Peaceful Competition Offers Opportunities

...Those who oppose such cultural contacts maintain that they hurt the cause of fighting the Communist regime...

...This was as expected...

...It is sometimes alleged that no foreign observer can ever, because of Soviet conditions, obtain genuine, unfalsified information in Russia...

...one might think that the cause of fighting Communism had come to an end...

...Secondly, and this is more important, such contact, insofar as it does influence Western thinking, does not necessarily provide only grist for the Soviet mill...

...So long as the "new course" remains officially in effect, this weapon can no longer be employed to the extent it was previously...

...such feelings doubtless were current in the satellite countries, too...

...In our era, when, in Eisenhower's remarkable phrase, "there is no alternative to peace" (except universal destruction as a result of atomic war, which is no alternative at all), the yearning for peace becomes a thousand times more powerful--and more justified...

...Till now, a favorite Soviet propaganda weapon has been the idea of hostile foreign encirclement, of an aggressive West ready at any moment to trigger a global atomic war...

...A rather impressive number of American books were based on this experience, books which were highly informative...

...The Western delegations at Geneva likewise failed to develop a broad program for genuine worldwide conciliation...

...As for the pernicious influence which Geneva may have exercised on the peoples under Communist rule, it is hard to conceive that the yearning for peace is any weaker among those peoples, who have hardly recovered from the catastrophic war of only a decade ago, than in the West...

...the tremendous propaganda efforts the Soviet regime made after the war to uproot this sentiment are a matter of public record...

...And these ideas will by no means suit the aims of the Soviet Government...

...But that does not mean that the struggle against these illusions is hopeless...

...Quite probably the Western governments, in the attempt to reach peaceful agreement with the Soviet Union, will curtail the volume and moderate the tone of their anti-Soviet propaganda...

...Karpovich edited and completed the late Paul Miliukov's monumental History of Russian Culture and is the author (with W. Bowden and A. P. Usher) of An Economic History of Europe Since 1750...

...The same considerations apply to the other side in this scarcely-begun "cultural exchange...

...The penetration into the Soviet sphere of even a feeble current of Western air may more than make up for the superficial, premature conclusions of naive foreign tourists about "the real situation in Russia...

...Of course, visitors from Russia have a completely different status from the Western scientists, writers, artists and farmers who may go to Russia...

...It will be up to them to combat harmful illusions, deliberate or inadvertent misinformation, and distorted political interpretations...

...Do these setbacks and difficulties mean that the summit conference was useless, perhaps harmful...

...That is, indeed, the view of many critics, who argue that Geneva weakened the will to resist Communism both in the West and among the peoples under Soviet rule...

...It is just as mistaken, in my opinion, to ignore the possible advantages of visits to Western countries by Soviet scientists, writers, artists or even collective-farm officials...

...On the contrary, fear of a new war is probably stronger in these nations, simply because they suffered so much more in the last one...

...True, these feelings may include an element of illusion, just as they do in the Western countries...

...But the only way to combat it is to make patient, intelligent, realistic efforts toward genuine peaceful solutions...

...Any increased opportunity to obtain information, however limited, must be regarded as a gain...

...In the new situation, the battle against illusions will, then, be more difficult...

...They, too, must (though to a lesser extent) take into account the popular feelings evoked by the "new course" in their international policy...

...To maintain that attempts to reach peaceful agreement can only disillusion East Europeans is an extremely dubious argument...

...To be sure, the intensified yearning for peace may lead to the rise of illusions, to an underestimation of our difficulties, to a weakening of vigilance...

...An associate editor of the English-language Russian Review, he is also the editor of the Russian-language quarterly Novy Zhurnal...

...No government conscious of its responsibility can oppose this desire...

...The Soviet delegation showed especially surprising restraint...

...It will be futile to base it on slogans like "No conferences with Soviet representatives...

...The Foreign Ministers Conference which starts this week may well be decisive...

...citizens they had detained...

