Russia and the United States

...The hitch, of course, was that there was a war on, that the Russians were doing most of the fighting in it, and that by threatening to stop, Stalin could apply pressure on his allies difficult to resist...

...Good familiar essayists are argumentative, but they rarely are shrill...

...The problem, Masmy thinks, was not just Stalin himself, but the system within which he functioned...

...After Yalta, in an effort to consolidate short-term gains in Eastern Europe, he managed in a matter of weeks to alienate the staunchest American advocates of cooperation with the USSR, notably FDR himself...

...Asked what she missed most about Russia and liked best in America, a wealthy Russian exile lady replied, respectively, "servants" and "equality...

...In an essay on jogging, we learn of Taxicab Rabinowitz, who "inevitably appeared to be either emerging from or entering into yet another cab...

...The familiar essayist should not fasten upon a subject but, rather, wander around one...

...F o r all the humor that runs through Epstein's work, there is also a melancholy strain as well, perhaps because Epstein is very much aware of the manifold ways in which many Americans strive to look down upon others--or even look down upon themselves...

...boring the reader by, say, explicating a text...

...F i r s t , the encouraging signs...

...incidents as the Katyn Woods revelations, or the Warsaw uprising, to D eliminate potential challenges to ~ u s s i a ' s Road to the Cold ~Var Soviet control in Poland...

...they don't try to make us become better neighbors, citizens, friends, or lovers...

...One might expect such an enterprise to evoke keen enthusiasm from scholars in this country, who have long bewailed the inaccessibility of Russian historical materials...

...ing too much of himself (familiar essays should not be confessional...

...A diplomacy based on what Henry Kissinger has called "pre-emptive concession' '--anticipating another state's interests, and attempting to meet them before it has stated them--might work with self-confident powers modest in their pretensions, but not with the Russians, who have never had either quality in abundance...

...American readers rarely get opportunities to sample the first approach, since Soviet scholarly writings do not often appear in translation and Americans do not often learn Russian...

...Richard Nixon's turn cannot be delayed much longer, and there is nowhere to go but up...

...At his best Epstein makes the familiar strange...

...Other aspects of the SivachevYakovlev account, however, show the gulf that still remains between Soviet and Western scholarship...

...Masmy tends to overlook the fact that the West was trading influence for casualties during World War II: Regaining the political initiative might have been possible, but only at a places wartime Soviet-American relations within a carefully-drawn bilateral context for the first time: It is authoritative in its research, in the logic of its argument, and in the persuasiveness of its conclusions...

...And the authors go out of their way to assure their readers that "the recently activated 'crusades' " on behalf of "human rights" constitute no "appreciable danger to the socialist principles of the Soviet Union...

...Stalin never made clear (perhaps because he himself was not certain) what his minimum postwar requirements were...

...None of the major revisionists were Soviet specialists...

...London and Washington should have taken a harder line earlier, Masmy argues, whatever the effect on the war effort...

...Revisionism now directs its attention at other targets, notably Dwight Eisenhower (whose reputation has benefited from the process) and John Kennedy and Henry Kissinger (whose reputations have not...

...The authors have nothing good to say, for example, of the first George Kennan, whose exposures of the Siberian exile system almost singlehandedly discredited the tsarist regime in the eyes of the West: "To criticize prisons is a safe cause," they sniff...

...There are occasional admissions of misperception and short-sightedness on the part of Soviet officials: One diplomat predicted that the Democrats would nominate Senator Borah for President in 1924...

...His essays are rich in precise observations about the oddities of American life, and he is especially perceptive when he takes a look at what we usually take for granted: the clothes we wear, the greetings we give to people...

...Although it looks easy enough to write, requiring neither strong scholarship nor a particularly rigorous argument, the familiar essay is difficult to bring off...

...Events in Czechoslovakia in 1968 are not even mentioned...

...what the Soviet Union wants is "to conduct business responsibly, proceeding on the assumption that the other side's representative is also empowered to negotiate and is serious about doing so...

