Cold war or détente? The Soviet viewpoint

[p. 47]

Chapter 2 On the History of Soviet-American Relations

Let's continue discussing the possibilities of the coexistence of countries with basically differing social systems.

As I told you already, I do not think that differences between our two societies create insurmountable difficulties for maintaining normal and fruitful relations. Let us recall the history of Russian-American relations before 1917. The old Russia and United States were very different from each other in terms of social and political organization. Take the late eighteenth century. On the one side there was feudal, czarist Russia and on the other side there was the young American Republic, born out of one of the first bourgeois democratic revolutions in the world. And who maintained what may have been the best relations with the newly born United States of America? It was Russia. Those relations were based on properly understood mutual interest. Later, during the Civil War in the United States, the czar even sent the navy to demonstrate Russian support for President Abraham Lincoln. Russian warships showed up in New York and San Francisco. Obviously, the czar was not motivated by any sympathy with the plight of the American slaves. He had his own foreign policy objectives in mind, which led him to support the United States. But the fact is still there. Alas, I cannot say that Americans reciprocated when we had our Revolution in October 1917.

[p. 48]

How would you describe American attitudes to the October Revolution?

Most Americans at the time were much more provincial than they are now and simply did not know what had happened here, or had only the vaguest idea. Among the more politically conscious intellectuals and workers, there was great interest and sympathy. An American newsman, John Reed, symbolized that attitude in his eyewitness account of the Revolution, called Ten Days That Shook the World, which remains one of the best-written books about those historic events. As to the United States government and the broader American political elite, including the media, the attitude was one of unmitigated hostility. To say nothing of the American Right. Even within the more ‘enlightened’ factions of the political leadership in the United States, our new society was looked upon as a child born out of wedlock, bound to be treated as a bastard of history forever. Thus the basis was laid for a long-term American attitude toward socialism and Soviet Russia.

You mean it still prevails?

Yes, that traditional attitude still plays a part in present American behavior toward us. Ironically, it was the American Declaration of Independence that gave an early and very definite formulation to the thesis that each nation had an inherent right to revolution, a right to rise up in arms and carry out the necessary changes in its social and political system. But in 1917, the wisdom of the Founding Fathers was not drawn upon in formulating the United States' response to the Russian Revolution.

It would have hardly mattered to us just what the American government thought about our Revolution, had not their hostility almost immediately materialized into action. The United States took an active part in the coalition of nations that tried to strangle our Revolution. American troops participated in the invasion of the northern and eastern parts of our country. More important, during our civil war, they rendered significant assistance to our enemies, including supplying loans and delivery of arms. They openly supported counterrevolutionary leaders like Admiral Kolchak, Ataman Semyonov, and others. The United States spent some $4 billion trying to unseat the new Russian government.

But some Sovietologists claim that this new government virtually invited Western hostility by threatening worldwide revolution and breaking off many of Russia's relations with the outside world.

As for the notion of worldwide revolution, I have already dealt with Lenin's position on that point. As for the changes the Revolution brought about in Russia's foreign relations, it should be kept in mind that czarist Russia, while being a colonial power, was itself a semicolony of the West.

[p. 49]

During World War I millions of Russians were used by the Entente as cannon fodder in its imperial rivalry with the German kaiser and his allies. The Russian people had a strong feeling that they were being used, exploited, and were dying for a cause that was wholly unjust and contrary to their vital needs and interests. That feeling was one of the main factors that caused the 1917 Revolution. Therefore, among the very first things the Lenin government did was to take Russia out of the war and abolish the forms of semicolonial dependence on France, Britain, and other countries. This did not mean that we turned away from the world or were refusing to deal with it until and unless it turned socialist. We wanted to deal with the world as it was. But we wanted to deal with it on equal terms, to secure our sovereignty over our own economy and our resources, and to have a foreign policy based on our national interests, rather than the interest rates of foreign banks. In other words, we strove for a democratization of our relations with the West. We changed our relations with Asian countries, too. Among other things, we renounced all the czarist government's colonial claims in Asia.

But did the revolutionary government of Russia express in clear terms its desire to establish relations with other countries?

Certainly. At the very beginning of the Revolution, to be precise, on its second day, we issued an appeal to all countries, including the United States, to end the war and start peace negotiations. Soon afterward, we offered to establish normal relations with the United States. That request was followed in May of 1918 with the proposal to establish economic ties on the basis of mutual benefit. Lenin sent a letter through the chairman of the American Red Cross mission in Russia, Colonel Robbins, outlining his plan for giving the United States trade concessions and establishing other commercial relations. But there was no reply.

Our trade representative to the United States, L. Martens, started active negotiations with American businessmen on economic relations between the two countries. By the end of 1919 he established contacts with about a thousand firms in thirty-two American states. Martens got the impression that a significant part of the American business community favored trade with Soviet Russia. A number of contracts were signed, but the United States government intervened, and Martens was expelled from America as ‘an undesirable alien.’

Was that the time that Armand Hammer, chairman of the Occidental Petroleum Company, arrived in Russia?

Yes, he was among the first Americans to establish business relations with the new Russia. He came on his own initiative, and we welcomed him. Later we issued a broad invitation to other American businessmen to

[p. 50]

come and open up economic relations with us. The estimate was that business with foreign companies could reach the volume of some $3 billion.

That is more than the annual volume of business between the USSR and the United States in recent years!

Yes, even if you disregard the fact that the greenback is now worth but a fraction of what it was then. The potential for our trade with the West was big. From the early days of our Revolution, it was our official policy to develop economic relations with all countries, including the United States. Lenin even stressed at the time, ‘especially with the United States.’ There were several reasons why he put special emphasis on the United States. The size and efficiency of American industries was an important consideration. There was also the fact that our relations with Europe those days were more strained than with the United States. I think Lenin also had in mind the political importance of well-developed Soviet-American economic relations, expecting them to become an essential factor for world stability and peace.

What other American businessmen received concessions from the Soviet government in those early days?

There were quite a few, including the Harriman family.

Did W. Averell Harriman have financial interests in the Soviet Union?

His family firm operated a massive manganese mining concession.

But the U.S. government's attitude toward Moscow remained hostile.

Yes, indeed. The United States took part in all coalitions that tried to follow Winston Churchill's advice at the time: strangle the baby in its crib. When the military interventions failed to accomplish that aim, the West adopted a policy of economic boycott and diplomatic nonrecognition. That was just another, if more passive, form of the same nonacceptance of the Soviet state. The basic presumption remained the same: there can be no common ground between the West and the Soviet Union, whose very existence, as U.S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby alleged in 1920, was dependent on the overthrow of the governments in all other great civilized nations. He also said that there were no coinciding interests that could justify an establishment of normal relations with such an antagonist.

[p. 51]

But did Soviet leaders not look upon the United States as an antagonist as well?

Clearly, we could have made a much stronger case out of the American hostility and aggressiveness against us, but the Soviet government did not stop its efforts to normalize relations between the two countries. Let me quote from the response to Secretary Colby's statements, by Georgi Chicherin, who was then our Commissar for Foreign Affairs: ‘Mr. Colby is very mistaken in his belief that our countries can only have normal relations if a capitalist system prevails in Russia. We hold, on the contrary, that it is essential to the interests of both Russia and North America to establish between them even now, despite the fact that their social and political systems are antithetical, completely proper, lawful, peaceful, and friendly relations, necessary for the development of commerce between them and for the satisfaction of the economic needs of both countries.’^1. However, it was to take quite a few years before American political leaders reached similar conclusions.

It all hardly looked like the enthusiastic beginning of a new relationship.

I was speaking about official policy, but it was only part of a broader picture. We were aware that many Americans held different views. There were many examples of American goodwill, of a realistic approach, and of genuinely generous efforts. We even received some material help from the American people, and we have not forgotten it. In the early twenties, at a time of starvation and great economic strain in our country, about ten thousand Americans came here through the Society for Technical Aid to Soviet Russia. They came to help rebuild our country. American and Soviet workers and specialists working side by side helped build farms and other enterprises. Substantial funds were raised for that purpose in the United States.

Were those Americans also threatened with the loss of their passports?

Actually, they took great personal risks, considering the anticommunist hysteria in the United States at that time. But the feelings of solidarity and the great interest in the unique Russian revolutionary experiment were too strong. At the same time, more and more people from the American business community were finding it profitable to deal with Soviet Russia. We offered them contracts on good terms, and they came. The total number of American businessmen that dealt with us at that time reached two thousand. By the early thirties, some forty American companies were operating here, including such giants as the Ford Motor Company and General Electric. Several thousand American workers and specialists were working

1. Telegram of the People's Commissar on Foreign Affairs of the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic to ambassadors abroad. Sept. 10, 1920. No. 520. ‘Dokumenty Vneshnei Politiki SSSR’ (Documents of the Foreign Policy of the USSR). Vol. 3. Moscow, 1959, pp. 176-77.

[p. 52]

here. Among those who helped construct our first major automobile plant in the city of Gorky were Walter and Victor Reuther, who later became prominent in the American labor movement. Some Americans received high decorations of our state, like Mr. H. Cooper, who assisted us in building our first large-scale hydroelectric power station.

In 1931, no less than 40 percent of the total American export of industrial equipment went to the Soviet Union. That same year, we invited some four thousand specialists to come and work here, and received over one hundred thousand applications. It was a bright page indeed in the history of our cooperation. Common sense and concurrent economic interests proved stronger than any desire to inflict maximum damage on each other during difficult times. After all, we did help ease the strains of depression in the United States, while American businessmen and specialists did contribute to building up our economy.

There are millions of unemployed in the United States now. Why not place an ad in the New York Times for manpower to work in Siberia?

I can imagine the uproar such a move would cause, given the peculiar image of Siberia in the West. But speaking seriously, our proposals go further and deeper than that. We want to remove all obstacles that prevent due development of trade and economic relations between our two countries. This alone would provide for many thousands of new jobs in the United States. And, of course, in a demilitarized economy, which would be possible under real détente, there would also be much more employment than in the present one. The combined economic consequences of détente would considerably improve the overall employment situation in the United States and other Western countries.

