The Kremlin

ATLANTIC

January 1956

on the World today

A TOP five of the Kremlin’s sixteen wall towers illuminated stars glow red these chill gray Moscow winter evenings. Erected by Stalin in pre-war days to symbolize the eventual triumph of Communism in all five continents (apparently he considered Australia a part of Asia), they still represent the Kremlin’s theoretical goal.

But the important news concerns the new strategy and tactics adopted by today’s collective leadership in Moscow to reach that goal. When every piece of available evidence is put together, jigsawpuzzle fashion, there emerges a picture which explains the Kremlin’s performance at the July Summit Conference and at the October-November Foreign Ministers Meeting at Geneva, as well as such manifestations of Russian policy as the Czech arms deal with Egypt and the Khrushchev-Bulganin visit to India.

Here is evidence the West can neglect only at its peril. For if the picture to be drawn is correct, Moscow has embarked on a new line challenging into the indefinite future every free nation — and, above all, the United States.

It may be stated this way: Moscow has decided that it has a tacit agreement with Washington on the prime, fact that a clash of arms between the great powers would firing onh mutual annihilation; hence there must be no clash. As one diplomat in Moscow put it, the Kremlin agrees that there is no such thing as “a class-conscious hydrogen bomb.” A Soviet official, in fact, has remarked that Marx could not have foreseen the weapons of the nuclear age. Moscow has largely abandoned the old Communist conspiratorial techniques of Comintern and Cominform days, and now Russia is challenging the West through diplomatic channels for dominance in the vast weak or uncommitted areas of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

In the past, Russian belligerence has served to alarm the free world and drive it together. But the new Soviet tactic is not directly belligerent. It remains, therefore, to be seen whether free men will respond to overt Soviet expansionism without resort to arms.

The meaning of the Bomb

There have been substantial signs that the change in Russian policy has not come about easily. The Molotov recantation of an ideological error can only be explained as part of an internal struggle over the change. Only last February, when Malenkov was ousted as Premier, Molotov was the one who declared that the Bomb would destroy only the capitalist world. His recantation involved a sentence in that same speech.

But sometime in March, Molotov′s evaluation of the Bomb began to be revised. On May 10. Moscow put forward an arms control proposal based on a judgment very close to that of the Most. The Bomb was described as “the most destructive means of annihilation of people.”

In June, Marshal Zhukov told a Western diplomat in Moscow that sonic people, unnamed, in the Soviet government still did not understand the meaning of the new weapons. He said he had writlen an article for Pravda about their meaning but that it had been toned down before publication.

Zhukov’s comments were at once dispatched to President Eisenhower, with whom the Marshal had already opened correspondence. At the Summit Conference in July the President, in his talks with Zhukov, concentrated on the meaning of the Bomb, and he addressed himself directly to Khrushchev and Bulganin when he proposed mutual aerial inspection and an exchange of military blueprints hy the two great nuclear powers.

Both Eisenhower and the Russians knew how close America had been only a few months earlier to nuclear war with Russia’s ally, Communist China. “The spirit of Geneva” was simply a tacit understanding by Moscow and Washington that nuclear war or moves likely to lead to nuclear war had to be avoided in mutual self-interest.

“Live and let live”

In Russia, every move must be properly wrapped in a dialectical overcoat. Last fall in Kommunist, the party publication in which Molotov had recanted a month earlier, the “main issue of our epoch” was stated to be “how to live and let live.” In fact, in the number which carried Molotov’s letter, there was a call for a “creative approach to the theory” of Marxism-Leninism and a statement that the Khrushehev-Bulganin leadership had “skillfully combined principle with flexibility in international policy” and that such a policy had “resulted in the enormous successes . . . recently achieved,” presumably at the Summit meeting.

Then, in late October, Kommunist expounded the doctrine that “Communism, like any new social order, cannot be imposed on people by force of arms. From this follows the profound conviction of the Communist Party that the question of further development of world sociely will be determined in the final analysis not by means of war but by economic competition” — a statement reverting to Marx’s original theory of economic determinism.

But what of Molotov? At the Summit meeting he said little and appeared to be almost sulking in his tent. Foreign diplomats in Moscow surmise that he still argued for the Stalinist line and opposed Khrushchev, Bulganin & Co. for reaching a tacit understanding on the Bomb with Eisenhower. Had his opposition been that of a single man — even of the Old Bolshevik, who, after all, was waiting at the Finland station when Lenin arrived in St. Petersburg to take charge of the Revolution — he could have been dealt with.

Hence diplomats surmise that Molotov has, or had, a considerable following among those at the lop of the Soviet power pyramid who make or influence policy. One European socialist leader who talked last fall with two other Presidium members, Suslov and Pervukhin, came away with the conclusion that they were fanatical Marxist theorists. Thus the majority had to force from Molotov a confession of error and a confession in ideological terms so that his Stalinist followers could be torn away and made to accept the new course.

