Reconciliation and the Russians.

ON JUNE 6, in Normandy, President Reagan extended a hand of reconciliation toward the Soviet Union. That was a noble, useful, and humane act. It clearly has religious warrant. But there are dangers in it.

Thinking clearly about the Soviet Union is a big step toward developing a long-term strategy. The United States desperately needs such a strategy. But the wrong way to construct one is to try to place oneself in the Soviets' shoes. Other leaders cannot easily penetrate the way the Soviet elite thinks. However, Soviet propaganda counts on our doing so.

This propaganda offers two false clues. The first is that the Soviets suffered twenty million casualties during World War II. While stirring immense and justifiable sympathy, this clue misleads. Since 1917, the Soviet leadership has for political reasons put to death at least three times that number of its own citizens. Solzhenitsyn puts the figure at 65 million.

The second false clue is that Soviet leaders are paranoid about defending the Russian homeland, because Russians can never forget invasions from the West by Napoleon and Hitler. This clue also misleads: No external army today is equipped to contemplate an invasion of the Soviet Union. NATO forces are barely prepared for defense; offensive operations are out of the question. The underdeveloped, under-equipped Chinese cannot plausibly threaten the advanced technology of the Soviet Red Army.

The Soviets like to picture themselves as paranoid. Cold-eyed calculation of the correlation of forces--their long-practiced principle--does not permit paranoia. Their own navies now operate on every ocean, and the Red Army as a whole can project force on every continent. In their configuration and order of battle, Soviet forces have for years been offensive, not defensive. If Soviet leaders suffer from an emotional disorder (a most dubious diagnosis), the proper name for it cannot be paranoia. Megalomania, perhaps.

In short, if the Soviet leadership were in fact to desire reconciliation, it can hardly be because the deaths of so many of their people sadden them or because they face an array of offensive forces. And Soviet leaders have three motives for not desiring reconciliation. First, they are unfortunately saddled with an economic system so poorly designed that it condemns them to perpetual inferiority. Unable to inspire their people by economic performance, they must seek other sources of motivation, including artificially induced fear. Second, by their deepest convictions, Soviet leaders must regard capitalism as "an evil empire," destined to yield its place in history to socialism by the laws of history itself. Apart from a belief in their historical inevitability, Soviet actions have no justification. Third, the leaders of the Communist Party, the KGB, and the Red Army form a privileged aristocracy, whose position rests neither on love nor on liberty, and certainly not on the consent of the governed, but on total control.

Thus, sadly, the Soviet leadership necessarily regards the West as an infection, from which their people must be quarantined. Reconciliation with the West cannot at present be considered.

AND YET . . . A government of lies cannot stand forever. The human spirit is by no means dead among the Russian people. Immensely impressive virtues of honesty and courage still thrive. If it were solely a matter of reconciliation with the Russian people, reconciliation would be easy.

Those who must be drawn into reconciliation are a smaller elite--perhaps as many as two million, perhaps just a few score thousand. How does one persuade a totalitarian elite that its future, and that of its people, may have a more attractive shape? Perhaps there are some in that elite who already recognize that Marxism-Leninism is a dead faith. Perhaps there are some ready to imagine a new future.

Long-term strategies begin with dreams. The problem to be solved is how to weaken the tight grip of an oppressive elite upon the vitalities of an immensely talented people. More accurately put, it is to change the dreams, the ways of thinking, and the ambitions of that elite. Is it not possible--barely possible--that some of them might dream of a Russia given to commerce and to industry, to the arts and to free scholarship, to the pursuit of virtue, and to cooperation with other nations in the development of resource-rich Siberia--indeed, the development of all the world?

A home and a garage for every family; a car in every garage. Is that so bad? The United States would be delighted to invest capital and knowhow, friendship and cooperation, in a more open and more liberal Russia. We seek a return to the moral values of honesty, truth, fraternity, and reconciliation that Judaism and Christianity together bequeathed to Russia a thousand years ago.

My father used to say that if you dream, you might as well dream big--and then take the first small steps. The first of those steps is to state what an American President dreams that Russians everywhere might some day dream.