THE DOMESTIC IMAGE OF SOVIET FOREIGN POLICY
Lens, Sidney
The Domestic Image of Soviet Foreign Policy by SIDNEY LENS Sidney Lens recently returned from a swing through the Soviet Union in company with nine other American trade union officials. He visited...
...Lens is the author of several books, including The Crisis of American Labor and The Counterfeit Revolution...
...At the station in Brest, just inside the Soviet border, are more soldiers, some unarmed, others carrying their guns with careless abandon...
...Khrushchev's special brand of Communism—so little understood in the West—stands intact...
...Ivan doesn't want this prospect squandered on military gambles and international tensions...
...Which is the true face of Russia, the Mir signs, or the armed soldiers— or both...
...After Khrushchev returned from Paris there were members who openly criticized him for not going through with the meeting...
...More important for the Russian Ivan, however, is the interlinking of peace and a higher living standard...
...I asked him...
...The hard policy in external affairs thus tied in with the hard policy internally—the lack of consumer goods, police terror, purge trials, and the rest...
...Yet, one can not pinpoint these forces accurately, nor can one estimate their relative power...
...He conceded that the party's popularity was not high — if there were a free election, he believed it would do well to get ten per cent of the vote...
...In its own way this dispute is more important than even the Trotsky-Stalin conflict over "socialism in one country...
...But within the context of Communism, the Soviet Union of Khrushchev persists as a radical departure from that of Stalin's time...
...And the drive to outstrip America in both industry and living standards requires time...
...An example of their fluidity is the Malenkov-Molotov alliance of a few years ago...
...Supplies of consumer goods continue a slow but steady rise...
...Whether the moment for this change is 1965 or 1970, there is clearly a movement in that direction...
...The term stuck with me throughout my trip...
...To build the industrial machine required for military defense, he was prepared to sacrifice the living standards of his people...
...But thousands of everyday goods just have not been available...
...However, the change in emphasis and detail is not without significance...
...The minutes of early Bolshevik Congresses, all the way back to 1897, are being printed anew, giving intellectuals an opportunity to become acquainted with opposition and dissension...
...The improvement of living standards is visible in two other areas as well—on the farms and in the stores...
...if they become unrealistic he, too, must go down the drain of history...
...Khrushchev, like Stalin, could let his secret police run riot—if his concept of the world outlook were the same as that of the late tyrant...
...If we were to emphasize a policy of sustained aid to the national revolutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America we could speed the process of relaxing tensions within the Soviet Union too...
...During this period the Soviet press was also sharply critical of the United States' role in Cuba, and that of the United Nations in the Congo...
...Are there any people like you in the Soviet Union...
...New quarters will be provided for fully one-quarter of the population by 1965...
...asked a woman at the Moskvitch auto plant plaintively...
...Their essence is to be found in: <I The de-emphasis of terror in favor of "subtle persuasion...
...The only thing is that the practice is not like the theory...
...This juridical structure still lacks many of the safeguards so long established in the West...
...The liberalization of Soviet life— the "half-revisionism"—is visible in every sphere, even in the functioning of the Communist Party...
...We do not grasp the inner motivations of Soviet behavior...
...Russia is still a long way from the United States in its production of heavy goods...
...As for the regime, it too can only gain with time...
...Was he under pressure from the secondary Soviet leadership...
...He said he knew some personally, but he refused to give me their addresses "at this stage...
...Once it goes beyond the "hump," however, it can reverse the process...
...Why, after building up the Summit idea for years, did Khrushchev wreck the meeting in Paris...
...This will augment considerably the production of consumer goods such as cloth, plastics, and furniture...
...The closest thing to a revisionist you will find," he said, "is Khrushchev...
...we also give the regime an excellent "out" for keeping the tempo of relaxation slower than it might be...
...He sought to catch up with the West almost exclusively in heavy industry...
...A warrant is signed by the prosecutor rather than a judge...
...There are still some people in "forced residence" in Siberia...
...Russian planes, sputniks, and other technical accomplishments suggest a high level of industrial development...
...I The slow emergence of pressure forces that some day will play an independent role...
...The drive to build millions of new apartments still has a top priority...
...He would use whatever time still remained before hostilities to catch up with America's steel potential, aircraft industry, and machine - tool equipment, rather than building apartment houses...
...The evidence in the area of internal policy is unmistakable...
