标题: 1965.04 克里姆林宫的艰难选择 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-6-21 04:31 标题: 1965.04 克里姆林宫的艰难选择 The Kremlin's Difficult Choice
The leaders in the Kremlin have long been dogged by a fateful, ines capable choice, as Professor Lowenthal makes clear in this penetrating analysis. The author teaches at the Free University in Berlin and this year is serving as Senior Fellow at the Research Institute on Communist Affairs at Columbia University. This article grew out of a talk he delivered at a recent conference of parliamentarians of NATO countries in Paris.
By Richard Lowenthal
APRIL 1965 ISSUE
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THE sudden fall from power of Nikita Khrushchev came to the Western world as a shock. To the professional analysts of Soviet affairs in particular, it was a rude reminder of the persistence of secret and unpredictable elements in Soviet politics, or, to put it differently, of the inevitable limitations of our knowledge and our powers of prediction in this field. No Western expert, as far as I know, had expected the overthrow of the Soviet leader at that time; and not many had even thought it possible that the man who combined the offices of First Secretary of the ruling Communist Party, Chairman of its Bureau for the Russian Federative Republic, and Chairman of the Council of Ministers, and who had taken care to run each of these three executive organs with the help of different and changing deputies, could be overthrown at all by the collective action of his immediate associates and subordinates. We still have to depend largely on deduction and guesswork about the personal infighting within the ruling group in the Kremlin — and it is just those personal alignments and rivalries that may often determine the day-to-day decisions of an autocratic power.
The value of our knowledge for the orientation of Western policy will thus more or less depend on the kind of question we ask. If we wish to know what Brezhnev and Kosygin will do next week or next month, or how stable the allocation of power among Khrushchev’s successors will prove, even the best-informed answer can only be a guess. But long-term changes in the Soviet outlook depend to a large extent not on the wishes and preconceived ideas of particular Soviet leaders, but on the domestic and international conditions in which they have to operate—just as they do with other great powers; and especially in the field of foreign policy, these conditions have been in part determined by our own action and may continue to be influenced by our actions in the future.
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What, then, are the factors likely to shape the Soviet outlook in world affairs in the post-Khrushchevian period? Any answer must start from the basic dual motivation that has been present since the birth of the Soviet state in 1917: the national interests of Russia as a great power on the one hand, and the worldwide ideological goals of the ruling Bolshevik party on the other. The Bolsheviks govern Russia, and they have sought to secure the independence and territorial integrity of their country, to develop its natural resources and human capacities, to surround it with a protective sphere of influence, and to prevent the formation of hostile coalitions of overwhelming strength, as the government of any sovereign state will try to do. But the Bolsheviks are also a totalitarian party, and they rule in the name of a revolutionary ideology that aspires to the total transformation of the world. They have conceived their relation to all nonCommunist regimes as one of ultimately irreconcilable conflict — a type of conflict that need not and indeed should not lead to world war, but that could be resolved only by the gradual expansion of their own type of regime over the whole world as the march of history offered opportunities for revolution or conquest with limited risk.
There is, of course, a dilemma between a foreign policy geared to the limited aims of national security and one geared to the unlimited aims of world revolution. But the Soviet leaders have for many years refused to admit the existence of this dilemma; instead they have sought to harmonize the two contradictory motivations, with considerable success. Stalin, as we know, interpreted Russian national interest in the ideological framework of the irreconcilable conflict with the non-Communist world. He insisted on forced industrialization, giving priority to heavy industry at the price ol decades of sacrifice by the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union; and he insisted on the establishment of Communist regimes on Russia’s frontier as the only reliable guarantee of its security. Conversely, Stalin interpreted the prospects of world revolution as wholly predicated upon the gradual expansion of Russian state power, Even when Khrushchev, in the early years of his rule, adopted a wider and bolder view of the growth of a commonwealth of socialist states by the spread of independent revolutionary movements, he conceived of Russia as its natural head, so that the progress of the world revolution could culminate only in Russian world leadership.
