Keeping the Balance

...the real meaning of words that often have to be misleading in themselves will be detected and passed on, without distortion...

...Thus, even the most trivial banter exchanged between Messrs...

...Gromyko understands Rusk, and vice versa...

...Ulam's bibliographical essay would have been among the most interesting and useful pages of the book...

...It is far less profound than an earlier and now all-but-superseded "special relationship," yet despite its more limited range it is as comforting...

...Reviewed by PETER GROSE Washington correspondent, New York "Times" Once when a plane strayed across an unfriendly frontier or a ship was hauled into a hostile port —it doesn't matter which of all this decade's diplomatic flaps it was?a very important American diplomat approached a very important Russian diplomat and asked if Moscow couldn't help out in bringing the problem to a quick and calm resolution...

...They went into the negotiations as world revolutionaries...

...Later, he sums up why the heady innocence had to be so short-lived: "In November 1917 and for some time afterward the world revolution was a constant expectation...

...Already in 1918 he finds the "phraseology of nationalism" stealing back into Soviet declarations: "The Socialist Fatherland is in danger...

...While the perspectives of the broad survey are provocative, the disadvantage is obvious: Virtually every individual episode seems unsatisfactory on its own in Ulam's account, considering that a hundred other scholars have already dissected and re-evaluated what he has to cover in a few pages...

...Rusk and Gromyko at any of their meetings seldom finds its way into print, for that would mean that one side or the other had talked to outsiders about the meeting...

...Insensibly, revolution and the achievement of Communism abroad became, rather than ends in themselves, the means toward strengthening the Soviet state, warding off any potential intervention and even solidifying the position of the ruling group within the Communist party of Russia...

...Someone must have made this decision advisedly...

...There is an 18th-century Russian warning which he says must still be on the minds of the men in the Kremlin: "That which stops growing begins to rot...

...There are, after all, two or more national archives involved in a diplomatic affair...

...The one serious defect of this study—and it is so serious as to bring tears to the eyes—is an incredible omission...

...Probably wisely, Ulam does not bother to join battle with the historical revisionists about the origins of the Cold War, though his minute account of postwar settlement and suspicion leaves little scope for analytical sanitizing of Soviet behavior and motivation...

...That's probably exactly what he is doing right now...

...He demonstrates a practical fact about Soviet diplomacy to be borne in mind even now: "Whenever it seeks a large-scale accommodation with another great power, it operates initially through rather vague hints, leaving it to the other side to spell out details and mutual concessions...

...Letting honesty triumph over theatrics, Ulam regrets that he cannot conclude his monumental study either on a hopeful or an apocalyptic note...

...during the 1920s it was gradually to become something in the nature of an advertising slogan, propounded not cynically but without any of the earlier urgency and enthusiasm...

...Ulam uses German sources well, but since no side has yet opened up everything on recent periods, the last third of the book, dealing with the 1950s and 1960s, is less rewarding reading than what comes before...

...Analysis of foreign policy suffers a little less than other branches of Soviet studies from the dearth of reliable primary sources...

...It is a long way from Brest-Litovsk to Glassboro...

...It depends on personal relations, not at the top level as between Roosevelt and Churchill, but between the diplomats Dean Rusk and Andrei A. Gromyko...

...He is writing about the Stalin-Trotsky clash, but his sense applies to present-day disputes as well: "We are in the presence of one of those disputes that in the strange world of Communist politics and semantics begins with a slight difference of emphasis, becomes exaggerated and sharpened because of the power maneuverings of the two sides, and finally is blown up for propaganda purposes into two apparently hostile ideologies...

...Gromyko, like his predecessors Maxim Litvinov and Georgi Chicherin, stands far from the origin of policy...

...Just how elusive the ability of Russians and Americans to understand each other in diplomatic discourse has been is one of the themes woven through Adam B. Ulam's long-awaited and long-needed survey of the Soviet Union's world policy from 1917 to 1967...

...If that happened, how could either side be sure the other would not also then let out something more substantive...

...And, need it be said, the two men do not agree nor does one believe the other is necessarily speaking frankly—they are both professional diplomats...

...the job need not be attempted again for another decade...