...It was easier simply to blame the United States, which with singular ill-timing made the archival record of its early postwar diplomacy available just as outrage over Vietnam was reaching its height...

...What should, or could, the United States have done differently...

...The result, for students of Russian-American relations, is an annoying asymmetry: Soviet scholars can find out, if they want to, what went on inside the U.S...

...Kremlinologists in this country and in Western Europe did occasionally object to this procedure, but without paying sufficient attention to the American sources the revisionists had relied on, so that a dialogue never really developed...

...It is pleasant to report, as well, that Masmy's prose is lean and tight--a model (except for an unerring instinct for splitting infinitives) of what scholarly writing ought to be...

...But until the Russians open their archives on a non-selective john Lewis Gaddis teaches history at Ohm University, and ,s the author of Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretive History...

...Obviously there are people to whose interest it is that 1 should fall ill seriously and for a long time, if not worse...

...Masmy's argument will give comfort neither to rigidly revisionist nor rigidly orthodox interpreters of the Cold War...

...But Epstein's opinions are, in a sense, beside the point...

...Russia's Road to the Cold War is a full-scale reassessment of Moscow's role in bringing on that conflict, and it is an impressive performance indeed...

...The Soviet Union, like Richard Nixon, is its own worst enemy...

...Masmy leans toward orthodox historiography, though, in stressing Stalin's brooding suspicion of his allies, his cynical opportunism, his preference for power over persuasion in seeking to achieve his aims...

...But Sivachev and Yakovlev do make an effort to synthesize contemporary Soviet scholarship on relations with the United States, and it is here that the book's value lies...

...Kennan was only the first of a succession of meddlers, "including the 'crusaders' of 1918-20 and the present-day supporters of the 'dissidents.' " There is a persistent note of exasperation with the unpredictabilities of American domestic politics: Congress, the courts, and the administration are supposed to form a "unified national system," the authors point out with frustration...

...Their joint effort, Russia and the United States, reveals no startling secrets-the book cites little if any material that has not been published elsewhere...

...Both methods have their shortcomings...

...As a result, Stalin "saddled his country with a cluster of sullen dependencies" which, "far from providing the ultimate protective shield...

...What both approaches reveal, above all else, is the perpetual state of insecurity Soviet leaders seem to live under--a chronic inability to be at ease with the world as it is that both unsettles the balance of power and simultaneously generates the countervailing forces necessary to reconstitute it...

...we could do worse ourselves, in choosing our own...

...Nor will Western historians easily endorse the view that Soviet troops marched into Poland in September 1939 to "protect the lives and property" of the populations there...

...none had either the expertise or the linguistic skills to undertake any serious analysis of Soviet responsibility for the Cold War...

...At the same time, he harbored the most baleful suspicions that Churchill and Roosevelt might be up to the same thing, and, indeed, accused them of 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 it as late as April 1945...

...Pithy it was not, but then the autocrat was never very tolerant of editors...

...How pleasant to meet (again) Mr...

...The familiar essay is a mansion with many rooms in it, housing such varied contemporary writers as J o a n Didion, Edward Hoagland, and Lewis Thomas--to name some of the best...

...and discomfiting the reader by giving him advice...

...It was a system that institutionalized suspicion as a standard operating procedure, that knew no way to project influence other than by force...

...Sivachev and Yakovlev share the view, now held by most American specialists on the subject, that relations between the United States and tsarist Russia until the 1880s were surprisingly cordial, though their explanation o( the phenomenon is somewhat different from that of their American counterparts: "Republican America and monarchist Russia were both exploitive class societies based on private property, and were thus fully able to get along with each other...

...No serious American scholar still believes, as they do, that Truman dropped atomic bombs on Japan primarily to frighten the Russians, or, as the revisionists used to claim, that Washington's concern over Eastern Europe grew out of the interests there of ITT, Socony-Vacuum, or Colgate-Palmolive-Peet...