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For more than forty years, then, the fears of Trotsky and the hopes of so many Western statesmen that the Soviet leaders would sooner or later have to make a choice between their two kinds of goals—that they would abandon their commitment to world revolution in order to pursue limited national aims — obstinately refused to come true. It was only during Khrushchev’s declining years that events at last forced on the Soviet leaders an awareness that the two motivations could no longer be harmonized, that their ideological ambitions for worldwide leadership were no longer compatible with their national interest. To put it in a nutshell, the Russian national interest has emerged clearly as that of a more or less saturated power, an imperial power with much to lose and little prospect of further expanding its dominions without incurring prohibitive costs and risks; and the national interest has thus come increasingly into conflict with an official ideology which, being committed to the goal of world revolution, is insatiable by its very nature. Three main factors have, in my opinion, been responsible for forcing this dilemma into the consciousness of the Soviet leaders, and indeed of the Soviet elites. The first is domestic: the erosion of ideology by the effects of industrial maturity. The second is due to Western policy: the effects of successful containment. The third has its origin in the changes in relations among Communist governments and parties: the effects of pluralistic decay, or the diminishing returns of empire.
FROM COERCION TO INCENTIVES
There can be no doubt that the achievement of industrial maturity has been the decisive factor for changing the internal climate of the Soviet Union. Brutal exploitation of workers and collectivized peasants and mass deportation to slave-labor camps had been possible methods for ensuring the rapid construction of modern factories, mines, and power stations, and the opening up of the inhospitable regions of the far east and far north; but they were not possible methods for running these industrial installations efficiently in competition with advanced Western countries. Once economic progress ceased to be primarily progress in the creation of the physical skeleton of modern industry and came to depend on the steady raising of its productivity, slave labor ceased to be rational. Economic motivation had to be drastically shifted from coercion to incentives. The urge of the post-Stalin leaders to carry out this shift, and to convince the whole gigantic bureaucracy of party and state of the need for it, was surely one of the motives for the condemnation of Stalin’s mass terrorism in Khrushchev’s secret speech at the Party congress in 1956.
In Khrushchev’s mind, the abandonment of Stalin-style mass terrorism did not at first mean the renunciation of Stalin’s program of revolutionary social change inside and outside Russia. An ideological believer as well as an economic modernizer, Khrushchev stuck to Stalin’s vision of bringing about the “higher stage” of Communism by assimilating the collective farms to the state farms, even though he wanted to achieve this end by different means. But Stalin had been able to operate on societv as with a surgeon’s knife, imposing his “revolutions from above’ by the ruthless application of force. Khrushchev was not only limited in the forms of’ pressure he could and would apply: he also had to take care that his social experiments were compatible with the vital imperative of increasing production. As late as 1959. he developed a program aimed at modifying the social structure of the collective farms — for instance, by pressing the peasants to sell their private cattle. But wherever these measures were carried out, output went down. By the time the new Party program was adopted at the Party congress in 1961, structural changes were no longer envisaged as a practical task to be promoted and enforced by the Party, but as a distant hope for the beneficial effects which a rise of productivity would bring about at some unspecified time in the future. The demands of economics had won over the demands of ideology.
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The 1961 Party program also showed that Khrushchev and his colleagues had recognized the basic political condition for steady economic progress: a climate of personal security and internal peace. In claiming that the class struggle inside Russia was at an end and that the Soviet state was no longer a “dictatorship of the proletariat” but a “state of the whole people,” they did not, of course, mean to abandon the dictatorial rule of the Communist Party. But they did mean to assure the ordinary Soviet citizen that he could henceforth go about his business not only without fear of arbitrary arrest and deportation but without fear of further Party-imposed revolutionary upheavals in his way of life.
It is just this desire for a climate of internal peace rather than of permanent ideological and social struggle which has been rightly branded by the Chinese Communists as a revisionist departure from principle. For it indicates a weakening of the power that militant ideology exerts on the leaders of the Soviet Communist Party; and it thus, in turn, encourages the long-apparent weakening of the ideology’s hold on ordinary Soviet citizens.
That weakening began with the spread of general and higher education, and by the attendant awakening of the critical faculties of large numbers of people. At the same time, the economic and technological need for growing contacts with the non-Communist world has undermined the Party’s monopoly of information. An official or technician who has traveled in the West or a scholar who reads learned journals from other countries and meets Western visitors no longer depends exclusively on regime-controlled channels for forming his ideas of the outside world. He may be a Soviet patriot and loyal to the regime, but he has no militant desire to impose his country’s dogma on other nations; and in the absence of an atmosphere of omnipresent terror, he can no longer be forced to pretend a conformist enthusiasm he does not share. A young Soviet writer or artist is able to develop his own critical standards, based on both Russian traditions and foreign developments; he may be temporarily silenced by Party pressure, but he can no longer be compelled to produce propagandist hackwork in which he does not believe —just as a Soviet biologist can no longer be made to accept the “dialectical” superiority of Lysenko.
