas all about anyway? What does it mean?"

I imagine a hundred years from now the printed word "Christmas" will carry an asterisk indicating a footnote about its quaint origin. As, today, an inquisitive child wondering about the word "boycott" can find out it's actually the name of a man, Captain Boycott.

Well, when all the newspapers are thrown out and the television screen has finally gone to black, we have to admit that the summit, the reason for the summit, the substance for the agreement, the grounds for hope or fear, that is not what those five, some say eight, thousand journalists were covering.

They were covering – and we were absorbing – not an historical event but a television event. Anything and everything that could be filmed. Which meant mainly following the two principal actors, Mr and Mrs Gorbachev, every second of the way in public.

And even before the end of it, the networks held a national poll, rather international, not what you like and don't like about the treaty, nobody could be expected to have read that stuffy old treaty, but how do you feel about a) Mr Gorbachev and b) Mr Reagan? The poll, the survey, extended through Europe.

In Britain 68% took a favourable view of Mr Gorbachev, only 39% a favourable view of Mr Reagan. In this country, it was a close thing, a near miss for Mr Reagan – 48% favourable for Gorbachev, 51% for Reagan.

A visiting friend of mine, a musician, who never reads or looks at political news, walked in on the telly reporting these percentages and said, irritably, "How do you feel about Gorbachev? How do you feel about Reagan? What's that got to do with an arms agreement?" He showed both the naiveté and the wisdom of the innocent.

Of course it has nothing to do with the treaty, with policy, but today public support for any policy depends not on people's knowing about the policy but on the way they like the looks of the man or woman advocating the policy on television. At long last – it's been half a century or more – the Russians have understood this.

We used not to have to worry about their public image. They always hated being filmed or photographed. And since the cult of individuality was so long considered a sin, they tended to line up for group pictures in their interchangeable cardboard suits. They didn't deign to cater to the press, their own press were obedient lackeys. The western press were running dogs of the imperialists.

Under Gorbachev, all this has changed. They allow themselves to be filmed by us, cracking jokes, offering drinks to the running-dog press. They're eager to let us see films of protest demonstrations outside the Kremlin – something startlingly new – which they must pretend are as common as protest demonstrations and marches have been in Washington and London since time began.

The Russians are shown joking across a table with the main adversaries in the arms talks. They have, for the most part, discarded their cardboard suits. Some of them, it's been noticed, wear grey flannel suits and regimental ties. And always they wink, they joke. Mr Gorbachev is, has proved himself to be, of course, the star of this new Soviet production. He looks genial, kindly, mature, good-natured.

So engagingly so that it seems almost blasphemous to some people if you are tactless enough to blab out that he was for so long in charge of the chilling apparatus that makes the political arrests, runs the labour camps, commits people with a mind of their own to psychiatric hospitals so they'll come out thinking correctly, and practised lord knows what tortures on the recalcitrant and the unrepentant.

Well, I, too, really ache to believe in the deep sincerity of both Mr Gorbachev and Mr Reagan. And it's not comfortable to recall that the American CIA has done some squalid things in its time. But whenever one of them came to light, like the mining of the Nicaraguan harbours, there'd be a genuine howl from Congress. The thing gets out and the Congressional committees that keep their eyes on the CIA toughen their restrictions on covert activities.

I have to say that watching some of the social cruising and banter between Ron and Mikhail, between Raisa and Nancy, as we're encouraged to call them, I've enjoyed myself when I could put my mind to sleep. But on this whole topic, the human, or packaged human, public relations, image-building side of the summit, I keep wondering how different are things going to be when the treaty's ratified. Which, thanks to Mr Gorbachev's engaging personality as much as anything, it will surely be. When it's all over, how different will relations be?

I hope and pray the American right wing will stop ranting about the Evil Empire and how the Soviets are bound to cheat on the verification precautions. If you feel that way, you're likely, without compunction, to learn a few cheating tricks yourself. But I also hope and pray, with an American lady, a determined liberal columnist, during a sonservative administration. Her name is Meg Greenfield. And she's all for this treaty, and the next, the strategic one.