But let me return to history. There was a good prelude to future détente in the twenties and the early thirties, but that prelude did not last very long. The year 1931 brought difficulties for trade relations. A campaign got under way in the United States about ‘freedom of religion’ in the Soviet Union. It was quite similar to what we have seen in recent years. There was another campaign about ‘the threat of Soviet dumping,’ followed by the introduction of discriminatory trade measures against us. U.S.-Soviet trade plummeted.

But then at last came the establishment of diplomatic ties in 1933. That was a turning point, wasn't it?

Yes, in at least two respects. First, it laid the groundwork for normal relations in the future. Second, it meant a new departure in the attitude of the White House, which, after sixteen years of nonrecognition, finally ceased to behave as if the Soviet Union did not exist. There was an exchange of letters between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Commis-

[p. 53]

sar for Foreign Affairs Maxim Maximovich Litvinov. At the insistence of Washington, both sides gave a solemn pledge not to interfere in each other's internal affairs. Moreover, both sides pledged to restrain any organizations controlled by or dependent on either of the two governments, from any direct or covert actions damaging the other nation's internal peace, welfare, or security. Among such forbidden practices were agitation and propaganda aimed at a forceful change of either country's political and social order.

It's worthwhile to remember that, for today Washington considers subversive activities against us quite normal, for instance, the activities of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. The United States has been engaged in a whole range of covert or semicovert operations against the Soviet Union in violation of that bilateral agreement of recognition between our two states.

Are you implying that the Soviet Union undertakes nothing of the kind against the United States?

In full accordance with the provisions of the 1933 document I mentioned, we do not encourage any acts ‘overt or covert, liable in any way whatsoever to injure the tranquility, property, order, or security’ of the United States. Nor do we engage in ‘agitation or propaganda having as an aim the violation of the territorial integrity of the United States, its territories or possessions, or the bringing about by force of a change in the political order of the whole, or any part of, the United States....’^2.

The Second World War worked in favor of closer ties.

No doubt. The war itself was a truly remarkable period in Soviet-American relations. Those were years of close cooperation between our political leaders and military establishments, of an unprecedented upsurge of friendly and even fraternal feelings between our peoples. All this, I think, left its mark in national memories. Americans, at that time, especially those involved in combat, were most appreciative of the giant Soviet war effort. I remember an excerpt from an order of one of the American field commanders in Germany, quoted by C.L. Sulzberger in his memoirs: ‘Millions of Russian soldiers and civilians died to save our skins. Just remember that. If propaganda causes you to hate Russians, stop and think. They died for you, too.’^3. It took years of cold war and intense anti-Soviet brainwashing to erase those feelings.

But there were shadows over the honeymoon.

Of course, there were some problems and difficulties. Despite the numerous promises, the opening of the second front in Western Europe had been

2. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1933, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1949), p. 808.

3. C.L. Sulzberger, A Long Row of Candles (New York: 1989), pp. 307-8.

[p. 54]

delayed for two years at a great cost to Soviet lives. The delays naturally produced some bitter feelings among our people. There were also some behind-the-scenes negotiations between the United States and Nazi Germany. Allen Dulles was talking with the Nazis in Bern, Switzerland, and there were other contacts in Ankara, Turkey, as one of our historians documented recently. Looking back, it's also difficult to shrug off the fact that the development of the A-bomb had been kept secret from us. But the overall balance of our relations was definitely positive, and it could have served as a basis for improved relations after World War II.

Instead we moved almost immediately into the Cold War.

The Cold War has become the subject of numerous books, and many others are yet to appear. It remains a hot topic, and our perspective here is quite different from the dominant American view that blames the Soviet Union for the Cold War. We feel that the main responsibility lies squarely on the United States and Britain. Incidentally, that fact has been amply documented by the so-called ‘revisionist’ historians in the United States in the last two decades.

Ate you familiar with the neo-orthodox critique of that school?

Yes, all orthodoxies die hard. But I would not like to intrude into this family quarrel among American historians. I can only explain how the whole situation looked from our point of view.

Did not the Cold War really gain speed when the Soviet Union rejected the Marshall Plan?

As seen from Moscow, the Cold War started much earlier. By the spring of 1945, some weeks prior to the end of World War II, we noticed changes in American policies. President Harry S Truman took a different position from Roosevelt in many areas of Soviet-American relations. Lend-Lease supplies were abruptly terminated the very day the war ended, and some ships already on the way to the USSR were turned back. The promise of a massive reconstruction loan was broken. And, of course, there was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which in our view was not the last salvo of World War II, but rather the first one heralding the Cold War. It was fired to intimidate both the enemy and the ally. Or, as Secretary of War Henry Stimson put it in his diary, ‘to persuade Russia to play ball.’

Next, and also prior to the Marshall Plan, Winston Churchill delivered his notorious speech at Fulton, Missouri, which actually contained the formal declaration of the Cold War. It should be remembered that Churchill's ‘Iron Curtain’ speech was publicly sanctioned by the president of

[p. 55]

the United States, Harry Truman, who was present at the occasion. Then, in February of 1947, the Truman Doctrine was announced, which called for a worldwide anticommunist crusade. Such was the political context in which the Marshall Plan was announced, and that context revealed the plan's true meaning. Later, a version was fabricated that we had rejected ‘a fair deal,’ choosing instead to intensify the Cold War. But when the recently declassified American documents on the Marshall Plan are examined, it will become clear that the offer was deliberately calculated to be rejected by the USSR. American officials were even fearful that the Soviet Union would agree to enter the plan. Privately, James Forrestal was saying at the time, ‘...the most disastrous thing would be if they did [come in].’ Charles Bohlen confessed much later that they had taken ‘a hell of a big gamble’ in not explicitly excluding Russia.^4.

In other words, you definitely felt hostility from the United States after 1945?

We realized the cards had completely changed. We actually even reckoned with a threat of war from Washington.

In Western Europe, after 1945, fear of a Soviet invasion was real. For this reason my family moved to South Africa and I came to Yale University in 1948 to take classes in international relations.

Fears of this kind were there, I imagine. Partially, they were rooted in the very unstable psychological climate of postwar Europe, which had gone through a terrible ordeal between 1939 and 1945. But the major reason for those fears was the ‘Soviet threat’ campaign launched right after World War II to erase feelings of goodwill toward the USSR. Those feelings were genuine and widespread, for wasn't it the Soviet Union that played the decisive role in liberating Europe from the Nazis? There is a very disturbing parallel here with what is going on in the West today, when many irrational prejudices and fears are being exploited again for the same purpose and by the same means. And also like before, the purveyors of the scare, trying to mobilize the public and the elite around an anti-Soviet consensus, may end up succumbing to these false fears themselves. As far as postwar perceptions of the ‘Soviet threat’ are concerned, I'd like to stress that, even allowing for Western fears, we had much more reason to feel threatened. And those feelings were proven quite well founded later, when the real American war plans became known.

War plans? Peace had just arrived.

Well, it makes revealing and painful reading even today when we can see in black and white that some of our worst suspicions about United States

4. Quoted in D. Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), p. 315.

[p. 56]

intentions were more than justified. By the end of 1945, top United States brass had begun preparing for a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Twenty of our largest cities, populated by thirteen million people, were selected as targets for the dropping of 196 A-bombs in a first strike.

We knew nothing about it in Western Europe, and most people there are unaware of these plans even today.

Still they were quite real, as shown by recently declassifled U.S. government papers, such as Report No. 329 of the Joint Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dated December 1945. This, and subsequent reports of this kind, served as a basis for elaborate war planning between 1946 and 1949 under the code names ‘Charioteer,’ ‘Double Star,’ ‘Fleetwood,’ ‘Trojan,’ and some others.

The war preparations climaxed in 1949 with ‘Dropshot,’ which was a plan for an all-out war against the Soviet Union by means of all NATO forces supported by some Middle Eastern and Asian countries. Actually, it was a blueprint for World War UI. Not only was ‘Dropshot’ a scheme for atomic destruction - ‘atomizing,’, as it was routinely called - of our country by some three hundred bomb strikes, the plan also provided for the occupation of our country by American troops and the subsequent eradication of the Soviet system. Diligent Washington strategists even elaborated rules of behavior for future regimes on our territory.^5. A Carthaginian peace was in store for yesterday's ally, which had lost over twenty million lives to save the world from fascism.

It sounds insane, but, after all, it is a matter of record that the great war hero Winston Churchill suggested at the time to blast the USSR with nuclear bombs.

Yes, he did, on at least two occasions. The first time he made this suggestion was soon after the war, as recorded by Alan Brooke in his diary.

Henry Cabot Lodge speaks of a similar episode in his memoirs.

Back in those days, we received many such signals and had to take them very seriously. Those threats were not merely words.

Could it have been just wishful thinking on the part of the military drawing up these war plans?

Some of it was wishful thinking, no doubt. But there was also a real policy, which spoke louder than words. There was a gigantic arms race, the building up of NATO, and the encirclement of our nation with military bases and first-strike bomber forces. If those monstrous plans did remain

5. Anthony C, Brown, ed., Dropshot: The American Plan for World War III Against Russia in 1957 (New York: Dial Press, 1978), p. 45.

[p. 57]

on paper, we don't think it was so much because reason finally prevailed in Washington, as because our growing power, reflected, above all, the rapid termination of the American atomic monopoly. The U.S. government did consider a preventive nuclear war on the USSR as a serious option, but had to reject it when it became clear they could not win it. In 1949, a plan for a nuclear first strike by the U.S. Strategic Air Command, called ‘Trojan,’ was put aside as unrealistic. The National Security Council document NSC-68 described preventive war against the Soviet Union as impossible to win. ‘A powerful blow could be delivered upon the Soviet Union,’ it said, ‘but it is estimated that these operations alone would not force or induce the Kremlin to capitulate....’^6. There were strong doubts about ‘Dropshot,’ as well.

Perhaps it was felt that they had not enough of such bombs.

Not only this. There was also deep apprehension that instead of a nuclear blitzkrieg the United States would have been in for an interminable and exhausting war destroying the whole world. So, by that time, it should have become evident that a military preponderance is of limited value in a nuclear age.

Apparently, this is still not clear.