In the crucial held of economic theory, the Party, for urgent practical reasons, has had to tolerate, and even to stimulate, a discussion of the need not only for greater managerial independence but also for market indicators, including profits and interest, as a means of reducing production costs and improving the quality and variety of consumer goods. Practical experiments have been started on the basis of these undogmatic ideas.
All this is far indeed from any “democratization” in the sense of a wider sharing of political power, of popular participation in the framing of policy. The fall of Khrushchev has again shown that politi cal decisions in the Soviet Union are still taken within a narrow circle of leaders, who do not even have to give a coherent explanation to their constituents. But there has been a considerable shift away from the extreme of totalitarian tension toward a more relaxed and less ideological form of bureaucratic autocracy, and limited areas of freedom have emerged from ideological control, from the straitjacket of Marxist-Leninist dogma. Such a weakening of ideological fanaticism from below and above cannot fail to have a long-term impact on the role of ideological motivations in Soviet foreign policy.
NUCLEAR BLACKMAIL FAILS
In foreign affairs, the Soviets have never been able to carry out a program of world revolution according to plan. They have always had to adapt their strategy to the constellation of forces prevailing at the given moment— to wait for the chances which the internal weaknesses of their opponents or the international conflicts among them might offer to Communist expansion. Yet under Khrushchev as well as under Stalin, they clung with amazing consistency to the ideological vision of their ultimate aim, of a worldwide new order under Communist rule. It is a fact too often overlooked in the West that when Khrushchev came to power, he was rather more sanguine than Stalin had been about the prospects of world revolution — because he was somewhat naively convinced that the advance of a number of independent Communist revolutions could proceed without mutual conflicts of interest, and hence without challenge to the unity of world Communism under Russian leadership. The recognition of the thermonuclear balance of terror did not lead Khrushchev to lower his sights in the international field, as his passionate speeches on the need for peaceful coexistence caused many Western readers to believe; for while those speeches expressed a sincere determination to avoid the supreme risk of world war, that determination was, in Khrushchev’s mind, perfectly compatible with any forms of local violence and nuclear blackmail that stopped short of this risk.
More than that: after the launching of the first sputniks had proved the Soviets’ capacity for launching intercontinental missiles with accurate aim, Khrushchev thought that he could overturn the military balance of world power by political means. Now that the United States had become vulnerable to massive nuclear attack, it seemed obvious that American nuclear retaliation would no longer be the automatic response to any Soviet aggression against America’s exposed allies; hence nuclear blackmail at points of Russia’s choosing, combined with diplomatic overtures to the American imperialists, should now have been sufficient to disintegrate the Western alliance.
That was the rationale for the persistent attempt to force a Western retreat from Berlin. It was also the background for the unprecedented boldness with which Khrushchev developed a truly worldwide offensive, seeking to exploit the numerous conflicts spawned by decolonization not only with propaganda but also with open political and thinly disguised military intervention all over the globe. When the pressure on Berlin met with unexpectedly determined resistance, Khrushchev sought to make the nuclear blackmail more effective by sending missiles to Cuba; it was at this moment that the two prongs of his offensive were closed. Never before had Soviet hopes of a decisive international victory been so high; never had a Soviet leader freely moved so close to the limit of risk compatible with an instinct of self-preservation.
When the gamble failed and the hope of worldwide victory was sunk in the Caribbean, it was not only the missiles in Cuba and the threat against Berlin that had to be withdrawn. The whole Soviet estimate of the West-East relation of forces had to be revised, and with it the order of priorities for Soviet policy.
BUILDING COMMUNISM AT HOME
For years, Khrushchev had acted on the overconfident assumption that the Soviet Union could bear at the same time the burden of the armaments race required for its worldwide offensive and the cost of a rising standard of living for its own people. Many of the agricultural campaigns which his successors now describe as harebrained schemes sprang from his desire to avoid the hard choice in the allocation of resources: he tried to make the Russian soil yield more food without correspondingly increased investment. His international optimism had also fed on the Leninist belief that the superior standard of living of the Western workers rested on the fruits of colonial exploitation, and was bound to decline as decolonization dried up the sources of imperialist wealth.
