Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  II. After my secret trip to Moscow in April 1972, I did not, in fact, undertake any more secret missions abroad.

  III. Ismail was accompanied by Dr. Muhammad Hafiz Ghanim of the Central Committee of the Arab Socialist Union; Dr. Abd al-Hadi Makhluf, Ismail’s Office Director, and two aides, Ahmad Mahir al-Sayyid and Dr. Ihab Said Wahba. I brought my NSC staff colleagues Harold Saunders and Peter Rodman, with Bonnie Andrews as note-taker.

  VII

  Détente: Zavidovo to San Clemente

  FOUR days after the resignation of Haldeman and Ehrlichman I was airborne for Moscow. No doubt the Soviets were bemused by this turn in our political scene; but it was too soon for even the most acute seismic ear to catch the scale of the pending earthquake. In the spring of 1973, Soviet-American relations were unusually free of tension. A second summit between Brezhnev and Nixon, this time on American soil, was due to take place in June and my few days in the Soviet Union, from May 4 to May 9, were to prepare for it. Away from the negotiating table on this trip I had a glimpse of Leonid Brezhnev that intrigues me today when I reflect on whether there can ever be a stable coexistence between us and the Soviet Union.

  Upon arrival my colleagues and I were driven from Moscow’s Vnukovo II airport, not to the ponderous guest houses in the Lenin Hills in the western part of the capital, but to Zavidovo, the Politburo hunting preserve — the Soviet equivalent of Camp David — some ninety miles northeast of Moscow. We took off in a motorcade traveling at a speed of close to 100 miles per hour with cars tailgating each other and security vehicles scissoring in and out of the column. This reflected either deliberate psychological warfare or the propensity for suicide described in nineteenth-century Russian novels. The American party and its Soviet escorts could not possibly have survived if the lead car had stopped suddenly.

  For all its perils, the journey was intended as a great honor. No Western leader had ever been invited to Zavidovo; the only other foreigners to visit it, I was told, had been Tito and President Urho Kekkonen of Finland. In light of what has happened since, the atmosphere of jovial if heavy-handed camaraderie may seem transparent. But at the time our Soviet hosts, headed by Brezhnev, certainly did their best to convey that good relations with the United States meant a great deal to them. They went out of their way to be hospitable, on occasion stiflingly so. Our meetings were conducted with easy banter and a minimum of the squeezing for extra advantage that is the usual hallmark of Soviet diplomacy.

  Was it a ruse to lull us while the Kremlin prepared a geopolitical offensive? Or were the Soviets sobered by Nixon’s firmness into settling for a period of restraint reinforced by the possible gains from economic relations? Did they seek détente only as a tactical maneuver? Or was there a serious possibility for a long period of stability in US–Soviet relations? Could the Moscow summit of 1972 have been a turning point, or was it always destined simply to be an ephemeral moment of euphoria?

  We can never know, and probably neither can the Soviet leaders. Within twelve months both Nixon’s capacity to oppose Soviet expansion and his authority to negotiate realistically had been undermined by Watergate. We lost both the stick and the carrot. Whether our East-West policy was doomed in any event by the dynamics of the Soviet system or by the inherent ambiguity of our conception will be debated for a long time. The issue became moot when the executive power in the United States collapsed. Fortunately for our state of mind, that future was still obscure when we arrived in Zavidovo.

  The American party was housed in an East German-built villa resembling an oversized Swiss chalet blown out of scale by the heavy stolidity that in the Communist world denotes status. The exterior looked vaguely Alpine; the inside was all velvet-covered Victorian opulence. Some junior members of my party were housed in an old dormitorylike structure diagonally across a wide lawn from my residence. They spread out happily in a number of suites that had formerly been reserved for the Politburo before a newer and more modern wing had been added.