Well, at that time Washington chose to modify somewhat the methods of cold-war policy; but the goals were left intact. Putting aside a preventive war for the time being, they adopted a doctrine of ‘containment’ as the foundation of United States policy toward the USSR in the Cold War. In essence, that was a strategy aimed at the destruction of our political system by means of applying constant pressure to us at all points. Among other pressures, the arms race was regarded as a way to wear the Soviets down. Since I can hardly compete in the exposition of this doctrine with its architects, let me just quote some key passages from the official bible of containment, NSC-68, which was issued in 1950 and declassified in 1975.

The major instrument of this policy was to be an overwhelming military superiority. ‘Without superior aggregate military strength, in being and readily mobilizable,’ it flatly stated, ‘a policy of “containment” - which is in effect a policy of calculated and gradual coercion - is no more than a policy bluff.’^7. It also stated that, until such a superiority was achieved, any negotiations with the Soviet Union ‘could be only a tactic... desirable... to gain public support for the program [of a military buildup].’^8.

Among other means proposed and then actively used were ‘overt psychological warfare, calculated to encourage mass defections from Soviet allegiance,’ ‘intensification of affirmative and timely measures and operations by covert means in the fields of economic warfare and political and

6. Thomas Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis, eds., Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 431.

7. Ibid., p. 402

8. Ibid., pp. 423-24

[p. 58]

psychological warfare with a view to fomenting and supporting unrest and revolt in selected strategic satellite countries....’^9.

But plans often remain plans. Not always ate such wild ideas necessarily meant to be put to the test.

Oh, no. They certainly were not mere fantasies, but real working guidelines. We did go through this kind of treatment by the United States during the fifties. Another interesting aspect of NSC-68 was an obsession with preserving an innocent defensive look while carrying out this aggressive course. ‘In any announcement of policy and in the character of the measures adopted,’ NSC-68 calmly suggested, ‘emphasis should be given to the essentially defensive character and care should be taken to minimize, so far as possible, unfavorable domestic and foreign reactions.’ All those means were directed toward the ultimate goal: the retraction of Soviet influence and ‘a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system.’^10.

Zbigniew Brzezinski seemed to center his diplomacy on trying to influence internal developments in the Soviet Union.

Brzezinski's reputation as a stubborn advocate of such a policy has been well established. He contributed to its formulation in the past, and, as can well be presumed, did not abandon such efforts when in government. This theme of ‘remaking’ the Soviet state by means of interference in our domestic affairs, doctrinized in the NSC-68, ran through many words and deeds of the Carter administration and has been readily picked up by its successors.

Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin indicated to Henry Kissinger that between 1959 and 1963 a number of opportunities were lost to improve relations between the superpowers.^11.

I would fully agree with the ambassador. It was in the late fifties, after Sputnik, that many Americans began to realize that a nuclear war would be unthinkable, a suicide. Some steps were taken to break the ice of the Cold War. I am thinking of Soviet Premier Khrushchev's visit to the United States in 1959, which was to be followed by a visit by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to the USSR in 1960. Unfortunately, those efforts did not succeed.

You mean following the U-2 incident and the shooting down of Gary Powers over the USSR? This incident has been described by some analysts as a deliberate effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to

9. Ibid., pp. 435-36

10. Ibid., 434, 389

11. Kissinger, The White House Years, p. 113

[p. 59]

prevent Eisenhower from having a successful meeting with Khrushchev in Paris.

I am not aware of CIA schemes in this respect, except that, as recently reported, they were installing some reconnaissance devices aboard Air Force One, in case Eisenhower's visit to Moscow materialized. The U-2 flight was sanctioned by the president himself, who also tried to cover it up in a most clumsy way, which torpedoed the Paris summit conference. The whole episode, while it seemed somewhat foolish and almost accidental, was very revealing: the administration rated routine intelligence gathering higher than a chance to improve relations with the USSR. That opportunity was lost, though it might have led to significant progress.

Other opportunities were missed during the first two years of the Kennedy administration, which was largely immobilized by its ‘missile gap’ start and the Bay of Pigs adventure in Cuba. It took the Kennedy administration the shock of the Cuban missile crisis to start reassessing its cold-war posture toward the Soviet Union. It resulted in the Test Ban Treaty and some other positive steps. But then this process was abruptly interrupted by the president's assassination.

In the final analysis, there is no reasonable alternative to peaceful coexistence. But each relapse in the realization of this cardinal fact of international relations can be tremendously costly. The experience of the sixties is clear proof of this. In the early seventies we did manage to achieve the kind of breakthrough in our relations that we had been seeking unsuccessfully in the late fifties and early sixties. But a whole decade was lost, and it was a very costly loss. It brought a tremendous military buildup. The Cuban missile crisis pushed humanity to the brink of war.

Dean Rusk said ‘eyeball to eyeball.’

Yes. Then the war in Southeast Asia began, which not only caused a national crisis in the United States itself, but also disturbed the international situation for a long time to come. Then there was the Six Day war in the Middle East in 1967. We still live in the protracted aftermath of that conflict, continuing for some fifteen years now. The Middle East remains a hotbed of constant trouble and there is nothing in sight that would resemble a suitable settlement. There were some lesser crises, too. Much of these could have been avoided in a general climate of détente.

But after the tension of the sixties, things did improve in the early seventies.

They certainly did. I would not like to minimize the importance of those events. That was a real moment of truth for United States foreign policy. The entire framework of policies designed in the late forties and early

[p. 60]

fifties began to show serious weaknesses; it was too divorced from reality, too irrelevant to the real problems confronting the United States and the world. It began to dawn on many Americans in the late sixties and early seventies that United States foreign policy had too often been counterproductive.

After all these fluctuations in relations, it looks indeed in the 1980s as if we're right back to the Cold War days of the fifties.

Yes, it does look this way. After all the traumatic experiences that should have taught everyone some solid lessons, the government of the United States is trying to talk the same language and play the same games all over again. But certainly, times have changed. I am sure that history cannot and will not repeat itself. We cannot afford to act as if we had forgotten the experiences of the past, let alone ignore them.

Eugene Rostow, in an interview before he became director of the ACDA, pointed out to me that American power had indeed diminished, for instance, to the extent that, whereas President Eisenhower had been able to send the marines into Lebanon in 1958, Washington was unable to repeat such a performance now.

The United States has not lost this capacity through any weakening of its military power. American military power has been steadily growing since 1958. But the deep changes in the international and domestic American environment have made such operations very costly. The Vietnam war made it quite clear. But now, Rostow's complaints notwithstanding, we see a different trend. Intense efforts are being undertaken to ‘unlearn’ the lessons of Vietnam and bring back military interventionism as an instrument of United States policy.

The cold-war policy being resurrected now was shaped in the late forties and early fifties, ostensibly as a response to the alleged ‘threat’ to American interests - then solemnly identified with those of ‘the free world’ - coming from a single enemy, the Soviet Union. Washington proclaimed that the goal was to be reached by means of the arms race, military bases and alliances, an economic blockade against us, psychological warfare, and other subversive activities. All these presumptions were flawed from the very beginning, for the ‘Soviet threat’ was a hoax. Eventually, many people in America came to understand that their real problems had very little to do with the Soviet Union.

Today, while these problems have multiplied, there is reemerging the primitive view of the USSR as the headquarters of the devil and the ultimate source of all American troubles. But if the United States were to take the most hostile course toward us, would this prevent another Iran or another Nicaragua? Would it help decrease unemployment, solve the

[p. 61]

energy problem, strengthen the dollar, or stop inflation? And most important, would such a policy contribute to the security of the United States?

It is a fact of life that United States military superiority over the Soviet Union is gone forever and will never return. It is simply astounding to find this goal resurrected as official American policy. And what would military superiority bring anyway? The development of ever newer types of mass-destruction weapons has obliterated many traditional concepts, and in fact puts in question the very idea of using military force for rational political purposes.

There is also a long-term change in relationships between the United States and its allies. American allies have become much stronger economically and less dependent on Washington politically. They demand that their interests be taken into account. And some of the overseas adventures undertaken by the United States have caused serious apprehension among them.

Vietnam?

That was just one adventure, but it had very serious consequences. Recently, we have seen more complications in relations between the United States and its allies on what may be the most important problems of foreign policy.

Henry Kissinger stresses, however, that no West German leader can afford to conduct a policy of which Washington would strongly disapprove.^12.

I would not argue with Kissinger over this. Indeed, the United States still enjoys a sort of hegemony within NATO. But wasn't it Kissinger who wrote in the same memoirs how cautious Washington had to be in regard to Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, even though Americans did not particularly like that policy? Of course, America's relations with her allies have undergone some important changes. Where at one time Americans could just command, they now have to use politics and diplomacy.

Undoubtedly, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had their share of setbacks in relations with other Western nations.

Yes, and when Carter ran for president, he and his team even made it one of their important campaign issues that Republicans had failed in West-West relations. But it turned out that the Carter administration was not very successful either in this respect. The same may be said about its successors. It looks like the allies are far from eager to follow the United States into a second cold war. They are making many sounds calculated

12. Ibid., p. 530.

[p. 62]

to please Washington, but generally are rather reluctant to follow through with actions.

There are many indications that the allies' confidence in the United States has been undermined. But certainly, it is still an asymmetrical relationship. If the United States really wants to or needs to, it can probably compel the allies into obedience on a given issue. Kissinger's probably got a point here, although such attempts may become more and more costly both to the United States and her allies.

Summarizing your analysis, what the United States has been trying to adapt to includes the loss of America's military superiority, the new role of the Third World, and changes in West-West relations.

I would like to add one more development: the changes that took place inside the United States. From the early forties to the mid-sixties, foreign policy had an unquestioned priority in American public affairs. It was logical in a way, for that period had begun with a qualitative expansion of the American world role. After the New Deal and World War II, the whole context of American public policy was largely determined by the process of building and maintaining the empire. This outward thrust had a temporary tranquilizing impact on the domestic scene, but not for long. Instead of stabilizing America, the Cold War crusade at a certain stage became the catalyst for a major domestic crisis. Domestic problems demanded urgent and serious attention and called for a reallocation of resources, a deemphasis on global involvement, and a more reasonable foreign policy. The domestic crisis of the late sixties and early seventies provided an important background for new thinking on foreign policy. No real consensus was formed in terms of concrete policy prescriptions, but the overall trend in thinking was unmistakable: American policy had to change.

