The Washington Post

A trip behind the Iron Curtain by an influential conservative leader might have significant impact on the restructuring of U.S.-Soviet relations that could emerge from the Bush-Gorbachev summit.

Paul Weyrich, conservative activist and president of the Free Congress Foundation, went to Hungary, Estonia, and the Soviet Union to teach dissidents techniques of political organizing—remarkable enough in itself. What he learned from them might be even more important for American politics.

Weyrich swings as much weight through his personal standing and his organizational network as anyone from that part of the political spectrum. After his testimony about John Tower’s drinking habits helped sink Tower’s nomination as secretary of defense, President Bush thought it prudent to send Weyrich a note saying that there were no hard feelings. That is clout.

Weyrich always has called things as he sees them. These days, he is speaking to his colleagues on the right with the fervor of a man who has seen something inside the Communist world he did not know was there.

Last month, Weyrich and six other conservatives went on a two-week training mission, financed and arranged by the Krieble Foundation. The session in Moscow, where their official host was the Academy of Science, was the one that had the greatest impact on them.

They worked with 45 people, more than half of them members of the Supreme Soviet and the rest their campaign managers. Most of them were indentified with the Inter-Regional Group of legislators pushing Mikhail Gorbachev for more radical reforms. Many of these novice politicians and legislators were scientists, academics or professionals, chosen in the first free elections the Soviet Union has known.

“We have been training people in politics for more than 15 years, all over the United States, and from Australia to Latin America, and this was absolutely the best group I have ever seen,” Weyrich said. “They asked penetrating and brilliant questions on everything from how you get a bill on the legislative calendar for consideration to how you balance your constituents’ opinions against what you think is right. We had to summon every bit of knowledge we possessed—and the members of our group have been in politics for 18 years on the average—to respond to them. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

On the final day of the program, Robert McAdam, who directs the domestic training programs for the Free Congress Foundation, put the Soviet politicians through a simulated election-campaign exercise that represents a kind of final exam. “They ran it better than I have ever seen our American trainees do,” Weyrich said.

As the program continued, several of the trainees sought out the Americans to discuss philosophy more than political technique. It came to a climax one evening at a Moscow hotel, where the Soviets shared their dream of building a society with free markets and constitutional protections of individual rights. They revealed their revulsion with a communist society which, one physicist-politician said, “contradicts every law of nature.”

With a catch in his voice, Weyrich told of one of the trainees giving him a pin with a miniature Soviet space shuttle on it. “People have said that this shuttle resembles the American space shuttle,” the Russian said. “Thanks to you, we hope to build a constitution and a nation that resembles yours.”

The child of immigrant parents, Weyrich said he told the Soviets, “This is why I got into politics, but I never thought I’d have an opportunity like this.”

The consequences of the visit will be felt both there and here. Weyrich’s group has been invited to repeat the seminar in the Urals. The Soviet trainees tape-recorded everything and already have been on the air in Russia, offering tapes and training to others who may run in next year’s elections.

As for Weyrich, he came back convinced that, “There is no question profound changes are going on in the Soviet Union. We don’t know how far they will go, but they are unquestionably real. And what I learned was that these are responses to fundamental forces at work in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev is not the source of these changes as much as he is the result of them.”

On the day we talked, he had spent the lunch hour arguing with other conservative operatives, most of whom, he said, “don’t believe anything is happening. They say the tanks are still there and it can all be reversed at any moment.”

Weyrich strongly disagrees now. “Anti-communism has been a cementing force for the conservative movement,” he said, and without it, the politics of the domestic scene will never be the same. But it would be a stupid strategy to deny the reality of what is happening.”

George Bush is always looking nervously to his right to see if the conservative activists are going to denounce him. Weyrich’s trip shows that Bush may be freer than he could ever previously have hoped to pursue the possibilities implicit in his new relationship with Gorbachev.