...Every time an American general or politician emphasizes "positions of military strength" he alienates the Russian people, who are genuinely afraid of this saber-rattling, and consolidates the Soviet citizen behind the Soviet regime, achieving precisely the opposite result from the one intended...
...The accused has the right to subpena records and witnesses...
...It can accede to the pressures of its people for higher standards only if the cold war relaxes...
...The only hope was to build heavy industry, and the devil take the cost...
...To the extent that we in America continue our preoccupation with military planning we feed the doubts of those who feel that the time for full relaxation is not yet here...
...Since war is not inevitable there is time to satisfy the pent-up hunger of his people...
...But this is a myopic estimate...
...Khrushchev's revisionism has precisely the opposite implications...
...Guarding the bridge, the sign, and the Soviet Union is a young soldier, rifle raised, surveying the visitors from the outer world...
...we might also help speed the process of revisionism in the Communist world as well...
...The internal orientation of Soviet life has remained unchanged in the face of the Summit collapse, the U-2 and the RB-47 incidents, and the loud diplomatic denunciations of the United States...
...Soviet culture still acts as an apologia for the system...
...Russian steel mills, according to two American experts we met at the U. S. Embassy, are more modern than ours...
...The supply of meat is expected to double, that of wool to increase by seventy per cent, shoes by forty-five per cent...
...In some cases he may be ordered to have a psychiatric examination...
...During the seven-year plan fifteen million apartments will be constructed, and seven million people will be helped to build private homes...
...Khrushchev claims that capitalism can now exist without war, that Leninism must be "up-dated" to include this concept...
...In Warsaw, before I reached Moscow, I had a talk with a Polish revisionist...
...It gives us real security...
...How far these guarantees are adhered to, I do not know...
...Malenkov stood for a relatively soft policy, favoring co-existence and a large increase in consumer goods...
...But Communism, under Stalin, wasn't so concerned about popular support—it always was ready to use the police...
...He visited Moscow, Leningrad, Tashkent (Central Asia), Sochi (in the Caucasus), and Kiev...
...Before the present ideological conflict is over there may be much in the fabric of Khrushchev's Communism that will be unrecognizable...
...There is always a feeling of careful manipulation...
...And Khrushchev's "half-revisionism" reflects this historical moment and the pressures that have generated it...
...It differs from Stalinism in much the way that Tito's Communism or Go-mulka's differs from the original variety...
...He would delay satisfying the needs of his people, just as Stalin did...
...It is in domestic policy that foreign policy both begins and ends, and it is here that we must seek an explanation for Khrushchev's behavior, both before and after Paris...
...It is racking—and will continue to rack—every Communist Party in the world...
...This sort of blurring occurs repeatedly...
...The army...
...Student groups are not bombarded with political indoctrination nearly so much as they were a decade ago...
...For the first time in decades the Soviets have republished John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World with glowing references to Trotsky intact...
...But every foreigner we talked to conceded that there have been three important changes in the Party structure: ^ The area of decision has been widened...
...But the U-2 incident caused some of his followers to hold back and thus put his policy in jeopardy...
...The economy of scarcity is most glaringly visible in the severe housing shortage...
...The three facets of this "half-revisionism" mesh into a single new Soviet approach— more consumer goods internally, a foreign policy of co-existence, and a new theory of capitalism...
...Where the train from Poland carried us across the border into the Soviet Union this summer, there is a bridge over the tracks displaying a large sign: Mir—Peace...
...We were told by V. A. Boldirev, Minister of Law of the Russian Federated Republic, that under the new codes of Soviet jurisprudence the presumption of innocence is with the defendant...
...Equally significant is the striking fact that the Soviets are winning major battles in the struggle of coexistence without firing a shot...
...The power alignments in the Kremlin are just too difficult to penetrate—nor do they remain stable...
...For Stalin the theory of "socialism in one country" meant that nothing could be expected either from "world revolution" or an attempted understanding with capitalism...
...Komsomol has become less political and more oriented to cultural activities and sports...
...Polish Communists with whom I discussed it considered the conflict with Peking a fight to the finish...
...Stalin's hard policies after 1929, it should be remembered, were a result of his belief that war with capitalism was not only certain but near...
...Khrushchev's whole policy appears to be tied to these twin-objectives...
...In a short three-week period recently, Cuba slammed the door on America, the Congo was poised to move out of the Western orbit, and Laos declared its neutralism...
