CAN GORBACHEV PULL IT OFF?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP87-00462R000100080005-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 10
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 1, 2010
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: May 17, 1985
• Content Type: MEMO

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SUBJECT: (Optional)
Can Gorbachev Pull It Off?
FROM:
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NIC #02478-85
Herbert E. Meyer
Vice Chairman, NIC
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17 May 1985 21
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The Director of Central Intelligence
Washington, D.C. 20505
National Intelligence Council
NIC #02478-85
17 May 1985
MEMORANDUM FOR: Director of Central Intelligence
Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
FROM: Herbert E. Meyer
Vice Chairman, National Intelligence Council
1. As the new Soviet leader settles in to secure his power--if he
doesn't kill himself laughing over Western media reports about his style
and personal charm--we need to focus on the question that in one form or
another knowledgeable Russians are asking, often with some sense of
urgency: Can Gorbachev pull it off? By "pull it off" they mean quite
simply this: Can Mikhail Gorbachev put the Soviet Union on a course
which will enable that country to continue to compete with the United
States? If he can, then the Cold War as we have known it for forty years
will probably go on for a long time to come. If he cannot--and it is
this possibility that worries so many members of the Soviet elite--then
we are probably heading toward a major shift in the balance of global
power, of a magnitude that happens only once or twice in a century. We
need to focus on this question right now, because to a large degree
Gorbachev's ability to "pull it off" will depend on what we Americans do,
or don't do, in the years to come.
2. It is remarkable how swiftly this perception has taken hold among
opinionmakers and policymakers on both sides of the Iron Curtain--that if
present trends continue the Soviet Union will find it increasingly
difficult and finally impossible to compete with the US, by which we mean
to compete until such time as the Soviet Union can displace the US as the
world's preeminent superpower. As you may recall, it was the mass of
evidence which supports this perception that shaped my own June 1984
memo, What Should We Do About the Russians? Whether or not Gorbachev
himself shares this perception we simply don't know. But if the man is
half as well-informed as Kremlin flacks are touting him to be, he must at
least be familiar with the evidence that so many of us find so
persuasive. If so, from where he's sitting now here's a summary of
what--to borrow a Marxist term--the "objective reality" would look like:
All portions Secret 1 Cl By Signer
Decl OADR
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3. After seven decades of Communism, the Soviet Union is beginning
to atrophy. A sense of exhaustion and a growing fear of the future
permeate the bureaucracy--and no wonder. Conceived of, structured, and
managed more like a nineteenth-century empire than a modern country, the
Soviet Union now is reeling from the same combination of trends to which
all previous empires in history eventually succumbed:
-- Demographic problems become acute and irreparable in the
foreseeable future. In the case of the Soviet system, imbalances in
ethnic population growth rates have resulted in too few Russians to
effectively lead and control an empire comprised of more than
100 nationality groups, most if not all of which want their freedom from
Russian domination. In coming years, there will be too few Russians to
man the armed forces; too few Russians to sustain even today's low
industrial productivity growth rate in the Russian Republic, which
contains about 65 percent of all industrial production.
-- The bureaucracy no longer can provide even the most basic
national services. In the Soviet case, the health care system is fairly
collapsing, with no less than five communicable diseases that have
virtually been eliminated in the West now running rampant throughout the
country--scarlet fever, polio, diptheria, whooping cough, measles. And
the Soviet Union is the only industrialized country in which infant
mortality is rising and the average life span dropping. (The Soviet
Union is the only country anywhere in the world known to have once opened
a cardiology clinic on the top floor of a five-story walk-up.) Moreover,
Communism has turned what in 1914 was among the world's leading
graineries into the world's largest importer of grain. Even so,
throughout much of the Soviet Union today the availability of food is
actually declining.
-- The economy stagnates. The Soviet Union's growth rate is
marginal at best, and the distribution system is so bad the gap between
what is produced and what actually gets properly used is big and probably
growing. So dependent has the Soviet economy become on the black market
and on corruption that any serious effort to eliminate either one now
runs the risk of bringing the entire system to a crashing halt.
4. Moreover, the Soviet Union has had the bad luck to become hobbled
by these trends at precisely that moment in history when a technological
revolution has begun sweeping the free world. That is, while Western
Europe, Japan, and the US transform themselves from industrial societies
to knowledge societies, the Soviet Union remains trapped by a
nineteenth-century, Marxist approach to the idea of production--an
approach that was scarcely relevant even then. The Soviet Union's
failure to transform itself into a knowledge society is easy to
understand. After all, the driving impulse of a knowledge society is the
free flow and application of data--the computer-based ability to gather,
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process, and use in countless ways a staggering amount of information
that all together pushes the rate of innovation to unprecedented levels
and makes the production of goods and services more and more efficient.
