The Dissidents' Detente Debate

...Yet, as I. F. Stone observed in his insightful analysis in the New York Review of Books, Sakharov "is no enemy of detente...

...These people, he argues, "have begun to express more extreme views and to make still less constructive proposals, guided more by emotions than by considerations of political appropriateness...

...Democrats seeking to profit from the Watergate scandal...

...His overall view was perhaps most succinctly stated in an interview he gave to a group of Western reporters on August 21, 1973, the fifth anniversary of the occupation of Prague: "Detente without democratization, detente in which the West in effect accepts the Soviet rules of the game, would be dangerous...

...But then, of course, the moral fiber of the West will face its true test...

...denial of "most-favored-nation" status to the USSR until it eases emigration restrictions—to bring about a liberalization of Soviet society...

...We will have to erase from human consciousness the very idea that anyone has the right to use force against justice, law and mutual consent...

...With Solzhenitsyn in exile and Sakharov in danger of being forced to follow him abroad, we may soon see the important debate on democratization and detente that has been flourishing among Soviet dissidents reduced to the more orthodox positions taken by Medvedev and other inward-looking reformers...

...The trouble, as Medvedev sees it, is that dissident appeals have provided Western "Rightist" circles with too much comfort, and have not given enough encouragement to "Leftist social organizations which are most interested in the evolution of genuine socialist democracy in our country...

...On the contrary, complete and genuine detente, ideological as well as political coexistence, has been one of the two objectives of the extraordinary campaign that he has been waging since 1968...

...But in the long run, he feels, the advantages of detente may outweigh the difficulties now being experienced by the regime's critics...

...Medvedev credits the cessation of jamming of foreign Russian-language broadcasts in September 1973, the ratification by the Supreme Soviet of two United Nations covenants on social and political rights, the continued outflow of Jewish emigrants, the de facto suspension of the notorious "education tax," and the generally pragmatic stance toward the West to detente-inspired compromises...

...Medvedev admits that a causal relationship might exist between the relaxation of international tensions and the growing repression of Soviet dissidents...

...Such an attitude is governed by the spirit of Munich, the spirit of complaisance and concession, and by the cowardly self-deception of comfortable societies and people who have lost the will to live a life of deprivation, sacrifice and firmness...

...In his opinion, the responsibility for recent retrograde policies belongs to "our hawks" and "Right-wing circles" within the Party's Central Committee...

...With the removal of conservative Politburo members Pyotr Shelest and Gennadi Voronov, he intimates, these forces have lost their leaders...

...trade restrictions against the USSR...

...His contempt for professional politicians ("boils on the neck of society preventing it from freely moving its head and arms"), far from being restricted to the Soviet leadership, extends to powerful hypocrites of all nations, including avaricious heads of nonaligned nations, apologists for acts of terrorism and "national liberation wars," U.S...

...It would mean cultivating a closed country where anything that happens may be shielded from outside eyes, a country wearing a mask that hides its true face...

...Another is Sakharov, who is taken to task for his endorsement of U.S...

...He tends to downgrade the positive results achieved by open protest, and is sharply critical of what he terms the "immorality" and "provocative" behavior of certain dissidents...

...They oppose political extremism and ideological demagoguery of all kinds...

...Not only because the Soviet partners in the talks will reasonably protest against interference in Soviet domestic affairs, but we generally doubt very much that the majority of Western leaders are really seriously concerned with problems of political and human rights in the USSR or China...

...As a result, the world would become helpless before this uncontrollable bureaucratic machine...

...SOLZHENITSYN, SAKHAROV, MEDVEDEV The Dissidents' Detente Debate by rudolf l tokes Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's expulsion from the Soviet Union last month, coming as it did in the midst of a growing concern over the course of East-West detente, has intensified the debate in the Free World about what the current relaxation of tensions between the superpowers means for dissidents within the USSR...

...Despite their disagreements about how to put pressure on the Party leadership, a remarkable consensus exists among dissident Soviet intellectuals on the nature of contemporary international relations and the place of the USSR in the community of nations...

...I would not wish it on anyone to live next to such a neighbor, especially if he is at the same time armed to the teeth...

...As an artist, Solzhenitsyn probably speaks to the largest audience: everyone who dreads war, oppression and the power of faceless bureaucrats over the destiny of mankind...

...Others have pointed out that since the Nixon-Brezhnev summit of May 1972, the Soviet government has largely succeeded in breaking the back of the dissident movement...

...Andrei D. Sakharov, in his famous 10,000-word statement, "Thoughts on Progress...

...The examples of this kind of imprudent behavior cited in Medvedev's essay clearly point to at least three identifiable figures...

...While he does not discount the influence of Western public opinion on Soviet internal policies, he thinks there are practical limitations to the efficacy of dissident protest aimed at foreign countries: "In general, the opportunities for pressure on the Soviet Union from the point of view of interstate or economic relations should not be overestimated...

...It would mean trading with the Soviet Union, buying its gas and oil, while ignoring all other aspects...

...believes the impetus for democratic reform will come from gradual personnel and policy changes in the top Party leadership, rather than from outside pressures...

...and in banishing Solzhenitsyn, the Kremlin has not only rid itself of its most celebrated domestic critic but clearly hoped to diminish the power of his voice by making him just another Russian emigre cut off from his spiritual roots...

...Solzhenitsyn's moral-absolutist definition of international order leads him to an unqualified repudiation of East-West detente as it has been practiced in the post-Vietnam era...

...Finally, he reminds his fellow intellectuals "not to fall victim to a peculiar Moscow-centrism and fail to see that in many other countries there are just as severe, and in many instances still more severe, internal problems than those that exist in the USSR...