...Soviet society is in transition away from naked terror toward a degree of liberalization...
...There is a tolerance for criticism —so long as it does not result in factionalism—that is far greater than in Stalin's day...
...Strained international relations went hand in hand with strained internal relations...
...After forty-three years the Soviet regime is for us a set, solid, impregnable fortress of dictatorship...
...There is no bail...
...It is no longer fear of imprisonment that motivates Soviet conformity, but the more sensitive concern that "you can't buck the system...
...We would give impetus to those growing internal pressures in Russia calling for further relaxation and still more consumer goods...
...The atmosphere, relatively calm and relaxed before the abortive Paris Summit conference, was sharp and tense once again...
...But these are the residues of an old policy, not the precursors of a new Stalinism...
...Heavy industry is still the major preoccupation of Khrushchev's regime, but consumer goods and housing are slowly becoming available...
...People are speaking more freely than they have since the 1920's...
...Russia's economy is reaching the stage that John Strachey calls "the hump...
...Khrushchev has started what may be an irreversible process...
...If Khrushchev felt that war was inevitable he would not embark on so ambitious a program of providing consumer goods and housing...
...A much more informative guide-post to Soviet international policy is the internal policy of the Soviet government...
...The purge trials, so characteristic of the 1930's and the period immediately before Stalin's death, are evidently things of the past...
...This year steel production will rise to somewhere between sixty-one and seventy million tons—not much below the American level...
...Spontaneous" protest meetings were called in many factories, and each factory paper carried indignant letters...
...And Komsomol, with its 18.5 million young members, is still the watchdog among the youth for the regime...
...A man can be held for investigation for as long as ten months...
...Taxes on produce grown by the collective farmer on the small plot allotted for his private use have been abolished...
...During the present seven-year plan, which will end in 1965, the chemical industry—now second only to that of the United States —will triple its output...
...During our stay the RB-47 incident hit the headlines...
...If we were to abandon our rigid course of relying so heavily on armaments in our conduct of foreign affairs, we might not only begin to win some victories—for a change— in the underdeveloped areas...
...Queues in front of butcher shops and food stores are becoming smaller...
...Almost no conversation, with leader or worker, ended without reference to the U-2 incident...
...Since the execution of Beria, the secret police has been stripped of its economic function, and forced labor abolished...
...So are the thousands of secret trials in which special councils tried cases in the absence of the accused...
...Undoubtedly there were some pressures within the Soviet bloc against the Summit, but how they operated and who they involved were questions not easily answered...
...For thirty years he has been waiting for the fulfillment of his leaders' promises of the good life...
...China...
...He knows instinctively that if tensions relax he will get his new apartment, more meat, some furniture...
...The state now tries to apply mild pressures, to cajole...
...The liberties we consider the essence of freedom are lacking...
...Instead, normal incentives are being used to open up virgin lands: higher wages, better quarters, promises of advancement, and the relentless propaganda of patriotism...
...But this is a naive concept...
...But there is more than last year, and last year there was more than the year before, and probably next year will see a still greater supply...
...Molotov was a neo-Stalinist...
...Communism in the past has executed many zig-zags...
...Central machine stations were dissolved and collective farms were allowed to buy their own tractors and other equipment...
...In our three weeks in Russia we saw thousands of pictures of Lenin, a dozen or two of Stalin, merely a few of Khrushchev...
...Khrushchev's "half-revisionism," on the other hand, is a soft policy in both areas...
...All over the Soviet Union there are thousands of similar signs—Mir, Mir i Drujba (Peace and Friendship), Mir Miru (Peace for the World...
...Nothing impressed me more in my three weeks in Russia than the sheer uselessness—indeed, the self-defeat-feating character—of present American foreign policy...
...If he were intent on war he would change his propaganda emphasis to carry these forces along with him...
...While he favored the system generally, he felt it should be modified to include freedom of speech and press, organized factions within the party, and economic reform such as retail cooperatives and a free market in light industry...
...Once a Communist concedes that capitalism can exist without war, he must alter not only his foreign policy but his estimate of capitalism's internal potential as well...
...Everything the Russian citizen does and everything he needs depend on the good will of a small, tight body of men in the Communist Party...
...When the Editor of The Progressive was in Moscow in 1956 he recorded the beginnings of this process...
...This thesis is strongly confirmed by the present ideological fight within the Communist world...
...The economy is reaching the level where it can satisfy these pent-up wants...
