WTO developments as largely the outcome of bureaucratic pressures within the Soviet defense structure. Just as each of the three images of the role that the WTO plays in Soviet security calculations has its vigorous advocates in Western circles, the same is probably true in the Soviet Union, and Soviet purposes likely constitute a composite, or mix, of all three conceptions.

Soviet Political Interests. With respect to Moscow's evaluations of the utility of the Warsaw Pact to the USSR in political terms, one finds two complementary perceptions current in most Western analysis. The first, and most prevalent, depicts the Pact as important to the Soviet Union in ideological terms. According to this view, the Pact performs a legitimi- | zation role. The Soviet political leadership derives legitimacy in international affairs and for its representation of the international environment to the Soviet people by being able to point to the largely sympathetic-cynics would say obedient-stances of other European "socialist" states. Manifestations of the existence of a "socialist commonwealth," in short, lend weight to the Soviet leadership's political positions and underline the idealistic and international claims of Communist ideology.

The second perception has received too little attention in Western scholarship. It, in turn, has interstate and intrastate dimensions. The interstate dimension stresses the value of the Warsaw Pact as a forum for communication and the exchange of views. According to this perception, the meetings of the Political Consultative Committee afford an opportunity for all parties to air their concerns and their preoccupations on a fairly regularized basisjust as the biannual meetings of NATO serve as a device for regularized communication among alliance members.

The intrastate dimension reinforces this view of the Warsaw Pact as a political organization which behaves much as political organizations do everywhere. Meetings of the WTO drive East European party and government bureaucracies. Although we know little about the mechanisms whereby the USSR and the East European states prepare for the

testimony of Dr. William B. Pendergast), and pp. 175-78 (the communiqué of the Eurogroup after its Dec. 6, 1973, meeting in Brussels, and the testimony of General Andrew J. Goodpaster). The Nunn Amendment to the FY 1975 Department of Defense appropriation bill permitted adjustments in the number of US troops through a reduction of support personnel and an increase in combat personnel, and required the elimination of 18,000 support spaces by June 1976.

Political Consultative Committee meetings, WTO meetings provide the calendar targets for the setting of memoranda deadlines and briefings for political leaderships in much the same way as NATO's biannual meetings do for NATO members.

Moreover, the developments in recent years tend to reinforce both perceptions. Soviet willingness to accommodate the demands of other Pact members for a larger role in decision-making within the Pact may in part reflect the worth that Moscow attaches to the Pact in legitimizing its policy. Certainly, the quantity of WTO consultation has driven the bureaucracies of all the WTO member states, and it has driven them hard. In fact, the apparent willingness to use ad hoc forms of consultation like the Crimea meeting may indicate a sensitivity to the demands of the post-1969 pace of consultation on party and state bureaucracies.

East European Perspective. East European atttudes toward the Warsaw Pact no doubt have similar dimensions to those discussed in connection with Soviet evaluations of the Warsaw Pact; however, the character of Eastern Europe's actual assessments of the role of the pact probably differs somewhat from that of the USSR. By far the most important security aspect of East European thinking about the WTO is that the Pact gives form to political, economic, and military reality. Whatever kind of social and political system existed in the USSR, the situation of the countries of Eastern Europe would be conditioned by their giant neighbor to the east. No real security would be possible for them without harmonization of their interests with those of the Soviet Union. In other words, the security of the USSR and the security of Eastern Europe are reciprocal-a fact which does not depend on ideological compatibility and which has long been recognized by Western statesmen. It prompted British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, for example, to accede to the tentative arrangements he made with Stalin in October 1944,2 and it motivated the West's tacit acceptance of the status quo in Eastern Europe in the context of CSCE this last summer.

If the security of the East European countries is inseparable from that of the USSR, the political in

28 These were incorporated into the "notorious blue tick" memorandum. Churchill proposed to Josef Stalin a division of Romania, Greece, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Bulgaria into spheres of influence, and Stalin marked a large tick on the paper in blue pencil. See Churchill's Triumph and Tragedy, New York, Bantam Books, 1953, pp. 196-97.

in the Warsaw Pact frequently run parallel to those of the Soviet leadership. Not only do the East European rulers, like the Soviet rulers, derive legitimacy and prestige in the eyes of their own populaces from the workings of the Warsaw Pact, but the diplomacy of intra-Pact affairs and East-West negotiations under Pact sponsorship also provides international political training for East European cadres of leadership potential. In this sense, the WTO framework performs a function which requires delicate balancing against national claims-a kind of socialization of cadres by reinforcing values already developed within them by their national political training, through exposure to an international system which affirms those same values. Bloc affairs, to be sure, "socialized" East European Communist elites in the days of the Comintern and direct Soviet intervention in Eastern Europe. However, the process is more subtle now, and we will not know its exact effects until we follow the careers of junior foreign ministry and defense ministry officials who have participated in the increased intrabloc and East-West diplomatic contacts.