And Nixon started changing it. But are you saying that it didn't really matter who occupied the White House in 1969, a Republican or a Democrat, since some adaptation to the new realities was unavoidable?

Well, any president would have had to try to adapt in one way or another. I do agree with the notion that it does not matter much in policy terms whether a U.S. president is a Republican or Democrat, though some Democrats, John Kenneth Galbraith for one, think that Republicans have a better reputation in handling relations with the Soviet Union. It seems that there are sometimes more important internal political differences among the Republicans and Democrats than between the two parties themselves.

The overall correlation of political forces is very important, and that correlation was favorable to détente at that time. It does not mean, of

[p. 63]

course, that one need not take into account the personality cast at the top of government, particularly the personal characteristics of the president: his political views, value system, moral qualities, psychology, even his temper. All those things may often be more important than his party affiliation, especially nowadays, when the traditional party distinctions are being blurred.

But do Marxists attach special importance to personality?

Certainly. According to Marxism, the tide of historical events is determined basically and in the long run by objective factors and conditions, economic, social, cultural, etc. But in the day-to-day decisions on the highest state level, when this or that option is chosen within the broad, objectively determined context, the personality of the policy maker can play a significant, sometimes even a crucial, role. I can imagine situations when it could mean a difference between war and peace.

Did it surprise you that Richard Nixon, who based his entire political career on anticommunism, would preside over the policy of détente?

Without trying to look more perceptive than I or my colleagues in Moscow were, I would say that to a certain degree we expected it. Let me remind you that we had just started work at this institute in 1968, when Nixon ran for president. I remember the first articles and analytical papers prepared by the staff of the institute. There was a clear consensus among scholars here, shared by specialists in our government, that some important changes in Soviet-American relations were imminent, regardless of who would be in power in Washington.

How did you reach that conclusion?

Well, we analyzed the major objective factors that I've already referred to - the changes in both international and domestic American situations. Among the more fluid developments, we found the way Republican politics had evolved in 1967-68 rather suggestive. Here was a party, that, by veering sharply to the Right in the early sixties, provided a backdrop and a pressure lever for Lyndon Johnson's policy of escalation of the war in Vietnam. However, when it had become clear that the war could not be won, many Republicans, including Nixon, who actually inherited the Goldwater movement, began looking for alternatives. In terms of public policy, they were beginning to realize that the way out of the crisis lay in revising the broad context of East-West relations, in trying to negotiate that context with the Soviet Union. That shift in Republican thinking was an indication that a broad consensus was emerging in the United States power elite in favor of an important change. In terms of partisan politics, the GOP under-

[p. 64]

stood very well that it could only hope to regain power as ‘a party of peace.’

Still, it remains peculiar that the beginning of détente, the first visit of an American president to the USSR, the first SALT agreement, and similar developments are connected with Nixon's name.

Trying to estimate the precise contribution of a personality to a given historical event is one of the most difficult tasks for a historian. It fell on Nixon and Kissinger to lead the United States government when progress along the road of détente began. We give them their due. Of course, there has been a whole stream of commentary in America about how paradoxical it was that none other than Richard Nixon, the red-baiter and witch hunter, who practiced McCarthyism even before Joe McCarthy got into the business, started to shift from confrontation to negotiation in U.S.-Soviet relations. In a way, Nixon's reputation certainly facilitated the shift to détente, for no one in his right mind would suspect Dick Nixon, the instigator of the Alger Hiss case and the kitchen debater in Moscow in 1959, of trying to sell America down the river. Hubert Humphrey may not have been able, had he been elected in 1968, to appease the conservatives as effectively. But this does not mean that there was any ‘new Nixon.’ We never bought that. Nixon stayed the same; it was the situation that changed. I think Nixon has always been, first and foremost, after political success: to get elected and reelected and get himself a prominent place in twentieth-century history.

In the late forties and fifties, Nixon saw the road to success in rabid anticommunism and anti-Sovietism. In the late sixties and early seventies, however, he was enough of a realist to see that a different tactic was needed if he were to get to the White House. This time, it was ‘negotiation instead of confrontation,’ ‘a generation of peace,’ détente with the Soviet Union and other socialist nations.

Nixon was clever enough to recognize he had to shift gears. Was he more successful in coping with the big changes on the international chess board than his successors?

If you take the final results, he definitely was, if only because the political situation in the U.S. pushed him very strongly in that direction. But still, the process of adjustment even then was far from being any smooth and ready acceptance of the new limits on American power. There was quite a lot of bucking the tide, double-dealing, trying to win time. Nixon came to power on the promise to end the Vietnam war, but he prolonged that war for five more years and even broadened it by his invasion of Cambodia. It took a lot of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and American lives, and a lot of turmoil in American society, to compel Nixon to fulfill his pledge. Gener-

[p. 65]

ally speaking, Nixon's policies in most of the Third World retained a basic cold-war pattern. Latin America, and particularly Chile, are clear examples.

Iran is another case in point.

Of course, active American interference in Iran's affairs started as early as 1953, when the CIA helped overthrow the constitutional government of Premier Mohammad Mossadegh in Tehran. But it was precisely during the Nixon-Kissinger years that the United States set about turning Iran into a major stronghold of American power in the Middle East by enormous arms sales and other means. Doing that, the United States was literally laying a time bomb under its own positions in the region, which was to go off sooner or later. The revolution in Iran was the inevitable result of this long-time pattern of abuse of force by the United States in Iran and in the Middle East as a whole. The amazing thing is that the defeat of the cold-war policy in Iran has been used as a pretext to revive the same bankrupt policy. To go back to the early seventies, there were many manifestations of cold-war inertia in American foreign policy at that time. But there was also an important shift in American perceptions of the world situation and, step by step, in practical policy.

And Vietnam played the decisive role in bringing that shift about?

The American failure in Vietnam played a very serious role. But I think the process was more complicated and prolonged. Indications of a new global situation, implying the end of American supremacy and the necessity of coming to terms with the new realities, were numerous long prior to the Vietnam fiasco. Take, for instance, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Although strategic parity between the United States and the Soviet Union did not exist at that time, the crisis clearly demonstrated that the United States could not simply dictate its terms and do whatever it wished. The situation in Europe also developed in such a way as to call for greater American restraint and flexibility. Had not the old United States policy been bound by so many traditions, prejudices, and, most important, by the powerful interests that so often prevented America from facing reality, the reappraisal could have taken place before the Vietnam war, thus making it altogether avoidable. But, alas, it took the tragedy of Vietnam to make certain truths evident to both the public and the policy makers.

Who, from the Soviet point of view, is considered the most impressive American president of the last half century?

Doubtlessly, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

[p. 66]

Because he extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union and became your ally in the antifascist coalition during World War II?

These are, naturally, very important reasons. Any nation, like any human being, tends to judge others by the way it is treated by them. It may be especially true in this particular case, since here we deal with an attitude toward the Soviet Union and its people during the most trying times of their history. Still, our estimate of Roosevelt as the most outstanding president of the past decades isn't explained solely by his impact on Soviet-American relations, which did reach a peak during his presidency. A lot has been written in our country about that period of American history, including a number of books on Roosevelt personally. A great number of our people are quite familiar with his life and actions. I think he is also appreciated for the New Deal, which significantly alleviated the hardships of the American people in the wake of the Great Depression. And, of course, he is greatly respected for his generally consistent antifascist policy during World War II.

But if Roosevelt had lived a bit longer the Cold War would have begun under his administration, and he might have been viewed in the Soviet Union differently. The Soviet attitude toward Winston Churchill did change after 1945.

Churchill was viewed differently from Roosevelt throughout World War II. He had a long anti-Soviet record behind him. Roosevelt always had a much more favorable image here. And I am not at all sure that, had Roosevelt lived, the situation would have developed the way it did. There is no doubt that after V-Day, when our common foe had been crushed, relations were bound to change. Many difficulties, contradictions, and tensions were inevitable, given our disagreements over the organization of the postwar world and different attitudes toward the process of revolutionary change stimulated by the destruction of fascism. Still, I personally think the Cold War was avoidable. And if there was a Western leader able to contribute to such a development, it was Franklin D. Roosevelt. However, this is an opinion that can never be verified. History does not recognize the subjunctive mood.

FDR apparently remains a controversial figure in America, judging by the way his centennial was observed there in February 1982.

Yes, the official attitude of the U.S. government to that event was rather peculiar. The Reagan administration even rejected such a modest proposal as putting up FDR photo exhibits in U.S. embassies around the world. If you compare Washington's apparent unwillingness to remind people of the Roosevelt legacy in 1982 to the lavish celebrations of,

[p. 67]

say, the Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson anniversaries, FDR, indeed, begins to look like a controversial figure by today's Washington standards.

But Ronald Reagan does invoke Roosevelt's name from time to time in his speeches.

Yes, but usually in a profoundly anti-Rooseveltian context. Or he says that he voted for Roosevelt four times, but each time hoped Roosevelt would change his policies.

Do you think such an attitude has ideological reasons?

Of course. The brand of politics and ideology that gained an upper hand in Washington in 1980 is rooted in the anti-New Deal tradition dating back to the Alf Landon campaign and the Liberty League. The American Right in the last five decades has been obsessed with what it regarded as ‘the Roosevelt revolution,’ working hard to undo its legacy. The Right has certainly whittled down that legacy, but the Reagan administration is seen by the right wing as the first real chance to do away with it.

How about Harry Truman?

I would say he may have one of the worst images here of all the postwar U.S. presidents, which is understandable if you take into account the sharp reversal in U.S. policy over which he presided.

Jimmy Carter put on his White House desk the Truman sign ‘The buck stops here.’ Some Americans rank Truman among the greatest.

I received the same impression on my very first visit to the United States in 1969. It somewhat puzzled me then. First, I tended to think that ‘Give 'em hell, Harry!’ was a popular American slogan because it expressed habitual American arrogance. But then I came to the opinion that this attitude toward Truman might have grown from American nostalgia for those unique early postwar years. Everything seemed to Americans to be so simple and clear, durable and attainable back in those days. Only a few sensed that such a situation was due to temporary and exceptional circumstances.

