When Emigres Meet

...The only question that threatened the well-organized proceedings was that of how long speakers from the floor might hold forth...

...Fischer suggested that industrialization has profoundly altered the basis of colonialism in the Soviet Union as well as in the rest of the world...

...Perhaps there is a parallel, too, with events in the Balkans during the war, when I was attached to Marshal Tito's staff...

...The Great Russians counter-attacked with the claim that no one had been worse put upon by the Kremlin than the Great Russians themselves...

...Though it produced no startlingly new information or ideas, the meeting at least demonstrated to the participants the potentialities of dispassionate exchanges of views which might in time lead to more scholarly analysis and fruitful conclusions...

...anti-Tito, of survival vs...

...K. Krylov presented a lively description of what is going on in the kolkhozes...

...The decision was wisely, though perhaps somewhat autocratically, taken to limit them severely...

...Otherwise, the conference would still be going on?if not in the hotel, which had been reserved for only three days, then on the boat-landing of the lake, where the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria and his tutor had established the dangerous precedent of drowning in the course of a quarrel...

...In the first place, it seems to me highly desirable to bring together the more scholarly and less political elements of the emigration in such conferences as frequently as possible...

...Occasionally in the Caucasus one ran across evidence of nationalism, but usually in the form of idle boasting over a glass of heady Georgian wine...

...George Fischer, as co-speaker with Seton-Watson, was equally measured and free of the political passions which characterized some of the other speakers...

...R. Wraga started off the proceedings with an excellent summation of recent changes in Kremlin policies since Stalin's death...

...starvation or arrest...

...Al-though there were several snide comments among the emigres that the West "doesn't understand us" and understands the Bolsheviks even less, many of those present privately commerited that the two Western speakers, Seton-Watson and Fischer, had given them a good lesson on the value of cerebration vs...

...Professor Naum Jasny provoked a heated discussion on the question of how much scholars can rely on Soviet statistics...

...Nevertheless, the conference went off without any serious explosions...

...If future conferences were to turn their scholarly efforts to these more pressing issues, they might accomplish two things: mitigation of the deplorable bickering that has prevented any sort of united front among the emigration from the USSR, and development of a few ideas on how best to exploit the Kremlin's dilemmas in the real problems it is facing...

...The guest speaker was Professor Hugh Seton-Watson of London University, whose paper on the Kremlin's nationality policy set a high scholarly tone for a dispassionate discussion of the problem...

...Some speakers, notably Professor Kande-laki, who spoke on the Caucasus, approached the problem with remarkable restraint...

...It was the third such conference the Institute has organized, and about a hundred specialists on Soviet affairs heard eleven reports, six of them on the nationality issue—interrupted only long enough for a moonlight ride on the lake complete with balalaikas and beer...

...polemics...

...My second conclusion is that the nationality issue which divides the emigration is dangerously overrated on this side of the Iron Curtain...

...N. Kowalew-sky gave an account of current developments in the internal and external fields...

...But the main topic was the nationality question, which inevitably sent emigre blood pressure soaring...

...For me, the Tutzing Conference produced two conclusions...

...Others, however, gave their listeners heart-rending accounts of how badly their compatriots had been treated by the Russians, illustrating their complaints with lengthy descriptions of events long since recorded in history...

...During my own stay in Russia, I cannot recall a single instance when we were aware that the Kremlin was seriously occupied with the nationality problem...

...WHEN EMIGRES MEET East European exiles discuss nationality question without shedding blood By Charles W Thayer Munich Recently, in the small German village of Tutzing on Lake Starnberg, a group of Russian and Eastern European experts gathered under the auspices of the Institute for the Study of the History and Culture of the USSR to compare notes on Soviet economic developments and the eternal question of the nationalities in the Soviet Union...

...As one visitor put it, the very fact that so many Russian emigres could discuss the nationality problem without letting blood was an achievement of which they could well be proud...

...According to Seton-Watson, the Kremlin's current so-called "Russification" is not, as in Tsarist days, an end of Soviet policy but a means to suppress or destroy any potential competitor for the loyalty of the Soviet peoples...

...Doubtless, from time to time the Politburo or the Presidium has addressed itself to the question long enough to draft a decree liquidating this national rival to Kremlin power or suppressing that competitor for Soviet loyalty...

...Each time I returned to headquarters in Italy or Washington, the Balkan experts plied me with questions about the course of the Croat-Serb rivalry or the Catholic-Orthodox issue, and each time I had to tell them that those issues had, at least for the time being, been completely submerged by the far larger issues of pro- vs...

...Several Georgians, forgetting how often their ancestors had appealed to Moscow for protection from the infidel Turk, grudgingly agreed to be nice to the Great Russians after liberation, provided the Russians leave them strictly alone...

...But, compared to the agricultural problem, the heavy-vs.-light-industry problem, foreign affairs and the Chinese problem, I strongly suspect that the nationalities question keeps few people awake in the Kremlin...

...Nevertheless, the experts on Soviet affairs insist that the nationality problem is very real...