Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union

Financial Times, Tuesday, April 15, 1980

Caviar sold as herring

200 Soviet Officials Held

The Soviet authorities have arrested more than 200 employees of the Fisheries Ministry, including top officials, in connection with a multimillion dollar caviar swindle which appears to be among the most serious economic crimes in Soviet history.

It is understood Ministry officials made a secret and illegal agreement with a Western firm to send black caviar abroad in sealed 3–5 litre tins marked “smoked, seasoned herring.”

A Western firm which imported the caviar paid the hard currency price for herring. Then it repacked the caviar and sold it at enormous profit, splitting the proceeds with Ministry officials, whose share was deposited in Swiss bank accounts.

Economic crimes involving foreign currency, are punishable by death in the Soviet Union if big enough. It is believed more than 150 people could be liable to capital punishment for their role in the caviar operation which involved the Okean stores in Moscow and was undetected for more than 10 years.

Fisheries Ministry officials asked about the report declined to speak to the Financial Times. However, an official of the Internal Affairs Ministry acknowledged he was working on an investigation involving the Okean stores, but declined to discuss the case.

The Soviet Foreign Ministry also declined to comment and there has been no mention of the case in the press.

The Soviet system, with its uncertain distribution network, shoddy consumer goods and tough currency restrictions, creates rich opportunities for black market operations and illegal economic activity. Some is overlooked by the authorities if it is economically beneficial.

There is a history of large scale operations, although not, it is believed, as complex as the caviar swindle. The insistence on fulfilling the plan creates possibilities for massive concealment, if all staff of an enterprise are willing to falsify results.

What appears unprecedented in the Okean scandal is the alleged involvement of Ministry hierarchy, as opposed to an individual enterprise, and that the payments were in hard currency.

The investigation has been going on since February last year, when Mr. Alexander Ishkov resigned as Fisheries Minister. Also replaced were other high officials, including Mr. Vladimir I. Rytov, a deputy minister, Mr. I. V. Nikonorov and Mr F. P. Zaitsev, two Ministry Secretariat members; and Mr. S. I. Gushchyan, deputy chief of resources and fish products marketing.

Besides the more than 200 people arrested in Moscow, hundreds of people involved in processing, packing and distributing caviar have been held in the provinces, especially Soviet Azerbaijan, where most black caviar originates.

Also apparently involved in the operation were scores of restaurant managers in Moscow, the Black Sea resort of Sochi, and other cities.

Mr. Ishkov has not been arrested, although the state prosecutor’s office has demanded that he be charged. Other major figures are about to go on trial, however, and the investigation continues.

Red caviar from the Soviet Far East and other types of fish delicacies were also reportedly involved, but black caviar was the largest item because of the substantial increase in production from the Caspian Sea in the last 10 or 15 years.

Mr. Alexei Kosygin, the Soviet Prime Minister, is reported to have interceded for Mr. Ishkov—one of the longest-serving Ministers and a member of the Communist Party Central Committee—at the beginning of the investigation last year. It is not known if Mr. Kosygin has involved himself in the case since then.

If Mr. Ishkov were brought to trial, it would be the first time in Soviet history that a Minister had been charged with violation of the criminal code.

In the past, high-ranking officials accused of corruption have been allowed to retire or, in some cases, to retain their posts after a warning.

There is reported to be strong sentiment in favour of bringing Mt Ishkov to trial because of the size of the operation and because top officials of an entire ministry were reportedly implicated.

It is understood the operation might have continued undetected for many more years, but for what one source described as a case of “typical Russian disorganisation.” Some of the mislabelled tins of caviar began to slip into general circulation.

Financial Times, Friday, May 16, 1980

Moscow ‘lacks Afghan strategy’

Fighting a War of Shadows

Almost five months after the Soviet invasion, the war in Afghanistan has become a war of shadows. Western observers believe the Soviet army has not yet developed a strategy for defeating the Afghan rebels, who melt away as Soviet units approach.

There is little information about the fighting, but there have been signs in Moscow that Afghan resistance has been greater than expected, while Soviet military performance has been poorer.

The first indication of problems was the speed with which the Russians replaced the original invasion force, drawn from quarter-strength Central Asian reserve units. The Soviet troops in Afghanistan are now overwhelmingly European, with some reported to have been transferred to Afghanistan from bases in East Germany.

There has been no confirmation of reports of desertions by Central Asian soldiers, but it is thought the Soviets would not have replaced thousands of Asian troops as quickly as they did if they had been satisfied with their discipline or performance.

The Communist Party newspaper Pravda, in a highly unusual acknowledgment of the problems facing Soviet troops and their Afghan Allies, said last Saturday that “the struggle against the bandits in the mountains is no easy matter.”