The second most popular American president in the Soviet Union in the last fifty years?

I would say John F. Kennedy.

[p. 68]

In spite of the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis?

Yes, and even in spite of a new mad round in the arms race launched under the phony pretext of a ‘missile gap.’ Yes, all those blunders were made, but Kennedy was statesman enough to realize that U.S.-Soviet relations had to be changed; that the Cold War was not a natural state of affairs. Hence, the remarkable speech delivered at the American University, postulating for the first time in many years a new approach to world politics, to relations with the Soviet Union. It was essentially the approach that almost a decade later we learned to call détente.

After that historic speech, there was the nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the first significant step on the way to arms control. We are talking about another hypothetical situation here, but many people in the USSR are convinced that the Kennedy assassination prevented a major positive shift in Soviet-American relations. This, as I have already mentioned, was not the only lost opportunity in American-Soviet relations. Even now I believe that we could have achieved much more under Dwight D. Eisenhower. Sometimes I wonder whether this president is being given his due, at least as far as his foreign policy is concerned. Of course, for most of his presidency, he stayed under the sinister shadow of John Foster Dulles, anticommunist crusader number one, a great moralizer and a great connoisseur of ‘brinkmanship.’ Part of the responsibility for disrupting efforts to improve the international situation, including the ill-timed U-2 adventure, lies with Eisenhower himself. Nevertheless, it was under his administration, and with his participation, that the first attempts were made to break the ice of the Cold War. It is very remarkable that Eisenhower, a professional soldier, whose whole life was devoted to military service, happened to be the first political leader in the United States to alert the country to the dangers of militarism. Actually, he turned his political testament into a warning to the nation about the military-industrial complex.

So you think what ultimately became known as détente might have started as early as Eisenhower's second term?

Here we are faced with another unverifiable historical situation. But your suggestion seems quite plausible to me. And if it had occurred, the 1970s would have been different.

President Nixon must be rated rather highly by the Russians.

Yes, because it was under Nixon, with his personal participation, that the turnabout from confrontation to negotiation, from the Cold War to what we call détente, took place. But it may be too early to pass a final judgment on Nixon, if only because a statesman's reputation is often established not so much on the basis of his own accomplishments as by comparing them

[p. 69]

with those of his successors. A successor may turn out to be so miserable that even a mediocre politician can grow into an impressive historical figure. And vice versa: quite a big-time statesman may be overshadowed by a successor with even greater accomplishments.

The latter perspective doesn't endanger Nixon as yet?

No, he seems to be safe, at least through 1984. You know I keep wondering about Nixon. From my personal experience of dealing with many American political and public figures, I have the impression that on leaving public office they tend to become or at least look wiser, more balanced and farsighted, more statesmanlike. Perhaps it is sheer hindsight. Perhaps government office imposes some strict limits on people's natural capacities. But Nixon and many leading figures of his administration provide a striking exception to this rule. In their case we witness just the opposite.

As far as Nixon is concerned, I think it's more than the psychological trauma of Watergate and compulsory retirement. Nixon happened to occupy the presidency at an historical juncture that had a strong compelling logic about it. That logic led him to make some important and realistic decisions. In other words, it may well be that history lifted Nixon beyond his own personality and background. But then, removed from the White House, he again decoupled himself from history and returned, so to say, to his initial dimensions - intellectual, political, and personal, Détente had been the peak of his political career, but he started deriding it, as if trying to apologize for what he had done. Sometimes he seemed to be revising his own record to make himself acceptable for some political role in the future.

You don't think Nixon will go down in history as a great president?

History sometimes plays very strange tricks with reputations. So let us abstain from this type of guesswork. But it would be fair, I think, if history records that, as president, he led his country through a very difficult period and made a rather significant contribution to defining a new, more realistic American role in the world. I am speaking, of course, only about foreign policy, although even there Nixon's record is contradictory. As for Nixon's domestic policy, it was quite a different story, crowned by Watergate, though the trend toward an imperial presidency was not started by Nixon, but has been a long tradition in American history.

Nixon toured Europe in the spring of 1980 to promote his book The Real War. He observed, for instance, that during the entire length of his presidency ‘we were at war with the Soviet Union.’

If that was so, where was his ‘generation of peace,’ which he proclaimed after the 1972 summit in Moscow? He was so proud of his achievements

[p. 70]

then that he was even criticized by Kissinger for his ‘euphoria.’ All this is just another clear manifestation of the matters we have already discussed. I recall Nixon in 1974, during his last summit with our leaders, when he stressed at all public occasions his friendly attitude toward the USSR and his personal ‘friendship’ with our president.

To a certain degree I deplore the statements he is making now. In a way, I feel sorry for Nixon, because he is now undermining, degrading, the one big achievement of his lifetime, the transition to détente. What else will remain of his political achievements in history? His Alger Hiss affair? Or the Checkers speech?

In May 1980, Nixon declared in West Germany that Afghanistan was just a phase in World War III.

I ask myself how people who once occupied such high positions in their society can throw words around so easily. If you label each international development you don't like as another start of World War III, you gradually lose all sense of reality, while to perceive the world as it really is remains a sine qua non for a sensible foreign policy.

How was President Ford's role assessed in the Soviet Union?

We give President Ford his due for his serious political achievements, such as the Vladivostok agreement on SALT II in 1974. But as soon as the Right put pressure on him, he began falling back onto a hard-line policy. I have in mind such actions as freezing the SALT talks, adopting rearmament programs, even trying to banish the word détente from American political vocabulary. Later, having lost the election, he was said to believe that panicking in the face of the right-wing pressure had been a mistake and was possibly a reason why he lost. Sorry to say, Ford's election-time behavior was not exceptional in American political practice.

How would you size up the impact of the Carter administration on U.S.-Soviet relations?

In the light of what took place in Soviet-American relations in 1979-80, one is tempted to isolate his administration as the major source of all troubles in this field. But, the more you listen nowadays to Nixon, Kissinger, or Reagan, the easier it is to resist this temptation. And I want to be fair. The negative trends in our relations started well before Carter.

The first counterattacks against détente were felt as early as in 1972. Later, in the last months of the Nixon administration, the Pentagon significantly curbed the president's freedom of diplomatic action, the result being that he came to Moscow in 1974 with very few substantive subjects to talk about in connection with SALT II. At the end of 1974, Congress wrecked

[p. 71]

the Soviet-American trade agreement. Later, President Ford froze the American position at the SALT talks and introduced a major rearmament program. Far from reversing the trend, Carter gave it a strong boost. But at the beginning of the Carter presidency, developments were not so one dimensional.

What was the initial attitude toward Carter in the USSR?

If Mr. Carter was practically unknown in his own country, what would you expect from us? We did know something about him, of course, and, as usual in such cases, there were some facts that could give cause for concern, just as other facts could be interpreted as hopeful signs. After Carter became president, the Soviet government felt it appropriate to make it absolutely clear that it remained ready to improve relations with the United States and to work together in spheres of common interests. But our attitude was not reciprocated.

Again, I would not like to simplify the situation. There were intense struggles in the American power elite at that time over foreign policy. Carter gave some hopes to the hard-liners, but his emerging administration as a whole was not committed to wrecking arms control and détente. So, the Right began portraying Carter as a liberal and creating new groups to put pressure on the administration, trying to block any positive move in Soviet-American relations and, at the same time, to create incentives for Carter to move rightward. The Committee on the Present Danger was set up almost like a shadow government, with its strong elitist credentials, intimate connections with the power centers, and its overall ‘respectable’ facade. The older hawkish groups became more active.

What do you think made Carter yield to those pressures?

If the Carter administration had been unequivocally committed to détente, it would have been able to withstand those pressures and provide constructive leadership both in the Congress and in the realm of public opinion. But the problem was, first, that Carter himself did not have either an indubitable position or clear-cut commitments. Second, the antidétente camp had rather prominent representatives within the administration, like Zbigniew Brzezinski and James Schlesinger. Third, Carter overestimated his ability to forge a broad consensus that would have satisfied all groups. As a result, Carter's approach to foreign policy was initially characterized by attempts to include in his policy important elements of both the prodétente and the antidétente positions. This ambivalence not only damaged Soviet-American relations, but created a justified impression that Carter indeed did not have a coherent foreign policy. Once you do create such an impression, you shouldn't wonder why you cannot mobilize support for your actions.

[p. 72]

You mentioned Soviet signals to Mr. Carter.

Even before the inauguration, Mr. Carter had established contacts with the Soviet government. Apparently, he had been led to suspect that we would try to ‘test’ him in the course of the lame-duck period or in the first weeks of his presidency. He seemed very apprehensive: one could see that he had heard a lot of bad things about us. Well, he got very positive answers here, like ‘Don't worry, we do not intend to “test” the new president; we are ready to work for improved relations with the United States.’ Really, the Soviet Union took care not to create any difficulties during the process of transition from one administration to the other in the important field of Soviet-American relations.

Then came President Leonid Brezhnev's speech at Tula in January 1977, just on the eve of the inauguration.

Yes, President Brezhnev spoke of the tremendous effort that had gone into making détente a reality, of the necessity not to waste the assets of détente that had been accumulated. He said, ‘We are ready to make, together with the new U.S. administration, a major new stride in relations between our two countries.’ He called for a speedy conclusion of the SALT II treaty, to be followed quickly with SALT III talks, for new measures against nuclear proliferation, for reaching an agreement at the Vienna talks on mutual reduction of armaments and armed forces in Central Europe. He also clarified some important points connected with Soviet military doctrine and concepts that had become subjects of heated discussions in the United States. The Soviet government was saying that the road to better relations was open, that we were ready to continue détente. But the response from Washington that followed in a few weeks was of a different sort.

You mean the human rights campaign. But steps like sending the personal letter on White House stationery to dissident Sakharov were widely criticized in the United States by Time magazine, James Reston, and many others.

But the letter was there, and subsequent events showed that it couldn't be regarded as an isolated step. The sudden ‘human rights’ campaign started out hand in hand with an abrupt change in the political position of the United States on some of the most important issues of its relations with the USSR. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance visited Moscow in March 1977, and the proposals on SALT II he presented here constituted a very sharp break with the Vladivostok agreement of 1974.