Thus the continued prosperity of the West, particularly the success of the Common Market in Western Europe, like the success of Western containment, and Soviet economic troubles, all pointed to the need to give more weight to the material needs of the Soviet people and less to the effort to subvert the non-Communist world. In November, 1962, Khrushchev proclaimed the improvement of the domestic economy as the principal task of the Soviet Communist Party; in the summer of 1963, the signing of the partial-test-ban agreement marked the Kremlin’s recognition that a measure of détente in East-West relations was a necessary corollary of this shift of emphasis.
Of course, Soviet policy has repeatedly seen similar changes from phases of revolutionary expansion to phases of consolidation, from the deliberate creation of international crises to the search for relaxation of tension— and back again. Both Lenin and Stalin were skillful at engineering such pauses when the international or internal situation seemed to require them; they did this without abandoning their worldwide ideological goals. Yet the turn that marked the last phase of Khrushchev’s reign differed from those precedents in several ways. First, the previous pauses were used to carry out major revolutionary changes inside the Soviet Union or the newly Sovietized countries; the ideological zeal of the Party cadres, temporarily prevented from finding fulfillment in the outward progress of world revolution, was nourished by the needs of the class struggle at home or in the bloc. This time the scope for revolutionary transformations was waning on the Soviet domestic scene just when it had been effectively restricted in the outside world.
Second, the previous pauses did follow on phases of major revolutionary expansion; they served to consolidate conquests, to digest the fruits of victory, whereas the present turn has been forced on the Soviets by defeat, by the failure of their prolonged offensive effort.
Third, pauses in the past were inaugurated by leaders with virtually uncontested authority, who could afford to justify their turns by a frankly realistic analysis of the international relation of forces. The present turn had to be carried out by men of gravely impaired authority who could not admit their previous miscalculation without handing ammunition to their militant critics in Peiping; yet precisely because the turn had to be accomplished under the fire of Chinese ideological attack, it had to be justified in terms of ideological principle. When M. A. Suslov declared in February, 1964, that the international duty of the Soviet Communists consisted first of all in building Communism at home so as to furnish the foreign comrades with an attractive example, he formulated a principle which would allow the rulers of the Soviet Union to free themselves from the ideological pressure from China and elsewhere.
CHINA CHALLENGES THE SOVIETS
This brings us to the third major factor of longterm change in the Soviet outlook: the pluralistic decay of the former unity of the Communist bloc, the world Communist movement, and even the Communist dogma. I am not using the term polycentrism, for that was coined to express the hope that several independent Communist centers could exist side by side yet cooperate harmoniously. What has actually developed with the growing emancipation of various Communist governments and parties from Soviet control has been conflict and schism.
Clearly, the danger of such conflict has been implicit in the situation from the moment that the Chinese Communists achieved full control of mainland China under the independent leadership of Mao Tse-tung in 1949. Ever since then, two major Communist powers have existed, with all the potential for differences of interest that is inevitable among sovereign states. For some time, the Chinese Communists hesitated to push their interests openly in conflict with a country on which they had to rely for economic, military, and diplomatic support, and which they had long been trained to recognize as the model of their own revolution and the fountainhead of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. But when Khrushchev, in his secret speech on Stalin’s crimes at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956, deliberately set out to destroy the myth of Stalin’s infallibility, he unwittingly inflicted irreparable damage also on the general dogma of the infallibility of the Soviet Communist Party and its leaders, which had been the basis of Moscow’s authority in the world Communist movement. At one stroke, Khrushchev thus removed the crucial factor which had so far restrained Chinese as well as other Communists from openly challenging Soviet policy.
In view of the immense differences in the situation of the two main Communist powers, the grounds for such a challenge were many. The contrasts between Russia and China in their economic development, in the degree of military security achieved by nuclear deterrence, and in the scope for diplomatic flexibility are all too obvious to require elaboration. These required a unilateral dependence on Russia, with the inevitable tension such dependence produces between allies, because the dependent ally will always feel that his interests do not rank high enough on the priority list of his “big brother.” The contrasts between the two also led to the elaboration of different concepts of the proper strategy for dealing with the Western enemies and the major neutrals. Above all, the Chinese were less anxious to keep under control local armed conflicts arising from national liberation movements, and therefore denounced the Soviets for seeking to subordinate their support of such movements, even during the years of their worldwide offensive, to their general line of peaceful coexistence — that is‚ to the principle of limited risk.