Pravda said that “just 10 or so men, occupying good vantage points and wellarmed with automatic weapons, machine guns and grenade throwers provided by the United States and China, can hold up the advance of a much superior force.” The narrow ravines prevent the use of tanks, while the echoes of shots make it difficult to determine the source of attacks.

There was no acknowledgement that Soviet troops were taking part in the fighting, and the problems were said to affect only Afghan army units. Soviet forces, however, are now believed to have taken over almost the whole burden of the war against the rebels. According to one report from Indian travellers young Afghans are being rounded up every night in Kabul and forced into the Afghan armed forces’ depleted ranks.

The Soviet armed forces newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda, has carried almost no information about fighting in Afghanistan, but there have been an increasing number of reports about training exercises on Soviet territory in such specialities as mountain warfare, airborne operations and since the February rioting in Kabul, fighting in cities.

Western military observers believe the Soviet forces in Afghanistan are mechanised and road-bound, and the growing emphasis on training in unconventional warfare stresses the fact that Soviet military training has traditionally presumed front-to-front confrontations of the kind which might be expected in a conflict in Central Europe. The Russians have little experience of anti-guerrilla warfare.

There are now 80,000 Soviet troops in Afghanistan, and about 25,000 in the Soviet Union near the Afghan border. But the long-awaited spring offensive against the guerrillas has not come, and may be postponed indefinitely.

The Soviet forces have secured major cities and the roads between them, but military observers believe they have not adjusted psychologically to the kind of war they are fighting. The vast amounts of ultra-modern equipment they have moved into Afghanistan, including the latest rifles, mortars, anti-aircraft missiles and long-range artillery, can be thoroughly tested in Afghanistan but the equipment is of little use in pursuing the guerrillas on their own terrain.

Soviet and Afghan units typically respond to calls for help from beleaguered local authorities only to arrive and find that the Afghan rebels have disappeared. They may search houses and make a few arrests, but they do not take drastic action to assert government authority. The rebels return as soon as the Soviet units withdraw.

When Soviet and Afghan units come into direct conflict with the Afghan rebels, the rebels are usually the initiator and the Soviet troops normally take up defensive positions behind their heavy equipment. This minimises casualties, but does little to suppress the insurgency. The Soviet troops apparently seldom pursue the rebels on foot into the mountains.

The deployment pattern suggests the Russians believe their own propaganda about defending the Afghans against “foreign aggression.” There have been punishing Soviet strikes against some rebel strongholds, including, most recently, a battle involving hundreds of Soviet tanks in the Ghazni area, south of Kabul. But the Soviet force, military specialists believe, would have to be increased to no less than a quarter of a million men if they were to subjugate the entire country.

The Soviet authorities appear hesitant to commit a much larger number of troops, and the reasons may be both military and political. Massive attacks and a huge Soviet presence could eliminate any possibility of President Babrak Karmal’s government broadening its base. If indigenous support for the Karmal’s Government cannot be created, a large Soviet occupation force will have to remain in the country for many years.

The Soviet authorities may, therefore, be very uneasy. The war is unpopular in the Soviet Union.

The Soviet newspapers say almost nothing about casualties or fighting—aware that they cannot count on broad public support. Reports from Afghanistan have concerned Mr Karmal’s Government, co-operation between Soviet and Afghan specialists, and the successes of the Afghan army against “gangsters” “criminals” "mercenaries” and “bandits,” with Soviet troops said to be playing only a support role.

The control over information affects the families of soldiers posted to Afghanistan. Throughout a Soviet soldier’s service, his relatives know only the number of his division but not where the soldier and division are posted. There have been cases of Soviet soldiers passing word to their families that they were not in Afghanistan. When a soldier is killed in battle, his family is told that he was “killed in the fulfilment of his duties”—the same formula used for accidental death—but not where he died or how.

This lack of information has softened the impact of Afghanistan. Many of the seriously wounded are treated in East Germany, and maimed or disfigured soldiers are reported to be resting in sanatoria on the Black Sea. They will probably not return to their home towns until after the Olympics at the earliest.

Sometimes, however, reality still manages to intrude on the all-but-pervasive impression in Moscow of a distant war against an ill-defined foe. Thirty officers were reported in mid-April to have been buried in the military cemetery in Kiev, a high toll for one locality. By the end of the month, there were 25 more fresh graves.

The Soviet takeover in Afghanistan was rapid and painless, but the Soviet authorities may be unable to consolidate their control so easily. The war has had little impact on Soviet society so far, but the choices which the Soviet armed forces must face suggest that, even with only the barest access to information in Moscow, the Afghan War may soon come to people’s attention of its own accord.

Financial Times, Wednesday, June 4, 1980

Afghanistan

Moscow Starts ‘Phoney War’ Over Peace

With Afghanistan far from pacified, but at least firmly under Soviet control, the conflict has entered a new stage which, adapting a phrase from forty years ago, might best be described as the “phoney war.”