And the free flow and application of data is the one thing no rigid
Communist society can tolerate. Result: production in the
industrial-based Soviet Union is becoming less efficient relative to
production in Western, knowledge-based societies. There is no way on
earth the Soviet economy in its present form could ever catch up with,
let alone surpass, its Western counterparts.
5. Most important of all, the US has recognized and acted upon a
fundamental change in the very nature of warfare: namely, that
technology has brought us to the start of an era in which a unit of
defense will cost less than a corresponding unit of offense. Since the
US is a "defensive" power, versus the Soviets as the world's "offensive"
power, and since technology is our national genius, this change in the
nature of warfare works to our advantage. Indeed, it was the President's
grasp of all this which led him to propose the Strategic Defense
Initiative, which is not at all a gadget but rather a strategy based on
our technical prowess and on our inherent role as a "defensive" power.
As the US continues on course toward SDI--which means toward development
of strategic systems to stop nuclear-tipped missiles and, equally
important as the President said explicitly in his March 1983 speech,
toward development and deployment of high-tech conventional weapons that
would further raise the nuclear threshold--the Soviet Union's
opportunities will evaporate to use the military power which has become
that country's sole claim to superpower status. More precisely, within
the next ten years at most new Western conventional weapons will make it
virtually impossible for the Warsaw Pact countries to overrun Western
Europe; the Pact's four-to-one tank advantage will be as useless in the
face of NATO high-tech defense weapons as was the Polish cavalry in the
face of Nazi tanks. And by roughly the end of this century we will have
the means to intercept rockets in their boost phase, which means the
Soviets will no longer be able to threaten the West with nuclear
annihilation.
6. In the very broadest sense, then, what the Soviets call the
"correlation of forces" is shifting not in their direction, but in ours.
Moreover, with anti-Communist insurgencies beginning to flourish around
the world and with major powers such as China and India beginning to
barrel forward by unleashing their economies to adopt the free enterprise
system, it is apparent that the "correlation of forces" is shifting with
a momentum that is as terrifying to the Soviets as it is heartening to
us. Throughout the world now, it's becoming obvious that history, after
all, is not on the Soviets' side but on our own. _
7. To reverse these trends, Gorbachev will need to do more than
merely coax--or flog--the Soviet economy to a slightly higher rate of
growth. All this would do is assure that the Soviet Union will continue
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to fall behind but at a marginally slower rate. Rather, Gorbachev must
transform the Soviet economy from its present and obsolete industrial
base into an economy that, like its more dynamic Western counterparts, is
based on knowledge--whose driving impulse is the free flow and
application of data. For it is only by achieving this economic
transformation that the Soviet Union will be able to generate the wealth,
the technology, and the weapons with which to sustain its military
challenge.
8. To begin with, Gorbachev will need to break the Communist Party's
stranglehold on power. He will need to set free the agricultural sector
by allowing farmers to plant whatever they want and to sell their produce
for whatever prices they can get. He will need to set free the
industrial sector by allowing factory supervisors to manufacture whatever
products they judge the market wants, and to charge whatever prices they
believe are correct. And he will need to rejuvenate the country's
scientific community, which despite the high quality of individual
members has grown stagnant after years of politicization and overemphasis
on technical advantage rather than on creativity. All this will merely
set the stage, rather like bringing a sick patient to sufficient strength
to endure a necessary operation. Then--and here's the really tough
part--Gorbachev will need to smash the Communist Party's monopoly on
information. For it is only when Soviet industrial managers, scientists,
technicians, bureaucrats, and intellectuals are free to gather, process,
and use data just about however they want that the creative strength of
Soviet society can become fully deployed. This is the dynamic
force--indeed this is the only dynamic force--that can power the Soviet
economy forward by pushing the pace of innovation and making the
production of goods and services more and more efficient.