...That is why Powers was given a moderate ten-year sentence (in contrast to the thirty-year sentence for the Soviet spy Colonel Abel here in the United States...
...Tito's break with Stalin's "hard" policy also started as a small breach and widened with each succeeding year...
...Organized factions are not permitted...
...If we could have some freedom it would be a good way to live...
...The recalcitrant Russian finds it difficult to get a new apartment, or a low-cost vacation in the rest homes, or a better job, or a scholarship...
...For decades the Soviet citizen has been subjected to a shortage of consumer goods so that the state could build basic industry...
...Translated into foreign policy, the new Soviet domestic reforms mean a sustained and long-term quest for a modus vivendi with America...
...These are the indications of the current transition...
...There is, most of all, a marked decline of fear in today's Soviet Union...
...The Soviet regime is still a dictatorship...
...The basic freedoms of speech, assembly, and press are still absent...
...Tired after a long bout with privation and war, ever on the alert that Stalinism can return, he prefers to live cautiously...
...The other side of this coin is the steady increase in living standards...
...it indicates the transition character of much of what is going on in Soviet Russia...
...In distant places wages are twenty-five to one hundred per cent higher than in Moscow...
...As the economy becomes more viable it generates important new pressures...
...But the new regime shies away from using total police power...
...Rumors in Moscow label the army a rigid opponent of every attempt at demobilization...
...J Party nuclei participate more in secondary decisions than they did before and are more informed of what is going on at the top...
...He is a half-revisionist...
...Everything about Khrushchev's internal policy suggests the belief that peace is possible, that "time can be bought...
...One can argue, of course, that this hunger is forcing some concessions, that it cannot be sidetracked longer...
...Thus Khrushchev's "half-revisionism" has, so far, far-reaching and self-propelling implications...
...As he raises living standards, there is a relaxation of fear and a loosening of controls...
...there is an increasing development in the direction of legality...
...Were these incidents the prelude to intensification of the cold war...
...The tone of the Soviet press towards foreign visitors changed perceptibly...
...The new novels are no longer the "boy meets lathe machine, boy falls in love with lathe machine" type...
...Though Khrushchev is the party "boss," he does not rule alone...
...It is entirely conceivable that Khrushchev may be forced into a similar path...
...To many people this may sound like a "change without a difference...
...His articles have appeared in many American publications, including The Yale Review, The Harvard Business Quarterly, The New Republic, and Liberation...
...he must consult and be guided by a few dozen, perhaps a few hundred, others...
...No one may be arrested without a warrant...
...Everything is said or written for a purpose, and the immediate purpose may often be merely a fleeting and misleading deviation from a long term trend...
...This estimate has a ring of truth to it, though one can never be certain...
...The soldiers seem less apparent in the interior, perhaps because they are engulfed by the streaming masses of civilians in the state stores, in the streets, and in the parks...
...Now he thinks he sees it on the horizon...
...today it is much more clearly delineated...
...The Communist Party is still a monolith...
...any attempt to assess Soviet policy through the rising or declining fortunes of individual leaders must include this factor...
...There is slightly more produce and fruits, though far from enough, and somewhat more cloth and footwear, but again far from sufficient...
...By 1980, according to Khrushchev, it will soar to 240 million tons...
...But knowledgeable Americans agree that the flagrant transgressions of justice in the past no longer occur...
...Was Nikita Khrushchev making a grand shift back to Stalinism...
...Otherwise the present internal policy makes no sense...
...Talking with Soviet leaders or reading the Soviet press helps little in resolving this question...
...The prime function of unions is still to boost production...
...Time is Khrushchev's greatest ally...
...This is a theme that many Americans will find alien...
...Or was it all part of a maneuver for position in a domestic political struggle or in a struggle embracing the far-flung outposts of Communism...
...Equally heartening for the Soviet citizen is the increasing supply of consumer goods—not yet adequate by our standards but greater than ever before in Soviet history...
...This could not have happened in Stalin's day...
...We have become prisoners of our own cliches to the point where our image of the Soviet Union is at least a decade out of date...
...If the Russian leader felt that war was on the immediate agenda he would bend every effort to bridge the industrial gap...
...Now, however, the disparity is being remedied...
...The people, of course, have had their fill of war...
...the rest was irrelevant so long as war was imminent...
...Why risk war when political victories come so easily...
