Soviet-American Cultural Ties :Kto kogo?

...The most visible manifestations of these cultural relations have been the exchanges of ballets, orchestras, and athletic teams, and, of course, the ApolloSoyuz joint manned space laboratory...

...The Soviet government therefore wishes to participate in cultural exchanges and to increase trade —but on the condition that it maintain censorship and other forms of control...

...By the same token, cultural exchanges increase and improve the Soviet elite's knowledge of us, thus beginning to reduce some of the misapprehensions caused in part by Soviet propaganda, and in part by simple lack of information...

...ernment, in that order...

...Critics assert that detente sanctifies the status quo in areas that Communists rule but gives them free rein elsewhere, as in Angola, that it gives the Soviets access to our superior science and technology but offers us few corresponding advantages...

...Indeed, as President Kingman Brewster of Yale University recently noted, our scholars and universities will have to devote increasing energies to defending their independence from their own benevolent government...

...The Muscovite rulers appreciate the hazard they endure to obtain political and scientific-technical advantages...

...and "the neglected aspect of foreign affairs," even when adroitly used, can only supplement...

...During the past five years some cosmetic changes and basic improvements have occurred, but Americans are still restricted largely to Moscow, Leningrad, and a few other cities, while Soviets travel freely throughout the United States...

...The joint research programs negotiated since 1971 promise benefits to both countries, but they can only enlarge this-federal influence...

...We shall no doubt remain locked together in a shrinking world, suspicious of each other, unable on the one hand to conquer by force but equally unable to disengage and findsome kind of armed security...

...However, the main price is the infectious spread of Western ideas from the contacts the exchanges allow...

...It is important not to exaggerate the scope of these exchanges...

...In this sense, Louis XIV' s dictum that states touch only at the top remains true, and Western influence flows into the Soviet Union through the new elite...

...Indeed, has this already happened...

...One must remember that no Americans studied in Soviet universities between 1936 and 1958, and that the Soviet decision to send some of their young elite to their major rival and to accept Americans in their dormitories touches a critical Soviet nerve and serves as a symbol of post-Stalin policies...

...Many now accept controls that used to chafe...

...Soviet scholars, artists, and athletes of course have many of the same interests as ours...

...So far, Washington has exercised little control over the cultural relations process...

...Stephen's, and the establishment of an American Studies Program at the University of Warsaw symbolize the deterioration that has occurred...

...The presence of 240 foreign correspondents in Moscow and the skill with which Western news services retain contact with Soviet dissidents, have restricted Soviet action against them...

...They promote pragmatic and more traditional attitudes and tend to make the Communist leaders ever more nationalistic...

...Soviet advantages and disadvantages from cultural exchanges are in many ways the obverse of ours...

...No more than ten Americans have taught in the Soviet Union in the last two decades, and only about three thousand Westerners have studied there since 1958, whereas 150,000 foreigners studied in the United States in 1974-75 alone.* Nor should one exaggerate the role cultural relations play in re-laxing tensions...

...The Soviet rulers have long considered Eastern Europe a barrier against the West...

...Many discouraged from studying twentieth-century history, the Soviet economy, or foreign policy thus turn to subjects more comfortable for the Soviet leaders, or even abandon Soviet studies...

...They have also introduced revised information and attitudes directly into the research areas crucial to the Soviet government and into the higher reaches of the Soviet system...

...The Soviet position at the Conference on European Security and Cooperation in Geneva reflected this rein-forced fear of "the free exchange of peoples and ideas...

...Glaring inequities abound: Columbia University has assisted dozens of Soviet scholars and artists, but Vitali Rubin, a Soviet specialist in classical Chinese philosophy, cannot get a visa so that he can begin his appointment at Columbia...

...The Soviet government then chose to continue to tolerate Sakharov and his activities...

...Does Communism bear within itself the seeds of its own decay, ripened into flower by necessary contact with the outside world...

...Imagine the effect here if we were drinking kvas and seeking Soviet equipment to exploit our oil and gas resources...

...It seeks "a fire that will not burn...

...Access to Eastern Europe is far easier than to the Soviet Union: one British observer noted that we approach the Soviet Union only across a moat and over a wall, while we reach Eastern Europe through a criss-cross of turnstiles—and Eastern Europe provides access to the Soviet Union...

...Jamming of radio broadcasts must end...

...it has instead become a carrier from the West, raising specters of 1956 and 1968 but under more subtle and dangerous circumstances...