  The largest private residence in the compound belonged to Brezhnev. It was a two-story chalet built in the same style as my residence, though on an even grander scale. The ground floor contained a number of large reception rooms filled with heavily upholstered furniture, a dining room, and a movie theater. The upper floor had a large living room, a study, and a bedroom. Each upstairs room opened on a balcony shaded by an overhanging roof. At right angles to Brezhnev’s villa and connected with it by passageways on each floor was a fully equipped gymnasium containing an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

  Brezhnev came to my residence soon after my arrival and greeted me boisterously. A little later he invited my colleagues and me to dinner at his villa, which he first showed off with all the pride of a self-made entrepreneur. He asked me how much such an establishment would cost in the United States. I guessed tactlessly and mistakenly at four hundred thousand dollars. Brezhnev’s face fell. My associate Helmut Sonnenfeldt was psychologically more adept: Two million, he corrected — probably much closer to the truth. Brezhnev, vastly reassured, beamed and resumed his guided tour. He showed us with boyish pride a scrap-book of clippings and congratulatory telegrams from various Communist leaders on the occasion of his being awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. The near-absolute ruler of the Soviet Communist Party seemed to see nothing incongruous in boasting of an award from his own appointees and congratulations from those whose careers and political survival depended on him.

  Brezhnev conducted almost all the negotiations for the Soviets; only highly technical subjects, such as the European Security Conference, were left to Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Brezhnev’s repertory of jokes seemed as inexhaustible as the previous year’s, now spiced with a new familiarity that probably went further than he intended. His drinking was less restrained; one of his jokes, allegedly a Russian folk tale, was vaguely anti-Semitic — indicating perhaps that I had been promoted to an honorary equal!

  The timetable was, as usual, enigmatic. No schedule or advance indication of subject matter was ever given, even though Brezhnev had no other visible program. Meetings occurred randomly, with little, if any, advance warning. Except for concluding the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War (which I shall discuss later), there was no definable agenda. Twice, when our conversations did not come up to Brezhnev’s hopes — on the Middle East, and on some dispute over the nuclear agreement — he sulked in his villa and refused to schedule another session. The Soviet Ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, did his best to minimize tensions; making Brezhnev appear like a man whose tender feelings required careful cultivation, he explained that his chief needed to regain his composure. When I maintained my position — simply by putting forward no additional thoughts — Brezhnev suddenly materialized again as if nothing had happened. His ploy having failed, he would then do the best with what he had and set about to restore an atmosphere of ebullient goodwill.

  My team — Hal Sonnenfeldt, Philip Odeen, William Hyland, Peter Rodman, and Richard Campbell — had the usual problem of how to communicate with one another without becoming immortalized in the KGB tape library. In a strange way we felt somewhat more secure in the Politburo hunting lodge than in our usual haunt of the state guest house in Moscow. We thought the KGB was likely to be somewhat less exuberant in wiring the vacation retreat of its own top leadership than in doing so to the residences specifically designed for foreign guests. We came equipped, of course, with the so-called babbler, the cassette tape machine emitting incoherent gibberish that allegedly drowned out the sound of our voices for eager listeners. I do not know whether it worked and I hate to think that I may have subjected my emotional balance to that infernal noise-making machine to no avail. It was a close race between KGB technology and our sanity. In any event, my colleagues and I occasionally escaped the babbler by identifying what we considered one absolutely secure place: the balcony outside Brezhnev’s study to which we repaired during breaks in our meetings. We thought it improbable that Brezhnev would be so imprudent as to allow the So
viet secret police to install eavesdropping equipment in his own office.

  The dominant impression from the potpourri of buoyancy, watchfulness, and random negotiation was Brezhnev’s insecurity about his forthcoming trip to the United States. It is one of the glories of our country that it seems endowed with a special, almost magical quality even to its adversaries. Brezhnev might be the General Secretary of a party dedicated to world revolution, the leader of the assault on the capitalist system that we epitomize. Still, his major concern seemed to be whether he would be treated as an equal in what his media never ceased to describe as the citadel of imperialism.

  The Communist form of government had not mellowed and had perhaps accentuated an age-old Russian ambivalence about America. This was reflected in a relentless insistence on status and a doubt that it would be conceded; a boastful assertion of strength coupled with uncertainty that it would be recognized. Whatever Brezhnev’s systems analysts might tell him of the emerging parity in the military power of the two countries, to him America seemed to be what he had learned of it in his youth — a land of superior technology and wondrous industrial and agricultural capacity, a country of marvelous efficiency compared with the cumbersome Soviet colossus.

