A lecture in Moscow.

I last visited the Soviet Union, in November 1979, I swore vigorously that I would never return. Through a blend of bureaucratic incompetence, sheer deceit, and a sharpening of the cold war following the seizure of the U.S. hostages in Teheran, my trip stalled in Moscow-all we saw here was the rehearsal for Red October Day. Sitting like robots on their self-propelled guns in freezing weather for hours on end, the troops looked terrifyingly menacing. Moscow seemed infinitely oppressive-and sinister.

This year, on the exact place where I had witnessed all those tanks, there was a huge anti-Gorbachev demonstration. Masses of police lined the street; but they were good-humored and restrained (much more so than riot police in Paris would have been). Looking on, as some of the demonstrators brought out old tsarist flags, was a returning boyar, Prince V-- from London, now resident as a merchant in Moscow. It was a scene that, in 1979, would have stretched the imagination of even a science-fiction writer.

I was in Moscow at the invitation of the Soviet Institute of Military History. It is located in a handsome building, up on the Lenin Hills. Its nearest U.S. equivalent might be Washington's Fort McNair, and it was no less palatial. The walls of the entrance hall are hung with dramatic (and some rather good) oils of the civil war, the Defense of Moscow in 1941, and the titanic 1943 tank battle at Kursk.

My host is the director of the Institute, Colonel-General Dmitri Antonovich Volkogonov-who is also a doctor of philosophy, professor of history, and a deputy in the new Soviet parliament. A small, compact figure in full uniform with nine rows of ribbons, just old enough to have fought in the Great Patriotic War, Volkogonov has already made quite a stir as the first post-glasnost biographer of Stalin. His father was one of the officers executed in the 1937 purges.

The subject of my lecture? The Russians, after six months cogitation, plumped for "The Cuban Missiles Crisis of 1962." 1 was delighted. Combined, inevitably, with Yhrushchev's 1961 challenge to Berlin, it could hardly have been more topical-and I hoped at least the ensuing questions might throw some light on just why Khrushchev had embarked on such a mad gamble. I decided to make my theme the dangers of miscalculation leading to war-starting, en passant, with the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact of 1939, and ending with Saddam in the Gulf.

Assembled in the lecture hall were some two hundred senior officers and a sprinkling of civilians. They appeared grim-visaged, and extremely business-like. It is quite daunting, suddenly, to find yourself looking into the eyes of men who, you have been led to believe, had been out to kill you these past 45 years. I was nervous as a cat, yet they could hardly have been more friendly. I opened by mouthing a couple of sentences in dreadful Russian; then the interpreter took over. It was the first time I can recall giving a lecture, and not understanding one single word of what I was saying.

The questions that followed were unrestrained. Would I expand on how Hitler had "used" Stalin in August 1939? Wasn't Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech in March 1946 a miscalculation?

What had been the goals of Anglo-American strategy in the cold war; and had these now been achieved? (Wry laughter.)

One officer drew general support when he asked: Wasn't Ehrushchev's placing the missiles in Cuba only comparable to the U. S. "Jupiters" that had threatened them from Turkey, Italy, and Britain for the previous three years? There was more, ironic, laughter when I evoked the Monroe Doctrine. A retired admiral suggested that, well, it had saved Cuba, hadn't it? Yes, but . . . was

Castro really worth risking nuclear war?

To me almost the most interesting commentary was about Colonel Penkovsky, the double agent whose information on the poor state of Soviet rocketry had helped steel Kennedy to confront Khrushchev over Cuba. In the West, there had at one time even been suggestions damning Penkovsky as a treble operator, and I had deliberately trailed my coat to see whether his name would provoke response.

It did. One officer (probably KGB) said he had known Penkovsky; and, yes, certainly, he had been in a position to know all the details of Soviet ballistic capability-but there was no need to make a hero of him! Laughter.

PERHAPS the best part of the day, for me, were the conversations both before and at the lunch that followed. General Volkogonov spoke uninhibitedly about the problems of writing history in the Soviet Union, still. He had seen Stalin's order condemning Trotsky to death, had tracked down the 82-year-old KGB officer responsible, and had taped many hours with him. He personally had seen most of the Stalin archives; but the rest remained in the hands of the Central Committee, and-as a committed radical-he was now regarded as the "enemy." So it had become more difficult for him to gain access.

"The Right Wing [i.e., the anti-Gorbachev Old Guard] say we are writing too much dirt." He added, "the Left say the Institute is not brave enough, but our criterion is to publish what we should not be ashamed of in 25 year's time."

I suggested Stalin's greatest crime had been to deny two generations of Russians a good economic life, through launching the cold war. Had Stalin then played his cards right, the Soviets would have been a more favored recipient of Marshall Aid than France. The generals agreed.

One Russian surprised me by regarding the 1963 Kennedy-Macmillan nuclear test ban treaty with Khrushchev as having been the most important of all the disarmament agreements. SALT had just followed on. Could we have reached 1990 25 years earlier, if the three leaders had remained in power, I asked? No, he replied: domestically "we had to achieve perestroika and glasnost first."

All were surprisingly hawkish about the Gulf-, they could not understand why the Americans were hanging around." They might have missed the boat; but if they moved now, for all its doveish noises, the Gorbachev government would back them squarely.

That afternoon, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Perry Worsthorne, and I tried unsuccessfully to get into the infamous Lubyanka. A friend, Lord Montgomery expostulated--fancy "you two idiots trying to get in, where other people have been trying to get out for the past seventy years!"

After two weeks traveling between Georgia and Moscow one concluded that if perestroika was not succeeding then at least glasnost was. The exchanges in Moscow had been so amazingly frank-especially when one recalled that it was not just a matter of catching up on seventy years, but that Russia, over the past seven hundred, had had precious little glasnost.

What stuck most in my mind was a remark by my host: "Maybe you are witnessing very historic days in Russia. If Ryzhkov [Gorbachev's conservative and very unpopular prime minister] wins, we may have ration cards--possibly even a dictatorship."

The prospect of a grim winter has brought angry frustrations very close to the surface. Food is so painfully short that the general's warning about ration cards may well be fulfilled. We encountered one line, an estimated four hours long, for a modest one pair of imported shoes.

After what a Georgian philosopher friend described to me as "seventy years of slumber," it was hard to detect prospects of the country breaking out of its infernal vicious circle to embrace anything resembling the market economy called for by Gorbachev.

Had we been there during a new Kerensky period? Certainly, if I had been one of those grim generals that faced me at the Institute, I think I would be feeling puzzled and bitter at how much that had been won, with our blood, sweat, and tears in 1945, was now being given away-for so little tangible, material benefit. It was not a comforting thought.