...Now, as he approaches the end of his controversial tenure, Rusk could well regard the strange "special relationship" with the Soviet Foreign Minister as his unique personal contribution to American foreign policy...

...Starting from the ludicrous beginnings, when Trotsky's deputy Zalkind invited a departing Old World ambassador to take any of the once illustrious decorations he fancied from a ministry desk drawer, to the intricacies of nuclear nonproliferation, Ulam provides a broad sweep of growth, paradox and, to an unexpected extent, success...

...The "expansion" to him is ideological—the spread of the Communist doctrine, the wax and wane of the international Communist movement...

...Ulam makes his way deftly between the encyclopedia and the essay in his presentation...

...there is no bibliography of any kind...

...during the Civil War it became a more distant but still sustaining vision, enabling the Bolsheviks to endure privations and reverses...

...Indeed, the earlier "special relationship" had greater value before it became so publicly self-conscious...

...No such essay appears...

...The Messianic urge and miUennarian vision had to become weaker simply because the Soviet rulers were becoming absorbed in the task of running their own society and in the process were discovering that many economic and political problems had to be tackled in time-honored ways, regardless of the precepts of Communism...

...The signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he writes, "marked the end of the age of innocence as far as the Bolsheviks were concerned...

...Coexistence" is the nation-state's component of the Kremlin's foreign policy motivations, and this Ulam finds the more stable and constant of the two, almost from the very start...

...At last this generation has its basic text on an awesome subject...

...Ulam offers another approach to foreign policy more appropriate to the age of nuclear confrontation...

...If the Soviet participants are mum for one reason or another, the available records of the others tell much of the story...

...they emerged as men solicitous mainly about their own state and power...

...One of the most significant untold stories of the moment is the "special relationship" that has grown up between the highest diplomats of the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics...

...The pressure for ideological expansion, even if for internal reasons, still stands as a basic drive in Soviet foreign policy (though one supposes that recent events in Czechoslovakia are less a reflection of continued growth than a sign that rot has already set in...

...Not at all," replied the American principal...

...When the Secretary says something to Gromyko," one aide explained, "he is absolutely confident that the message will be faithfully and accurately conveyed to the proper quarters...

...Occasional footnote references point without comment only to the most apparent, and usually secondary, sources...

...Talleyrand wrote after the Napoleonic collapse, "To be great once again, France must cease to be colossal...

...A "special relationship" certainly does not translate into detente...

...Except for the documentation kindly provided by Peking, we are all thrown onto such conjecture that not even Ulam can give it to us as it really was...

...whoever he was, he was tragically wrong...

...Around the double theme of the book's title revolves the whole story of Soviet Russia's relations with the outside world...

...That was rough," said a young American aide who witnessed the exchange...

...A broad survey permits comparisons and contrasts necessarily absent in works of narrower focus: Mao Tse-tung's behavior in the early 1960s, at the height of the public polemics, was "reminiscent of Stalin's foreign policy in the 1930s, which was usually based on quite rational considerations, at the same time that elements in internal politics must be traced to some clearly pathological aberrations...

...Neither man makes decisions for his government...

...Nor can we probe the depths of diplomacy among the various Communist parties and governments, which might have explained much that remains inexplicable...

...If the positions had been reversed, I would have said just the same thing to him—and then gone and done just what he asked of me...

...Unless the "special relationship" with the diplomacy of the United States, and all that could follow from it, is only a transitory aberration, one can expect the drive of the Soviet nation-state to coexist —a drive almost as old as expansion —to play an increasing role in the next 50 years of Soviet diplomacy...

...And in a few words he disposes of all the meandering analysis elsewhere around points that seem to be missed regularly...

...The Soviet representative rebuffed the personal approach firmly and rudely: It is none of Moscow's business to bail the United States out of trouble...

...The story must remain untold in detail, for to expose it would be to ruin it...

...I felt cheated on the subject of foreign concessions in the New Economic Policy years: Were they really so unimportant to the Soviet attitude toward the outside world as to be almost ignored here...

...Ulam, who for years has guided his Harvard students along this uncertain path, is as sure-footed and lucid as his subject matter permits...