Article published November 1978
Editorials in the Soviet Union’s chief propaganda organ, Pravda (the word means “truth” in Russian) ordinarily attract little serious attention outside the Soviet Union, and are likely to be tracked more by those who try to spot subtle shifts in Kremlin policy rather than those who seek, well, the truth. But a recent Pravda pronouncement has caused a stir. Aimed, obviously, at a wider audience than the usual captive one, its author avoided the customary good-Bolshevik polemics and won the accolade “sober and worried” from the perennially sober and worried New York Times.
Pravda‘s editorialist warns that “changes dangerous to the cause of peace are taking place in the policy of the U. S. A.” Two things disturb him. “There is no end to attempts at interfering in our country’s internal affairs”–a reference to America’s reaction to the trial of Anatoly Sharansky and other Russian dissidents. More ominous, however, are critics of détente who seek “a common language with the aggressive anti-Sovietism of the Chinese rulers.”
According to the editorialist, the motives of these “groupings that would like to undermine détente and return the world to the cold war” is not the alleged superiority of Soviet military power, but the fear of military equality. These malignant “groupings,” he argues, do not want the United States and the Soviet Union to be truly equal; they want the U. S. to return to its former state of military and geopolitical superiority. It is these motives that stand in the way of ratifying SALT II, and hope to stymie other arms limitation agreements.
Without speculating on the motives of the supposed anti-Soviet elements in the Carter Administration, it is easy to find in the writings of the most prominent among them, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, much to reassure rather than to worry writers in the employ of Pravda and the Times. In his book Between Two Ages, published in 1971, Brzezinksi argued that “even if one is not a Marxist, it is not necessarily a cause for rejoicing to note that Communism–which helped to enlarge the collective consciousness of mankind and to mobilize it for social progress–has failed in its original objective of linking humanism with internationalism.”
Given this `humanist’ reading of Marx, no wonder Brzezinski recommends, in the same book, that “it would be wise for the United States to make an explicit move to abandon the Monroe Doctrine”; that “an extensive American military presence abroad is becoming counterproductive to American interests and to the growth of an international community”; that “it would be advisable to view the question of the political development of both communist and the developing countries with a great deal of patience”; indeed, that American foreign policy should become “increasingly depoliticized” or ideologically neutral.
Each of these recommendations have been, or are in the process of being carried out by President Carter, who has been tutored in foreign policy by Professor Brzezinski since 1973. And, remarkably enough, Brzezinski may well be the `toughest’ anti-Soviet voice in the Carter Administration. That alone should reassure Moscow about Washington’s motives.
The belief that gives the fizz to these and other Brzezinskian bromides is what’s called `convergence theory’–the hypothesis (it shouldn’t be dignified by the term `theory) that the regimes of the United States and the Soviet Union will become more and more similar. While the Soviets democratize politically the United States will socialize economically; the two countries will then have no more reason to quarrel, having become brother social democracies.
This strikes me as wishful thinking on the part of democratic socialists, whose mild and hazy Marxism substitutes meliorism for dialectics. Real Marxism has without exception yielded trannies. These tyrannies have varied in their severity from mere police-state brutality, as seen in today’s Soviet Union, to genuinely Hitlerian levels of degradation, as seem in China twenty years ago and Cambodia now. He who argues, as Marx does, that human nature has no innate dignity, that it is `historically’ determined by forces traceable to economic class struggle, can justify the most vicious attempts to remake human nature, all the while citing pseudo-philosophic `proofs’ to justify his barbarism.
What Pravda calls “our country’s internal affairs” means the Kremlin’s consistent policy of denying human rights to the Russian people. The Carter Administration has condemned the show-trials of Russian dissidents and the mistreatment of Russian Jews, but these policies flow from the Soviet regime, the Soviet form of government, which oppresses not only political and religious dissidents but all Soviet subjects.
It will be objected that the Soviets, being Marxists, have a very different conception of human rights than that held by the United States or the West in general. Correct, obviously: but that only reveals the fundamental problem with the policy of détente. Contrary to Pravda, America’s withholding of trade and its cancellation of joint scientific conferences aren’t quite the selfsame designs to undermine the socialist system that our people were compelled to encounter in one form or another beginning in 1917. Hitler was a bit more forceful and malignant than sober, worried liberal U. S. scientists and intellectuals. But such economic sanctions do damage Soviet interests. What needs to be emphasized, however, is that Soviet interests, insofar as they are Soviet and not simply Russian–for it’s in Russia’s interest to dismantle “Sovietism”–are fundamentally opposed to American principles.
Those principles are opposed to those of “Sovietism.” Arms agreements, worth only the arms that guarantee them, may come and (assuredly) go. But as long as the fundamental moral, political, and spiritual principles of the two regimes remain opposed, there will be no end to the conflict, whether understood as a `Cold War’ or masked under the misleading term, `détente.’ That is why so many liberals, especially in the West, dream of ideological `convergence.’ For better or worse, the only important dreamer of `convergence’ in the Soviet Union is the physicist-turned-dissident Andrei Sakharov. Needless to say, he is not President Brezhnev’s adviser on national security.
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