Finally, the different stage of internal development has produced in China an ideological climate utterly different from that of Russia today. Ever since the failure of the Hundred Flowers experiment in 1956 and 1957, Mao and his team have been convinced that they can maintain their power only in an atmosphere of the besieged fortress — of relentless, unceasing struggle against internal as well as external enemies. The Soviet program of comparative internal relaxation, of moving from “dictatorship of the proletariat” to a “state of the whole people,” was thus bound to appear to the Chinese leaders as a direct danger to their own regime.
The Soviets, being the stronger power, would have liked to keep these differences quiet in order to pursue their own policy without public ideological challenge; even after the first Chinese public attacks in 1960, the Soviets offered formally to renounce their traditional leading role in the Communist world movement so as no longer to have to justify their policy in international ideological discussions. It was the Chinese who saw, and still see, their best chance in exerting ideological pressure on the Soviets by challenging their “revisionism” and “betrayal” in the forum of the world Communist movement— because China is the weaker power, and also because of its internal need for ideological militancy. Finding the Soviets unyielding, the Chinese after 1961 gradually prepared both an ideological platform and the organized contacts for a complete international schism, working everywhere to discredit the Soviets and present themselves as the only true Marxist-Leninists.
As the struggle proceeded, the Soviet leaders became drastically aware of the limitations of their control of foreign Communist governments and movements. They had not only failed to control China; they were not even able to induce Fidel Castro, despite his total dependence on Soviet economic support and military protection, to condemn the Chinese or sign the test-ban agreement. In Eastern Europe, the Communist rulers of one country after another used the Soviet need for support against Peiping to complete their own emancipation from satellite status, which had begun with the crisis of destalinization. Occupied East Germany was left as the only wholly submissive protectorate, while Rumania stayed neutral in the Sino-Soviet dispute and refused to coordinate its economic policies within the bloc.
The embarrassments caused by Mao and Castro and the experience of the diminishing returns of empire even in Europe must thus have caused the Soviet leaders to wonder whether further independent Communist revolutions would necessarily redound to the greatness of Russia; while the Chinese attempt to exert pressure on Soviet policy by ideological means proved that far from being able to control independent Communist powers, the Soviets now had to take care to avoid being controlled by them. The obvious conclusion was that a stage had been reached when Russian national interest required a certain loosening of the ties to the world Communist movement so as to ensure the Kremlin’s freedom of diplomatic action. And Moscow’s preparations for a Communist world conference do indeed show, along with the effort to retain influence over the maximum number of parties in competition with Peiping, a new willingness to make cooperation loose and informal— not only to make the prospect more attractive to independent-minded foreigners but for Russia’s own sake as well.
THE PARTY’S DILEMMA
The effects of the decline of Soviet authority in the international Communist movements have thus combined with the consequences of industrial maturity at home and with the disappointments inflicted by successful Western resistance to Soviet expansion to make the Soviet leaders increasingly aware of the need to choose between a realistic policy of national interest and the ideological pursuit of world revolution. But a resistance to change has also been at work, originating in the ruling Communist Party apparatus itself. For the Soviet Communist Party has conquered, exercised, and maintained its power in the name of the revolutionary task defined by its ideology, including world revolution; and it cannot abandon the ideological beliefs which justify its claim to rule in the eyes of its own members.
Throughout the post-Stalin era, the CPSU has been caught in this dilemma between the need for realistic adjustment and the need for ideological continuity, and the career of Khrushchev has reflected it. Khrushchev emerged soon after Stalin’s death as the controlling figure in die Party apparatus, and he rose to national leadership as the exponent of the supremacy of the Party over all other organs of power, but also as the exponent of a policy that aimed at maintaining the Party’s rule by modernizing its methods and outlook. Hence, as soon as he had climbed to the pinnacle of power, he had to begin to restore some kind of balance between the power of the victorious Party bureaucracy on one side and the unorganized, inarticulate, but increasingly important new forces of Soviet society on the other. He needed the Party’s monopoly of power to keep society under control, but he needed the pressure for modernization exercised by society — by economists and managers, by technicians and scientists, even by writers and artists — to keep the Party bureaucrats up to scratch. That is why he turned so many Central Committee meetings into huge, semipublic confrontations between the Party officials and the representatives of the economic, technical, and cultural elites of the nation.
