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36. Valentin M. Berezhkov
Valentin M. Berezhkov was born in Leningrad in 1916. From 1940 to 1945 he was a member of the Foreign Service. He accompanied Foreign Minister Molotov to Berlin for negotiations with Hitler and von Ribbentrop. Berezhkov was a member of the Soviet delegation to Teheran and Dumbarton Oaks, and after the war, he was in San Francisco, when the United Nations was organized. After 1945 he concentrated on journalism. He began his career with the New Times in Moscow. In 1969 he became editor in chief of U.S.A.: Economics, Politics and Ideology, published by the Institute for the USA. His books include Diplomatic Mission to Berlin, The Teheran Conference of 1943, The Anti-Hitler Coalition, The Creation of the United Nations, and Years in Diplomatic Service.
Like the Institute for the USA of the USSR Academy of Sciences, our magazine is comparatively new. The institute is some six years old [in 1974]: Our magazine, USA, Economy, Politics, Ideology, is some four years old. The title perhaps sounds long, but it represents what we are dealing with, all the various problems. It is a monthly magazine, basically aimed at Soviet readers. Out of a circulation of 35,000, 30,000 are within the USSR. Some 2,000 copies go abroad, while another 3,000 are sold in our bookstands each month.
We began publishing in January, 1970, or some two and a half years prior
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to the first major summit meetings between the leaders of the USA and the USSR. During these first years we issued a considerable amount of information about life in the United States, about social, political, and economic developments there. We explained how a major shift in attitudes and politics took place in America and why the summit meeting was possible at all, how we moved from the cold war era toward the period of détente, and how more or less normal relations between East and West, or between the US and the USSR, came about.
Of course, we explained all these events in connection with international developments, like the successes and failures of the socialist countries and the Soviet Union in many fields, the successes of national liberation movements in various areas of the world, and also successes or failures in connection with developments inside the United States, which among other things has shown us that even such a rich country cannot raise its budget indefinitely and have such enormous expenditures on war. The United States was forced to halt the war in Vietnam and begin peace talks. We also explained why we are conducting talks on the reduction and control of strategic armaments with the United States. As you probably know, the aim of our country always was and is to reduce armament expenditures and to use this money for more important and more necessary improvements. We are still hoping that we will reach an agreement between East and West on this most important problem so that we can save more money and reduce our military budget.
You are stressing détente. But the Secretary-General of NATO, my distinguished countryman Joseph Luns, warned during an interview with Newsweek, May 29, 1972, ‘The Soviets, the Communists, only mean by détente, continue war, only by other means.’ Mr. Luns is the most prominent spokesman for the Western military alliance.
In order to reply to this question we must first go back some and delve into the history of the socialist and capitalist nations. The vital question in this respect is, Are we prepared to tolerate both systems? Are we prepared to coexist? There are still well-known efforts to ‘roll back’ socialism and not to acknowledge it as an existing social force, or to consider socialism as an illegitimate child of history.
When we return for a moment to the years immediately following the great socialist revolution in the Soviet Union, we see that the policies of the capitalist nations have always been to destroy socialism. We watched these attempts during the First and Second World Wars, when the Soviet Union was still the only socialist country in the world, and when attempts were
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being launched on all sides to destroy us. The Japanese attacked us. The Chinese militarists attacked us after World War One, and, of course, all the policies of Hitler Germany were in essence directed at this aim. But, as is well known, history played a joke on us all, and as the first victims of Hitler, some Western countries were wiped out, including your own, the Netherlands. Instead of creating an anti-Soviet coalition during World War Two, history engineered an anti-Hitler coalition, because the Western powers were now being threatened by Nazi imperialism. It was thus considered advisable to join the Soviet Union in the battle against Hitler.
Yes, it is interesting to note that my own country only recognized the USSR diplomatically after Hitler's attack on the Netherlands, May 10, 1940.
We in the Soviet Union not only fought World War Two for our own liberation, but we also struggled for the freedom of the Netherlands.
But when the war came to an end, we discovered that Cold War patterns stayed at the same levels.
They continued.
Yes, there was a continuation of the same anti-Soviet policies by capitalist countries. But now the USSR was no longer alone. There were other nations in Europe and Asia that had embarked on the road of socialist reconstruction. They were called ‘people's democracies.’ However, the policy of the principal Western countries, including the United States and the NATO countries, was to ‘roll back,’ i.e., destroy socialism. In order to explain why they had these policies, to justify them to their people, they continued to say, as they had been saying prior to World War Two, that the Soviet Union was threatening them. But after World War Two, of course, it was not only the USSR that was threatening them, but the entire socialist commonwealth of nations.