Did it come as a shock to you?

Well, we had indications that things were developing in this direction. But it did not make things much easier. I remember those days very well. My

[p. 73]

impression at the time was that our representatives at the talks with Vance and his team were expecting even up to the last moment of his stay in Moscow that Vance would put something more realistic on the table in the end, at least as a reserve for the next stage of negotiations. It was hard for them to believe that his original package was all he could offer, that he could have traveled all the way to Moscow to present us with proposals that were so blatantly one-sided and so openly aimed at getting unilateral advantages for the United States. Soon it became clear that Secretary Vance's first mission to Moscow was doomed.

Would you have considered Kissinger capable of embarking upon such an abortive mission?

I didn't expect it of Vance either - he personally deserves respect as a statesman and a diplomat. Frankly, even today I don't quite understand how all that happened. As for Kissinger, if you had asked me several years ago, I might have said no, he would not have done it. But now, in the light of his recent speeches and writings, I begin to have some serious doubts.

Henry Kissinger emerged from the huge financial womb of the Rockefellers, like Vance, Brzezinski, and more than half of the top of the Carter government.

I do not know a single American administration in recent decades that did not have someone in one way or another connected with the Rockefellers, or organizations in which they took an active part, like the Council on Foreign Relations or the Trilateral Commission. This goes beyond the Rockefellers, however, since they are only the most visible and publicized part of the American corporate elite, which, we believe, is served by the American foreign policy establishment.

So, the very first talks arranged by the Carter administration turned out to be a flop.

Yes, they were a failure. The talks made a very disappointing impression here. Most important, they made us more apprehensive of the whole approach of the new administration and its future policies. The very first months of the Carter presidency raised the question of continuity of the U.S. policy. The previous administration had concluded a number of agreements with the Soviet Union. But would Carter consider those agreements binding for himself? Or did the new administration want to start it all over from square one? Those were the questions we had to ask ourselves. Soon it became clear that a cycle pattern was emerging in our relations.

[p. 74]

But frankly, in the West it is felt, on the contrary, that these perpetual hot-cold tactics are typical for the way foreign policy is conducted by the USSR.

The Soviet foreign policy has been highly consistent over the years. I think that at least in this respect even the West cannot deny us a good reputation. As to the American policy, especially under Carter, just look at the record. The year 1977 was off to a bad start, but late spring and summer improved things a little bit, and by October we were able to reach an understanding on SALT II and the Middle East. In a few days the latter was in fact cancelled, and in 1978 things were going downhill again. This time the events took an even more serious turn with Brzezinski's visit to China and the NATO meeting in Washington in May. By summer the relations were probably worse than at any time in the seventies.

So, during the Carter administration détente went down the drain?

I don't think you have used correct words. In my opinion, détente is not dead. But it is true that from 1977, Soviet-American relations progressively lost stability. Each cycle turned out to be more detrimental to détente than the previous one. What was also very damaging to our relations was the increasingly hysterical anti-Soviet tone, not only in the mass media, but in official pronouncements and propaganda as well. Instigating this campaign, the Carter and Reagan administrations ignored another vital link in our relations - between substance and atmosphere. That link was well described by Kissinger, who warned in 1974 that ‘we cannot have the atmosphere of détente without the substance. It is equally clear that the substance of détente will disappear in an atmosphere of suspicion and hostility.’ As a result, we have ended up with neither the atmosphere nor the substance of détente. Of course, as I have already mentioned, this deterioration of relations proceeded unevenly, especially during the Carter administration. There were moments of hope that things would change for the better.

You have in mind Vienna?

Yes, the SALT II treaty was finally signed in June 1979 in the Austrian capital. It was a very important event, indeed. It was not only a step forward in arms control, but also an achievement, against great odds, that could have a positive impact on other arms-control talks, and on the general political atmosphere. But the treaty had to be ratified, and it was clear that there would be a bitter struggle in Washington over the ratification process. The subsequent events hardly need to be recounted. All in all, I would say that if there is a historical example of how an important treaty can be wasted, here it is.

[p. 75]

Does SALT II still have a chance?

I hope so. But I think we should now be concerned about the fate of the whole SALT process. Each month of further delay in the talks, especially when accompanied by a constant growth of the military budget and the launching of new weapons systems, brings grave new dangers. But to return to Carter, I don't think the president was lying in 1976 when he pledged his adherence to the ideas of arms control and military spending cuts and even proclaimed as his ultimate goal the exclusion of reliance on nuclear weapons altogether. Nor do I doubt his sincerity in including some strong proponents of arms control in his administration. But, obviously, he was no less sincere expressing quite the opposite views at other times. And what may have counted even more than his sincerity was the desire to consolidate his political support and secure his own reelection as president. Comparing Carter of 1976 and Carter of 1980, I can't help recalling a well-known saying about the road to hell being paved with good intentions.

Summing up, I would say that there was an erosion of the entire framework of Soviet-American relations, which, by the beginning of 1980, climaxed in an open turnaround from détente to cold war.

But this process of erosion, as you yourself said earlier, had started before Carter became president.

Right. The narrowing of possibilities for positive development of Soviet-American relations started earlier. The first link to be lost was trade, not in the sense that trade has stopped altogether, or that there is no hope that the situation could be improved eventually, but in 1972-73 trade was regarded as a very promising field of mutual cooperation, as well as a matter of major political importance. Then the Jackson-Vanik amendment was passed by the U.S. Congress, which killed the trade agreement, and the situation deteriorated.

Kissinger claims that the Jackson-Vanik amendment was a clear reaction to the sudden exit tax required by your government for Jewish emigration. This decision apparently ‘dumbfounded’ both Nixon and Kissinger.

As far as I remember, by the time the Jackson-Vanik amendment was passed, the question of the exit tax no longer existed, and therefore did not have any direct connection with the congressional decision. As for the exit tax itself, it was an attempt to solve one of the problems that arose in conjunction with a new development - the increase in emigration. The problem had to do with the state spending huge sums of money on educating people who then left the country. This subject was thoroughly discussed, and finally the decision was made not to recover those sums.

[p. 76]

Well, after the trade link was seriously weakened, there came the turn of the European link. Before 1975, Americans had been constructive, although not very active, in their attitude toward enhancing security and cooperation in Europe. But after 1975, their position underwent a drastic change. One could even say that they actually started trying to sabotage the process of rapprochement in Europe. This approach manifested itself so vividly in Belgrade and then in Madrid that it produced a certain resentment even among some of the Western European allies of the United States. The concentration of the American delegation on the issues of human rights was a convenient smoke screen for the lack of a constructive U.S. position on other important issues. After Europe it came the turn of the Middle East. In October 1977, Andrei Gromyko and Cyrus Vance published a joint document on the principles of a mutual approach to Middle East problems. This was a very important achievement, which came as a result of a long process of overcoming difficulties and continuous efforts to bring our points of view closer. But a few days later the United States broke its pledge to work together with the Soviet Union toward finding a solution to the problem.

Why do you think the United States abandoned the joint approach?

One of the reasons was apprehension voiced by some of the president's assistants that such an approach would complicate the administration's relations with influential segments of the Jewish community. So, the Carter administration took one more link out of Soviet-American relations - joint efforts to settle one of the most dangerous regional conflicts. With that link gone, hopes for a successful resolution of the conflicts in this most unstable region of the world faded away. Thus, gradually, we arrived at where only one major link still remained: arms control, a joint effort to contain the arms race. This, of course, is also the most important link, directly connected with the main issue of Soviet-American relations: prevention of a nuclear war. But because of negative developments in other fields, this link was also seriously weakened, and when everything came to be, so to say, hanging on one hook, Soviet-American relations became almost entirely dependent on SALT, with almost no other arrangements to take the pressure off SALT and arms control in general.

You mean that the now politically isolated matter of arms control, including SALT, became much more vulnerable?

Yes. I hoped, and I am sure such hopes were shared by many, that if things had taken the due course, with the treaty ratified and both sides fulfilling their obligations, a gradual restoration of the damaged links would have become possible. But, unfortunately, those hopes have been dashed. If and when we again begin to put Soviet-American relations in order, and I hope

[p. 77]

it will be in the not-too-distant future, we should keep these lessons in mind. Curbing the arms race will naturally remain the most important task. But other relations shouldn't be downgraded either, both for their own sake and because otherwise any progress in arms control itself will be more difficult to attain. On the other hand, an acceleration of the arms control process, so needlessly and incredibly delayed over the last few years, will be a major precondition for strengthening détente as a whole.

In other words, you believe in linkage?

Not at all.

But how is your viewpoint different from the old Kissinger concept of linkage, or from Reagan's insistence that there can be progress in arms limitation talks only if the Soviet Union withdraws its troops from Afghanistan, changes its African policy, and so on?

Well, no one can deny that all spheres of our relations with the United States are interconnected in one way or another, and that their improvement in one sphere creates greater mutual trust, a better overall climate, which is helpful for improvement in other spheres. Conversely, deterioration in one sphere can affect the situation in others.

The big question, however, is not whether these interconnections exist, but what we do about them. Here one must have a clear set of priorities. None of the spheres of Soviet-American relations is more important than arms control. Thus, if you really care about preventing war and stopping the arms race, how can you possibly put a brake on arms control on the grounds that the two sides are at odds over some local problem? How can you put forward as a precondition of solving one difficult problem the solution of other problems, sometimes even more difficult? This is a sure way of pushing oneself into a dead end. So, what linkage does is stimulate the interconnections to work for a deterioration of relations in all spheres, including the most vital.

What's the alternative?

As an absolute minimum, to work for the improvement of relations in whatever sphere is possible, to try to isolate arms control and disarmament as an area where progress must continue despite all the difficulties in other areas.

Incidentally, SALT I did not take place in an ideal atmosphere. And it is not only the United States that grumbles about some aspects of the other side's policy. The Soviet Union has more than enough reasons to be displeased with American policy. Following the logic of linkage, both sides should cease the dialogue, or rather restrict it to an exchange of enraged

[p. 78]

accusations and wait for the problems causing their discontent to settle themselves. But it will never happen.