...They agree that the United States should negotiate with the Soviet Union in order to reduce the likelihood of war, but they condemn us for weakness and irresolution and for failing to use our influence to advance the rights of the Soviet and East European peoples...

...Can an open, flexible society maintain close relationships with a closed and secret society without being infected by totalitarian practices...

...In the sciences, for example, the Soviet Union has acquired enormous benefits, from the Salk vaccine and new methods of heart surgery to the most sophisticated methods of exploring for oil and precious metals...

...Above all, the Soviet Union uses cultural exchanges to narrow the considerable gap between Soviet and Western science and technology by obtaining access to the equipment, techniques, and discoveries of our campuses and laboratories, just as it uses trade to obtain industrial information and to inject Western technology into critical parts of the Soviet economy...

...Because of the scientific and technical revolutions, particularly in transportation and communications, can any state isolate itself from the rest of the world...

...Can we allow our government to assume control over our cultural and economic relationships with another part of the world without undermining our own freedom...

...Occasional defectors are an embarrassment...

...Journalists must be guaranteed the right to function and report freely...

...In particular, they welcome opportunities to go "out," to perform and compete in other countries, to share information and insights with fellow specialists, and to obtain recognition from the international community...

...Their total cost to America has been less that $50 million, a fraction of the annual budget of a major state university...

...However, the East European governments cannot import knowledge from our universities, factories, and farms without importing the ideas and values at the heart of Western institutions, a continuing source of infection among a people already vulnerable...

...Even the most obtuse Soviet citizen must suspect from the flow of Western science and technology that the West retains its cultural leadership...

...Cultural relations between these two powerful countries illustrate the issues and dilemmas both states face, and they may help to answer the critical question Lenin himself asked: Kto kogo...

...The West has long held a magnetic and contagious attraction for Eastern Europe, and this attraction, intensified by events since 1945, has been increased by the various exchanges, by greatly increased economic ties, and by the tantalizing opportunities to taste the adjacent forbidden fruits...

...The more they borrow by sending Soviet artists and intellectuals abroad, by accepting Western scholars in Soviet institutions, and by increasing trade with other countries, the more they open the new Soviet elite to ideas they consider dangerous...

...Scientists and other intellectuals in relatively influential positions are among those most critical of the Soviet system, particularly of the restraints it places upon travel and access to information...

...The greatest cost we pay in accepting controlled cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union is in granting respectability and dignity, parity and legitimacy to a government that denies the freedoms essential to civilized life...

...Travel, art forms, hybrid corn and Holsteins, the presence of Soviets in American dormitories and of Americans in Soviet dormitories, exhibits of kitchen equipment, cooperation in cancer research, -study of computer technology, and the adoption of our business management techniques all affect the Soviet intellectual elite, as Pepsi-Cola, jazz, miniskirts, and jeans affect other levels of Soviet society...

...The Soviets have even learned from us the best techniques of organizing and directing scientific research...

...We should not be satisfied with vague agreements about reuniting families but should insist upon the free flow of publications and the right of people to travel...

...Sending novelists to a country, or accepting chemists from one in which historians are imprisoned for seeking to be objective and in which scientists of independent mind are hounded from their positions, is a high price, one that may lead to further moral demobilization and intellectual corruption...

...Given its obsession with bureaucratic and centralized arrangements, however, the Soviet government would open its frontiers, and some of its cities, universities, laboratories, libraries, and archives, only if the United States accepted an intergovernmental exchanges agreement...

...Who is overcoming whom...

...Foundation support is declining, however, even as the costs of cultural exchange rise, and the government looms as the main, almost the lone, financial supporter...

...Cooperating with capitalism" exposes the Soviet government to criticism from the People's Republic of China and from fervent old-line Communists everywhere...

...The United States and its allies should continue to press for an agreement that incorporates clear acceptance of free movement throughout Europe...

...Please print) Name Address City State Zip he Alternative: An American Spectator April 1976 21 tests against Soviet treatment of dissidents and from participating in conferences in which subjects distasteful to the Soviet government might be discussed...

...Indeed, these relationships raise fundamental questions for any totalitarian government: can a society import a skill or a product from another culture without also introducing other alien elements which produced that skill or product and which carry destructive potential...

...The success with which the West has protected Soviet dissidents illustrates the Soviet dilemma and the significant way in which we can marshal our resources to advance human rights and international security...

