How the Soviets See Detente

...The activity on the grass roots level [for a united front]," they further observed, "helps to break up the remaining artificial barriers set up by the splinter forces in the Cold War period in the trade union, youth and other mass movements...

...Having determined that the correlation of forces has changed in their favor, they are now concerned with preserving and strengthening this advantage by influencing politics within the various Western democracies...

...Of course, Moscow has always striven to alter the international system in its direction...

...Wherever the Communists and their allies win a large percentage of the vote in elections, sometimes as much as one-half, the ruling circles of the bourgeoisie have to pursue a foreign policy meeting the demands of the democratic opposition in order to stay in power...

...That is quite natural because realistically-minded political leaders and statesmen cannot afford to ignore the real correlation of forces in the world or fail to reckon with the new historical conditions...

...What makes this way of analyzing the Kremlin's foreign policy especially odd is that Soviet spokesmen, confident that almost no one in the West is paying attention to their appraisals, have been expressing themselves with unusual candor over the past year...

...In the early '60s, after all, American fears of an alleged Soviet-American "missile gap" prompted the United States to embark upon a massive program of strategic development...

...Henceforth, this is a concrete task facing the whole of progressive mankind...

...Most American supporters of Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger's policy seem to believe, without having bothered to examine Soviet sources, that Party leader Leonid I. Brezhnev has transformed the USSR into a "status quo power," with much the same problems, perceptions and aims as the United States...

...and Europe, but Washington's reluctant adjustment to the new pattern...

...They even criticized commentators like Maurice Couve de Murville, former French Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, for arguing that "detente is, above all, a frame of mind," and Marshall Shulman, of the Russian Institute at Columbia University, for calling it "a partial codification of the terms of competition...

...Correlation of forces" is a basic Soviet analytic tool, similar in many respects to our idea of "balance of power," except that it is much broader, referring to economic and political factors along with military capability...

...Assuring that "detente" is irreversible, however, means affecting matters within democratic societies as well as between the West and the Socialist camp...

...Ties and contacts between trade union centers of socialist and capitalist countries affiliated with international organizations are becoming ever more regular...

...And in this way, "leading contingents of the working-class movement, the Communist parties in the first place, have been winning ever more solid positions in the domestic political arena of the West European countries.' In short, the Soviets see the policy of detente as part of "the struggle for a fundamental restructuring of international relations...

...Progress" has been registered, too, in the international youth movement: "It is no longer a rarity for young Communists, Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, and others to join together in acting on the most pressing foreign policy issues...

...The Soviet writers were very clear on this point...

...Whereas overtures for cooperation came exclusively from the Communist World Federation of Trade Unions in the past, "today, trade unions of Social Democratic and Christian orientation also voice their support in favor of peace and international cooperation...

...As if responding to these very questions, the major theme of the conference was that the objective of the USSR's current "peace campaign" must be to make the new correlation of forces-—often a Soviet synonym for detente—a permanent state of affairs...

...Communist parties in the West were enjoined to direct their efforts at forging united fronts with non-Communist parties and groups that share their peace aims: "A key condition for insuring just and lasting peace throughout the world is the formation of a broad antiwar coalition consisting of various social and political forces...

...Nearly all the participants began their evaluations by referring to the "correlation of forces" between the Western and Communist blocs...

...But what, one might ask, if Western governments and people, refusing to acquiesce to the Soviets' improved position, decided there was an alternative...

...The ruling circles of the bourgeois states have now been forced to accept the principles of peaceful coexistence and to favor international detente...

...One participant put it as follows: "Over the past few years, the Socialist countries have immensely increased their economic and military might and enhanced their international prestige...

...Detente, in their view, signified not an easing of tensions between the two superpowers, as it does in the U.S...

...The Soviet experts agreed that a favorable "qualitative change" in the correlation of forces had occurred in recent years and that the USSR was gaining political-military superiority, proving the ultimate superiority of its "socialist system...

...Western public opinion, they claimed, "is well justified in being concerned over the fact that through the fault of the forces of militarism and war the political detente has yet to be backed up with measures in reducing arms spending and cutting back the military programs of nato and its individual members...

...They are aware that today the only alternative to peaceful coexistence is nuclear war, with all the consequences it may entail...

...Couldn't vigorous Western action reverse today's condition...

...Indeed, the Kremlin specialists asserted that it is necessary to "back up the political detente with a military one...

...Joseph Shattan, a past contributor to The New Leader, as well as to Commentary and Midstream, is a student of Soviet affairs...

...The March 1975 issue of the authoritative Soviet journal International Affairs, for example, carried the proceedings of a particularly interesting conference on the global situation...

...According to the conference participants, the prospect for forging a "broad antiwar coalition" has been improving, notably in the international labor movement...

...These demands, the Soviet experts assume, will include reductions in defense spending and the weakening of the nato alliance...

...What seems to be new is the prevalence of wishful thinking throughout large portions of the West, and the unwillingness of too many American and European experts to believe—let alone listen to—what their Communist counterparts in the USSR are actually saying...

...In other words, there is no alternative at all...

...These definitions, the Russians insisted, "bear only on some of the external aspects of detente, completely ignoring its internal content and sources...

...KEEPING THINGS IRREVERSIBLE' How the Soviets See Detente BY JOSEPH SHATTAN In the ongoing debate over the merits of detente little attention has been paid to the extensive Russian literature on the subject...

...The possibility of suggesting that the detente should be made irreversible is in itself a fact of tremendous positive importance for the present epoch," said a Soviet analyst...

...Yet this notion has rather severe limitations...

...It is as if a chess player were to ignore his opponent's moves on the assumption that each was trying to achieve a stalemate...