On the other hand, as we have witnessed in the last three years, arms control will be up against great obstacles if the overall political atmosphere between the Soviet Union and the United States deteriorates. Therefore, we must strive to improve the overall atmosphere and increase mutual understanding, which would strengthen peace and facilitate progress in the main area of relations - arms control and disarmament.

President Nixon launched a system of yearly summit meetings with Soviet leaders. That development has been abrogated.

Yes, the already established practice of meetings between leaders of our two countries has been almost discontinued. And this does not help, of course. At the same time, I would say that although they are tremendously important, we should not wait for a summit meeting to improve the political climate.

Following the 1961 nonaligned conference in Belgrade, Nehru, Sukarno, Nkrumah, and Keita were sent as emissaries to Moscow and Washington, urging such regular pourparlers between the superpowers.

Summits are important, yes. But the more powerful an instrument of international politics, the greater the care and precision it should be used with. Otherwise, results may be different from those intended. A summit handled clumsily or unskillfully can have dangerous consequences. Summit meetings turned into empty routine can jeopardize the whole structure of existing relations. We are for summits with definite substance.

Both Nixon and Kissinger express the same view in their memoirs. What was your impression of the Kissinger memoirs?

My impression is somewhat ambivalent. For a student of the United States, reading this book is a must. The author is often impressive and sometimes brilliant. At the same time he is so famous and well established that he could have afforded to avoid some of the distortions, especially concerning Soviet foreign policy. Attempts to revise the historical record are always disappointing. Could they have been inspired by a desire to update his record according to the latest political fashions? I wonder. But too often it looks like a projection of the present hard anti-Soviet posture back onto recent history.

Kissinger presents himself as an absolute success story in his memoirs.

Well, no memoirs are written for the purpose of downgrading their authors. The question is how you define success in this particular case. I cannot get

[p. 79]

rid of an impression that Kissinger almost apologizes for détente, and by doing so presents his success story in terms of deceiving and manipulating the Russians, getting unilateral gains for the American side, etc. I am sure that he would not have achieved anything of real value in Soviet-American relations had this been his principal method of work. No doubt, Henry Kissinger does have significant achievements to his credit. But they were due to his realistic inclinations and to his ability to perceive and locate spheres of mutual interests and then to search for mutually acceptable solutions within the framework of those interests. Personally, I'm more impressed with Kissinger the statesman, who said in 1974. ‘There can be no peaceful international order without a constructive relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union,’ than with Kissinger the politician, who several years later tried in his memoirs to downgrade the importance of what was done in our relations in the first half of the seventies. And of course, I find more attractive, both as a political figure and a scholar, Henry Kissinger proving that military power doesn't translate itself into political influence anymore, and that ‘the prospect of a decisive military advantage, even if theoretically possible, is politically intolerable since neither side will passively permit a massive shift in the nuclear balance,’ than the Kissinger who was instrumental in defining as a precondition for the ratification of the SALT II treaty a new round of the arms race, or the Kissinger accusing Messrs. Reagan and Haig of being soft on the Russians.

What particular inaccuracies have you found in his memoirs concerning Soviet-American relations?

It was my impression during the first summits that Kissinger was sincerely jubilant about the success of those summits, and I strongly doubt the authenticity of the description of those events in his memoirs. In my recollection of the 1972 summit, the mood of the American delegation was quite different from the rather cynical, self-confident attitude described by Kissinger. They came very nervous about our response to the bombing of Hanoi and the mining of the Haiphong harbor, committed a couple of weeks before, and about a possible breakdown of the summit, which would have been a very painful blow for the Nixon administration in that year of domestic turmoil and the presidential election. And when it became clear that, while condemning those American actions, our leadership was responsible and courageous enough to realize that it was not the time to claim an eye for an eye, but the time for a major breakthrough in our relations, the Americans were greatly impressed. I remember one of them musing privately about the steps of history being heard in the Granovitaya Chamber of the Kremlin during the first official reception. Even those hard-boiled people of the Nixon administration felt that a major historical turnaround was happening and had great hopes for the future. That was

[p. 80]

a very remarkable and symptomatic feeling, but it is almost completely absent from the memoirs.

How did the Carter foreign policy look to you compared to the Kissinger approach?

Kissinger, in effect, attempted to transcend the cold-war pattern, even though the attempts might have been at times inadequate and limited by the traditional balance-of-power perception. Of course, some people from the Carter team did all they could to differentiate between their policy and the Kissinger policy, but ultimately they failed to come up with a realistic alternative. It was nearly impossible to define any comprehensive design in Carter's foreign policy. In the beginning there were some conceptual innovations concerning North-South relations, arms control, new priorities for American foreign policy; then, after many fluctuations and zigzags, it all came down to a repatched cold-war pattern, completely disregarding all the lessons of recent history. This brings us again to the real challenge American foreign policy faces today - that of an accommodation to the new realities of the international situation, to the changing foreign and domestic conditions under which United States policy is shaped. Sometimes this process of accommodation can be delayed or checked, as is happening now, but the basic trend is irreversible, and it will reassert itself again.

Comparing Kissinger and Brzezinski, what in your view is the main difference between them as diplomatic managers?

Even putting aside their very different intellectual and political potentials, there still remain, I think, some important distinctions of style. The major point is that Kissinger is above all a true disciple of the Realpolitik school, a realist in the sense of recognizing only the more tangible factors of policy, while Brzezinski is an ideologue, whose views are colored to a very large extent by ideas and approaches springing from a priori ideological schemes. You can see many such people in the Reagan administration, though perhaps Brzezinski was better educated.

And what are the implications of this difference for Soviet-American relations?

One is that, in Kissinger's view, the Soviet Union is but another actor on the international scene, and, depending on circumstances, may be regarded as being anything from an irreconcilable foe to a more traditional rival, or even a partner. According to Brzezinski, the USSR is above all an ‘illegitimate’ kind of society with which normal durable relations are impossible unless basic internal changes take place in it. I think it goes

[p. 81]

beyond the personal differences between the two men, because actually what we have here are reflections of the two influential schools of American political thinking.

Kissinger seemed more preoccupied with East-West relations, while some feel that Brzezinski concentrated on West-West and North-South problems.

True, the shifting focus of attention toward West-West and North-South relations was one of Brzezinski's favorite ideas in the framework of trilateralism. It was all covered up by sophisticated rhetoric, but the real essence was unmistakable - to rationalize a freeze on further progress toward détente in East-West relations, and a retreat from solving the most acute problems in this area. As a result, neither West-West nor North-South, to say nothing of East-West, gained from such a design.

Under the Carter administration, there was no substantial progress in North-South relations. The initial flirtation with the developing countries gradually gave way to more traditional military-interventionist concepts. At the same time, after futile attempts to downgrade the priority of East-West relations, they were brought back to the top of the U.S. foreign policy agenda; but unfortunately the administration was not able to do it in the context of détente and did it, rather, in the context of confrontation. This, in its turn, distorted the whole structure of U.S. foreign policy. It was like tampering with a compass instead of letting it show what it has to according to the laws of magnetism. The predictable result was a loss of orientation in foreign policy.

In saying this, I have no intention at all to downgrade in any way the importance of United States relations with Western Europe and Japan, or other parts of the world. Nor do I deny anyone's right, including that of the United States, to build up a system of relations that best fits its interests. But what I do want to stress is that, however important other factors might be, one cannot push East-West relations to the bottom of one's list of priorities without committing a tremendously grave mistake. Very serious and pressing problems have to be solved in East-West relations. This is not a matter of a free choice or preference. We are simply bound on both sides to take very special care of relations with each other, whether we like it or not. The major problems of contemporary international affairs are revolving around this East-West axis, including the problems of West-West and North-South relations. They are still greatly dependent on relationships between socialist and capitalist countries, including, of course, the big two - the Soviet Union and the United States.

Speculating on the prospects for Soviet-American relations under the Reagan administration, some observers have referred to ‘the Nixon model.’

[p. 82]

Nixon, like Reagan, was a tough anticommunist, but it was his administration that carried out the turnaround to détente. Would you expect a similar shift from the Reagan administration?

If a presidential term lasted longer than four years I would, perhaps, consider such a scenario plausible, if only because I am strongly convinced that there are no sensible alternatives to peaceful coexistence and détente, that the current platform of America's leaders lacks realism, and that objective conditions will simply not allow anyone to play irresponsible games for too long. Long-term trends are all in favor of a sober return to earth. But it is difficult to say how long it will take them to change their minds, and then their policies. In Nixon's case it took fifteen to twenty years, and I am not sure that the time left before 1984 would be enough.

To go back to the parallel with Nixon, it does not look very persuasive. The current situation, however fast it may change, is still very different from that of the late sixties and early seventies. Nixon came to power when the bankruptcy of cold-war policy was exposed in the starkest way. The country understood it, just as it understood the necessity of changing budgetary priorities - in particular, increasing social spending and reducing to some extent spending on the military. In recent years, strong attempts have been made to try and make Americans forget all that, to sell them once again on cold war and arms racing as the only way to security. These attempts will inevitably fail, and what's more, America's interests and well-being will be substantially damaged by them. But it is really difficult to expect that all this will become clear before the administration's policies have received a number of bruises and setbacks. In fact, that process may already have started.

Then there are differences between the two presidential personalities - admittedly a delicate subject. Let me just say one thing: Nixon became president already having substantial policy experience, including in foreign affairs. Reagan did not have such a background. Nixon was an active president, anxious to do big things in foreign policy. I don't know how active Reagan's nature is. Nixon, like Reagan, came from California, but Nixon's political views were hardly provincial. I would not like to go deeper into this subject.

There are differences between the entourages of the two presidents. Nixon was surrounded by all kinds of people - mediocre and talented, provincials and establishmentarians, novices and old hands, conservatives and moderates. And most of them were pragmatists. Reagan's entourage is very homogeneous. With rare exceptions, they are people who came to Washington without experience in national policy making, provincial novices in government, very conservative. I would even say they are extremist in their views, particularly people on the subcabinet level. And most of them are ideologues rather than pragmatists. I would add that this

[p. 83]

administration seems to contain a higher than usual number of people better equipped to create problems than to solve them.

What do you perceive as the main goal of Reagan's foreign policy?