As Khrushchev probably became aware of the dilemma confronting the Party, he tried in his usual sanguine way to cut the knot by a drastic operation. When in November, 1962, just after the Cuban debacle, he tried to turn the Party’s nose to the grindstone of steady economic effort, he proposed a reorganization of the whole Party according to the “production principle,” dividing all its organizations into industrial and agricultural sectors and tending to leave the ideologists in midair. Yet it was precisely at that moment that he began to encounter serious resistance within the Party leadership for the first time since his victory over his rivals in 1957; and this reorganization has become the one major measure of Khrushchev’s reign which his heirs have hastened to rescind after his overthrow.
Part of the reason is no doubt that the reform had hurt many vested interests of the Party bureaucracy, and that it had been intended also to increase Khrushchev’s personal power and reduce his dependence on the constituted organs of the Party. But it seems clear that many of the Party leaders felt that in seeking to reduce the role of ideological work so drastically, Khrushchev was touching the vital nerve of the Party — the legitimation of its rule; and it was this point which Khrushchev himself was forced publicly to correct, during the winter following the reorganization, in the course of the campaign for bringing the writers and artists under stricter ideological control.
So far from solving the Party’s dilemma, Khrushchev’s reorganization had indeed only pointed it up more sharply. In a situation which offered no scope for internal and little for external revolutionary policies, the Party might easily appear as parasitic unless it proved its value by concentration on constructive economic tasks; but if it did concentrate on these tasks, would not many of its administrators reveal their lack of technical competence? Indeed, it had been easy enough to see why a centralized totalitarian party was needed to carry out a policy of permanent external and internal revolution; it was far more difficult to argue that such a party was needed to raise productivity, to lower costs, to improve the quality and variety of consumer goods. Khrushchev, it seemed to many, was shifting the Party’s main work onto a ground where its performance could all too easily he checked by its subjects: the promise of goulash may be far more attractive to the present Soviet generation than the promise of world revolution, but “goulash tomorrow” may lose its credibility much more quickly than “world revolution tomorrow.”
The Party’s instinct of self-preservation, then, has been the one great factor of resistance to change, the major force opposing an open discarding of world-revolutionary ideology. From all we know about the circumstances accompanying Khrushchev’s overthrow, this same force led the very men whom Khrushchev had designated as his eventual successors to remove him. Since then, they have undone his reorganization and freed the Party from direct responsibility for production; but they have not escaped from the dilemma any more than he did. For they cannot, and indeed will not, return either to the former program of imposing periodic violent upheavals on Soviet society or to the former strategy of worldwide revolutionary expansion. Hence they cannot come to terms with the militant Chinese position: in the face of bitter Chinese attacks, they have recognized the need to accept the main results of the Khrushchev era by publicly defending the decisions of the Khrushchevian Party congresses, including the “revisionist” Party program of 1961.
Clearly, the defenders of tradition and bureaucratic inertia are still powerful enough to slow down the process of ideological erosion and to cause occasional setbacks; but they seem no longer able to reverse the trend— to produce an ideological revival such as Khrushchev attempted in his early years, much less a return to Stalinism.
From the point of view of Western policy, this means that the strategic concept of containment has proved its worth, because its original objective was a realistic one. That objective, it will be remembered, was to stop Soviet expansion by concerted action until the time came when the Soviet leaders would realize that their worldwide ideological goals could not be attained. The concept of containment assumed that there were forces of change at work inside the Soviet Union which could eventually bring about a less missionary outlook in world affairs, that time would work in our favor if only we used it properly. That is exactly what seems to have happened.
Yet to be useful as a guide for Western policy today, this optimistic verdict must be taken with three qualifications. The first is that in practice, we are dealing not with the long-run trends described by our analysis, but with the actual shortrun Soviet policy of each given moment. In retrospect, the all-out offensive which Khrushchev pursued for five years, from the fall of 1957 to that of 1962, may appear as a short-run aberration: but it was extremely serious while it lasted and might have had disastrous consequences had he been allowed to get away with it. With the balance of world power once decisively upset in Russia’s favor, the trend toward a realistic acceptance of limited aims would have been fully reversed, and even the Sino-Soviet split might have been healed by Khrushchev’s peaceful triumph over the imperialists. So long as setbacks to the new realism are still possible, the danger persists, and with it the need for a vigilant and united defense of the common interests of the West.