9. There is just one more thing Gorbachev will need to do. He will
need to knock our country off its present course. After all, in a
two-car race it does little good to accelerate from twenty miles-per-hour
to forty miles-per-hour, if all the while your adversary is cruising
comfortably at sixty. Gorbachev absolutely has to slow us down. To do
this without war he must strike where we, as any democracy, are most
vulnerable: at our political will. For as we have learned to our horror
in Vietnam and elsewhere, without the political will to prevail our
military power, technological prowess, and economic vitality are
useless. The Soviets understand full well that in recent years the US
has begun to regain its will. The restoration of our economic health,
our defense build-up, our efforts to strengthen Western alliances, our
willingness to actively support democratic revolutions, and above all our
determination to proceed with SDI--these are all reflections of a
political will whose inevitable result is an end to Soviet dreams of
global preeminence, or even to Soviet pretensions as a superpower in our
league. Thus if Gorbachev intends his country to continue to compete
with the US, he needs not only to change his country's course but also to
break our will, and by doing so knock our country off its present
course. And he needs to do it soon.
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10. We must assume that Gorbachev will give it all a shot. More
than likely he is sufficiently well-informed to grasp the challenge, and
his recent call for "revolutionary" economic reforms suggests that he's
at least willing to move beyond the status quo. And Gorbachev may indeed
be a man of talent and some vision. But it's worth recalling that two of
the Romanov dynasty's last Prime Ministers--Sergei Witte and Peter
Stolypin--were among the most talented and visionary European statesmen
of their age. The British historian and journalist Edward Crankshaw,
whose own dispatches from Moscow during the Khrushchev era were among the
best of their kind, offers this telling verdict on Witte: "He was
essentially a man of great parts with unbalanced talents and blind spots
to set against great vision--a man, in a word, who would be at his best
when kept up to scratch by friction with two or three colleagues of
scarcely inferior gifts. Witte did not fail Russia. Russia failed
Witte: from among all her millions she was unable to produce another
man, let alone more than one, fit to work with him." Like Witte (and
Stolypin), Gorbachev cannot succeed alone. The question is whether,
after seven decades of venality, sometimes murderous power-struggles, and
corruption, the Communist bureaucracy can produce enough good men to give
Gorbachev the critical mass he would need to succeed.
11. My own guess is that the Communist Party is too far gone to
transform itself, let alone the country. To be sure, for a little while
the bureaucracy will give Gorbachev and a few hand-picked lieutenants
some running room to introduce their "revolutionary" reforms. Gorbachev
& Co. will seize the opportunity, and they may even manage to loosen the
Party's grip on power enough to eek out an extra point or two of growth.
But having brought the patient to sufficient strength for the necessary
operation--smashing the Party's monopoly on information--Gorbachev & Co.
will have depleted too much of their energy and political capital to go
on. And the bureaucracy, as always when faced with the prospect of
serious, fundamental reform, will lose its nerve and start to pull back
on the leash. Moreover, while all this is going on the US will have
barreled even further ahead, almost out of sight. If only to save
himself and to secure whatever small gains he's made, Gorbachev will have
no choice but to switch gears by easing off on internal change and
pouring his and his bureaucracy's energies into knocking the US off
course. It will almost be a relief to switch gears like this. After
all, knocking the US off course is the game Gorbachev and his colleagues
know best; the game at which they have traditionally enjoyed the most
success for the least political cost.
12. Scaring us off, stretching us out, wearing us down--this will be
the essence of the looming Soviet campaign to break our political will.
There will likely be no one event that does the trick. Rather, the
Soviets will pursue a strategy to kill us with a thousand tiny cuts. For
example, the Soviets will step up their efforts to de-stabilize key Third
World countries. Time and again we will be forced to choose between
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watching a current or potential ally go down the drain, thus displaying
to the world our impotence, or providing the sort of economic and
military help that inevitably will generate controversy and protest here
at home and even abroad. The Soviet goal will be to draw us in deeply
enough to create a debilitating political issue, but not deeply enough
for us to win. In Europe, the Soviets will try to drive a wedge into the
NATO alliance by pouring millions of dollars--hundreds of millions,
actually--into their ongoing anti-US propaganda campaign. No doubt the
Soviets will drag out the same shopworn propaganda themes they've been
peddling for years--the US is responsible for global tensions, the US is
creating poverty everywhere, the US is funding the arms race, the US will
cause a war that will destroy Western Europe. No doubt these shopworn
themes, as always, will prove effective. In Asia, the Soviets will flex
their military muscle to threaten Japan, in hopes of weakening that
country's strong commitment to the Western alliance. And in political
powder kegs like the Philippines, while we struggle to assure stability,
the Soviets will look for ways to toss in a lighted match or two.