The main goal, judging from all the evidence, is to bring back the old times of America's extremely exceptional position in the world. This illusory goal is to be realized primarily through the buildup of military power, making it more usable in foreign policy; in other words, by taking the course toward achieving military superiority and declaring a policy of cold war against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. The Reagan administration seems to believe that an aggravation of its relations with the USSR and the launching of a global anti-Soviet crusade will help to consolidate the U.S. position in the world.

Do you think this design is doomed for failure?

It's too early to pass a final judgment on that, but by all accounts such a policy would hardly contribute to U.S. influence and prestige in the world.

The military parity that exists between the Soviet Union and the United States, between the Warsaw Treaty Organization and NATO, is pretty stable. Given the present numbers and the qualitative characteristics of the weapons, it would be extremely hard to change the balance of forces significantly in one's favor. In the long run, the goal becomes absolutely unattainable, because when one side threatens that stability, the other side takes the necessary countermeasures. Such is reality, and all the fuss the Reagan administration started about these military questions has failed to produce the least proof that it has succeeded in inventing something new capable of shaking this reality. Equally, this refers to other indisputable truths of the day: that to begin a nuclear war would be tantamount to suicide, that to count on a victory in such a war is madness, and that the very idea of a limited nuclear war is a dangerous illusion.

In an attempt to refute these truths one can spend thousands of billions of dollars more on the military buildup, but this will be of no avail. The dream of a safe and unopposed expansion of America's opportunities regarding the usability of armed forces, including nuclear weapons, will remain a pipe dream.

It was precisely the disregard of these realities that, in my view, led to the discrepancy between the goals and practical consequences of Reagan's policy and caused such a powerful resistance to it.

The antinuclear movement, you mean?

Yes. Reagan's course has forced enormous masses of people to think seriously about the problems of war and peace. The public in Western Europe

[p. 84]

and now in the United States itself has sensed the existence and growth of the nuclear threat more sharply than ever before. The changed political and psychological climate on both sides of the Atlantic has led to an increased opposition to the policy of intensified military buildup and confrontation.

The Reagan administration has ascribed this movement to Soviet propaganda.

Indeed, Washington has tried to beat this movement by means of that primitive libel, though it could have been taken as a compliment to the Soviet Union. It is no laughing matter - to organize such an enormous movement in dozens of countries all over the world. But this compliment is undeserved, and as a communist and Soviet citizen I may even regret it. If all it took were some intrigues and more dollars and conspiratorial activity, then the United States would have been far more competitive in this field. But somehow the situation has evolved not to Washington's liking, and the only reason is that movements of this kind are impossible without extremely broad public support, which cannot be bought or obtained by fraud. People are endowed with intelligence and also with an instinct for self-preservation. That is why this campaign about ‘the hand of Moscow’ has failed to produce any substantial impression.

It has become more and more obvious that the Reagan administration itself has made the greatest impression on the public this time, with its policies, rhetoric, and words and deeds that terrify millions and millions of people. It has not done so by invoking the mythical ‘Soviet threat.’ People now have their eyes open to the real prospect of a nuclear catastrophe stemming from the arms race and the exacerbation of international tension, both of which are results of the policies of the U.S. government.

This government came into office fully confident that the American voters had given it a mandate for an unrestrained arms race, for the revival of the Cold War, for military adventures abroad. But the course of events has demonstrated that most Americans gave the government no such mandate. It is becoming increasingly clear that the administration's foreign policy is running against a rising tide of protest and discontent. While the antiwar movement of the 1960s was based primarily upon students, intellectuals, and liberals, today's antinuclear movement is strikingly broad-based in its composition. It includes Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, labor leaders and businessmen, physicians, lawyers, clergymen, and many others.

It has also proved wrong to calculate that the course toward destruction of détente and a return to the Cold War, toward a crusade against the

[p. 85]

USSR and the other socialist countries, will enable Washington to rally its allies together and make them follow blindly in the wake of American policy. It has turned out that questions of détente, of disarmament, of relations with the USSR, including trade, have provided an additional source of friction between America and its allies.

By the beginning of 1982, some people in the Reagan administration had begun to realize that American foreign policy was faltering. There were certain attempts to correct it; Allen and Haig have stepped down, and the rhetoric has been changed.

No doubt, political setbacks have had their impact on Washington policy. On our part, we would welcome any reasonable step by the administration, as we did, for instance, with respect to its long-delayed decision to come back to the strategic arms limitation and reduction talks. Yet, overall, it does not seem to go further than political maneuvers designed to calm and mislead the public. Moreover, each peaceful move is followed by a series of militaristic actions that seem to confirm the invariability of the Reagan administration's aggressively anti-Soviet policy.

For example, after his May 9, 1982, speech at Eureka College in Illinois, where President Reagan agreed to resume negotiations on the limitation and reduction of strategic armaments, he addressed the British Parliament and the U.N. General Assembly in the spirit of the Cold War. The contents of the National Security Council's memorandum, signed by the president, and the Pentagon's Defense Guidance for Fiscal Years 1984-88 were deliberately made public. They are extremely bellicose documents - blueprints, actually, for total confrontation with the Soviet Union and other socialist countries by all means, from economic and technological war with unlimited subversive activities, to a war fought with conventional and even nuclear weapons.

What is your impression of the Pentagon directive?

This document is typical of many members of the present U.S. administration: it is impudent and rude, and at the same time light-minded and thoughtless. It contains a lot of obvious humbug, which forced even General David Jones, when he was retiring as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to warn that an attempt to carry out some of the plans outlined in the directive would be tantamount to throwing money into a bottomless pit. The authors of the document obviously have become victims of their own propaganda, misjudging the potentialities of their own country and the problems that face others.

[p. 86]

It may well be that these directives reflect mainly the position of the Pentagon, which does not necessarily speak for the administration as a whole.

I do not think so. This attitude can hardly be ascribed to the Pentagon's independence of mind - it does reflect some gut instincts of the leaders of the present administration. No wonder that, at the end of the 1982 NATO session in Bonn, President Reagan, having first assured his colleagues that he would negotiate arms limitations with the Soviet Union, immediately urged them to remember that, politically, the West continued to be in a state of war with the Soviet Union.

Here we witness another gaping discrepancy between U.S. policy and today's realities. The men in Washington have forgotten, or simply do not want to remember, that successful talks on arms limitation and the very prevention of nuclear war call for normal relations, relations of peaceful coexistence and détente between countries with different social systems, in the first place between the largest among them - the USSR and the United States. One cannot count on the preservation of peace, or on the success of the negotiations, while at the same time unleashing a wholesale political war against the socialist countries, spurring on the arms race, and fanning hatred and mistrust of the Soviet Union.

Professor George Kennan, a veteran of American diplomacy, has emphasized in a number of his recent speeches and articles that he finds the views of the Soviet Union prevailing today in the U.S. government and mass media to be extremist, subjective, and far removed from what any sensible study of existing realities would indicate, adding that as the basis for political action these views are not only ineffective, but dangerous.

Few people will, of course, be surprised by right-wing extremists in the United States hating the Soviet Union and wishing to make short shrift of it. But the directives to this end look ridiculous. Their authors forget that attempts of that kind have been made in the past both by the Entente and the Axis powers, and, in the years of the Cold War, by the United States itself. Invariably, these attempts have ended in fiascos, and they have even fewer chances of success today.

I am not belittling the dangers with which present U.S. policy is fraught. These are dangers for the cause of peace, for all nations, including the United States. Those whom the U.S. administration sees as its adversaries, and now even America's allies and the public at large, are by no means blind to these dangers.

What does the future hold for this policy, in your view?

As far as the near future is concerned, I would venture to say this:

The U.S. policy will be as good as it will not be allowed to be bad, and it will be as safe - not just for the USSR, but also for the United States itself

[p. 87]

and its allies - as it will not be allowed to be dangerous; as it will not be allowed by economic and political realities, by the policies of other countries, by the common sense of the American people, by humanity's desire for survival. I hope those factors will be strong enough to bring U.S. policy back to the understanding of the crucial fact that, besides the obvious contradictions between the two countries, there also exist very important and vital common interests - interests of peace, interests of survival, which demand not only negotiations but also agreements and general improvement of U.S.-Soviet relations.

Now, what if it will not happen? Then we can only hope that the time will come when we will be able to say: History did not begin with this administration, and history did not end with it.

Hegel once wrote that people never learn from history. Is this dictum applicable to Soviet-American relations?

Hegel left a great wealth of ideas, while my memory in the realm of philosophy, alas, is often imperfect. I recall some other thoughts of his, emphasizing the opposite: the ability of reason to understand history and learn from it. I have no doubt, though, that the great dialectician also had some ideas along the lines you suggested. I think both points can be argued, for each of them reflects one of the sides of the complex relationship between mankind and history. If human beings had been totally unable to learn, there would hardly be any history at all. But if they had been capable and diligent apprentices, thoroughly mastering the lessons of history, it would have been quite a different history. Mankind would have long been living in a kingdom of perpetual peace, complete security, and absolute justice.

But both history and mankind move somewhere between these extremes. Obviously, the same is true of Soviet-American relations. Our two countries have survived, which is already proof that reason can prevail. But the danger of war is still great, which means, among other things, that the lessons of history haven't been fully assimilated. The seventies brought many positive changes in Soviet-American relations - but still, reflecting on it now, I think we can call it by and large a decade of lost opportunities. As for the recent developments in our relations, they really make you wonder whether history is remembered at all.

Will the new American administration draw proper lessons from history?

Please ask me that question in 1984. But important as history is, it is not enough to learn from past experience. Each generation has to face new challenges for which the past gives no clue, challenges that are the responsibility of each generation alone to overcome. Some of the tasks facing our contemporaries are historically unique, and we have no margin for error

[p. 88]

in trying to fulfill them. The first in importance is, of course, the problem of preventing war.

The generation of our parents, which witnessed and fought in World War I, made a tragic mistake, failing to derive proper lessons from history, and thus allowing World War II to come. I repeat, it was a real tragedy. But mankind as a biological species, and even those individual nations that suffered most, managed to survive it. Should this tragic mistake be repeated, there most probably will be no one to learn any lessons. In this sense, our generation truly has a rendezvous with destiny.