Debating Detente

...This has been the experience of Communist systems since their inception, and recent developments precipitated by the new East-West detente have further reinforced the law's validity...

...President Nixon's triangular diplomacy has had the effect of increasing the Soviet and Chinese stakes in an improvement of relations with the U.S., and as a result the revolutionary interests of third parties have suffered...

...Striking evidence to this effect has been supplied by a remarkable analysis published several weeks ago in Wojsko Ludowe, official organ of the Polish Army...

...This, in turn, has been costly to the revolutionary prestige of the two major Communist powers...

...The external costs—involving the decay of revolutionary virtue—are matched by equally unsettling domestic spinoffs of the detente...

...Thus the negative foreign reaction, even of Communist parties, to the latest trials in Czechoslovakia has certainly been an encouragement to liberal elements in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union...

...Senate...

...The current crackdown directed at Soviet Jews is apparently designed to prevent the situation from getting out of hand...

...Indeed, one cannot separate the detente from the course of events this summer in the United Arab Republic: The expulsion of the Soviet military forces from Egypt was the direct consequence of the new U. S.-Soviet relationship...

...In a relatively relaxed international atmosphere domestic opposition tends to assert itself more vigorously...

...Written by a senior officer and entitled "Peaceful Coexistence and Ideological Diversion," the article warns that the East-West Zbigniew Brzezinski is Herbert Lehman Professor in the School of International Affairs and Director of the Research Institute on Communist Affairs at Columbia University...

...One of these was the extraordinary North Vietnamese statement protesting what appears to Hanoi to be a betrayal of the revoluntionary cause by both Peking and Moscow...

...The North Vietnamese leaders were used to playing off Moscow against Peking and vice versa, and thus obtaining compensating support from one when the other's enthusiasm was wavering...

...Signs of rising nationality tensions in the Soviet Union are mounting, and, increasingly, non-Russian intellectuals are arguing that in the present international setting the various non-Russian nations should be entitled to have separate Communist states?like the Hungarians, the Poles, and so forth...

...Kremlin leaders must be disturbed by the steadily growing open disaffection among Soviet Jews, and they are doubtless afraid that successful Jewish defiance will prove contagious to the Ukrainians, the Baits, and the Central Asians...

...It confirmed the Egyptian leaders' growing suspicion that the Soviet Union was not interested in any policy other than that of real-politik, designed to enhance its own interests...

...The detente is not only being debated in the U.S...

...It counts on external support and it calculates that the government will be less likely to pay the international costs of a suppressive internal policy...

...behind the scenes, the Communist leaders are also assessing its value and trying to balance its advantages against its dangers...

...Under such circumstances, an alliance with the USSR ceased to have any value for the third party, in this particular case Egypt, but the lesson clearly has broader ramifications...

...It should be noted that some of the most doctrinaire critiques of international affairs appear in the Soviet and East European military journals...

...There is reason to believe the situation is breeding an active debate within the ruling Communist elites...