In conclusion, it is worth reiterating that the meaning one derives from recent developments in the Warsaw Pact depends on three interlocking sets of images one has of the purposes of the political, military, and economic institutions of the WTO/ Comecon framework: one's images of the utility of that framework to the USSR in (1) security and (2) political terms and (3) of the value that the East European countries place on it. Western perceptions of the framework have consistently tended to attach

importance to its implicit purposes. Thus, the Warsaw Pact and Comecon have been viewed as having the primary functions of (1) exercising political control over a satellite system, (2) rationalizing that control ideologically, and (3) legitimizing the exercise of domestic political power by elites thought not to enjoy adequate popular support to rule. They have been perceived as having, at best, only tangential or inconsequential significance for the USSRin the one case, as merely a geographical buffer and line of forward defense which enables the Soviet army to achieve more tactical flexibility in defending the USSR; and, in the other case, as a mechanism for the economic domination of Eastern Europe, which could nevertheless still be accomplished (albeit by less camouflaged means) even if that particular institution did not exist.

But these perceptions may contain biases which produce a misrepresentation of present truth and emergent reality. They call for our analytical suspicion because they derive essentially from the cold war era. Whether the WTO/ Comecon framework has yet acquired concrete substance closer to its explicit purposes than it had previously and whether it performs functions more integral to the political, military, and economic interests of all the participating states than it did before cannot be determined with certainty, but changes in the Warsaw Pact in the period of détente may point in that direction. Therefore, our analytical mind-set in approaching the framework should be receptitve to the possibility and alert to the dangers of continuing to view it in the terms that fitted comfortably in the past.

beneath the tranquil surface? If generational chasms open wide everywhere else, why should the USSR, despite its impressive apparatus of internal control, remain untouched? And if "youth" vs. "age" is not the critical confrontation there, is it not still reasonable to surmise that the convictions and expectations of the "middle-aged"-the educated, "industrial" generation may differ greatly from those of the "gerontocracy" in the Politburo?

3

In trying to assess whether generational differences exist and, if so, what their political impact is, or is likely to be, we should beware of confusing our own hopes and expectations with reality, or with evidences of what we assume to be reality. This is an easy danger to succumb to, especially when we have the convenient peg of "generations" (for we know that one generation must succeed another) on which to hang our expectations, and the danger should be recognized as such. Perhaps, after all, it is not the seeming gap between generations, but rather the impregnable solidity of the Soviet system, the stability of the Soviet "way of life" as it involves masses, elite, and the political process, that is the datum the reality rather than the appearance. At least, raising this possibility provides a starting point for posing questions about Soviet "generations" and their relevance to the prospects for political change in the USSR.

These generational questions involve two distinct groups. First, there is Soviet "youth," i.e., the under30 population. Does a broad gap divide it from the Brezhnev generation; and if so, what is the gap about, and will it make a difference to the future of Soviet politics? Second, there is the generation of presumptive Politburo "successors," those no longer "young," but younger than the current leadership. Do its members view their current rulers across some sort of chasm, and if so, is the nature of the chasm such that their succession to power can be expected to make a difference?

The question of "youth" can be handled in relatively short order. Western journalists and analysts are still inclined, on occasion, to point to the dissatisfaction of Soviet young people with the lack of consumer goods, to their desire for more rock music, miniskirts, blue jeans, etc., as evidences of a generation gap, and more important-they view this

"Generation" is of course, an exceedingly slippery and imprecise term. People are born "all the time," not at intervals convenient for grouping under such terms. It is used here in a very loose sense, bearing in mind its deficiencies as well as its familiarity.

-EUPRA.

<Even if such a culture did exist, it could have no near-term political effect since it is not from youth's ranks that the successors to today's "gerontocracy" will come. Unlike the US Congress, the mechanisms of Soviet government have not yet reached the point of welcoming those in their late twenties and early thirties to a share of the seats of power. Thus, the relevance of the current political convictions of Soviet youth, whether they be oppositional (unlikely) or conformist-apolitical (more likely), lies only in the distant future, by which time those convictions may or may not have changed but will certainly no Longer be the convictions of "youth."

More relevant, surely, are questions about those who will succeed to power, and what we may expect from them as the iron law of the actuary works to change the composition of the Politburo in their favor. Here, if there is a "gap" which will have a marked effect on the conduct of Soviet politics, it must, in the author's view, be of a particular type. Certainly we may anticipate gaps-in styles of management, in readiness to rely on "technical" expertise, in propensity to employ Marxism-Leninism as a rationalization for actions-that arise from career

professional credentials were often attained after their potential leadership ability was noted by the party and a younger one whose similar credentials were their "ticket" of admission into the lower ranks of the elite can doubtless be expected to behave differently in some cases. But these differences, however significant, are not the stuff of which political transformations are made. The gap must come in the realm of "political culture" itself-in that region where questions about the purposes and uses of politics are explicitly raised. This being the case, it is well now to turn to an examination of political culture in the contemporary USSR.