Soviet Public Treatment of President Reagan

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

306. The question naturally arises of the true motives and true aims of the campaign unleashed by the United States over the events in Poland. . . .

307. I want immediately to stipulate that in mentioning the present leaders, I mean not only the President and his most influential ministers but also a broader stratum of the Washington bureaucracy, above all the stratum comprising the deputy and assistant cabinet members, the President's chief advisers and entourage, the heads of a number of departments, and so forth. And with the utmost responsibility I would venture to claim that as a group, this "second echelon" is in considerable part composed of extremists representing the far right wing, extreme militarist flank of the U.S. ruling class. A whole series of conclusions can be derived from all that is known of these people. One is that they are people who rose to prominence on a wave of crisis and feel like fish out of water outside a crisis.

308. A certain circle of American figures now needs a crisis as a condition of its political success, even political survival. And it is apparently prepared to go to any lengths for the sake of that.

309. Aleksandr Kaverznev, Soviet television political observer (Hungarian domestic radio, 18 Feb 82)

310. We are of the opinion that the coming years will be difficult. In the beginning, when the Reagan Administration came to power in the United States, we had certain hopes that the President would not implement the policy he announced during his election campaign. We hoped that life would oblige him to see many things in a different way. But now we are forced to conclude that for the entire duration of the Reagan Administration we can hardly expect a different U.S. policy.

## 311. Shishlin (Soviet domestic radio, 11 Apr 82)

312. Reagan, it must be said, has garnished these rather bellicose statements with the somewhat curious assertion that he, the President of the United States, is willing to meet Leonid Ilich Brezhnev in the summer at the second special session of the UN General Assembly on disarmament. And there is a rather strange contradiction here. Actually, the idea of a summit meeting--a Soviet-American summit meeting--was proposed over one year ago from the platform of the 26th party congress. In that time, the Soviet Union has covered a considerable part of the distance toward finding ground for mutually acceptable solutions in the interests of improving Soviet-American relations. We saw nothing of the kind from the American side. And now into the midst of these rather definite statements, which can