...Sivachev amd Yakovlev seem oddly unaware that American revisionism on the origins of the Cold War, of which they predictably approve, has not been much heard from in recent years...

...American students of the New Deal will find startling the assertion that FDR between 1933 and 1939 was operating a complex scheme to use Russia as a counterweight to both Germany and Japa 9, thus making possible the luxury of American isolationism...

...it is as well a study policymakers concerned with the current deterioration of Soviet-American relations would do well to ponder...

...Meet is an appropriate word, since the familiar essayist should write as if he were conversing with the reader-discoursing extemporaneously upon a subject that has for the moment seized his attention...

...Samuel Harper, an early American expert on Russia, is quoted on his abortive attempts to achieve rapport with Petrograd revolutionaries by showing them pictures of the American incendiary, George Washington: "prosperous looking gentleman," they scoffed, with professional disdain...

...Epstein is not a chronicler of sordidness and absurdity, but at his best he succeeds in transforming the familiar territory of American manners into a puzzling country populated by souls driven to a t t a i n - - what...

...They try to entertain us with an unusual turn of phrase, a sudden sally of wit, an unexpected view of the commonplace...

...Health, sophistication, naturalness, honesty, fulfillment...

...C } n e weakness of Cold War revisionism was always its one-sided nature...

...Stalin probably pushed too hard in seeking Roosevelt's cooperation against the aggressors in the 1930s...

...Epstein's style is moderately antic-unleaded, not high octane...

...Soviet efforts for peace during the Cuban Missile Crisis were "crowned with success...

...enlarged the area whose integrity the Russians had to uphold and also diluted its internal cohesion...

...Not at all...

...their conclusions are less important than the distinctive ways in which they meander towards them...

...Good familiar essayists--and they include, as Epstein says in the introduction to his collection, Addison and Steele, Montaigne, Hazlitt, and Lamb--are like good conversationalists...

...The joint Soviet-American documentary project is not likely to proceed beyond 1815 anytime soon...

...Stalin's postwar plans were equally vague: He wanted security primarily, but like FDR tended to defer giving sustained thought to the measures necessary to attain it...

...In "Marlboro Country," which deflates the publishing business, Epstein tells us about his performances on the talkshow circuit while trying to peddle his first book...

...neither is likely soon to unravel Churchill's "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma...

...Imperialism thus became the highest form of Communism, begetting a cycle of insecurity breeding expansion, and expansion breeding insecurity, that has persisted right down to the Christmas invasion of Afghanistan, a country not exactly overlooked by previous imperial aspirants...

...The Soviet leader, we learn, made several half-hearted attempts to negotiate a separate peace with Germany, including one with Hitler's successor, Admiral Karl Doenitz, just days before the German surrender...

...Rabinowitz, Epstein tells us, was "the very antithesis of all that is implied by the phrase 'in shape.' " Some may think that praising a writer for his style is a backhanded compliment--a way of insinuating that the writer is all style, no substance...

...There is even the flat statement that "in 1950 the war in Korea broke out," a definite improvement over the standard official history of Soviet foreign policy, which has it that "on .June 25, 1950 South Korean troops began the aggression against the Korean People's Democratic Republic conceived by the USA...

...He does not wear the reader out by trying to provide a laugh-a-minute, but he does move the argument along with a telling anecdote or a carefullyphrased exaggeration...

...Jogging, self-help books, gourmet food, boutiques, and casual clothes all get their comeuppance...

...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980...

...He seized, higher cost in lives than American or with ruthless precision, upon such British leaders were willing to pay...

...as a consequence, his search for stability came across in the West as a drive for hegemony, thereby unsettling his allies and making the Cold War unavoidable...

...We have had to resort, accordingly, to two alternatives: Scrutinizing the voluminous but ponderous writings of Soviet scholars who have had limited access to archival sources, but who write under obvious official constraints...