...All seem to agree that some kind of change is inevitable in the way the USSR coexists with the rest of the world...

...Accordingly, he assumes the posture of keeper of his people's moral conscience and guardian against its corrupt and inherently immoral rulers...

...Medvedev might be called the honest broker between the two, trying to reconcile his comrades' pleas for sympathy and help from the outside with the forbidding political realities of the Soviet Union —where, he argues persuasively, all domestic reform must begin...

...I think that if detente were to proceed totally without qualifications, on Soviet terms, it would pose a serious threat to the world as a whole...

...He argues that it resolves nothing and serves to prolong the danger of global war: "There seems to be little doubt, as many now realize, that what is going on in the USSR is not simply something happening in one country, but a foreboding of the future of man, and therefore deserving the fullest attention of Western observers...

...His view was not shared, though, by either of the other two leading Soviet dissidents—Andrei D. Sakharov, the nuclear physicist and father of the Russian H-bomb who became a fighter for civil rights in his country...

...A strong advocate of East-West convergence, he nevertheless also supports a balance-of-power approach to international peace and stability...

...made public last November, was prompted by what he considered to be the counterproductive radical-ization of several leading spokesmen for the Soviet civil rights movement...

...It would not really solve any of the world's problems and would simply mean capitulating in the face of real or exaggerated Soviet power...

...But he fears a devil's pact between the two superpowers at the expense of their democratic opponents at home and their militarily weaker clients abroad...

...Solzhenitsyn, following the classical tradition of the Russian intelligentsia, is perhaps above all else a moral philosopher...

...International Olympic Committee officials, and those who in the name of ending the Cold War wish to muzzle free international broadcasting...

...If we want to achieve not just a brief respite from the threat of war, but a real peace, a peace in essence, with a healthy foundation, we will have to struggle no less intensely against the quiet, concealed forms of violence than we struggle against the loud forms...

...They are deeply concerned about the prospects of a genuine and enduring peace, and are fearful of the Soviets' "military-industrial complex...

...Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom," was the first to consciously link the question of political democratization in the USSR with the larger issue of peaceful coexistence and global economic progress...

...who is chastised for comparing the South African government's treatment of imprisoned blacks with the Kremlin's confinement of dissident activist Pyotr Grigorenko in a hospital for the criminally insane...

...Consequently, although he is an anti-Machiavellian in the general area of international politics, Sakharov is prepared to use every legitimate lever—such as U.S...

...Roy A. Medvedev, unlike Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov...

...None has false illusions about the Western political institutions and the capitalist market economies that shape the daily lives of politicians, intellectuals and the common people on the "other side...

...I appeal to you with respect and hope...

...If that happens, the dissident movement will probably "go native" for a while and cease to be a serious obstacle to Moscow's efforts to sell its version of detente to the West...

...Medvedev's samizdat essay, "The Problem of Democratization and the Problem of Detente...

...A number of observers have noted that were it not for the Kremlin's policy of improving relations with the West, the Nobel Prize-winning author would probably have been prosecuted and imprisoned instead of deported...

...In any case, he feels "it would be an illusion to think that Western public opinion will sometime become more concerned with internal Soviet problems than with internal problems of its own...

...One is the writer Vladimir Y. Maksimov, who in an open letter to the German novelist Heinrich Boll denounced Chancellor Willy Brandt's Oslpolilik as a fraud and described its architect as a "mediocre apologist for a new Munich who takes himself for a great politician...

...In the long run, Nixon, Pompidou and Heath defend the interests of the ruling classes of their countries, and it is not axiomatic that capitalist circles in the United States, England, France, and the German Federal Republic are so interested in the most rapid development of socialist democratization in the USSR or in speeding up economic, social and cultural progress in the Soviet Union...

...Long before this debate flared outside, however, it was under way inside the USSR...

...According to their individual temperaments, these men address different constituencies at home and abroad...

...The third is Solzhenitsyn...

...Therefore, Soviet 'dissidents' who turn to Western countries for support must consider carefully the 'address' to which they direct these appeals...

...or Roy A. Medvedev, the revisionist historian who advocates the return of Communism to its original Marxist-Leninist principles...

...In the 1970 Nobel lecture that Soviet authorities would not permit him to deliver, for example, Solzhenitsyn expressed the fear that East-West detente would harm prospects for internal democratization in the USSR...

...I think such a development would be dangerous because it would contaminate the whole world with the antidemocratic peculiarities of Soviet society, it would enable the Soviet Union to bypass problems it cannot resolve on its own, and to concentrate on accumulating still further strength...

...Sakharov, the liberal scientist, seems to be directing his remarks to political decision makers, educated elites, and those who believe in the superiority of reason to the blind passions of anachronistic ideologies...

...In his letter proposing Sakharov for the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, Solzhenitsyn deplored "the widespread mistake of defining peace as the absence of war rather than the absence of violence," and urged the leaders of world opinion to expose individuals who accept a fraudulent peace as the alternative to armed conflict: "Coexistence on this tightly knit earth should be viewed as an existence not only without wars—that is not enough!—but also without violence, or telling us how to live, what to say, what to think, what to know and what not to know...

...indeed, he is the first prominent Soviet figure to be forced into exile since 1929, when Stalin ordered Leon Trotsky out of the country...

...It seems an especially appropriate time, therefore, to analyze the different attitudes of the three men toward detente, which have tended to be obscured by their common opposition to the excesses of the Soviet regime...

...No, it is not any difficulties of perception that the West is suffering, but a desire not to know, an emotional preference for the pleasant over the unpleasant...

...The other is the democratization of the Soviet Union...