...Moreover, all of our scholars, even the most cloistered and politically naive scientists, have acquired substantial knowledge of the controls and iniquities which abound in the Soviet Union and of the difficulties our diplomats face in dealing with the Soviet government...

...Two years $15...

...access to archives and laboratories is frequently denied in the Soviet Union, while Soviets have the same access to our scholarly resources as any American...

...Similarly, the warning the National Academy of Sciences issued in September 1973 served to safeguard Andrei Sakharov, to define the price of more open relationships with the West, and to demonstrate that we are determined that the Soviet Union modify its policies in order to obtain benefits...

...Most cultural leaders are especially concerned because the exchanges occur under an official intergovernmental agreement and because, almost inevitably, the role of our government has grown constantly...

...We should rejoice that the competition between the Soviet Union and the West has shifted to include a competition in ideas on a peaceful field, with intellectual weapons, one for which we are particularly well equipped and one from which all peoples, though not the Soviet system, will benefit...

...But our national interest is also served by the increased knowledge and understanding of the Soviet Union which these individuals bring back with them...

...We should promote cultural relations, and commercial relations as well, because freedom is our main strength and our best instrument...

...The American athletes, historians, agricultural economists, and ballet dancers who perform, study, or do research in the Soviet Union benefit personally and professionally from their experience, just as Armand Hammer does from his business dealings there...

...Sakharov was in serious danger until President Philip Handler of the National Academy informed the Soviet Academy that depriving Sakharov of his rights would end Soviet-American scientific cooperation...

...The Western world benefits from extraordinary intellectual and cultural vitality, in art and architecture, in music and literature, in philosophy (including Marxism), and in all the sciences, at a time when there is a silence in Russian culture...

...For those who go to the Soviet Union, the most annoying costs are the monumental inefficiencies of the Soviet system, which they cheerfully endure, and the indecencies and indignities to which many are subjected, and which 20 The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1976 they bitterly resent...

...They exercise some influence over American scholarship by denying admission to qualified scholars with prickly subjects...

...This is particularly true because the largest single group of Americans who have spent more than a few months in the Soviet Union consists of specialists in Russian studies, generally in history, literature, and gov*It is equally important to keep East-West economic relations in perspective: in 1974 West Germany, the Soviet Union's most important Western trading partner, had more trade with tiny Luxembourg than with the Soviet Union, and its exports to Sweden equaled those to the entire Soviet bloc...

...Federal control over Soviet studies and other disciplines is therefore increasing, and, through its control of purse strings, Washington threatens to become a kind of St...

...However, we pay a price for these benefits...

...On the other hand, the National Academy's silence last year when the Soviet government prevented Sakharov from going to receive the Nobel Prize proves, in reverse, the same point...

...But the United States and the Soviet Union have also been engaging in cooperative research on environmental protection, medical care, agriculture, and transportation...

...Three years $20...

...In short, we should use the keen Soviet interest in obtaining our high technology in order to obtain the freedoms essential for the survival of a free Europe and a peaceful world...

...American proponents suggest that the SALT and nuclear-arms negotiations, the arrangements on crisis management, and the Helsinki agreement are liberalizing the Soviet system, softening old hostilities, creating a new spirit and a new structure of peaceful relations...

...They appreciate the respectability and prestige the exchanges bring and the impressions their artists, dancers, and eminent scientists create...

...Eastern Europe is a part of the Soviet empire, but yet another world...

...Thousands of foreigners traveled to and lived in Germany, Germans traveled abroad freely, trade flourished, and publications moved without interruption even after the Nazis had begun their barbarities and were preparing to attack their neighbors...

...They use travel abroad as a patronage instrument, denying those of independent, critical, or unorthodox mind the opportunity and awarding a bonus to those who faithfully endorse every government action...

...In selecting their participants, the Soviet rulers have naturally emphasized the fields of research central to continued Soviet progress, and the scientists who have benefited from travel abroad, discussions and cooperation with foreign specialists, and increased access to professional literature, have been visibly influenced by their experiences...

...The restrictions the Soviet government imposes create resentment among many visitors and a sense of shame among informed Soviet citizens, as the policies of Nicholas I and Alexander III did in the nineteenth century...

...and the KGB still harasses some Americans and especially their Soviet associates, while the FBI has never bothered a legitimate Soviet participant...

...Petersburg-on-thePotomac...

