Fear of Foreigners

...Perhaps the astronomic costs as well as terrifying nature of the nuclear arms race, and the deep weariness of both peoples with Cold War adventures, may yet compel a mutual "wind-down" as the best bargain available...

...First, impossible as it is to quarrel with Daniels on the force of traditional (Tsarist) elements in the post-Revolutionary synthesis, his pre-Revolution-ary precis tends, in my opinion, to scant Russia's liberal and democratic traditions—admittedly weak (or, rather, "late" emerging) for most of its history...

...If the continuity of Russian history is Daniels' primary theme, his secondary concern is Western, particularly American, misperception of Soviet reality...

...Without minimizing the impact of the 1917 Revolution, which "did the most damage to the attitudes and practices that had been most recently imported from the West," Daniels insists that Stalin's revolution of the early '30s was the decisive step in forming Soviet society as we now know it...

...Neither such prophesies, nor the dying echoes of competing Leninist and Wilsonian mes-sianisms, can obscure the bald fact that there never has been—nor is there at present—any real conflict between the vital interests of the United States and those of Russia, let alone between the legitimate aspirations of their peoples...

...That de Toqueville, Custine and others once prophesied a Soviet-American duel for the world is hardly, in my view, scientific evidence either of its inevitability or of its permanence...

...As the unpublished papers of the late Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson will disclose in a few years, in the midst of the Hungarian Revolution Khrushchev also offered to neutralize Hungary on Austrian lines...

...author, "The New Russian Tragedy," "An Empire Loses Hope" Robert V. Daniels' extraordinarily compact survey of Russian history, contemporary Soviet society and Soviet-American relations arrives right on time...

...to anyone who has spent time in Russia, it is as evident, at every level of society, as the blue sky...

...Not completely, however—as Andrei Sakharov, Roy and Zhores Medvedev, Valery Chalidze, Pyotr Grigorenko, and others bear witness...

...Khrushchev actually went an extraordinary distance in 1956-59 to extend the olive branch of arms limitation to the West," offering concessions in the very areas Stalin had been most rigid about, but the Eisenhower Administration missed the boat...

...The regime's primary justification has long been and remains "militant patriotism," hard to distinguish'from old-fashioned Russian nationalism, and could in fact be accommodated by more flexible modes of government and less paranoid relations with the outside world...

...had its fingers burned more than once...

...concerns...

...Moscow correspondent, Washington "Post," '67- '69...

...His 70-page precis of the thousand years before 1917 is perhaps too concise (one misses the human empathy of Wright Miller's Russians as People and the subtle textures of James Billington's The Icon and the Axe), but he is magisterial on the Soviet period, and best of all on the contemporary scene...

...Of course, reform must start from the top down—enter Mikhail S. Gorbachev—but miracles should not be expected overnight: "it would be too much to expect any hasty tampering with the basic habits of the closed society, including the deception and prevarication on which the Soviet regime has regularly relied...

...For the turmoil of the developing countries, Daniels points out, "Americans have suggested few alternatives other than isolationist abandonment or military confrontation...

...Moreover, space must be allowed to express differences of opinion on two related points...

...Unable to fathom the aggressive defensiveness of the Russians, Americans impatiently swing from naive optimism to offended idealism, and in their righteousness repeatedly back the USSR into a corner where its security demands allow no concession...

...From 1945 onward, Daniels sums up, "the United States has tended to overestimate the Soviet threat, while the Soviet Union has always overestimated the threat from the West...

...Daniels' approach may seem controversial to those who still believe that "Communism" (however defined, wherever it may be) is the problem, or that crude analogies with Nazi Germany represent some ultimate clairvoyance...

...Daniels courageously sets the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in the same defensive sphere-of-interest context as previous interventions in Eastern Europe...

...This is not to say that liberal-democratic traditions are as vivid in Soviet society today as they were in the Russia of 1907 or even 1927...

...Although "Russian nationalism cannot readily accept either the separatism of the non-Russian nationalities or the loss of control over Eastern Europe," there are nevertheless "reasons to expect that the political, intellectual and economic stagnation that has characterized the Soviet Union in the '60s and '70s may soon be coming to an end...

...Is not the problem now the overextension—territorial, economic and especially military—of both superpowers, with all the clients, interest groups, special agencies, and psychological reflexes that overextension has spawned...

...The advanced technological society built by the Communist regime finds its maker not only dispensable but, as Karl Marx said of capitalism, a ' fetter' that is inhibiting the nation's development...

...Still, the other side of the coin is that although certain Soviet interests (notably, across the indefensible Polish plain to Germany) do represent historic Russian interests, these are geographically limited and not necessarily incompatible with U.S...

...What Stalin wrought between 1929-39 was a political, social and cultural upheaval that may be seen, in retrospect, as both "the functional equivalent of a [Tsarist] Restoration" and one particularly brutal variant of a worldwide trend toward rule "by a new class of managers and manipulators" who owe their status not to wealth but "to their function in and loyalty to bureaucratic organizations...

...The event was at least as traumatic as the 1981 Jaruszelski coup in Poland, or (in a different context) the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention...

...In these respects the Revolution only made matters worse, sharpening contrasts with the West, heightening the need to dissimulate for the sake of ideological legitimacy, and enhancing the power of the state over all facets of life...

...Professor Daniels' "Short Course" in Russia's baleful history is a major contribution to the understanding critical to a patient, constructive diplomacy...

