The Soviet Dissidents and the American Left

...The same isolation allowed Western liberals in the past to live comfortably with the double standard of morality that is now being challenged by a "tiny bunch of intellectuals" in the Soviet Union...

...Far more is at stake here than the future of a particular political party...

...military involvement in Vietnam has lifted a dark and distorting cloud from the American horizon, with one result being that the Jackson Amendment has replaced the McGovera-Hatfield bill on the center stage of public debate...

...Gradually, a consensus is growing among liberals that, in Schlesinger's words, "the question of intellectual freedom is at the heart of the stability of detente...

...These are not isolated incidents...

...As long as the dissidents retain support abroad, therefore, particularly among intellectuals, they apparently are not totally at the mercy of the Soviet state...

...Attorney General Ramsey Clark for special (and symbolic) criticism...

...It has a deadly fear of them...

...The point, however, is not that liberals have completely reversed themselves...

...rather, it is that they are starting to react to new issues defined essentially by the Soviet dissidents and calling into question many previously popular attitudes about this country and the world...

...For obvious reasons, attention has focused on this fact, and on how it stands in sharp contradiction to the repeated assertions by Kremlin leaders that they will brook no foreign interference in the USSR's "internal affairs...

...Addressing themselves primarily to Western liberals, they have begun to challenge the current conventional wisdom of the Left...

...Modern communications have made it possible for the voices of Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn to be heard throughout the West, though they remain silenced in their native land...

...On such matters," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "always trust the man on the firing line...

...Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the 1970 Nobel Prize laureate in literature, has been even more explicit on this point: "It is important to understand that the East is not at all indifferent to protests from public opinion in the West...

...In the United States this was shaped during the years of protest against the Vietnam war, when many liberals seemed to lose all sense of perspective about the relative virtues of their own society...

...The moral integrity of liberals as such-and, in a larger sense, of all those political groups in the West that are thought to be more or less of the Left-Is being put to the test...

...Soviet physicist Andrei D. Sakharov said last month, "The world will save me," and so far it has...

...Similarly, Senator Edmund Muskie, in his bid for liberal support during the 1972 Presidential primaries, quoted approvingly and frequently New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis' assertion that "the United States is the most dangerous and destructive power in the world...

...Of course, President Nixon's advocacy of unconditional detente has instinctively made liberals take a hard second look at the notion that once was their own...

...As many have noted, the world has become much smaller and more interdependent in the electronic age, despite the continuing political divisions...

...Early in September Solzhenitsyn, the most outspoken critic of liberal hypocrisy, delivered his message to Western intellectuals in the simplest terms: There cannot be peace with-out a universally accepted set 01 values...

...More important, the end of U.S...

...Eventually, the new climate should, among other things, temper the animosities that have torn the Democratic party apart for nearly a decade...

...I. F. Stone, writing in the New York Review of Books...

...The key new element is that where Vietnam fostered a negative liberal attitude toward the U.S...

...In this context, it is not necessary to repeat all that has been written about the bankruptcy of liberalism, except to note that its loss of faith in Western democracy in recent years has been accompanied by an erosion of opposition to Communist totalitarianism...

...Arthur Schlesin-ger Jr., for example, recently noted that he opposed the Jackson Amendment (which would tie most-favored-nation tariffs for the USSR to liberalization of Soviet emigration policies) until he read Sak-harov's letter to Congress urging that it be adopted...

...This new closeness frightens the Soviet leaders, who know that their system cannot survive in its present form without remaining isolated from the West...

...The mutuality of our relationship with the dissidents-the fact that we need them as much as they need us -Is often overlooked...

...And even Anthony Lewis has adopted a tough line toward Moscow: "A powerful government that breaks its word at home, that practices vindictive cruelty toward its own citizens without any moral or political constraints, can hardly be trusted abroad...

...in the '50s suddenly concluded that the country as a whole-except for the educated elite and the impoverished minorities -was imperialist, racist and sick...

...Also quite significant, but largely overlooked, perhaps because less apparent, is the impact the dissidents are having on political trends in the free world...

...We need a single moral standard by which to judge all forms of violence-wars, terrorism, and state repression-and a similar worldwide standard by which to judge Communist and non-Communist societies...

...To be sure, disunity still exists within the liberal coalition that FDR wrought, and it will persist so long as the party consists of varied groups with differing values and interests...

...REVIVING THE DEMOCRATIC FAITH The Soviet Dissidents and the American Left BY CARL GERSH The response in the West to the recent statements by prominent Soviet dissidents is a dramatic indication of how internationalized the issue of human rights has become...

...The truth," he wrote, "has long been demonstrated and proved and explained, and yet it has remained without attention or sympathy, like Orwell's 1984, because of a 'universal conspiracy of adulation.' " The reference to Orwell is not without significance, for in many respects Solzhenitsyn has assumed the late British critic's role of attacking the Left's "lopsided way of looking at the world," its "spirit of complaisance and concession, and . . . cowardly self-deception...

...reached the same conclusion for roughly the same reason...

...This is not to say that Soviet repression of dissent will ever become as powerful an issue for liberals as Vietnam was, yet without question it already has noticeably altered the political climate...

...Now there are rumblings of an ideological counterattack against this view, stimulated not from within by the small group of liberals who persistently rejected it, but from the outside...

...Sixty-five leading U.S...

...The soviet dissidents have intervened in this crisis of the West as directly as Senator Jackson would have us intervene in Soviet "internal affairs...

...But while Vietnam exacerbated these differences to the breaking point, the dissident issue could help make coexistence possible once again, and not simply because it poses a fundamental foreign policy question on which most Democrats can today agree...

...But it is at the heart of what may prove to be a revival of faith in Western democracy...

...Solzhenitsyn, whose admonition was included in a 3,000-word letter nominating Sakharov for the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, went so far as to single out former U.S...

...that was repugnant to a majority of the American people, Soviet repression and resistance to lowering barriers between East and West should have the opposite consequence of fostering a renewed appreciation on the Left of what it means to live in an open society...

...intellectuals, some of whom only months ago would not participate in any joint action, signed telegrams to Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn praising their "courageous efforts on behalf of peace and freedom," and sent a toughly worded cable to Soviet Party chief Leonid Brezhnev denouncing his government's violation of human rights...

...Americans for Democratic Action, one of the leading New Politics organizations, has endorsed the Jackson Amendment...

...Skeptics will undoubtedly warn that this is reading too much into the evolving situation...

...Carl Gershman is chairman of the Young People's Socialist League...

...Respected thinkers who had celebrated the U.S...