...Khrushchev raised the state prices for produce and lowered the quotas that collectives were required to deliver to the market...
...It no longer will have to squeeze its citizens so cruelly...
...There were broad hints that not all the tourists were just tourists, and Russians were warned not to buy "dirty shirts" from foreigners...
...The dispute with China is more susceptible of verification...
...otherwise they will pay a greater price once hostilities begin...
...That he does not is a good omen for the United States...
...The juridical structure has been drastically revamped...
...None of these has changed fundamentally...
...Within both Russia and China there are elements for and against the official view...
...The Chinese insist that war is inevitable, that eventually the capitalist world will take to rockets and hydrogen bombs...
...But the loosening within the Communist Party reflects itself in almost every facet of life, the unions, culture, the youth organization...
...It means that if we de-emphasize our saber-rattling in favor of a social and political approach to world problems we might exercise a deep impact on the Russian people...
...I like this system...
...The same can be said of Stalin's hard policy during the cold war...
...Even as he was boarding the plane for Paris—so the story goes —Khrushchev had to go into session with Communist Party leaders to seek a formula for action...
...Khrushchev stands midway between Stalinism and freedom, neither with one nor the other, but definitely oriented in the direction of greater liberalism...
...There was no anger or ill-will among the people, as contrasted with the leaders, only a sort of sadness and a desire to let things be...
...Though a member of the Communist Party, he was frankly critical...
...Ordinarily Khruschev commands a sufficient majority in the councils of the Communist Party to carry the day...
...Khrushchev undoubtedly intends to spread his social doctrine, but the wellsprings of Soviet life and the balance of terror created by rockets and H-bombs impel him to do this by essentially political means...
...He may be called before a "comrades court" of his neighbors, or he may be given a long lecture by his union committee or the Komsomol...
...Soviet society is dynamic...
...It pacifies the population, instead, with consumer goods and wheedles it with incentives...
...And as fear lessens, incipient pressures emerge from consumers, urging more concessions in the direction of legality and consumer goods...
...Coexistence and consumer goods are interchangeable with him...
...They remember the twenty-five million casualties, affecting one of every two families, of World War II...
...Whether Khrushchev was set to pursue a hard line or a soft line toward the West would be revealed in the extent of the housing program, the availability of consumer goods, the nature of the seven-year plan, the "tightness" of the Communist Party, the line of propaganda...
...Why do you send planes over our territory...
...For Mao today the theory of capitalist inflexibility is an ideological underpinning for a similar internal course...
...We cannot believe that Communism can—or will—change...
...The blunders of American policy not only strengthen his hand abroad, but internally as well...
...What is the significance for the West of the Khrushchev transformations in Soviet internal policy...
...When Khrushchev, in the center, isolated both, he forced them into an alliance for survival which completely blurred their political hostilities...
...There is no attempt to glorify him as there was with Stalin...
...Each national revolution tips the scale further away from the West...
...A new magazine, A broad, came out recently with an uncensored reproduction of one of Adlai Stevenson's speeches and a moderate appraisal of Allen Dulles...
...The paced reduction of the work-week from forty-six to forty-one hours has continued without interruption...
...Up to now it has deprived its people of innumerable necessities in order to form capital for heavy industry...
...That is why, for all his crude diatribes in public, he leaves the door open for another Summit, and for further disarmament talks...
...The conflict with China is not a mere maneuver to deceive the West, but the most serious dispute in world Communist ranks since 1924...
...A brilliant chemistry student, who did not say a favorable word for the regime after hours of conversation, ended with the surprising statement: "I must tell you the truth...
...Khrushchev, on the other hand, is building a popular base among the managerial element, the peasants, and heavy industry workers...
...There were worried faces in the foreign community...
...Collective farmers, who in 1953 were on the brink of disaster, have made a significant comeback...
...It will be able to raise living standards and expand heavy industry at the same time...
...Its gross national product is only forty to fifty per cent of America's, and for an appreciably larger population...
...This fundamental imbalance, carried over from Stalinism, is still visible...
...Looking at the face of Russia there was no ready answer to vexing questions...
...The attempt to build some kind of popular political base...
...The forces were so evenly divided, however, that the Prime Minister was immobilized...
...Students in several cities confirmed this observation...
...Since war is inevitable, in Mao's thinking, the Chinese people must make their sacrifices to build a steel industry now...
Vol. 24 • October 1960 • No. 10
