Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS East-West Personal Contacts: Menace or Opportunity? By William Henry Chamberlin Everything Moscow does coldly calculated from the standpoint: How will it affect the national...
...On the United States side, a man whose knowledge would be useful in a trip of inspection to Russia is free to stay at home if a trip to Russia does not appeal to him...
...Stalin, especially in his later years, believed that these causes would be best promoted by hermetically sealing off the Soviet Union and the satellite states from all but the most essential contacts with the outside world...
...But unofficial person-to-person meetings should, on balance, do our side more good than harm...
...By William Henry Chamberlin Everything Moscow does coldly calculated from the standpoint: How will it affect the national interest of the Soviet Union and the prospect...
...To be sure, there are some forms of Soviet-Western contact that are undesirable...
...The contrary case of a citizen of a free country passing over voluntarily to the Soviet side is about as rare as a man biting a dog...
...On the other hand, it is a safe assumption that no one suspected of political unreliability is being allowed to leave the Soviet Union or the satellite states...
...For the first time in twenty years, the welcome mat was spread for foreign tourists...
...Despite these disadvantages, I think person-to-person contacts with the Soviet Union and the satellite states should be encouraged...
...The foreigners who enter Russia will, in the natural course of things, meet mostly members of the Soviet upper crust with a good idea of what it is politic and safe to say to a foreigner...
...It is demoralizing and deceptive when Western statesmen can be photographed exchanging toasts and professions of friendship with Stalin's heirs, with men of whom the British publicist Edward Crankshaw says very justly: "They were all the satraps of the most terrible tyrant in modern history...
...So, although one may be sure that the political police keeps full dossiers on the comings and goings and sayings of diplomats and other foreigners who are considered important, the more obtrusive forms of open spying were dropped...
...Official interpreters and lack, in most cases, of a knowledge of the Russian language will insulate most foreign visitors from the less pleasant aspects of the Soviet system...
...The result is likely to be precisely the reverse...
...It is significant that for a Communist to remain in the West is about as common as a dog biting a man...
...It is to be hoped there will be no more Soviet state visits, no more honoring of men with such records as criminals against human rights...
...Possibilities of travel were broadened...
...Stalin's heirs, at least for the time being, are proceeding on a different assumption: that some contact with the non-Communist world, carefully controlled and directed, will benefit the Soviet regime...
...This can scarcely be reconciled with the kind of regime Stalin instituted for foreigners...
...There is fairly wide agreement among returning visitors to the Soviet Union on the widespread Russian curiosity about conditions of life abroad...
...It is to be hoped there will be no more "summit" conferences of the Geneva type, at least until such elementary conditions of peace and justice as the reunion of Germany in freedom and the ability of the present satellite states to shape their own destinies freely are realized...
...We stand to gain more than to lose from uninhibited conversations and discussions...
...they were all murderers on his behalf...
...of the international Communist movement...
...For the Stalin method of isolation kept the Soviet economy behind in the march of technical progress...
...Even within the limitations which are set by the nature of Communist rule, it is unwarranted defeatism to assume that freedom will suffer more than Communist totalitarianism as a result of more person-to-person contacts...
...If the Soviet Government taps an expert in some field for a trip to the United States to acquire some desirable knowledge, that person goes without question or argument...
...If there were complete freedom of movement of human beings, ideas and publications, the Communist system would probably collapse...
...One may anticipate a boom in books about Russia of the "I Was There" type, of which there were extremely few (except by escapees from concentration camps) in the last phase of Stalin's 30-year reign of terror...
...These were preferred in delegations or groups, but individual visits have also been permitted...
...Allowing for all the deficiencies and inadequacies of American knowledge of the Soviet Union, the picture of America created by centralized Soviet propaganda is far more crooked and distorted than the American's image of Soviet conditions...
...Furthermore, it is clearly Soviet policy now to win success by smiles rather than scowls...
Vol. 39 • October 1956 • No. 44