  Brezhnev could not hear often enough my avowal that we were proceeding on the premise of equality — an attitude inconceivable in Peking, whose leaders thought of themselves as culturally superior whatever the statistics showed about relative material strength. Brezhnev endlessly sought reassurance that he would be courteously received in America, that he would not be exposed to hostile demonstrations, and that he would have the chance to meet “ordinary” people. This was a tall order and its various elements were not necessarily consistent with each other. He spoke of bringing his family with him and of a number of side trips he planned to take — always with a mixture of awe, wonder, and uncertainty. No doubt his gesture of spending five days in the Politburo hunting lodge with me was to establish a standard for us to emulate.

  I confess that I was touched by this insecurity even while I recognized that the country he represented had a record of seeking reassurance in bullying and safety in domination. On this occasion Brezhnev’s vulnerability allowed a human contact that was not to recur. He would suddenly appear and whisk me off to some excursion in the rolling countryside of lakes, meadows, and vast forests. One day he called for me in the black Cadillac sedan that Dobrynin had suggested might be a suitable State gift for Nixon to bring the year before. (Brezhnev, an automobile enthusiast, collected national cars as souvenirs on every State visit to every country; his ambassadors were not bashful about suggesting them.) With Brezhnev at the wheel, we took off along narrow winding country roads at speeds that made one pray hopelessly for some policeman’s intervention, unlikely as it was that a traffic cop — if indeed they existed in the countryside — would dare halt the General Secretary. Thus propelled to a boat landing, Brezhnev bundled me off onto a hydrofoil — mercifully not driven by him — which nevertheless seemed determined to break the speed record established by the General Secretary in getting me there. My brain being addled by these multiple jolts, I lack a precise recollection of this excursion. Another morning, Brezhnev kidnapped my attractive secretary, Bonnie Andrews, and took her on a boat ride. She was returned, by her account, equally shaken and unharmed.

  One afternoon I returned to my villa and found hunting attire, which our hosts had ordered for me since my arrival. It was an elegant, military-looking olive drab, with high boots, for which I am unlikely to have any future use. Brezhnev, similarly attired, collected me in a jeep driven, I was grateful to notice, by a game warden. Since I hate the killing of animals for sport, I told Brezhnev that I would come along in my capacity as adviser. He said some wild boars had already been earmarked for me. Given my marksmanship, I replied, the cause of death would have to be heart failure.

  After more heavy joshing, Brezhnev nevertheless whisked me off to the hunting preserve. Simultaneously, Gromyko took Sonnenfeldt away in another direction. Deep in the stillness of the forest a stand had been built about halfway up a tree, with a crude bench and an aperture for shooting. Brezhnev, the interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev, the game warden, and I waited there for the wild boar to be lured by the bait that various foresters in green uniforms were spreading on the ground. All was absolutely still. Only Brezhnev’s voice could be heard, whispering tales of hunting adventures: of his courage when a boar once attacked his jeep; of the bison that stuffed itself with the grain and potatoes laid out as bait and then fell contentedly asleep on the steps of the hunting tower, trapping Soviet Defense Minister Marshal Rodion Malinovski in the tower until a search party rescued him.

  After about an hour of this, as dusk was settling, a herd of wild boar came toward the bait. I was struck by the grace and wariness of their movements, though clearly their desire for food overcame all prudence. While Brezhnev calmly selected his victim, I reflected on the vulnerability of the greedy — only to have my rudimentary philosophy quickly disproved by a very large wild boar that emerged from the forest. One could see easily why it had attained such a size. It was not greedy; it set about to investigate the bait. It examined the ground before every step. It looked carefully behind every tree. It advanced in a measured pace. It had clearly survived and thrived by taking no unnecessary chances. All its precautions attracted Brezhnev’s attention, however, and he felled it with a single shot. Only Brezhnev’s jubilation prevented me from launching on another train of thought about the perils of excessive intellectualism.