That the“Iiveand let live” doctrine is immensely popular in Russia is amply demonstrated by even the most casual contact between Westerners here and Soviet citizens. Everywhere one talks with Russians, one finds a feeling of immense relief that there is not going to be a Russian-Ameriean war because the Summit Conference somehow, they feel, ended that hideous prospect. In a way, this sense of relief matches that so vividly exhibited in America when Eisenhower returned from Geneva.

Geneva, July-November

When live Foreign Ministers met to carry out the Summit directives, however, the West found that “the spirit of Geneva” had evaporated. Vet, if the evidence is correct, the West will make a great, even a tragic, mistake if it assumes that the substance has altered. For there is no reason to think that it has.

The Foreign Ministers Meeting only served to illuminate the new Soviet course based on the tacit understanding of last July. On that basis, Moscow has decided to stand fast in Europe and await the passing of Adenauer. If there is no American nuclear threat, Moscow could reason, there is no need to do business now over Germany. Instead, why not exploit the soft spots of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia? The Czech arms deal marked a first major step to penetrate the Middle East and outflank NATO in Africa. More steps will surely follow.

There will be more visitors to Russia from these areas of the world. And traveling in Russia brings home to an American a vivid impression, an understanding, of how those who come here from such lands are affected.

To the American eye, Russia presents a picture of vast urban slums interspersed with new apartment and office buildings of bad design, atrocious taste, and poor construction. But to those who come from lands where slums are all about them, Soviet cities must give an impression of great movement, of action, of things being accomplished —as they are so often not back home. Such a visitor’s eye is drawn to the skyline dominated by giant cranes hoisting prefabricated concrete slabs into place. Here is dynamism, not the immobility which afflicts so much of the world. It matters not the cost, or that what is being done is far short of American standards, and few care to discover that new bousing, for example, probably does not even keep up with the birth rate.

The Kremlin’s China policy

Russia’s relation to Communist China plays a major role in the new course but it is the hardest to assess. Yet there are some guideposts. Perhaps the key date was the October, 1953, visit of Khrushchev and Bulganin to Peiping. From Stalin’s death six months earlier up to this visit, Malenkov was espousing his domestic consumers’ goods line. His relations with the Chinese were so poor that when Chou En-lai stopped off in Moscow en route from the Geneva Indochina conference, Malenkov failed even to offer a toast to Mao Tse-tung; and Chou, in turn, upbraided the Russians for failing to learn the Chinese language.

But when Khrushchev returned from Peiping he was heard to remark: “If China is strong, we arc strong. If China is weak, we are weak.” And lie began to use the Chinese phrase about building up the socialist bloc of 900 million souls. Four months later Malenkov “resigned” and the consumers’ goods program was shelved.

Curiously, though, Malenkov’s viewy on the Bomb — he had been the first Russian to say that it would destroy all civilization, not just the capitalists — has now prevailed.

What can the West expect ?

What, then, can the West expect from Moscow now that a new course has been set ? Kommumst itself has explained it best of all. What Russia wants, it says, is “peaceful co-existence and competition between the socialist and capitalist systems”— in other words, competition short of nuclear war. And what kind of competition? Kommunist has listed four tenets which, when translated from Communist dialectics into English, seem to give the answer: —

1.Moscow assumes “the further hardening of capitalism’s overall crisis.” That is, it will do all it can to provoke economic controversy between free nations, such as the drive at the Foreign Ministers Meeting to break down the West’s strategic trade ban by holding out promises of profitable business with Russia.

2. Moscowwill further “the formation of the great commonwealth of socialist states.” That is, it will work not only with its Chinese and satellite allies but with Yugoslavia, with whom it has made peace, and with socialist forces in Western Europe and elsewhere where it can talk them into variants of the united front idea.

3. Moscow will play upon “the disintegration that has set in of imperialism’s colonial system.” That is, it will stir up those nations still chaffing under ties to the West. The Middle East is a prime example.

4. Moscow will make use of “the mighty popular movement for the strengthening of peace.” That is, it will make use of every dupe, fellow traveler, discontented politician, and nationalist to further its policy in every nation possible.

If, indeed, all the pieces described here of the Russian jigsaw puzzle do in fact fit together as they seem to, the West at least should know what it faces. Perhaps when the scientists change today’s balance of nuclear power, Moscow’s line will again change. In the meantime, however, it is up to the West to determine how to meet the Russian challenge already well in motion around the globe.

Washington reaction

The failure of the second Geneva conference to solve any of the hard problems has given Democratic orators a foreign policy issue, or so some of them appear to think. Governor Harriman has gone so far as to declare that the Summit Conference was “a great Communist victory.” And Secretary of State Dulles has been on the defensive since his return from Geneva.

Foreign policy is, of course, a proper subject for discussion in a presidential campaign. The GOP knows the Administration is open to attack on how it has handled foreign policy. But it would be very surprising to Washington observers who are not primarily interested in the outcome of next November’s election if the Democrats find much pay dirt in the foreign policy issue.

The danger would seem to lie, however, in terms of the national interest — in the possibility that the Administration might bow in some way before charges that it had gone “soft ” on the Communists. But the expectation is that President Eisenhower, convinced of the soundness of what he did though he has never adequately explained it to the public, will refuse to bend to political winds.