Paweł Krawczyk

As the new rounds of American negotiations with Russia are covered in the media in early 2025 with the great confusion regarding intentions of both sides, I decided to re-read the classic “Negotiating with the Russians” book from 1951. While most of the book covers very specific talks on specific now historic events, the last chapter “Soviet Techniques of Negotiation” is an attempt to produce a more general analysis, and I found a number of observations contained there still very relevant to today's negotiations.

About the very idea of a compromise in negotiations:

One the difficulties of Soviet-Russian vocabulary is that the word “compromise” is not of native origin and carries with it no favorable empathy. It is habitually used only in combination with the adjective “putrid.” Compromise for the sake of getting on with the job” is natural to American and British people, but it is alien to the Bolshevist way of thinking and to the discipline which the Communist Party has striven to inculcate in its members. To give up a demand once presented, even a very minor or
formalistic point, makes a Bolshevik-trained negotiator feel that he is losing control of his own will and is becoming subject to an alien will. Therefore any point which has finally to be abandoned must be given up only after a most terrific struggle. The Soviet negotiator must first prove to himself and his superiors that he is up against an immovable force. Only then is he justified
in abandoning a point which plainly cannot be gained and in moving on to the next item, which will again be debated in an equally bitter tug-of-wills.

About “agreement in principle”:

One main pitfalls in wartime Anglo-American negotiations with the Soviet Union was is tendency to rely upon reaching an “agreement 1n principle, without spelling out in sufficient detail all the steps in its execution. After long and strenuous debates, studded with charges, accusations and suspicions, it was undoubtedly a great relief to reach a somewhat generally worded agreement and to go home. Prodded by manifold public and party duties, anxious to prove to themselves and to their people that current agreements and postwar cooperation with the Soviet Government were genuinely possible, facing “deadlines” with respect to the expectations of legislatures and of public opinion, the western leaders often approached these negotiations under serious disadvantages. Wooed rather than the wooer, able to deal at leisure with the manipulation of their public opinion at home, facing no dead-lines, the Soviet leaders had many advantages. In this situation the western powers sometimes gained the “principle” of their hopes, only to find that “in practice” the Soviet government continued to pursue its original aims.

The authors give a concrete example, that of post-war Poland which, as we know today, became fully integrated into Soviet Eastern Bloc:

At Yalta the Soviet Government agreed, after very lengthy argument and stubborn resistance, to Participate in a reconstruction of the Polish Government which would, it appeared, permit the survival of some political freedom for the great non-Communist majority of the people. By delays and quibbling over the execution of the “agreement in principle” during the next few months, the Soviet Government secured about ninety percent of the original position with which it had come to Yalta and thus strengthened beyond challenge the small Communist minority in its dominant control of the country.

But that was not all – agreement “on paper” is one, reality “on the ground” is another. Following these negotiations. Russia aggressively pushed its goals, doing some pro-forma steps such as the falsified 1946 referendum and falsified 1947 elections. These events bear strong resemblance to the falsified referendums in Ukrainian Crimea and Donbas, which were – just as Poland's fate in 1946 – stamped de facto by Western inaction.

Another tactics used by Soviets that allowed them to put their foot into the door while at the same time don't letting themselves be blamed as those unwilling for talks was simply to send negotiators with no instructions.

In opening negotiations with any Soviet representatives except Stalin the first problem is to discover whether the representatives have any instructions at all. ‘To discover what those instructions, if any, are requires sitting out the whole course of the negotiation, with its demands, insults, and rigidities and its always uncertain outcome. (...) The usual experience with “uninstructed” Soviet delegations has been (...) after delivery by it of numerous charges and accusations, [it became clear] that the Soviet delegation had no instructions except to “report back”.

The authors give a concrete example of negotiations about reconstructions of railway network on the liberated territories (EITO), for which topic Moscow hasn't yet made its mind:

After several weeks of “negotiation” the American delegation came to the conclusion that the Soviet delegation was unable to present any proposals of its own or to accept any British or Amer ican proposals. On the other hand it was free to raise and repeat any number of criticisms of the other drafts, provided it did not allow itself to be pinned down to approval of any individual provision or textual wording. It was clear that the Soviet delegation had long since given up any effort to record in Russian or to transmit to its own government any of the numerous modified drafts which had been submitted by the other two delegations during the course of the negotiation. It was quite probable that the Soviet delegation had been hustled off to London with no proposals to present and with no detailed instructions except to report back. Once in London, its members were probably too timid to make any recommendations or even to ask for new instructions, and in Moscow the few people who were qualified to handle a question of this kind were too busy with matters of direct Soviet interest, such as transforming the Lublin Committee into the government of Poland or negotiating the Soviet terms for the armistice with Rumania, to bother their heads or Stalin’s head about EITO.

Here's not directly related but historically relevant mention of the propaganda technique that we currently see in Russian media quoting anonymous comments on social media (likely written by Russians themselves) and then selling them under titles such as “Britons outraged over their government's attitude to Russia”:

This does not mean that Moscow is cut off from the flow of
public opinion materials from abroad. On the contrary, it probably receives a very large volume of material, especially clippings of all kinds. On occasion Andrei Vyshinsky quotes triumphantly from some small local newspaper or some relatively obscure “public figure’ to prove that the “‘ruling circles’ in the United States are hatching some “imperialist,” “war-mongering’’ plot. This practice arouses bewilderment or uneasy merriment in American listeners, whose ears are attuned to the cacophony of conflicting views. In the Soviet way of thinking, the citing of such sources is perfectly logical since it is assumed that nothing happens “accidentally” and therefore all expressions of opinion are of equal value in exposing the underlying pattern of hostile intention.

Authors also explained the peculiarity of Soviet negotiating traditions arising from the changed in diplomatic staff caused by the 1930's Great Purge:

The new foreign affairs staff was recruited among the middle ranks of Soviet officials, whose entire training had been based on rigid adherence to centralized decisions and who had rarely had informal contacts with life outside the Soviet Union. The present. day Soviet representative can hardly be called a “negotiator” in the customary sense. He is rather treated as a mechanical mouthpiece for views and demands formulated centrally in Moscow, and is deliberately isolated from the impact of views, interests and sentiments which influence foreign governments and peoples. Probably the Soviet representative abroad, through fear of being accused of “falling captive to imperialist and cosmopolitan influences,” serves as a block to the transmission of foreign views and sentiments, rather than as a channel for communicating them to his government.

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Paweł Krawczyk https://krvtz.net/
Fediverse @kravietz@agora.echelon.pl