...Few historians these days see the United States as having proceeded, with singleminded consistency and determination, to impose a pax Americana upon the post-war world...

...The most striking aspect of the book, though, is what it reveals about the preoccupations and anxieties of the c u r r e n t Kremlin l e a d e r s h i p , which presumably passed on the "correctness" of the arguments advanced therein...

...Masmy has little sympathy with Roosevelt's patient attempts to win Stalin's trust, but he is even more critical of the British, who lacked the excuse of "innocence and inexperience...

...Few experts outside the Soviet Union will accept the authors' repeated insistence that Lenin at no point attempted to export revolution--that unfortunate idea, they maintain, was all Trotsky's...

...he at one point supported Churchill's plan for AngloAmerican military operations in the Balkans...

...In any case, we suffer from an excess of writers who tell us what they think about Social Problems...

...Moscow's cautious approach to scholarly inquiry is, of course, far removed from the rapidity with which this country makes its most secret documents available to all comers, whether through systematic declassification, Freedom of Information Act appeals, weighty memoirs by currently unemployed eminences, or other less formal procedures facilitated by the advent of the office Xerox machine and the appetite for its extrusions manifested by the New York Times and the Washington Post...

...What, Epstein seems to wonder, should one make of the comic and pathetic aspects of the way we live now...

...We appreciate them, that is, less for their substance than for their style...

...The Soviet leader had no precise blueprint for military operations at the beginning of the war: He considered halting the Red Army at his own borders after driving out the Germans...

...The authors even detect hitherto unsuspected glimmers of wit in .Joseph Stalin, who in 1932 responded to rumors of his demise with a quip they think worthy of Mark Twain: "This is not the first time that false rumors that I am ill are circulating in the bourgeois 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 27 press...

...Is the familiar essayist an irresponsible fellow who wastes our time by gossiping about trivial matters ? A reviewer in the New Republic complained almost wistfully that "Epstein does not seem to urge any social action . . . . " Well, no, he doesn't...

...In a wholly gratuitous slur upon the memory of Andrei Vyshinsky, the authors claim that Soviet representatives at the United Nations during the early Cold War years acted "with the utmost patience," explaining "literally as one would do with children or with hysterical unbelievers.., that the USSR regarded peaceful coexistence as of paramount importance...

...There are frequent attributions to American statesmen of vague but sinister "balance of power" machinations against the USSR--no naive legalistic moralism here...

...Sometime later this year a committee of Soviet and American historians will complete work on a project, long underway, to publish the significam documents on relations between their two countries to be found in both American and Russian archives...

...We don't appreciate familiar essayists because they take a particular stand on a question...

...He doesn't do a lot of things, but only a rigidly high-minded soul would argue that we should limit our reading to writers who wrestle with momentous subjects...

...There is an acknowledgement that American Lend Lease was "a definite help to the Soviet people" during World War II, and the treatment of Roosevelt is ambivalent, reflecting trends in recent American scholarship suggesting that FDR was both craftier and more cold.blooded in dealing with the Russians than was once thought...

...The authors mercifully depart from the usual Soviet practice of referring to "unpersons" only by their titles: Trotsky and Khrushchev are discussed by name, if only briefly (they each get a single page reference in the index, as compared to seven for Brezhnev, 18 for Lenin, and, interestingly, 25 for Stalin...

...They usually want to unsettle the reader, disturbing his moral or intellectual complacency, but at the same time they want to amuse him...

...Documents beyond that date the Russians consider too sensitive to expose to Western eyes (though some more recent materials have been made available to individual researchers on a selective basis...

...In several essays he gently ridicules its major and minor snobberies...

...even the Lublin Poles, indebted to Stalin for their very existence, gave him trouble from time to time...

...Vojtech Masmy is the first historian to combine familiarity with American (and British) archives together with the linguistic and analytical ability to draw fully upon the limited Soviet and East European sources to which we do have access...