13. At the same time, there will be more horrifying incidents and
episodes along the lines of KAL 007 and the Nicholson shooting. The
Soviets will hope that in each case "cool heads" will assure us that it
was just an isolated event, rather than part of any policy--missing
completely the point that atrocities like these are the inevitable
by-product of the Soviet system itself--and convince us not to "give in
to our emotions" by responding sharply. And each time we accept this
advice, we Americans will feel a bit smaller, a bit less confident. And
of course, the Soviets will move forward with plans to deploy an awesome
range of new strategic and conventional weapons, forcing us to divert
still more of our money and political capital to defense.
14. Meanwhile, here at home the US anti-defense crowd that caused so
much damage to our security in the 1970s will regain its momentum. One
specific objective of their next campaign will be to stop SDI at all
costs by doing to the concept of strategic defense what they have already
done to the concept of nuclear energy: discrediting it politically
despite its technological merit. Soon our own domestic voices of despair
will rise again to spread their perception throughout the country that we
cannot win, that the cost of going on is intolerable, that somehow it all
must be our fault. Cut by cut, drop by drop, the Soviets will work to
draw out so much of our political will that in the end we will lose our
national velocity. And so the Soviet Union will be able to compete with
the US for a long time to come.
15. Let us be clear about the stakes. If Gorbachev tries all this
and succeeds--if he can achieve the double-whammy of changing both his
country's and our country's courses--the Cold War as we have known it for
decades will go on, with the momentum shifting back toward the Soviets
and a perception taking hold once more that time, after all, is on the
Soviets' side. This doesn't mean that we will "lose" the Cold War any
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time soon--that is, be displaced by the Soviet Union as the world's
preeminent superpower. It does mean that we shall suffer a devastating
blow to our hopes for peace, freedom, and prosperity. It means the cost,
effort, and sacrifice of the last few years will go for nothing; that we
will be back where we started.
16. On the other hand, should Gorbachev try and fail--or decline to
try at all--the Soviet Union will enter the most dangerous, decisive
period of its history. Militarily, the Soviet Union will find itself in
a "use-it-or-lose-it" situation. That is, Soviet leaders will face a
stark choice of using their conventional or strategic power soon to
change the "correlation of forces," or doing nothing until they reach a
point when it is too late to use this power because the West's defenses
will be too strong to defeat. A Soviet decision to use power, of course,
would risk war. A Soviet decision not to use power would condemn the
Soviet Union to drifting downward into the second rank of nations, rather
like some of our European allies did after World War II. In the case of
our allies, their internal stability enabled them to cope fairly well.
It's an open question whether the Soviet Union has sufficient stability
to cope, or whether internal centrifugal forces--or similar external
forces from the East European satellites--will prove too strong for
Moscow to control.
17. We've no idea how the world at large will respond should a
perception take hold that the Soviet Union will not, after all, displace
the US as the world's preeminent superpower. Perhaps the time has come
to give this subject some serious thought. I have a suspicion that this
reaction would be stronger than anyone anticipates; that we may all be
greatly underestimating the effect that physical fear of the Soviet Union
has had on Western civilization--on our national policies of course, but
also on our cultures and even on our private hopes and worries. Rather
like fear of street crime, fear of the Soviet Union may run so deep that
an accurate calibration of its impact is impossible, at least until after
the threat passes. If fear of the Soviet Union does run so deep, the
effect of its passing on the West, on the East European satellites, and
on the Soviets themselves could be dramatic in ways that we cannot
foresee.
18. I believe that we are moving now through one of those rare
periods in history, when the tectonic plates of global power have broken
loose. Should Gorbachev succeed, these tectonic plates will grind around
for a bit and then settle back into their present positions. But should
Gorbachev fail, we and our allies soon will be safely and irrevocably
beyond reach of the Soviet Union--or as the Soviets would see it,
hopelessly beyond their grasp. Global power would shift from a bi-polar,
US-Soviet focus to a multi-polar focus, with the US preeminent and with
power shared among ourselves, Japan, Western Europe, China, and whatever
becomes of the Soviet Union and its satellites. That would be a very
different world; more complex in some ways but on the whole less
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dangerous. It all depends on whether or not Gorbachev can "pull it
off." And the answer to this question depends as much on our political
will as on his. Thus the coming years will be more than a verdict on
Gorbachev. They will be a verdict on ourselves.
IWOZ~"
Herbert E. Byer
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NIC #02478-85
17 May 1985
SUBJECT: Can Gorbachev Pull It Off?
DCI/NIC/VC/NIC:H.Meyer:bha
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