Your quotation by Mr. Joseph Luns follows practically the same pattern. He is simply interpreting the same old idea that we are conceiving some kind of sinister policy that threatens the West. But this is very wrong. We never had such policies. We have consistently proposed establishing normal relations with all countries and developing trade, cultural, and social contacts. We have always been in favor of this. But when could we begin? It can only start when political figures in the West understand that it is impossible to destroy socialism; that they have got to live with socialism. We were created in a capitalist world. We were once the sole socialist country in the world, which made us understand at an early stage that we had to live with capitalist countries. But the capitalist leaders looked upon us as an historical
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accident. They decided long ago that we should disappear; they did not want to live with us and work with us. But finally we have a new situation, one in which Mr. Richard Nixon and other American leaders say at last that there is parity between the Soviet Union and America. This means, in fact, that they realize that they cannot destroy us without being destroyed themselves. And so they are becoming accustomed to living with us. This is the period of history we are in now. This is the period of détente, the era of peaceful coexistence. It is not an easy period, since there are still people like Mr. Joseph Luns and others who look back, who are still devoted to the old policies, and who do not want to abandon them. They are still trying to scare people with all kinds of theories and fantasies about Communism.
I have attended press briefings by Mr. Luns over the past years and what is striking during those sessions is Mr. Luns' continuous hammering on the subject of your expanding your fleets.
These statements are all in the same pattern.
But what can one do to change this?
First of all it is absolutely necessary to know each other much, much better. And, above all, to know what our policies really are. In our magazine, for instance, we consider it our task to study as carefully and objectively as possible what developments in the United States are and what they mean. We study the positive movements as well as the negative ones. I think it would be useful if Western journalists would also carefully study our policies, developments in the USSR, and all proposals that the Soviet Union has made during the past years in the field of international relations.
It would, furthermore, help if foreigners would study the history of the Soviet Union more carefully. After all, during the fifty-six years of our history, we have never attacked any country, and especially not any capitalist country. There is no such precedent, although we have many, many examples in which a capitalist country has attacked a socialist country, or in which a capitalist country has attacked another capitalist country.
The second point I would like to raise is this: If we really would like to destroy the Western way of life with our military forces, then we would have had a number of opportunities immediately after World War Two. We had reached Danish territory - the island of Bornholm. But we went away. We liberated Danish territory from the Germans and gave it back to the Danish people. Or take Finland. Finland was an ally of Hitler during World War Two. They were bombing us. They were threatening Leningrad. We have discovered documents that the Finns were preprared to act together with the
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Nazis to destroy Leningrad. When we had the chance to destroy them, we did not do it. We now have a treaty of friendship with Finland. We have had, as a matter of fact, very good relations with the Finns all the years following the great war and these relations should serve as an excellent example of relations between a socialist power - even a superpower - and a small capitalist country, which is above all also a neighbor.
And then our fleet, which you mentioned -
- that Mr. Luns is always mentioning -
All right - but you quoted him. When America has its fleets in the Mediterranean, the South China Sea, or the Indian Ocean -
- that is considered normal.
Exactly. That is normal, of course. America is a big power, so it is normal. However, some people do seem to accept by now military parity between the US and the USSR, and they have to get accustomed to the situation that the Soviet Union will also have its fleet wherever it seems necessary. Just recently, [April, 1974] Senator Edward M. Kennedy visited us in Moscow and addressed members of the institute. He stressed in his speech a number of times, ‘You must understand, gentlemen, that I came to you in the understanding that we must treat each other as equals.’ Mr. Kennedy repeated this theme several times. Now, if we accept this premise, we must no longer attempt to scare people by saying that the Soviet fleet is operating somewhere where American warships are also to be found. And, as you well know, Leonid Brezhnev has repeated in the name of our government that we are prepared to have talks end reach an agreement to withdraw all fleets everywhere. But this should also mean, of course, that the Americans likewise withdraw theirs.
Maybe we should chase out the US and the Russian fleets and let Dutch ships take over the high seas again, as in the seventeenth century! But, to return to our profession, journalism. The Netherlands has stationed a large number of correspondents and stringers in the United States. For years, there has been no one representing the Dutch media in Moscow. I mean, when discussing parity between the superpowers, it will be hard getting to know each other's problems if no one comes out here from our side of the fence.
I do not know why there have been no Dutch journalists stationed in Moscow.
