Witness to détente

Soviet interpreter had front-row seat for Nixon-Brezhnev summit

By Jill Dougherty
CNN Moscow Bureau Chief

MOSCOW -- This city was crackling with excitement in May 1972 when Richard Nixon became the first U.S. president to make an official visit to the Soviet Union. The leaders of the two superpowers would shake hands -- and the world would be different.

Viktor Sukhodrev, interpreter for Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, was standing in the Kremlin as Nixon arrived. An aide to Brezhnev appeared and asked Sukhodrev to approach Nixon with a question:

"Would he like to have a face-to-face, one-on-one meeting with Brezhnev in a couple of hours, before the banquet? And tell him -- Brezhnev will be alone."

"That was it," Sukhodrev recalls. "I mean no one. Just Nixon and Brezhnev, and me."

Nixon and Brezhnev were no strangers. They had met before in Moscow -- in 1959 -- during the famous "kitchen debate" with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. This time it was different. There was Brezhnev, hand outstretched, smiling broadly.

Brezhnev, Sukhodrev recalls, told Nixon, "You know, many, many years ago, when I was a very young party official, one of the old Bolshevik leaders of the Soviet Union emphasized to me the importance of personal relationships between leaders. I've always remembered that. I want you and I to have a relationship of that sort."

Nixon, according to Sukhodrev, picked up the theme, recalling that Stalin and Roosevelt had the kind of relationship that made it easier to resolve major problems. Personalities, the president agreed, do matter.

Nixon's own personality -- and political persona -- made him the person best suited to arrive at an accommodation with the Soviet Union. Says Sukhodrev: "He was known as the Cold War warrior, the anti-communist par excellence."

Nixon and Brezhnev used their budding friendship as the symbol of détente, the policy Russians called the "relaxation of international tension." They signed major breakthroughs in arms control and mutual cooperation.

For future presidents and Soviet and Russian leaders, person-to-person diplomacy became the rule: Ford and Brezhnev, Carter and Brezhnev, Reagan and Gorbachev, Bush and Gorbachev, Clinton and Yeltsin.

Some now question building policies on personalities. Sergei Berezhkov, another top Kremlin interpreter who also observed the superpower leaders up close, says, "In politics, there are no friends -- there are mutual interests".

Other observers say that even if their leaders don't meet for years, the United States and Russia now have thousands of links that bind them together. Viktor Kremenyuk of Moscow's USA/Canada Institute, says, "In the Cold War, both sides had nothing to do together but fight. The only hope to overcome that was personal relationships."

Personalities can obscure changing realities. In the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, the United States was focused on Mikhail Gorbachev, blind to the rise of Boris Yeltsin. Now, says Gorbachev, America is making the same mistake.

"The West was very tied to Yeltsin," says the former Soviet leader. "'Who else could we support other than Yeltsin -- the man who ended communism? He's our man and he should get our support.' It's not far-sighted, it's not serious, but it's very typical of U.S. policy. To wager on people, when they should be wagering on democracy and reforms."

Washington now seems ready to agree, distancing itself from an ever-weaker Boris Yeltsin, probing for potential new leaders of Russia. Handshakes helped end the Cold War, but the bearhugs are over -- for now.