A bewildering series of proposals, suggestions and “hints” have been put about by the Soviet and Afghan governments, to the effect that Soviet troops can be withdrawn when “outside interference” in Afghanistan’s affairs is brought to an end.

MValery Giscard d’Estaing, the French President, met Mr Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet President, in Warsaw in an effort to “keep the lines of communication open”; and Herr Helmut Schmidt, the West German Chancellor, is due in Moscow later this month when a new West German-Soviet 25-year economic agreement will be on the agenda.

There is a lull in Soviet military activity in Afghanistan and the number of Soviet troops in that country has levelled off at 80,000, with another 25,000 stationed across the border on Soviet territory. One might almost assume that an agreement on Soviet troop withdrawals was imminent.

If precedent is any guide, however, it is far more likely that the West is witnessing a carefully orchestrated campaign whose purpose is not to prepare the way for Soviet troop withdrawals but to undermine support in Western Europe for economic sanctions against the Soviet Union, and prepare the groundwork for the eventual recognition, particularly in the Islamic world, of the Soviet-backed government of Mr Babrak Karmal.

Shortly after Soviet forces crossed the Afghan border in strength last December, Soviet official spokesmen said they had moved in at the request of the Afghan government in order to protect it against “outside interference.” There was no evidence of interference by anyone but the Soviet Union at the time, and none has materialised since. But Mr Brezhnev offered this explanation to U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and Mr Carter reacted by doubting the truth of what Mr Brezhnev said.

In the months since the invasion, the Soviet way of using language has become less confusing. By “outside interference,” the Soviet authorities mean the indigenous Afghan revolt against Soviet occupation; and when they speak of an end to “outside interference,” they are seeking an end to foreign backing for the rebels. This would—for the moment—leave the Karmal government in outright control, making the presence of Soviet forces unnecessary.

The Soviet peace offensive is now four months old but even M Giscard d’Estaing, whose meeting last month with Mr Brezhnev in Warsaw was hailed in the Soviet press as a “fruitful dialogue,” did not deflect Soviet determination to remain in Afghanistan until all resistance to the Karmal government has ceased.

The Soviets, on an official level, are still repeating what Mr Brezhnev said to Mr Carter about “outside interference,” but they have received free publicity for their peaceful intentions by continually reformulating their propaganda position to create the impression that they were offering something new.

Mr Brezhnev, for example, told Mr Armand Hammer, the President of Occidental Petroleum and a major supporter of U.S. Soviet trade that the Soviet Union would not insist on U.S. guarantees of an end to all “outside interference” (in effect, all Afghan resistance which the U.S. has no interest in ending) in return for troop withdrawals recognising that the U.S. might not be able to restrain all the elements at work in Afghanistan.

In April, the Karmal government offered to open negotiations aimed at normalising relations with Iran and Pakistan, based on an end to “outside interference” in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. The offer was doubly unrealistic because Iran and Pakistan not only have no interest in helping suppress the Afghan rebellion, but they also want no part of the Kamal government, which neither country recognizes.

The most recent reformulation of the Soviet position was the Afghan proposal on May 14, which combined the invitation to Iran and Pakistan with the existing Soviet offer to withdraw troops in return for U.S. guarantees of an end to “outside interference.”

Schmidt is now expected to arrive in Moscow on June 30 for the first visit of a Western leader to Moscow since the Afghan invasion. But despite the flurry of “peace feelers,” he has little Prospekt of achieving more than M Giscard d’Estaing in changing the Russian position on Afghanistan.

The Soviet leaders are often regarded as heavy-handed in the West, but they are frequently shrewd enough to outmanoeuvre their Western counterparts. The Soviet authorities realise that West European businessmen have no desire to make economic sacrifices to deter future Afghanistans, and the peace offensive is intended to reinforce this reluctance.

There are fundamental reasons why the peace offensive is not likely to be followed by real peace but rather a rapid doubling or trebling of the number of Soviet troops. The war is going badly for the Soviets in Afghanistan, and military observers believe that it will take a minimum of a quarter of a million men to begin to pacify the country.

This prospect might be daunting for a democratic country, but Soviet political authority is based on a supposed understanding of the iron laws of history.

The Soviet leadership cannot forsake the “Afghan revolution” after having committed troops and its own prestige to it, without undermining its own authority as well.

The damage to the West as a result of the present “peace offensive” may be serious. The inability of the U.S. to rally its allies can only convince Afghanistan’s Islamic neighbours that they have no choice but to accept the inevitable and come to terms with the Karmal government, any recognition of which would legitimise the Soviet presence.

Financial Times, Saturday, July 5, 1980

Why the Russians Think They

Have Taken Schmidt for a Ride

Masters of chess and the psychological novel, the Russians demonstrated once again this week during the visit of Herr Helmut Schmidt, the West German Chancellor, that they are more than a match for the leaders of the West.