Not only Dutch. The number of Western correspondents is most limited in
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this gigantic country of yours. It is, I think, because news is still controlled in the USSR. There is not the freedom of movement that journalists are accustomed to.
The number of American correspondents now in the Soviet Union is steadily increasing and points very much to the necessity of having more information available for American readers at home. We are working on equal footing with the American journalists here. When I study the American press and see what these correspondents are writing, I am impressed by the amount of interesting information they seem to be able to collect freely. They are often doing interesting and worthwhile work. But there are some correspondents sent to us not to study our country or our policies sincerely and objectively, but to confirm the prejudices they formed about us before arriving here. Those who come here with sincere intentions will be given the normal opportunities to obtain all the information they want. Some American journalists have traveled to the remotest places in our nation, places I myself have never visited. I read their reports in the American press.
As you know, I am in Moscow accompanying the Dutch Foreign Minister, Max van der Stoel, who is here on an official visit. What struck me during his press briefings to Dutch correspondents in between meetings with Mr. Andrei Gromyko was that détente should be accompanied by a much freer exchange between individuals from the East and West; between the media, journalists, writers and so forth. This seems to be a precondition to détente as our Foreign Minister sees it.
Our position on this question is as follows. Our principle has been outlined repeatedly in the name of our government by Mr. Leonid Brezhnev. In principle we also are in favor of exchanging information, and whatever you may want. But, of course, this exchange should be allowed to take place in full accordance with the rules and laws existing and maintained in the participating countries themselves. I do not know, for instance, whether you have in the Netherlands a general ban on pornography. We have a law which prohibits pornography, so we cannot distribute freely the same material that for instance, is being circulated in Denmark. Perhaps this is an extreme example. But I want to stress that we in the Soviet Union are prepared to exchange information in accordance with the laws, habits, and traditions of our country.
Another example: We have the tradition of not exaggerating crimes. Usually, these items appear on the last pages of our newspapers. We keep this information small and limited. Sometimes the public will only read
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about these events after the criminal has been sentenced by the courts. We do not have a tradition by which our newspapers headline crime or show people lying in the street in a pool of blood. You do have this custom in the West. For us, it often is a matter of violating our own traditions. We will never do this and we do not understand those who say that we too must print everything about crime and then there will be détente with the Soviet Union.
That is a little extreme.
That was only one example. What they really want is to flood us with all kinds of information. Just see how they built up the events around the so-called Soviet dissidents. We are well aware of dissidents in our country. What they write is freely reprinted and circulated in the capitalist countries. The writings of a totally unknown individual, someone who has never succeeded in publishing a single line in the Soviet Union, are eagerly read in the capitalist countries, particularly if the author is critical of the USSR. And, of course, it is called ‘literature.’ Some years ago there was such a person here. I believe Tarsis was his name. He considered himself a neo-Tolstoyan. He wrote incomprehensible prose and nobody paid the slightest attention to him. Then he was discovered by some foreign correspondent. Tarsis had begun to write stories with anti-Soviet tendencies. They were published abroad and all of a sudden Tarsis became a very important writer. He left the country, arrived in Switzerland, and after two or three years nobody ever heard again about the newly discovered literary genius. We never believed he was talented; it was Western magazines that labeled him as such.
There are more cases like that. Take Anatoli Kouznetsov. He did have some of his work published. But then he joined the small group of dissidents. He also began writing anti-Soviet articles and suddenly became famous abroad. Then he left our country as a tourist, went to London, and did not return. Now, some two years have passed and nobody has heard of Kouznetsov again. Whether he is writing, we do not know, but he has not published anything, since his writings seem to have no value to Western publishers.
We do have a lot of good and even very good writers in the Soviet Union, like Konstantin Simonov, who was just awarded the Lenin Prize for Literature in 1974. But I do not hear anyone mention Simonov in the West of late. All attention is focused on dissidents like Bukovsky and others, or people unknown in the USSR. Our most famous artists are not known abroad.
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We have spoken about these international attempts to destroy Communism and socialism and of military attacks. Now, it is realized that there is parity, whether your Secretary-General of NATO, Mr. Joseph Luns, accepts it or not. Perhaps Luns does not accept this thesis and perhaps he is still dreaming of attacking the Soviet Union or the socialist world and having a victorious war. However, there are other Western leaders who are more responsible and who accept the reality of parity. Therefore, there can no longer be an open war against Communism. Now, they must turn toward a subversive war. So they conduct ideological warfare and our enemies attempt to undermine our society and our way of life by all kinds of infiltration. These persons are not really interested in détente.
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