...Relations between the Soviet Union and the United States will remain tense, even if detente continues...

...Nevertheless, cultural relations do have some ideological significance, and, as the Soviet rulers constantly remind their subjects, the "ideological struggle" remains vital...

...They also bring closer together the peoples and their governments—the peoples eager to "rejoin Europe" and to enjoy the benefits of this century's advances, and the governments eager to acquire Western information to modernize their economies...

...Would such a policy of isolation, if it could be implemented, condemn that state to ever more critical scientific-technical and economic-military backwardness...

...They urge that we not grant legitimacy, and above all that we not provide scientific and technological assistance, to a government denying its citizens rights to which they are entitled under their own constitution...

...On the other hand, can our government retain the support of the American people, the confidence of our allies, the faith of those who seek freedom, and the respect of the Soviet leaders if it grants free access to Soviet scholars, scientists, and business leaders but does not insist upon equal rights of penetration...

...The dilemma for the East European governments is even more acute than is that of the Soviet government, as is their need for access to Western science, technology, -and intellectual sustenance...

...And perhaps most significant, if least visible, the two countries have been continuously exchanging graduate students and scholars since 1958: these were the first exchange programs, and they have slowly increased in magnitude, so that by now somewhat more than a thousand scholars have studied in the other country for a semester or more...

...The erection of a Hilton Hotel on the hills of Buda, overshadowing adjacent St...

...By living and working in Moscow and Leningrad, they have been able to go beyond Soviet slogans and published literature, and their views of Soviet life and policy have become less abstract and doctrinaire, more humanistic and discriminating...

...Our scholars, cultural leaders, and government were all reluctant in 1958 to accept the exchanges agreement because we sought free trade in men and ideas, not a primitive barter, or even reciprocal trade, in which scientists and athletes are counted as carefully as bales of cotton...

...Those who support cultural exchanges argue that we have no choice, that the Soviet Union exists in an ever-smaller universe, that the United States itself is a flawed society, that this is and will remain an imperfect world, and that we must use the instruments available to advance learning and at the same time to press for increased freedoms...

...The writings of men such as Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn illustrate with blindingclarity the dilemma that cultural relationships with the Soviet Union pose for us...

...They therefore constitute a modest pressure for moderating and mellowing Soviet policies...

...These erode the economic, ideological, and political bases of the governments and weaken ties with Moscow in the same kind of "unbinding" that the Russian empire witnessed a century ago...

...Some timid intellectuals refrain from pro" 'The Alternative' is perhaps the most articulate, thoughtful and well-written spokesman for the 'new conservatism.' Choice Magazine THE ALTERNATIVE, Post Office Box 877, Bloomington, Indiana 47401 Enclosed is $ Please enter a ^ new ^ renewal subscription to The Alternative for: ^ One year $8...

...Thus, the Soviet decision to expel Solzhenitsyn in February 1974, rather than to imprison him, reflects in part his courage and in part the pressure exerted by the information made available to the world, and then to the Soviet public, at a time when the Soviet government was desperate for Western scientific and technical aid...

...For Soviet leaders, the main advantages are clear...

...It may one day be forced to choose between reducing sharply or even ending intellectual and economic relations, trying to combine more open relations with the West with ever tighter controls over its own peoples, and adopting a far more flexible and relaxed policy toward control over the Soviet population, one that would almost certainly undermine the system...

...The costs to the Soviet Union constitute many of our benefits...

...Economic and military power, vitality and stability, and resolution and diplomatic skill are far more important in world politics than any mustard seed...

...Any Soviet citizens who remember Khrushchev's boasts in the early 1960s about surpassing the United States in important fields of production must wonder what has happened...

...They have learned that the Soviet Union cannot be open technologically and closed culturally, and that any relaxation, even to obtain great benefits, simultaneously raises great perils...

...Soviet insistence that the Conference ensure "respect for the principles of sovereignty and nonintervention" and "strict observance of the laws, customs, and traditions of each other" represented a position already enshrined in the exchanges agreements_ and in the determined refusal to accept "ideological coexistence...

...We should grant the Soviets access to our high technology only as they begin to permit free movement and equal rights of penetration...

...If we defend our principles shrewdly 22 The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1976 and resolutely in this unending struggle, the Soviet government will twist in debate over a painful dilemma...

...quite the contrary, it has encouraged universities and private foundations toassume many administrative responsibilities...