...to reiterate again that Soviet "cultural emissaries" travel to the West on Government orders and that their statements in the West are subject to Government control is to labor an obvious point...

...The difficulties which the Western diplomats face at this conference should be obvious...

...Chancellor Adenauer's trip to Moscow also evoked Soviet intransigence on basic issues...

...The same was true after World War II, during which a limited number of Allied officials and journalists received a far greater opportunity for observation of Russian life than in the immediate prewar years or during the subsequent cold war...

...True, it does entail the risk of strengthening politically harmful illusions, to the same degree that this is also true of the general yearning for peace...

...Today, the "new course" forces the Soviet Government to use tactics which, whatever their intent, tend to awaken interest and sympathy for the West in the population under its control...

...One detects in the statements of some critics of the "Geneva spirit" an almost panicky, essentially defeatist temper...

...In any case, they largely confined themselves to the propaganda of smiles and gestures...

...But, in the first place, the extent of this risk should not be exaggerated: The degree to which popular sentiment is antagonistic or conciliatory toward the Soviet regime depends far more on Soviet political actions and on international events than on any propaganda effects of "cultural contact...

...There it will be hard to avoid fundamental, very concrete problems...

...Any reduction, however slight, of the obstacles in their path increases the value of the information they gather...

...But their arguments are one-sided...

...Some things simply cannot be hidden--at least not from serious, perceptive observers, who have the requisite background and a sufficiently developed capacity for critical analysis, who know how to distinguish between the actual life of the people and the official facade...

...This direct impression of live Americans necessarily clashed with, and in part dispelled, the propaganda-created idea of an "American aggressor" hostile to the Russian people...

...However, what under certain circumstances is impossible for official diplomacy is still possible for the organs of public opinion in the free countries...

...It can only be done by persistent and realistic efforts to find such peaceful solutions...

...rather it was the universal intensification of the desire for peace which brought about the conference...

...Contact with the American farmers who visited Russia, however restricted, probably had an equally positive effect on the thinking of those Russians who were able to meet them...

...It was also expected that both sides would exploit the conference for propaganda, but this did not materialize...

...It took the Chinese an entire month of negotiations to agree to release the U.S...

...However difficult this method of learning may be, peoples learn only from experience, by trial and error...

...Thus far, the Communists have given no indication that they are ready to make serious concessions...

...Yet it was not the summit conference which led to an intensification of the yearning for peace...

...more serious Sino-American questions have hardly been approached...

...Raising of the Iron Curtain is important not only for the Soviet people but for the West...

...The point is not the intentions of the Soviet Government, but rather what effect even this slight raising of the Iron Curtain may have within the Soviet Empire...

...Nor can we tell how far Malik will go in his relative willingness to make concessions in the UN discussions on disarmament...

...It seems to have largely dissipated the notion of American '"militarism" which was still held in various European countries, and it also seems to have produced some temporary confusion in the Soviet delegation...

...That cause would really be doomed if it could expect success only in times of international and domestic crisis, in an atmosphere of war alarm and world instability...

...Perhaps they were reluctant to give the West an opportunity to discuss Eastern Europe...

...But not even the mightiest, shrewdest dictatorship can sweep the entire actual life of a vast country under the rug of a gigantic "Potemkin village" specially constructed for foreign visitors...

...and it would be most unusual indeed if, at a time when the entire world was in flux, only in the Soviet Union did everything remain immutable...

...good will...

...Though Bulganin did open with a statement of Moscow's general aims, this was simply a repetition of old, old statements, presented with little or no embellishment...

...For no healthy, effective policy can ever be based on the principle of "the worse things are, the better...

...Establishing this fact does not in any sense exhaust the question...

...Such unintelligent, unrealistic pseudo-pacifism must be combated...

...The West conceived the "summit" conference as a preliminary effort--an attempt to establish contact for further negotiations, which the West understood would consume considerable time...