But she wrote the other day after rejoicing that the Russians have come out of the Kremlin closet and that the attending Russian journalists have this week been socialising with the American journalists, she wrote she was saddened to hear her Soviet colleagues or counterparts, I quote, "argue the truth of Gorbachev's grotesque assertion that we're inspiring Soviet emigration as a plot to steal their scientific talent. Or that, and they print this, we have developed an ethnic weapon aimed exclusively at blacks. And that we invented and propagated the AIDS virus".

Her concluding comment was "Precisely because they no longer resemble aliens from another world, or Peter Sellers' Russians, and precisely because there are human aspects with which you can connect, even warmly and with humour, such moments are the more chilling and instructive."

Well, that's what the summit was about. The filming of the casual social exchanges, the tours, the dinners, the quips, the motor car comings and goings of Mr and Mrs Gorbachev and Mr and Mrs Reagan. Those constituted what movie and TV directors call the production values of the play. But how about the play? The script? The things agreed on? What is Christmas all about anyway?

I can only say, after a first diligent and laboured attempt to get down to the text of the treaty, I can only say it's so dense with abstract nouns and the special jargon of the arms control business that it seems to me to offer endless little loopholes for, shall we say not violation, but debatable interpretation. And I know you don't want to get into that. Your main interest, like mine, is peace. Isn't it? We're all in favour of peace. And I'm prepared to believe that the drafters of this treaty truly believe they're taking a first, positive step towards peace. All right, let's now look at how this thing came about. And then how two schools of thought look at it.

I think it's only fair to remind ourselves, however favourably or unfavourably we regard Mr Reagan, that it was his idea, back in 1981. But to go back to what you might call the red alert that caused the Americans to get worried in the first place, in the mid-1970s we heard, correctly, that the Russians had developed a missile, intermediate, mobile, very accurate, with many warheads. It was the SS20. And it was going to reinforce the Russian superiority all round.

President Carter decided something had to be done. And it was he who launched the programme, angrily resisted for so long in many countries in Europe, to offset the SS20s with a new generation of intermediate American missiles. They were installed, with NATO's permission, in 1983.

By that time, Mr Reagan was in the White House and at the end of his first year, believing, or being advised, that a new American generation of missiles would provoke yet a third generation from the Soviet Union, he proposed the so-called "zero option" which is substantially what the treaty, just signed, is all about.

The Russians didn't just reject this proposal, they scorned it. And the doves in Europe and America said it was preposterous to ask the Russians to destroy many more weapons than we were to do. The hardliners here said the number of weapons was not the point, it was only an approximately equal number of warheads that would ensure a balance.

Well, as we all know, the present solution was resisted all through the mid-80s. Mr Reagan fell back on a defensive position, which was to start research on a defence in space. And for years the Russians publicly bemoaned this Star Wars idea while beginning to explore it themselves.

At Reykjavik, they were ready to agree to an intermediate treaty if Reagan would abandon Star Wars research. He said, "No go!" Well, apparently the Russians own Star Wars research is far enough along, and their economy in such a dismal state, that these two considerations, it's the feeling here, persuaded Mr Gorbachev to agree to the 1981 proposal and come and sign the treaty that embodies it.

The best thing about it is surely the provisions for verification that the hawks, the right wing, have been screaming for all along, in the certainty that the Russians would never consent. Well, they have consented to verifying procedures, agreeable to the Americans, except to the hard right, which has now transferred its objections to the Soviet's huge army, its financing of terrorism in Africa, the Middle East, Central America, and to the rather pitiful Soviet record in flouting the human rights provisions of the treaty signed at Helsinki.

However, this summit was not about curing all the wrongs in both societies and setting the world to rights. The hard right, Mr Reagan's oldest, most ardent, supporters, are in dismay.

The rest, even old hawks, know that the hard right will lose in the Senate because if the Senate rejected this treaty, the Russians, on the evidence of their friendly, nice-guy, image this week would gain a tremendous worldwide propaganda advantage and make the Reagan administration, in its decline, look like a sullen warmonger, clanking off into the twilight.

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