THE COLD WAR: The New Face

The Soviet Union’s policy has definitely changed, declared Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito last week, and as a result, he said, international tension has eased. “If anyone is competent to recognize a trap, it is we,” said Communism’s No. 11heretic, who is, of course, still a Communist. “Because of our experience, we can distinguish between what is a maneuver and what is a positive step,” he added. To Tito, the Russian change is more than a maneuver.

No one else last week was prepared to go so far. But there were plenty of others who accepted the appearance of change, and were eager to test its reality. “I have cherished the hope that there is a new outlook in Russia,” Sir Winston Churchill told the Tory conference only last month, “a new hope of peaceful coexistence with the Russian nation, and it is our duty, patiently and daringly, to make sure whether there is such a change or not.”

Rightly suspicious of any Communist change of heart, Americans have perhaps been too quick to dismiss the Communist change of face. In minimizing each conciliatory Communist gesture, the U.S. runs the risk of having underestimated their cumulative effect. Put together, the Communist deeds and promises make quite a list.

Footwear & Philosophers. At home Russia’s new masters have made specific and grandiose promises of more consumer goods, including TV sets and “elegant footwear.” The Stalin auto works, which once produced nothing but the huge limousines that Stalin favored, has been converted to the manufacture of plebian bicycles. The Kremlin itself, which Stalin had made a symbol of dark terror, has been flung open to tourists and its rooms made over for children’s celebrations and public meetings. The members of the junta have taken to bounding around the country like so many politicians running for office: Malenkov may suddenly appear in a disaster-stricken town, Khrushchev may show up in Siberia.

Soviet “cultural” ambassadors, once cloistered at home, are now sent abroad in clusters. In recent months Russia has sent cancer specialists to Brazil, orientalists to Britain, horticulturists and oceanographers to Paris, demographers and geophysicists to Rome, mathematicians and chemists to Amsterdam, philosophers to Switzerland, ophthalmologists to Canada, philatelists to India. Last week two Soviet scientists suddenly appeared in Manhattan for the closing days of Columbia University’s Bicentennial.

Soviet chess teams have competed in Amsterdam and Argentina, Soviet basketball teams in Egypt and Syria, Soviet crews in The Hague and on the Thames. Soviet trackmen and robust Soviet women athletes performed before packed stands at London’s White City Stadium and overwhelmed Britain’s best.

Dancers & Wrestlers. The Iron Curtain has also been raised a perceptible inch, and foreign diplomats can move deeper into the countryside. Newsmen are still largely unwelcome, but other delegations are streaming in by the hundreds. They include Greek dancers, Swiss doctors, Italian film makers, British agronomists, Indian economists, Danish exporters, Israeli women, Egyptian wrestlers. Delegations from India, Ceylon, Indonesia and Burma (headed by the Agriculture Minister himself) wandered admiringly through Moscow’s huge agricultural exhibition.

Unlike the past, the guest lists have not been confined to comrades and sympathizers, but include skeptics and outright critics. Ex-Prime Minister Attlee’s British Labor Party delegation was the biggest catch; but there have also been Japanese industrialists, a couple of U.S. Congressmen, Maine’s Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith (see RADIO & TV). An official British parliamentary delegation that included the Duke of Wellington and all shades of M.P.s has just returned home. Georgy Malenkov told them: “We believe that the most realistic policy is that of peaceful coexistence—it must be either that or war.” “We should fight with ideas, not weapons,” Vasily Kuznetzov told British M.P. Christopher Mayhew with some ambiguity. “We want to end capitalism. But we do not impose our ideas.”

To all who would listen, the Russians have kept up another siren song: there could be lots of trade if only the Americans did not insist on an embargo. Britons, Germans, Japanese, French and Danes listened wistfully.

Abroad, the Kremlin’s new men have made adjustments, some trivial, some substantial. They sent Russian diplomats back to the diplomatic cocktail parties in Berlin, released swatches of German war prisoners from Russian prisons (the Germans estimate they still hold 138,000). They relaxed pressure on Iran, dropped their demand for the return of Kars and Ardahan from Turkey, resumed relations with Yugoslavia. They arranged for Air France to fly a Soviet-Paris service. They took their places in UNESCO and ILO, which they had previously boycotted.

Deceptive Docility. Coexistence, in the specific Communist meaning, is a far cry from what the ordinary man understands by peace. To the Communists it means a period of deceptive docility while gathering strength for a new assault.

As such, “peaceful coexistence” is a snare that impresses only the impressionable. The Russians still have the largest army in the world, and their Chinese allies have vowed to build the second largest. By ideology, the Communists are committed to the defeat of the West; they are dedicated men, and they have the H-bomb. On fundamentals they have not retreated one jot—on Germany, on Austria, on the satellites and the slave labor camps. Communist papers still spread hate of the U.S. while their diplomats talk placatingly.

Change of Atmosphere. Even so, the atmosphere in Europe has changed. The conviction is widespread that the danger of world war has receded. This European feeling comes not so much from the propaganda of coexistence but from a number of other assumptions: that the Russian leaders are in no mood to start a world war; that the capacity to destroy New York and Detroit is not good enough if it results in the destruction of Moscow and Leningrad; that the Russian junta is not sufficiently in control of its own people, or secure enough from its own rivalries, to trigger World War III; that the new gang is a somewhat sedentary set of revolutionaries (compared, for example, with the cockier, more aggressive new rulers of China). Some or all of these assumptions might be fatally wrong, but they are widely held.

Fear & Exhortations. In this atmosphere, the U.S., which successfully rallied a coalition against Communist truculence, was finding less enthusiasm for combatting a smiling enemy. The fact is that Europe fears Communism much less than war. While it felt a clear and present danger of war, Europe responded to U.S. exhortation, but it does not respond similarly to alarms about Communism. Europeans have lived for centuries with neighbors who are implacably hostile and intent on destroying their way of life. Yet when an uninterested Europe let EDC godown, Western European statesmen saw with sudden clarity that something had to be done—that peace ultimately depends on strength.

Last week three of the most influential Western leaders reflected the changed atmosphere, by their words and attitudes. They were optimistic, but their optimism was conditional. In the House of Commons, Britain’s Anthony Eden declared: “By negotiation from strength, we may be able to bring about a relaxation of the present tension . . . If we can bring stability and a common purpose in the West, we shall have established the essential basis on which we can seek an understanding with the East.” In Washington, West Germany’s Chancellor Konrad Adenauer looked to the day when the West shall have cemented its common defense, and be able to “enter into a relationship to be settled by agreement with the Soviet bloc, a relationship which would offer all those participating security against aggression.” President Eisenhower, too, spoke of the growth of Western strength until “there is some diminution of the intractability of the other side’s position, and, finally, better chances of negotiations.”

All three voices carried the same message : after—but only after—the West has consolidated its strength can it afford to negotiate with Russia. From that strength the West might yet win concessions, made in mutual self-interest, even from an enemy which could never be trusted.