...If the Soviets' categorization of revolutionary movements in the Third World has been shallow and hackneyed, the United States seems unable even to analyze the problem , let alone develop a strategy to cope with it...

...Surely it has long been aware that Ivan Ivanovich Sovieticus, hefting his 100 grams of Stolichnaya, is no less inclined than Archie Bunker to blame those far-off entanglements for most of his domestic woes...

...In citing the bulk of the economic, legal and social changes in Russia between 1861-1914, he fails to convey the very real sense of alternative possibilities that participants shared following the Revolution of 1905 and indeed, to some degree, well into theNEP period...

...For example, many of those who lived through the period (including my late father) would be shocked to find no underscoring of the gravity of Pyotr Stolypin's action in June 1907 proroguing the Second Duma, arresting Socialist leaders and "fixing" the election laws—thus defying the twice-expressed will of a substantial majority of the Tsar's subjects...

...Someofhis quotations from U.S...

...it is not...

...That is a proposition armchair analysts often challenge...

...Again and again Daniels stresses, as a common thread of that history since the Varangians, "the depth of Russia's national sense of insecurity," psychic and cultural as well as military and strategic: "Overwhelmed by the realization that foreigners do everything better, Russia has remained a closed society, in which thegovernment claims total responsibility and demands total justification...

...Ironically, though, nuclear parity and the threat of mutual assured destruction have enabled the Soviets to outflank NATO's "Maginot Line" in the Third World, most recently in Central America...

...It remains to be seen whether such a gradual disengagement from universalist missions takes place in an orderly manner through diplomacy or—as in ancient Athens and Imperial Rome—through a chaotic series of seemingly unrelated crises that may not all prove manageable...

...Lucid, level-headed, firmly grounded, it should serve as a perfect introduction to the Age of Gorbachev...

...Time after time, starting with the decision to build the hydrogen bomb, the United States has spurned opportunities to negotiate a halt to the arms race, and may be missing opportunities again as it pursues "the old chimera of technological superiority...

...When Peking and Moscow split, Washington's best and brightest "went counter to Machiavelli's advice: Rather than encourage the weaker party, the United States began to focus its generalized anti-Communist hostility on China, while gradually responding to Soviet overtures for detente" and pressing the war in Vietnam, "the one area where Moscow and Peking cooperated...

...With pertinent particulars rather than schematic theories, Daniels explains how, like geographical deposits, the distinctive eras and periods of Russian history, from Kievan Rus through the Brezhnev doldrums, have contributed to the current character of the Soviet Union...

...After two generations of forced modernization, however, "the Soviet political system has outlived its usefulness...

...The last 150 pages break out of history-textbook format into an incisive description of precisely where Soviet society stands at present, and an equally insightful analysis of where we have arrived in the American-Soviet rivalry...

...Second, I find unnecessarily sweeping Daniels' conclusion that Russia as a great power will not" cease to challenge the United States, regardless of its government," and that "no mere alteration in regime or ideology will quickly eliminate" its historic ambitions and interests...

...Since Stalin's death, Daniels demonstrates, Washington has been as myopic as Moscow in adapting to an evolving world...

...His guiding premise is that "history matters" and that to represent the Soviet Union in terms of ideology alone is "un-historical, unrealistic and dangerous as a basis for policy judgments...

...By making Soviet conduct intelligible in terms of historical experience, he hopes to help restrain "the cyclical Cassandra and Pollyanna attitudes so characteristic of public opinion in the United States...

...Has the time not arrived to acknowledge that, as the Soviet state has become more conservative in the post-Stalin era, its diplomacy has also, albeit gradually, become more traditional...

...Today," Daniels notes, "the revolutionary cycle in Russia is long overdue for a new turn, away from Stalinist conservatism and toward a revival of the Revolution's early hopes for freedom and equality...

...Inits encounters with the Third World, from Peking to Cairo and Havana, the post-Stalin leadership has (like the U.S...

...Three decades ago in The New Leader, the late Professor Michael Karpo-vich of Harvard argued convincingly that Imperial Russian diplomacy in pursuit of these interests was considerably more traditional in its objectives, limited in its aims, restrained in its methods, than the Soviet variety has been— and therefore easier to accommodate in a reasonable balance of power...

...As Max Hayward once remarked in comparing the pathetic standards of contemporary Soviet "unofficial" art with Russian painting of 1912, Stalin did show that, while it might take a thousand years to create a civilization, two generations might be sufficient to destroy it...

...Quickly" isof coursetheop-erative qualifier...

...Daniels observes that "since Stalin's First Five-Year Plan over 50 years ago, with the exception of some superficial gestures by Khrushchev the Soviet leadership has had no interest in changing the real structure of their state and society...

...Significantly, too, in response to Willy Brandt' s Ostpolitik even the sclerotic Brezhnev regime exhibited a readiness for realistic, quid pro quo compacts of the classical type—compromising deadlocks that could only be resolved by concessions on both sides, leaving "ultimate" questions to history...

...policymakers, from Robert Lansing through Paul Nitze, make embarrassing reading in 1985, and recollection of the Palmer raids and the McCarthy hysteria will make most readers squirm...

...I am tempted to continue quoting at length, but I do not wish to encourage the illusion that such a subjective skimming of highlights is an adequate substitute for carefully reading and pondering this excellent work...