The second qualification is that the distinction between limited national interests and worldwide ideological goals, though vitally important, is not in practice as clear-cut as many of us would like to believe. Different governments may define the national interest of their country in different ways; and the Soviets, once having given the concept a wholly ideological content, are more likely to change its interpretation by degrees than by a sudden and wholesale conversion. Even an ostensible concentration of the Soviets on national objectives would not automatically eliminate all causes of major conflict between them and the Western world: to mention a striking example, so long as the Soviets believe that their national interest requires the partition of Germany and the artificial maintenance of a Communist satellite in its eastern part, they will have to maintain large armed forces in the heart of Europe, causing a permanent state of military tension. In our view, of course, the idea that national security requires Communist regimes on Russia’s borders is a remnant of the ideological outlook. But this merely proves that the conflicts due to the ideologically motivated expansion of Soviet power in the past are as yet far from resolved.
The third qualification concerns the continuing role of Western policy as a factor in the process of change, or, to put it more crudely, in the education of the Soviet leaders to realism. If a relaxation of Western, and particularly American, vigilance gave the new Soviet leaders the impression that ideological successes could again be reaped in various parts of the world cheaply and without serious risk, or if serious conflicts within the Western alliance tempted the Soviets into new adventures, the gains achieved by the common efforts of the past could still be undone and the trend reversed. On the other hand, the process of ideological erosion could also suffer a setback if the West assumed a militantly “crusading” attitude toward all Communist powers, refusing to treat them differently according to their different international behavior and to resort to negotiation where appropriate.
Thus in Vietnam, where the popular political basis for the American presence in the south has virtually disintegrated and cannot possibly be replaced by any extension of military operations, the Chinese Communists are advising their Vietnamese comrades to continue fighting at all cost in the hope of complete military victory, while the Soviets appear to favor negotiation which would get rid of the American presence without a military triumph but also without the risk of wholesale destruction in the north. In the circumstances, an American policy that threatened such destruction without offering at the same time to negotiate terms for a withdrawal from a neutralized Vietnam could only force the Soviets back into closer cooperation with the Chinese, while a readiness to negotiate such terms might not only result in limiting the defeat which the West has in fact already suffered but might help to keep Sino-Soviet rivalry alive in this important region.
More positively, in areas of Western strength the process of change may be fostered by a calculated willingness to reward rational behavior, to improve cultural and economic contacts, and to explore every opening for the settlement of specific conflicts that may appear thanks to that strength. For indeed, if a realistic Western policy helps to ensure the continuation of the trend toward ideological erosion on the Soviet side, the time may well come when a number of disputed issues between the Soviets and the West — issues that have proved insoluble ever since World War II f and the rise of the Soviet Union to the status of a world power may at last become capable of a negotiated solution.
Some of us may anticipate that as the ideological poison is drained out of East-West relations and the more critical specific conflicts arc settled, the very need for the Atlantic military alliance in its present form may disappear. Nobody need be shocked at such a thought, for defensive alliances are distinct from economic or political unions precisely in that they have no abiding purpose in themselves, but depend for their survival on a common danger menacing their members: it is normal for them to dissolve once the danger has clearly passed. But the history of the Vienna Congress— and of Napoleon’s return from Elba— - stands as an eloquent warning of what may happen to allies who allow their bond to dissolve before its purpose has been finally achieved.
Next month Ernst! Halperin wilI discuss Communism’s dissension as it affects Latin America, and William Griffith will I analyze its meaning for American policy.
第三，过去的暂停是由具有几乎无可争议的权威的领导人开始的，他们可以通过对国际力量关系的坦率现实的分析来证明他们的转向是正确的。目前的转折必须由权威严重受损的人执行，他们不能承认自己以前的错误判断，否则就会给他们在北平的激进批评者提供弹药；然而，正因为转折必须在中国意识形态的攻击下完成，所以它必须在意识形态原则方面得到辩护。当苏斯洛夫（M. A. Suslov）在1964年2月宣布，苏维埃共产党人的国际义务首先是在国内建设共产主义，以便为外国同志提供一个有吸引力的榜样时，他制定了一项原则，使苏联的统治者能够摆脱来自中国和其他地方的意识形态压力。