Ever since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the overriding goal of Soviet policy has been to consolidate the Soviet position in Afghanistan while defusing the atmosphere of East-West confrontation in order to ward off damaging western economic sanctions.

The official Soviet Press has indicated that Herr Schmidt deserves some of the credit for the Soviet decision to drop preconditions to talks on Euro-strategic missiles. But to the Russians the real significance of his visit was publicly in signalling that, as far as Western Europe is concerned, there is no longer a crisis over Afghanistan.

The Communist Party Newspaper Pravda, in an editorial on July 1, the day after Herr Schmidt left Moscow, made clear that the Soviet position on Afghanistan would not change. It reiterated that the Soviet Union would not consider any settlement of the Afghan crisis which fails to confirm the power of the Soviet-backed government of Mr. Babrak Karmal.

Pravda said a political settlement was possible but it depended on an end to hostile acts from “outside.” Since the Soviet authorities refer to the indigenous Afghan revolt against Marxist rule as “outside interference,” the Pravda editorial was a reaffirmation of the Soviet refusal to pull out of Afghanistan before all opposition is crushed.

There has been almost no direct Soviet comment by officials or the Press on the Schmidt visit. But Soviet newspapers have quoted foreign comment to the effect that the visit had been a “powerful impulse” to detente and mutual understanding.

That the Soviets could make this assertion, albeit indirectly, immediately after having insisted that they were not going to withdraw their forces from Afghanistan and would, if necessary, increase them, is an indication of how much the Soviets feel they have gained in the wake of Herr Schmidt’s visit.

Unlike their Western counterparts, the Soviet leaders have never agreed to summit meetings solely for an “exchange of views” except where they felt that the fact of the meeting itself could be taken to symbolise foreign acquiescence in a Soviet action such as the invasion of Afghanistan.

By his presence in Moscow, Herr Schmidt almost certainly diminished in Soviet eyes the credibility of Western objections to the invasion of Afghanistan. The impression of irresolution could only have been strengthened by West German readiness to sign a 25 year economic co-operation agreement with the Soviet Union during Herr Schmidt’s stay.

An indication of the Soviet Union’s attitude towards summit meetings can be gained from the experience of the first years in office of U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Mr. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet President, repeatedly refused to meet Mr. Carter after the latter began his human rights crusade. The Russians didn’t want to be put in the position of seeming to endorse the campaign, in the same way that they appear to have manoeuvred both President Giscard d’Estaing and Herr Schmidt in apparently endorsing Soviet policy through their respective summits with Mr. Brezhnev.

The Soviet agreement to negotiate on limiting medium range missiles in Europe may be taken to justify Herr Schmidt’s trip. But Western military observers have long been sceptical of the ostensible Soviet refusal to negotiate while a NATO decision to place U.S. missiles in Western Europe was in force.

The Soviet Union has between 150 and 200 highly accurate medium range SS-20 missiles with multiple warheads targeted on Western Europe. It is introducing one new SS-20 every five days. The NATO decision to deploy 572 Pershing-2 and Cruise missiles, which prompted the Soviet refusal to negotiate, was intended to counter an existing Soviet force.

Radio Moscow, in its English language world service, praised Herr Schmidt for helping to break the deadlock caused by the Soviet refusal to negotiate over the Euromissiles. The Soviet decision, however, could equally have been taken without Herr Schmidt’s presence. It was almost inevitable given NATO’s own determination to press with a matching medium range missile deployment.

The greater likelihood is that the Soviet authorities prepared a “concession” for Herr Schmidt which, like the limited Soviet withdrawal of men and equipment from Afghanistan, was heralded as an achievement.

The general East-West situation has not been fundamentally altered. Herr Schmidt, far from achieving genuine progress over Afghanistan may have only stiffened Soviet resistance by assuring the Soviets that despite their refusal to talk about Afghanistan, as evidenced by the way his remarks were censored and corrected in Pravda, the Soviet Union can still count on West German technology and goods.

Part of the difficulty in trips like those of Herr Schmidt to Moscow and M. Giscard’s to Warsaw is that they are based on the assumption that the tension over the invasion of Afghanistan exists because the Soviets do not understand the West’s position and consultation will help them understand it better. In fact, the Soviet authorities show every sign of understanding the Western position and the tenuous commitment to it at least as well as most Western leaders.

Financial Times, Saturday, July 19, 1980

An Olympian view of the Moscow games starting today

Russia Through the Looking Glass

In a macabre footnote to the pre-Olympic preparations, Soviet television viewers were surprised one night last month by the unscheduled appearance of Father Dmitri Dudko, a Russian Orthodox priest, who had been arrested six months earlier on charges of anti-Soviet agitation.