...basis, or pass their own version of the Freedom of Information Act, they will have to do...

...Were it to do so, we would clearly have more to learn from it than the Russians would, which may in part account for .Moscow's reluctance to proceed...

...E p s t e i n ' s room is one with a view on American manners, especially the manners of America's upper-middle class...

...or relying on the more spacious but admittedly speculative judgments of academic Kremlinology, based precariously on such shreds of evidence as do, from time to time, leak out...

...Washington officials are acknowledged to have been at times confused, iU-informed, indecisive, powerless--in short, human...

...It is wrong, though, to assume that because Epstein is both an elegant and an unfailingly goodhumored writer, he is lightweight...

...Nevertheless, it holds many attractions for writers because it allows them to discuss innumerable subjects that, as Joseph Krutch has said, "are neither obviously momentous nor merely silly...

...When a "counterrevolutionary revolt broke out in Hungary" in 1956, "the Soviet Union came to the assistance of the Hungarian people and helped them to hold out against the attempted takeover...

...This was not always as simple a task as it might appear: Communists outside the USSR did not mechanically follow Moscow's orders...

...The University of Chicago Press has helped to remedy that deficiency, though, by commissioning a history of Russian-American relations written especially for American audiences by two Soviet scholars, Nikolai Sivachev and Nikolai Yakovlev...

...The genre, if we can call it that, allows for--perhaps requires--digressions, which add to its appearance of informality...

...He agrees with the revisionists in stressing the primacy of security over ideological goals in Stalin's mind...

...The familiar essayist, moreover, should avoid a number of things: embarrassing the reader by disclosStephen Miller is a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...

...we know little or nothing about what went on inside theirs...

...Certain that he was a terrible bore as a TV "personality," he laments: "All through the South I imagined men and women watching me over their breakfast, their heads nestling gently, asleep, in plates of scrambled eggs and cereal bowls...

...And possibly it would have, were it not for the fact that the collection is to cover only the period up to 1815...

...he postponed, early in 1945, the capture of Berlin in order not to get there too far ahead of his allies, only to have to scramble at the last moment to prevent Eisenhower's troops from getting there first...

...There is also, remarkably enough, humor...

...Even on the delicate subject of the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent Allied intervention, one finds fewer differences than one might expect: Sivachev and Yakovlev admit, for example, that the United States was not the primary leader of the intervention, and that Woodrow Wilson was not exclusively preoccupied with throttling Bolshevism in authorizing it...

...both leaders were surprised by their adversaries in 1941...

...Perhaps it is not very tactful of me, but unfortunately I have no data capable of gratifying these gentlemen...

...Nor is there much disagreement about what ended this comfortable relationship: the growth late in the nineteenth century of American concern about Russian Jews and dissidents, and a Russian-American competition for influence in Manchuria and North China...

...But the view from Washington is not totally opaque: We can gain useful insights both from diligent reTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 29 search of the kind Masmy has undertaken, and, less directly, from what Soviet scholars like Sivachev and Yakovlev choose to emphasize or ignore...

...Even practitioners of"historico-materialistic methodology" feel the occasional urge, it seems, to whistle in the dark...

...It provides evidence, simultaneously, of increasing sophistication in American studies inside the Soviet Union, and of the egregious shortcomings that still remain...

...Epstein, whose familiar essays, gathered together in this volume, first appeared in the American Scholar under the pseudonym of Aristides...

...In an essay that attacks what Philip Rieff has called "The Triumph of the Therapeutic," Epstein speaks of "the strange cluster of the desperately hopeful gathered under the banner of the human potential movement . . . . " Lionel Trilling once said that "the life of competition for spiritual status is not without its own peculiar sordidness and absurdity...

...The Soviet dictator consistently subordinated the interests of the international proletarian revolution to those of the Soviet state, as he perceived them...

...government at almost any point...

...The book will be the starting point for all future research on Soviet diplomacy and strategy during World War II...