...This "external threat" also served as the chief Soviet justification for further exertions and sacrifices by the people, and for various harsh Government measures...

...In the 1920s and early 1930s, when Russia was open to foreigners to a much greater degree than today, this contact resulted not only in pro-Soviet and fellow-traveling literature, but in a plethora of serious, detailed critiques, which played an important role in acquainting Western public opinion with the real nature of Soviet Russia...

...However great their hostility to the Communist regime, one can scarcely imagine that they are ready to purchase their freedom from it at the price of thermonuclear war...

...Of course, the danger remains that the new international climate, if it lasts for any length of time, may make it easier than it was in the past decade for excessive optimism and harmful illusions to gain ground...

...Michael Karpovich is the author of the classic, Imperial Russia 1801-1917, and has been a professor of history at Harvard University for more than two decades...

...In the West, these critics say, Geneva stimulated all sorts of illusions about the possibility of "peaceful co-existence" with the Soviet regime...

...Thus, the real test of the "new spirit" in international politics lies ahead...

...The human yearning for peace is perfectly legitimate, healthy and natural...

...Insofar as the "new course" may open up such opportunities, it would be a great political error to ignore their importance...

...Perhaps they concluded that their best course was to insist on maintaining the status quo...

...Thus there is no reason to question the correspondents' reports which described how the population of Moscow followed the course of the Geneva Conference with great and sympathetic interest...

...We have many accurate reports on how Russia's collaboration and contact with the West during World War II stimulated "pro-Western" sentiment in the Soviet Union...

...Abstract attacks on "pacifism" cannot eradicate this fact...

...We cannot close our eyes to the changes taking place in the world...

...And this means that, to some extent, the tendency toward psychological disarmament is now present throughout the Soviet Empire...

...Quite apart from the rather fantastic notion that any success of Soviet science, literature or art abroad strengthens Communist political prestige at home, personal contact may be far more effective than historical and political disquisitions in combating the tendency, widespread in...

...What influence will "cultural contact" exercise on people in the West...

...Except in periodic paroxysms of nationalist fever (usually produced by propaganda), no people ever wants war...

...Such essentially educational work, may I repeat, cannot succeed if it is negative in character...

...It is easy to dismiss such "cultural exchanges" as mere Soviet propaganda tricks, designed to hoodwink naive foreigners--easy, but unconvincing...

...No matter how carefully these emissaries are chosen, no matter how great their fear of the Soviet regime may be, the possibility--indeed, the probability--is that they will carry back to Russia with them ideas and feelings about the West which they never had before...

...No attempts to reach peaceful agreements with the Soviet regime...

...It can try to keep it within realistic bounds, but this cannot be done by flatly denying the very possibility of peaceful solutions...

...Nor are all the tourists going to Russia so naive...

...it simply does not conform to the objective state of affairs...

...To assert that such observers do not exist in the Western world is absurd...

...But if that is the case, then the Soviet Government and its East European satraps must cope with the very same difficulties and dangers which beset Western governments...

...The Soviets did not raise at Geneva the ideas of a neutralized Germany and a "neutral belt" in Central Europe which they had assiduously propagated before the conference...

...Related to this are the inevitable psychological consequences of Soviet contact with the West, which has now opened up on a most modest scale...

...Not only is this line psychologically unrealistic...

...The only dramatic Western move was President Eisenhower's air-inspection proposal, which, whatever one may think of its practical merits, unquestionably made a strong impression as a proof of U.S...

...Peaceful Competition Offers Opportunities Geneva spirit does not doom anti-Communist cause By Michael Karpovich At Geneva last summer, the major world problems not only remained unsolved, but were not even posed...

...The more there are of such cases, the better it is for the cause of fighting the Communist ideology...

...And any policy pursuing aims which cannot be attained in the short run must be sufficiently flexible to adapt itself to changing circumstances...

...the West, to think of Russia and the Russian people only in terms of Communism and the Soviet regime...

...No cultural exchange with countries under Communist rule...