  There is no telling what other contribution to pop philosophy I might have generated on this expedition had not Brezhnev’s hunting instinct propelled him to move us to another stand even deeper in the forest. By then, fortunately for the boars — for whom I was rooting — night was beginning to fall and Brezhnev missed two shots at long range.

  Brezhnev and I remained in the second stand for some hours, and someone brought cold cuts, dark bread, and beer from the jeep. Brezhnev’s split personality — alternatively boastful and insecure, belligerent and mellow — was in plain view as we ate together in that alfresco setting. The truculence appeared in his discussion of China. He began describing the experiences of his brother who had worked there as an engineer before Khrushchev removed all Soviet advisers. He had found the Chinese treacherous, arrogant, beyond the human pale. They were cannibalistic in the way they destroyed their top leaders (an amazing comment from a man who had launched his career during Stalin’s purges); they might well, in fact, be cannibals. Now China was acquiring a nuclear arsenal. The Soviet Union could not accept this passively; something would have to be done. He did not say what.

  Brezhnev was clearly fishing for some hint of American acquiescence in a Soviet preemptive attack. I gave no encouragement; my bland response was that the growth of China was one of those problems that underlined the importance of settling disputes peacefully. Brezhnev contemptuously ignored this high-minded theory and returned to his preoccupation. China’s growing military might was a menace to everybody. Any military assistance to it by the United States would lead to war. I reminded him (irrelevantly) that we did not even have diplomatic relations with Peking; I warned that history proved America would not be indifferent to an attack on China. But the Soviet leaders were not content to let the matter rest on that note; the next day Dobrynin took me aside to stress that the China portion of the discussion in the hunting blind was not to be treated as social. Brezhnev had meant every word of it.

  Reflecting the duality of the national character and of his own personality, Brezhnev shifted suddenly from menace to sentimentality. He spoke of his youth in the Ukraine and his father’s experience in the First World War. His father had learned from that carnage that peace was the noblest goal; he had never stopped insisting on this theme. Brezhnev agreed: We had reached the point in history where we should stop building monuments for military heroes. Public memorials should be reserved for peacemakers and not generals. His father had wante
d one constructed on the highest point in the Ukraine (which, unless my knowledge of geography betrays me, is not a very towering eminence). Brezhnev wanted to dedicate his tenure to bringing about a condition in which war between the United States and the Soviet Union was unthinkable.

  Brezhnev reminisced about his rise through the Communist hierarchy, his sudden elevation in 1936, and the human impact of World War II. Before he went off to serve in that war, his wife and he had pledged never to question each other about the interval no matter how long it might be; it turned out to be four years. He described movingly their reunion over the gulf of a long separation and how both of them kept their promise and their trust. He told me of his difficulty in finding a uniform for the victory parade in Red Square in 1945 under the conditions of wartime scarcity and how he succeeded, only to have his resplendent garment ruined by a daylong torrential downpour. In this account he spoke gently, with none of the braggadocio so evident even a few moments earlier. His theme now was peace. And with his slightly slurred and halting speech he was suddenly an old man somewhat drained by a lifetime of struggle.

  Which was the real Brezhnev? The leader who spoke so threateningly of China or the old man who recited his devotion to peace? Probably both were genuine. Was the peace of which he spoke only the stillness of Soviet hegemony, or an acceptance of the imperatives of coexistence? Again, the answer is almost surely both. Which strand predominated would depend on circumstance and opportunity. And probably the West’s ability to address the two antiphonal trends of Soviet policy simultaneously and effectively would decide the issue of peace or war. The Bolshevik believed in the prevalence of material and military factors; the aged leader was exhausted by the exaction of a pitiless system. Doubtless no more than any Soviet leader would Brezhnev resist taking advantage of an opportunity to alter the power balance; nothing can take off our shoulders the imperative of preparedness. But within that constraint some leaders, driven by the impossibility of suppressing human aspiration forever, may well emerge eventually to explore the requirements of genuine coexistence. The West’s policy must encompass both possibilities: uncompromising resistance to expansionism and receptivity to a serious change of course in Moscow.